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Lesson Info

Adjustment Layers for Photography

So here's an example that a photographer might offer another product to your clients is wedding announcements or engagement announcements or what have you invitations, graduation announcements, graduation invitations? When you're doing a photo, she you've got the photos, so why not offer that to your client as well? With this simple design technique, you don't have to worry about not knowing graphic design. Okay? This is a tried and true technique that will work. The biggest problem you'll have is choosing finds, okay and that's fodder for another class. Maybe here creative, live maybe this winter. Ok, so let's, take a look at how to create this I'm gonna go ahead and turn off these layers, so we're starting out with our photo again. If you know the exact print size, you can start with a new document just like we did a moment ago. But let's say the photo is the right size, so let's, go ahead and add our phil layer so let's click the half black, half white circle the bottom of the layer...

s paneled choose solid color and we're using solid color because that is easiest to read the text on. Okay, so we'll go ahead and say white for this one now will click to activate the layer mask that tags along with every single filling adjustment layer. We'll press g to activate the grady in tool take a peek in the options bar make sure that you've got the black dwight radiance that make sure you've got linear for the radiant style and then come over to your document and shift click to begin to draw your radiant and I just love that photoshopped updates that layer mask as you keep dragging, so if you are nonplussed with your first professional radiant dragging attempts, then you can just keep keep dragging until it looks right to you. Now we're ready for our text, so we'll go ahead and turn on our type player here, but I do want to show you how to create a text box and actually gonna cheat in copy that text and now when we create our text box, I can just plop it in there, so we're going to come over here to the tools panel and grab the big old honkin t t for type grabbed the horizontal type tool and now instead of clicking where in our nice gentleman from the studio audience pointed out that footage shot well paced all of your text a mile to the right, it's happy let text hang off the document that's not what we want, so what you do is you click and hold on your mouse button and then you drag diagonally downward to draw a box and then when you paste in the text or as are other wise settlement from the studio audience pointed out that you can add placeholder text and c s six, then it's not going to be running off ten miles to the right of your document, and you will never see it again. So when she get that text box drawn to your liking and again, I'm leaving, breathing room around the edges, equal breathing room around the edges of my document in the edges of where my text box is not gonna make it really close to the edge, just text will hang off, then you release your mouse button and you've got a box. I can't tell you how many folks never knew that you could create text boxes and photoshopped, but again photo shop is not a text editor, so you don't want to be writing, you know, columns and magazine articles in this program, you know, photo top cia sixty missing annual was not written, it was not done in photo shop. They make me do it inward. So once we've got the text blocks here, when we've paste in our text, then we can use any of these re sizing handles, teo, alter the box, okay? They can be a little bit contrary to grab because photoshopped thinks that you're about to edit text, but you can grab those handles. So when I'm doing that, I'm not re sizing the text. I'm only resizing the text box, which is very handy. We have a question, just another annoying tip. I see people looking in their text box and trying to squint your eyes to see what their text looks like in which one they want to use. If you click on your type tool there's a fund preview size from small to huge with my old eyes, I find huge, very helpful and I can see exactly instead of picking nine hundred fonts to figure out what I'm doing when you have eight hundred fonts loaded to really see a decent preview of the font. Indeed, that is a great tip, so let me show everybody here. So what we're talking about is the ability to see what the fun face actually looks like in your funny menu that appears in the options bar when you have the type to active okay. In previous versions of the program, you had to root around in feather shops preferences. Teo not only turn the darn thing on in cs for an earlier can you believe front previews were not on by default so you had to not only turn him on and preferences and then you had to set the size of what you want these previews to show up we'll happily and cia six adobe have mercy on us and they've liberated it from preferences and the font previews are on by default and uh oh here we go is this many right here in the new type of menu so if you're running see us five or earlier you're not going to see this menu at all on your copy of photo shop but again you can download cia six to play along with us during these workshops by going to adobe dot com so let's go ahead and turn huge on and it will be glorious yeah oh that's nice, huh? So now you can get a better much better idea of what your fun is gonna look like before you pick it. I will say though, that the best way to experiment with fonts is to purchase a font management utility my favorite ism fraught explorer x and I go hunting for funds using that utility and I know what fun I'm gonna use by the time I hit photoshopped okay? Because the fund managers have an ability to let you preview fonts with specific text and they it's a lot helpful a lot more helpful to figure out what fun you want to use before messing around in this minivan