Lessons
Fine Art Compositing: Class Introduction
07:36 2Why Composite ?
14:51 3Logic Checklist
24:10 4Shooting for Composite
08:12 5Changing Backgrounds and Light
04:18 6Practical Ways of Lighting for Composite
13:29 7Compositing Simple Swaps and Group Shots in Photoshop
09:16 8Lighting in Photoshop
17:26Lesson Info
Compositing Clouds
Okay, so this is what the image looked like to begin with my cloud layer. I cut the clouds out. You can see that there was her horizon line happening in this. And if I change this from multiply to normal, then you can really see what I had to work with here. So this was my cloud shot, and it looked just like that on my screen. I dragged that into photo shop. I dragged it on top of the picture that I was working with, and I just plopped it right on top. So I obviously have some mountain in my picture, and we can't keep that because that would look crazy. So instead, I am going to make sure that I lower the opacity on that layer. And once I do that now, I can see where those mountains are, so I can see that I need to move it up or down. If if the mountains were intersecting the sky than that wouldn't work, I would have to clone them out or stretch it or do something like that. So I'm putting them back in place. You can see it's coming really close to the horizon. line here. I'm gonna be ...
okay with that, though. So once we have the clouds in and we take that opacity backup, we need to be able to see our subject. The awesome thing about moving somebody to a different background is that the person is already cut out. So if the person is already cut out, then you can just put the cloud layer behind the subject. And the moment that you do that, then you don't have to worry about erasing the clouds off of your subject cause the cloud layers already behind your subject. But if we don't have that luxury, if it was shot on location just like this, then we need to worry about the cloud sticking to our human or not human, whatever you prefer. So let's see. I'm gonna go to multiply. I blend a lot of my clouds on multiply. And I do that because it just really helps it stick to the lightest parts of the image here. It helps it Teoh not stick as much to whatever has some variation in the totality there. So the clouds still look really good on the background and all I need to do now is go back and forth to see what is happening to the clouds. And if you like that effect, so other things that we can try from multiply darken. We could try because darken allows the clouds to stick to whatever is lightest in your picture. But my problem with that is that now, my my dress here that I had her wearing was so bright that it just sticks equally to all of that. And I can't even see the edges of where my subject waas. So if I go back to multiply that at least now I can see where the edge of her dresses and it doesn't make much of a difference for the background. So in this case, I prefer multiply. But if I zoom out, then I can start to a layer mask, and that is what I typically do to blend clouds. I will layer mask it off of my subject, but this is what I never do because I don't want to have a headache about this. I don't want to be paranoid that suddenly I'm not going to be able to finish my picture. I do not go in with my layer mask on my brush tool on black. I make that smaller. I don't go in with a hard brush expecting that, I'll just be able to erase it perfectly. So, like when I start doing this and then I'm like, Oh, crap, Oh, crap. Oh, it's not working. Well, then I would get really angry and frustrated, and then I would never finish this picture. So instead of doing that, I try to make some more subtle changes first so that I can just see it as a little bit of a cleaner image and not have to go in with a really hard brush right away. So take the hardness down and the size up a little bit, and instead of opacity at 100% for that brush, I'm taking that down. I'm gonna take that down because with blending mode multiply, you're already getting this kind of effect where it's not sticking 100% to your subject. So I'm going to start to erase at 50% opacity here, just so I can start to even out the dress a little bit more, and I don't have to worry as much about creating those really horrible, harsh lines that would be happening around the subject. So I'm just lightly erasing now. Obviously, that didn't do enough. But don't we feel much better now about tackling this image because we've just gotten rid of some of the harshness of it, so you can go in again over that portion now, don't hear this. I would erase it 100% because that's just, Ah, harsh line from the clouds that we don't need anywhere. But when it comes to a racing off of the subject, I'm much prefer to go in with a much lighter eraser and get rid of what we can now. I don't mind that my subject is covered a little bit. I don't mind that she's a little bit dark because there are a few things that I can do to adjust that. First, though, I would have to go in, and I would have to change how I am viewing The edge on that zoomed in at 300% at the moment. But I'm going to take my size down for my brush, and I'm just gonna color it back in on White, where we kind of erased a little bit too much just around here. Now, this is where you might want to use a harder brush to go along the edge of your subject. But that just all depends on how much work you want to put into it and how long you're going to sit to cut around on edge and so on. This is where it gets a little bit tricky where it's still kind of dark in this area and, you know, you can see that there's some cloud layer on it. So a couple of things that I would dio if I'm having a really, really hard time blending my sky then in that case I would probably go in with a really big brush like Okay, not that big. I'm not used to this version of Photoshopped. My version doesn't create brushes like that. So I'm going in with a pretty big brush that I'm going to take that opacity down a lot on the brush into the teens and then I'm going to on black. I'm just going to erase sort of a larger portion through here of the clouds. That way we're erasing some of the clouds, but it's also adding white to the clouds because you're allowing more of that white background to show through. And so that's going to soften how it looks on the subject and how it looks on the edges. So you don't have such dark edges going around. Your image obviously wouldn't do that a ton, but it helps a lot in creating just a little bit of a softer effect when you are racing some clouds. So I'm gonna go in here now, and I'm gonna race at 100% opacity. I'm just going to get in here to make sure that we are able to get rid of this line because I don't want that at all. I'm going to erase, erase, erase 100% opacity. And that's going to create kind of a sticky situation for us because in doing that were kind of cutting into our cloud layer, and we kind of create this really weird brightness in the background that maybe we don't want, so I'm just gonna color that back in a little bit. But now this is where I would then flip the cloud layer. So a lot of people say that they have problems with making the clouds blend exactly over her horizon because of the fact that you are now sort of creating this problem for yourself, where you have something really dark on top of something that was not dark to begin with. It's really bright horizon line, and that's when you would want to flip your clouds, lower the opacity and let that blend itself instead of going in. And I mean, I could go in here and I could say, OK, I'm gonna cut around every little piece of that mountain in the background, and I'm gonna make sure that that horizon line blends. But there isn't really a lot of point to that. When the water needs to reflect the clouds, the land below needs to reflect the clouds. So let's see how that looks first, before we start to get in there and meticulously cut, I'm going to duplicate that layer. But now I'm going into edit, transform, flip vertical. It's really important that we don't go into image image rotation flip vertical because that's going to flip your whole canvas and then you're going to want to you're gonna want to back up. All right, so edit transform foot vertical. And now, with our move tool, we can go ahead and just move this around. You can see that are subject to still cut out, and we need to fill that back in because she is not flipped vertically as well. So we would go back to the layer mask and go ahead and start filling that in all along here. But maybe it needs to be a little bit more. Okay, so we've got that filled in. But now we still need to lower the opacity so we can start to lower that opacity. And then suddenly it doesn't look like it needs to be blended as much in the background because we're continuing the clouds. How they would normally look, we do need to get it off of our subject. That's something that I would highly recommend working on first. So I'm just going to go in with a big sweep there and get rid of some of that because there are certain places where maybe we don't need the clouds as much. There are certain places where we can stand to race it a little bit more, but along the horizon line is not one of those places. That's where I would definitely keep it
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