Lessons

Lesson Info

Making and Using Overlays

You're gonna buy over laser ifyou're gonna create overly create big ones you know like same thing with, um elements or any of the any of the stuff that you're making a sort of scrolls or flourishes get big ones you know, I've seen people out there that sell templates that r j picks that's a joke don't buy time put that tj pick I've seen people out there that still brushes their flourish or their scrolls that air like forty eight pixels it's terrible you know you can't do anything with that, you know by by victor based um elements or by awesome or by things that are really, really big now in this case this was shot with a decent camera but I could go in and this is just how you can extract extract elements yourself okay, so I see something like this and like really like these little flowers in here, I think that would be really cool I can get these out a few different ways if I go to my magic juan tool, I'm going to start extracting okay and it's just going to start selecting and I'm ho...

lding down the shift key toe add to that selection, okay, now I have that apartment I want a little bit more of it I'm gonna go in and grab some more all right and then hit command j after I get my selection now that extracts that and puts it on it's only now I have what I want ok can go in to the crop tool and call that save it has its own file flower flourish your flower element okay? And I have that and I can use that moving forward for treatments for like car designs are advertisements or whatever they're doing I'm probably not going to put something like this on, you know seniors, wall portrait or whatever, but I'm going to use it for like marketing materials or things that were doing their seasonal christmas cards stuff you know things of that nature but uneasy way just to extract things but the point is if you see something really cool photograph then you have your own library of textures and overlays and elements and stuff um here's a cool way to create like, grungy effects you know an easy way I saw this there's that same image again, but if you want to extract like here's one of my favorite overlays that we have we're just really all the time. This is like a metal wall in some warehouse when I really like about this is the edge like the border, you know, the left and the right sides and even the bottom, so if I want to just extract that out, I could go to select and color range and you can see as I as I pick different points in the image I get different selections the white is what's going to be selected but if I go right over there you can see that I can get that edge and that border kind of all by itself it's isolated by itself and I have this slider hearing this dialogue box called fuzziness I don't know why it's called a fuzziness but I like that they use that term there I'm sure there's a reason why but you can see as I opened that up like this I'm gonna get more and more kind of a grungy effect for him okay that extremely detailed intricate selection is now going to be made I'm not overly command j again then it's on its own layers so once again I can save that I call those skins because they're transparent it's not really an overlay isn't really a texture it's it's transparent so it's like something that you could just kind of put over the top like skins for your phones I just call this his skin and you can bring it in then all right and it's much bigger so I hit command tea and then command zero zooms out and show me where my transformation is bring it in and then I can put it on this put it on the image like that ok if it's too strong I can lower the opacity okay if I want more on the top two I can copy it goto edit transform flip vertical how it's on the top to bring it down so I have kind of this border going all the way around I can also flip it horizontally I want teo I can also go and see how this is kind of duplicated right there I will go in and transforming flip horizontal okay that's kind of taken care of and it kind of looks like a box or a frame it's a little strong maybe I'll change my uh, layer mode tio it's all flight and I'll drop my capacity just a little bit okay, maybe I don't want it to go over the subject so I put a layer mask on it. Okay, this is kind of incorporating everything that I've been talking about and take it off of my subject like this. Okay, so now it looks like it's if anything it's kind of on the wall are going behind her, but once again, you know, I want something that subtle it's effective and maybe I don't like that piece I'll just knock that out, okay? But this is something that I'm creating on my own and I've done it really fast, you know, from something that I photographed and extracted and that's how this stuff is done for these grungy effects or for any sort of you know texture that you wanna had to something it could be done really quickly and really easily and it could be easily incorporated into your work photo even build something like this on spec for your client before okay and that's the important thing for me is if I'm gonna build it beforehand and I'm gonna do it on a regular basis I wanted to be either automated where I wanted to be really easy to do you know if I'm gonna have to do it manually really quick okay and so that's that's like one of the reasons that we use templates you know like here's a bunch of templates for eclectic all right you can see it's all set up with clipping masks and so I have these images of the dog I could bring them all in and maybe I'll put him everything's labeled so that's image clip one I'm gonna clip that in okay that's just uh all control g or option command g and that's clipped in there. Okay bring this one in probably put him in the middle. I haven't done this yet so I'm just assuming that it's gonna work all right and then this pink one will probably put the pink one on the right side so easily fixed drop that over there, clip it into that and then move it over there shows up c it's just bound by the parameters of that clip okay, now I'm moving things around in my layers palate and clipping them and then moving them in the back well, this worked out pretty yeah. Okay. All right. And if I need to make that smaller I just do a free transform make it a little bit smaller, ok? It's bound by that clip you know, maybe there's this is charlie and ginger maybe there's not a charlie or a ginger I just couldn't get rid of charlie and then just work with ginger or change the name if I need to change the name which you know your work with the template so you're going to but that's our eclectic template that's a four by four by ten which we sell framed um and it works out great um and you can make these really, really fast and you khun turn off different textures if you want to but I can design this for my client on spec so that when they come in they see it's done like it's just in there slide show along with everything else and it took me forty five seconds so really like an extra ten minutes maybe I can have the night opening maybe I can have an eclectic maybe I can have you know, I've done my