photoshopped me so just quickly what was the one that you used just fun explore ex parte explore ex thank you thanks for a pro yeah I used to be free but it it's cost money now but it's there's a whole lot more feature so it's really, really great ok, so now we've got our text and my favorite script text in the world right now is audio's script prue and that's what this beautiful font is right here audio's script pro it's an open type font which means that I can't access all kinds of alternate swash is and swishes for my my characters okay let's say we wanted to do that and look at these els right here for lucy and larry they're kind of boring I mean they're pretty but they're kind of warring what if we really wanted a big flourish? E swirl onil what we can do is just highlight it and then n c a six come up here to the tight menu and if the font that you've used is an open type font which means that the dude who designed the fun can build in all kinds of alternate letter characters and cliffs and fabulous symbols and things like that then they may have built in some extra who hawes like that see how the oil changed now I've got two different ills so that's why I like to stick with open type fonts because they have a whole lot of goodies buried in them like easter eggs ok, so in c s six you can access those extra goodies if the open type font has them and not every open type font well it depends on the designer but this one has a lot of getty's in it then you can go up to the tightening u choose open type and all of these options will trigger different letter forms your characters to be used stylistic alternates that I'll probably give us I gave us the same ill but in what you guys get the point do you actually what did you click on before the stylistic alternatives yeah it was swash so you highlight the letter you want to change tried up to the tight menu goto open type and then just play around with these things if the fine doesn't have one of them built into it then it will be great out like this one doesn't have any justification alternates or any old style characters anything like that so that's that's a fun thing all right so another thing now that I've laid my text down on our post card here my fill layer isn't is far to the left as I would like it to me now I could click within the the mask and have another go with ingredients cool, but couldn't I just activate that layer executed over with the move tool? Absolutely so oppress v to grab the move tool we've got our phil layer activated. We can either use are arrow keys on our key board to med it over or weaken discussed the darn thing that's. Another great thing about a film layer is that if you change the size of your canvas, you don't have to refill that layer with color it's had we used a regular old image layer filled with color, we could have added a layer mask and use the grady and tool in that layer master the same thing, but you wouldn't be able to move it around like that because you would come across the hard edge of that feel that's. Another great thing about these phil layers is that they re size themselves. They refill your that layer according to the size of the canvas, even if you change it on the fly so that's anything let's, take another look at a good use for phil layers and photography specifically, so go ahead and close this document. I'm gonna collapse my many bridge panel by double clicking it's tab so we can make this bigger so here, let's, look at what we've got going on in my layers panel over here so we've got the original image, and I'm gonna option click that layer visibility icon so that it turns off the other layers you can see the original option on the mac or halt on the pc so here's our original image, this is yet another adjustment later, we're not going to talk about it just yet, the levels adjustment layer and I've used that to kind of bring the color and lighting back in line with what it should have been when it was shot. The thing we're going to talk about right now is this other phil layer that I've made at the top, the layer stack just called a grady and phil when I turned that on, you'll see that's where my dark edge vignettes coming from and that's an oh so beautiful thing to do to portrait's just really makes the viewer's eye zoom right in, and it gets a little bit of depth to the photo it's also a great way to hide a little bit of a distracting or maybe under overexposed sky or foreground so let's, take a look at how to create that, so we've got our image and we've color corrected it, we're ready to go let's, go ahead and click the half black, half white, circle the bottom of the layers panel and choose grady int photo shops going to give you a little dialogue box nests what kind of radiant you would like to use okay, so see we could do we could use a grady in't phil to make room for text as well. So infinite possibilities so for this technique we're going to change the grading it style to radio because, uh vignette is circular in nature so we're going change it to radio right off the bat photo shot wants to put it right here in the middle of the photo we don't want that ok? So we're going to click reverse so turn on the reverse checkbox and now we're going to tell photo shop which grady and we wanted to use in what we want is a black transparent grady int okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and make one change over here in my layers panel I'm gonna press or mine tools payment rather I'm gonna press d to send my color chips to the default of black and white and then I'm gonna make sure black is on top and if we do that I think it will give us what we want no okay, so what we're gonna do is we need a transparent to black radio I love it when you do something one hundred times and you can't remember how the heck he did it okay? We're going tio grab the radiant tool and see if we've got a black tio okay we're going to set our color ships to the default of black and white. Now, if we come up here there's our black to white grady in for around two transparent really, what we want. Okay, so now, if I come over here and create our grady in't fill air, okay, that's, what we're gonna do? All right, see, I do these things on purpose show you had trump choose. So we're going to grab the radiant tool, okay? And we're going to go ahead and make sure that our foreground color chip is black. Ok, so, like I did earlier, you can set your foreground color or your color chips to the default a black and white by pressing d and then you want to press x until black cops on top. When you do that, you should be able to hop up here to the grady in't preset picker. I don't want to open that click that little down pointing triangle and the second grade ian in that pre set list will be foreground whatever your foreground color is too transparent. So that's what we want now when we come over here and click the half black, half white circle and we choose grady int, then that's automatically what we're getting in our grade and preview over here. And if you didn't, but you still have your foreground color chips that two black and you can access it within here as well. Ok, now we want to change the style to radio and again photo shop is going to do the opposite of what you want, so you got to turn on reverse now what we need to do is change the scale of that grady it because it's too big okay, it's covering up our focal point, so we're going to click the scale slider and we're going to drag it slightly to the right, and when I say slightly, I mean slightly because you can go just a little bit further to the right and then your edge. Vinje is pretty much gone. It's it's become so soft and wide that you really can't see it and that's not what we want, so we're going toe experiment somewhere around one hundred thirty five for this particular image, and then we're going to click. Ok, now we've still got a little bit of our as vigna that's on our pretty little faces of our happy couple here, so what we're going to do is use the included layer mask that came along with that grady it feel layer, and we're going to hide that vignette from their faces, ok, so let's click to activate the mask now we need to lay down some black paint so we can do that with any tool you want, but for this technique we're going to use the brush tool that's the regular all the brush tool so you can press b for breast activate that then you want to try it up to the brush preset picker in the options bar and you want to make sure that you've got a soft edge brush active? It doesn't matter which one of these fuzzy brushes you pick because we're going to change the size with keyboard shortcut so we'll go ahead and pick one of the fuzzy ones. Make sure your brush opacity set two hundred percent probably is and now when we come over to our document, we're going toa use thie right bracket key to go up and brush size a lot okay, the left bracket key goes down in both sides, right brackett? He goes up in brush aside and I'm gonna come in appear to where our couples faces are and I'm just going to click a couple of times to brighten up the center of that photo. Okay, now since I've got the center of it brightened up, I'm going to go ahead and go down and breast size a lot and then come up here to our faces and his paint across the faces and that simply ensures that none of that dark edge vinje is encroaching on the faces of your subjects ok so we'll have another go at that one soul waiting close that document and open up another one here so here's our before nice photo but the colors terrible right show I brought it back in line with the levels adjustment layer and we're gonna look at that later but I've still got all this super bright sky appear that really to me is distracting from the photo I tend to notice it so we're going to fix that with a dark edge vignette see how it just softens that up and makes it not as distracting so we'll go ahead and delete that layer take a peek over here at your color chips the bottom of your tools panel make sure black is on top and we can go ahead and make sure our grading set up by popping into the grady and tool before we create that grady it feel by pressing g and then we're just going to pick that second preset which is a foreground color to transparency and now we come over here to the bottom of our layers panel and we choose great aunt then we've got the right kind of grady and already in there we're going to change the style to radio and turn on reverse now we need to change the scale so we can just carefully dragged that up, drag it to the right a little bit let me get it looking good and you want to really pay attention to the edges so get the edge is looking good don't worry if it encroaches on your subject matter because we're going to click that mask that came along with it and we're going to use the brush tool set to a soft edge brush we're going to make it honkin big by pressing the right bracket key the bracket keys or next to the pt on your keyboard for paul mccartney and now we're just going to click around on our subject or a focal point to make sure that they haven't become too dark as a result of our darqueze vignette now I'm going to go down and brush size by pressing the left bracket key and I'm gonna paint across my subjects faces just to make triple triple sure that I'm not darkening them as well and then if you decide that you're vinje is a little too dark, you could simply drop the opacity a little bit you know using the opacity, sending at the top of your layers panel this guy right here so it's really, really flexible and then you can sit back from your image and topple that visibility often on to determine if you like it or not there see if your client likes here this technique is also fabulous for product shots really sets them off if you're doing commercial photography this will be a good thing for you to know, so we'll go ahead and do that one