hardest suggestion already that I was all kinds of cool things on it you know? I have a bunch of actions with treatments you know whether it's been tend your brownstone or whatever it doesn't matter but have maybe an extra ten maybe fifteen minutes for my client and a lot of this you know an internal employee khun d'oh I have all these products ready with the clients images so they're not seeing samples with somebody else's images they're seeing samples with their images and then it kind of stops being a sample like it's no longer a sample they see that and it's really hard for them a lot of times to not get it you know they see their puppy in there they see their child in there oh, that is beautiful it's really hard for them not to buy because it's a finished product in their lined with their child and sometimes we've even gone tio I don't know that called us whatever it is but we've had people not buy things that we thought were really awesome and we got it anyway and use it as a sample so they come in to pick up and look what's hanging on the wall over there what's that thing you didn't buy it now it's pretty cool, huh? We don't make a big deal but we want them to see it and they see their we've had people look and I gotta have that too how much is that? Well, okay, we just happen to have invoice ready for you you know, or whatever the point is, have it ready for them, you know, and it makes it a lot harder to pass up and it and it should, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a beautiful product with their family or their pet in it and it's done this is this is painting light in more of a, um when you're when you're dealing with a dark dog in particular, this is painting light and more they are I know what I could talk about, how I could go for a while. This is paying, like more of a practical sense when you have a dog with dark for oh, you know, I don't have the detail there that I was hoping for, so we have that same technique just create a blank layer, turn into overlay here's, a black brush or a white brush in this case, I want to lighten the kind of paints and light, and so I'm going to go in pennies so dark that it's hard for me to see, maybe twenty percent I'm gonna go in and start trying to lighten up that for just a little bit on that layer by itself, it's nondestructive, I'm not hurting the actual pictures of the dog itself, but his face maybe is a little dark. See that and I'll show you before and after two maybe a little bit there you want to you want to be careful like if you go too much do you reckon you can wreck it you don't want to do that and you also don't want like some people use screen or multiply something people used dodger burned don't use dodger burn don't use him do this instead if you're gonna do this don't dodger burn your files um because you can really wreck it really quickly really easily uh dodging and burning your files um this is this is just a much better technique in my opinion so if you look back now just even with something simple like that okay you see that yeah it's again it's it's not like this big huge wow this dog it's not like one of those things that blow your mind but it's something that is subtle and added to everything else that you do like the color adjustments you know the crop is right the vignette maybe you do so my enhancement on the dog you know just a little bit here and there you add all those parts up and the hole is much much better and what it was before um and it's in doing something like this is simple and easy and quick and for me that's essential I want to be able to do something that simply using quick to make something not much better so maybe I spent another two minutes on this image and I have a final image that's much much better than it was before and it only took me two minutes to do it because I have my actions already over here my palate I'm familiar with, you know, all my palace where they're at well, you know what layers I'm working with I'm doing things that are not destructive so I can have adjustments on the separate layers whether it's you know, the layer mask whether it's uh this on its own separate layer, whether it's if I had a skin it's on its own separate layer, I can adjust capacity blurt out if it's an overlay, whatever I'm doing all of those things so that I have lots of customization has I'm working on and then I'll save it that way you know, as a psd layer psd because maybe later on I want to change it or maybe the client doesn't like it that way oh my dog's not that light that's what you know you never know what's gonna run into but give yourself the option later on to fix it and it's just a matter of saving in a certain way you know it's not like a really big deal, okay with pets I wanted to show that running actions here is just, you know, have your actions ready there's that same this is a pretty cool action that we ran on this image last night this isn't uh this isn't our seven pack it's called fashion pastels so this is something that I would do beforehand is I would run some actions maybe for that artistic ideas on the back it would just give me this more fashion you look and then like what? This action in particular I have all kinds of options, you know, later on that I can change the look and it's not this huge thing again it's just this subtle different look, you know, I'm not doing something crazy with like rainbow colors, you know, running out of people's heads and stuff like that but it's just a little bit vintage touch just like a pinch of it like a dash of it, you know rather than something nuts, but I'll show them maybe a couple different options just so that they can see how you know this is this has got a slight treatment on it. You know, we can kind of discuss what their style is. Maybe maybe they have more of a modern style maybe they have more of a novel guard style in their house so you can kind of do things you know, even even finding some of that stuff out beforehand so you can kind of do things in the in the process before they come in to have things ready for that, I get to know who they are and kind of what their style is and then use actions to do it for you because, you know, when I have to go through there and, you know, do it all manually that's terrible here's here's the one I was supposed to run the sweet black and white on so we would have this done and that's really. And I love that black and white um just really, really nails it not the dog could get a little hot in this black and white you can go through and you're history and go back even one and it brings back some of the you know, the shadows aren't so strong and the highlights aren't so strong either. So always know that too when you run an action everything's recorded in your history and if you like where it was like one step for but not step eight just go back in your history you can even check the different steps. Oh, I like it here, so I'm just gonna keep it here. Oh, I like I can make an adjustment here, so go back in your history or you can make adjustments or where you like the image better than where it was maybe even at the end