more time. See there's the original how boring is that boring lane so let's, go ahead and at another grady it, phil, we've already had our grading it set up so we have our black toe transparency style. The radio click reverse and then adjust the scale so that you can still see your product on and then used the included radiant phil layer mask big, soft, fluffy brush to hide that grady in from your focal point, reduce the brush size if you need tio paint across your product just to make triple sure that it's not being darkened, and then if you need to drop the opacity of the vignette of degrading it, phil layer to make it look good, see it even looks good on puppy dogs that have been put into a luau outfit, not my dog. Any questions on the dark answering yet starting with j lake, lady j like like levi, some like that. So why do you have to emerge or flattened the text on a photograph, or does it automatically do it in see essex? Do you have to merge or flattened text on a photograph is just what you're actually doing, they're finished with it. No, absolutely not! I would not do that now you can print straight from photo shop you can generate a high quality, flattened file from your photo shot document, but you always want to keep those texts layers hanging around a case you need to edit it or if you want to change the color of the text or experiment with the fallout later on, so if you're sending it off to be printed, most of the online print companies less to say we were going to send our little I will help me pepi dog your printer, you would keep this layered file around so you would choose file save as and he would make sure that you chose photoshopped as the format and that's going to keep your layers intact. So that's going to be your master file for editing then if you need to export it let's say teo really high quality j pig, which is what most of the online print companies want or they'll ask for a pdf or they'll ask for a they don't really ask for tips that much anymore. But you can export the foul format, which would be a flattened file format once you're finished with it so and even for stock photography they have you I'm a star photographer for I saw a photo and they have us export out the highest quality j pig from whatever we're shooting so the same thing that print company so we could choose j peg and then set this on the desktop say save and then when we open that file back up or when the print company opens it up it's been flattened but that way you always have your editable text layers hanging around thank you way had a question here in the audience I am so I know the new ah six allows you to a round trip into light room because I play a lot with vignettes in that and I know there's other things you can do with photos that might be more intuitive to people that use light room is that a good thing going back and forth from light room to photo show it depends on how you've got light room set up to send files toe photo shop you can send files from light rain to photo shop in the open you know as a psd as long as you keep it is a psd and you're not you know you're not exporting and j peg you're not creating a j pic from photo shop and opening that in delight room or creating a j peg from light room and opening that up in federal shops long as you tell my room hey when you send files to put a shots and I photoshopped document which is you know full quality and then you're fine anymore questions get it oh, one other question the honey layers pellet what's the difference between the opacity slider and the phil slider oh, that's a family if you've got a shape or anything filled with color, then the phil slider will drop out that phil. So, for example, begin his play with our little help me text here, I'll make it big so we can see help me. I thought that was funny. Y'all didn't laugh. You all did not laugh when the little dog is saying, help me, okay, so we'll get a big, fluffy, fun, big, thick thing here. And what I'll do is I'll put an outline on it or a stroke with layer styles. Okay, so we'll pick a nice cultural picked this nice little green over here near you and we'll make it big t illustrate our point if I drop the opacity it's going to drop the capacity of everything on that layer if I drop the fill on lee, the font color drops out. So when you feel something with color, few felt like a vector shape or anything like that. We've applied uh, an outline to in the phil part the propeller is what's gonna drop when you use that feel cider is easiest to describe with text like that yeah, ok, so guess three, eight five a seven and myself have always wanted this to within the text box. What is that little the control point in the center? What does it really do? Because you can move in? I've never noticed anything change. So what is that? Well, that actually was coming from free transform. Okay, so that sets the central point of the transform so it didn't really have anything to do with text in that situation. But that's, why you're seeing it? Because I used free transformed, resize it good to know any other questions. All right? And I'm not sure if you answer this but net ingenuity had asked. Is there a way to preview the text that you want for the font other than the word sample? No, not in photo shop that's where fund management tool comes in handy, right? They're great and ok, we can keep going. All right now, the next thing I want to show you for grady it phil layers there's, phil layers and generally use photography is that if you do an interesting effect to an image, we did this one in class yesterday. I'm not going to repeat it. But what we did was we took a photograph and we split it into five vertical panels using the right tenure marquis tool and then we jumped each panel up onto its own layer well, in doing that, I've been need to create a new background for the piece of art, right? If I'm going to print that so what I did was actually ated eh grady and phil layer okay, so we'll just do that I'll go ahead and click the half black, half white circled bottom of the layers panel choose grady in and this time we're gonna load a bunch of other pre cess that are only found in sea essex unfortunately, but that doesn't mean that other presets won't work that air in previous versions of the program, so I'm gonna go ahead and click be down we're pointing triangle next to the grading it preview and then we're going to click the tiny little gear sprocket and that's going to allow us get at all the other wonderful presets that are hiding in phone shop and there are a slew of um adobe spends big bucks on having these presets she can think of is built in rest fees for things like grady instance, they spent a lot of money finding people color experts that choose these colors that go together nicely so the new one cia six and you category is photographic tony but again, if you're not running cia six, just play around with these other praecis and you'll find agreement that will make a nice new background for you, but we're going to use photographic toning when you do that for other shops going to say, hey, do you want me? Teo, throw away all the other process and just show you these from this category and this means temporarily toss them you can always get them back, but we want to add them tio what we're seeing in that preset panel already so we'll say upend why doesn't say ad is anybody's guess e makes it seem more complicated, so now we're going to choose the one called blue one and that that one just works well with the colors that are in this photograph that I used, I'm going to set the style to a radio and that's it I'm not going to reverse it because I actually want the new background toe look like it's a, uh blue circular light coming from behind the photo and you can play around with the scale of it if you'd like, but just rife in the factory, this one works really well, so again, all we did was create artistic effect or our edge effect or whatever you're going to do that precipitates needing a new background, then we're going to add a grady and phil layer and if you're running for the shop cia six we're going to load those new photographic toning process by clicking me dan we're pointing trying well next to the grady it preview and then clicking that little gear sprocket and then you can come down here and load more presets and then we're just going to find one that works for us and for this particular photo that blue radiant is going to be nice and then we're going to change the style two radio and call it done so if you print this out and you decide that, well, maybe that blue radiant isn't going to be the right one for me or maybe your client doesn't like it since you wisely say this as a photoshopped document all you have to do to change that is to come back in here in double click that radiant from you and then you can get right back to all those other colors and experiment with different ones that may look better to you or your client I was playing with the grady it yesterday and just happened to put my cursor over the page the a picture and realize just like the shadows you khun the great the thing around behind the image oh yeah, that is true excellent any questions on that particular technique way to have a few questions from the internet and let's see the first one was a couple people are wondering if you could talk to you and this was from john w c and then let's see dallas designs could you just talk about dither? They've heard you talk about that? They're a little bit or in other classes perhaps, but and what that is in the grady in't preset it's just going to an a little bit of beckel e I don't think you're going to be able to see it on here. Yeah, it's not anything that we can really see with this particular technique. So um mainly says should I reset or load radiance on the palate of the black transparency grainy it is not showing no that's not gonna help you. What you need to do is set your four grand color tip toe black and then when you either use the grade and tool or you go into that radiant phil layer, then what you're after is that second preset, which is a is your form around color chip to transparency. So you have to check you have to set your foreground colored ship to black before you're going to see that that's what tripped me up when I was doing it, what I did on purpose yesterday one about looting him from steve hamel dot dot com hamel dot com if you load all the presets and other things that adobe makes available but they're not loaded by default with the program slow down. I don't think so. No, I don't think so at all you'll be in a little bit of scrolling hill trying to scroll through all those previous if it's to find the one you want. You know, that's the thing about the process I wish some day a w would give us the ability to make preset sits so once you load all those praecis then you lose the ability to see what category they came from. So if you know we got a technique later in the day, we were going to use a grady and map adjustment layer to fix a really boring sky. Make it look real pretty sunset well, there's a nice grady a in the color harmonies to category ok, and I know that because I've done that a bunch, but if you load all those pre cess, then it can become impossible to figure out what category they came from and it could make it really hard to find anything, so that would really be the only drawback. But certainly, if you're used to use in certain radiance from certain categories like islay photographic toning, I leave those presets because I use a voluntary so just further on that from jerry be so is there a way to limit the number of fonts or or the grady ints that are available to work with in order to not have those or memorize the names. Can you do? I've seen earlier. Somebody asked if you could delete some out. You can delete him. Yeah, it takes a little bit of work, but you can delete him.