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Challenge #4 Order UP!

I have been delivered three USB drives, just in case our Dropbox didn't work, of the photos that were shot next door. So, what we are doing for our fourth and final challenge, which we will give you extra time on, is we are going to have you dropping in a model into your background scene that you chose. For instance, in this case, this is a photograph that I did. You can see the castle in the background. And I just wanted someone in there, so I went on Adobe Stock and looked for a woman with a bicycle. And there she is. So we got that from Adobe Stock, very easy to drop her in. Of course, it's much easier when they're a long way away, so I'll give you extra points if you actually bring them a little closer to the foreground, 'cause it's harder to sell that. But what you're going to do is you're going to be taking the model and putting it into your backdrop, and you get an extra thousand points if you can make it believable. So you have to, if you can touch them to the ground and add a ...

shadow, and I'm going to give you, how much time do we have? Oh, we have plenty of time. I'm gonna give you, actually, seven minutes on this. So you're gonna get seven minutes to finish this job. Are you ready? Yes. And three, two, one, find your model shot. Jesus, looks like they found the right one for you. They did. They got the model walking, a blonde, that's good. Oh wait, that's not the right one. That's not the right one? Yeah, it is. Down here, it's, I'll delete all the other layers. I'm wasting time. Have fun with your blonde. (laughter) That's hot. That's gonna work really well with your storyline. I know, but I'm looking for story: that's good. Yeah, you really need the fright. I think the fright, the fear is much-- Fright'll work, that'll work. Yeah, the fright will work really well. I also appreciate the fact that it is a creative, live dungeon. So it's kind of like the dungeon that you're currently in. I mean right off the bat, probably one of the things that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to tone it. I'm looking at this compared to where we are there. Yeah, you gotta, right, you want it to match. I'm like, so if we can get closer to it to begin with this is where I'm like, alright Photoshop don't fail me now. There's this tool called Select Subject that you can use to be able to get the subject, but will it know a subject trying to pick up a phone with a foot? It did. It did. Look at that. Alright. That's brilliant. Way to go Photoshop. Thank you, Photoshop! Look down at the foot, dude. Wait, so, Lisa, nice. I like it. I'm gettin' there. You got rid of the phone. Yeah, I'm gonna put the phone in. Give me a second. Oh, you're gonna keep the phone? Don't lose the phone. The phone is a common motif. Yeah, I'll get the phone in. I just need a minute. The photographer was very, very specific about keeping a motif throughout the whole thing. Art directors. It's very, very good, very artistic photographer. Look at that. Jesus is going with the same, so this image wasn't even meant for you, and you found a way to use it. I love this guy. That is brilliant. So, you asked for walking. I gave you walking. Hands. What? You gave me no hands. I said walking on their hands. Oh, it was the hands. That's right. So now you're going for the phone. I'm going sitting, yeah. Alright, sitting is fun. I mean clearly. That is a little bit of a crab walk. Yeah, actually you're right. So, okay, I should've given you a hand crawl. I'm just not that good at balancing. Or the model wasn't. Sometimes it's hard. It is hard. What are you doing now, Lisa? I'm just trying to turn my layers on. I'm feeling the heat with Jesus next to me. Are you getting nervous? Who, me, never. So, that's like the giant. I like, I kind of like the giant man. Look at him. He's got a pink wig. He doesn't belong in this kind of weird thing. Watch out for the giant man of Havannah. You said something about bringing it forward, and if you-- Oh, you want the extra points? Yeah. Lisa, if you want the extra points, I'll just give you the extra points. Oh, I just had to ask, right? The extra points aren't real anyway. Oh, it's all real make-believe. Oh, there is a rubber chicken as a prize, if you want that. I'll take a rubber chicken. You got one? Where is it? Can we get the rubber chicken, please? That's the main prize. Where do we find the rubber chicken? It's not in the files, actually there is a file with a rubber chicken, just in case. Just in case I find a need? Just in case you want a rubber chicken somewhere. I think I want to cool him down a little. So let me see. Let me take a look at my color table. So Lisa, we did something very special for you. Oh, I love that. What'd you do? We didn't use any gels on our lights. Thank you, thank you! So that you could determine what color you wanted. Because you know I like that. Yeah, we were thinking specifically about you. I appreciate that. Add it in post. It's much easier. Awesome. It's much easier. Thank you, darling. Well, that's looking good, RC. Thanks. Like here's something that people usually don't know. I'm using a blend mode for this. Like you see right here if I drag the opacity out, you can see that. A lot of the times people are like "Well what's this distance?" "Where do you move it?" I'm just like "Screw it." Don't use this. Just come over here and go "Where am I gonna move it?" Whoa! And then you can just grab that and put that wherever you want. Are you kidding me? And then from there-- I never knew that. Did you know that, Jesus? You don't even know what we're talking about. Yeah. No, we're trying to watch but it's kind of cool. So once you kind of get it there, the problem with that is that once you have that there it's tied to the style, which kind of sucks, and it doesn't really look good, and you don't really need it everywhere. But if you go over here to that layer style, and you go under layers, you want to go to layer style, then you go to create layer. That takes that layer, and it pulls it out. So now you see you have that drop shadow by itself. On its own layer and now you can-- Mask it, and then you can get rid of it from the sections where you don't need it. And could you also go into the liquify and warp it? Yeah, so, I can grab this from here and either liquify it or if I needed to transform it, I can do a transform which lets you do scale, which you don't want to do but you can also come over here and do transform. Everybody, big cheers for that one. Absolutely. (cheering) Lovin' it. So once you have it there, then at least that kind of throws the element of throwing some sort of shadow, but obviously you don't want it to be that much. So you just drop the opacity just a little bit to just sell that he's there. Nice, nicely done. You get the extra 1,000 points, for sure. Dude, well done. (cheering) What are you working on? I'm just getting a little dust because, you know, Yes, a little atmosphere there. We actually use some atmospheric spray there for you. Did you see that? I saw that. Yes, it's just lovely. So we have one minute and eight seconds left, contestants. Just know that you are on the clock. No pressure, no pressure at all. Actually at this point, it's less than a minute. Now it's like 58 seconds. What are you doing with the colors, RC? I was just gonna see if I can kind of color it a little bit, but to be honest with you I'm not really feeling it. I'm thinking that's kind of okay, and maybe what I'll do is just do a quick levels adjustment from here. I tend to, every time I make a levels or a curves layer or a burn or anything, I tend to take it to 50% always. It's like I go way overboard, I get all excited about Photoshop. I go way overboard, and then I end up at 50%. I mean, and that's the thing, at this point all I'm doing is kind of trying to treat it a little bit and playing with it a little bit. Oh, I like it warm. Kind of give it like a fake 70's kind of look. Oh, that's brilliant, isn't it? It's just a good look. That's intelligence, guided by wisdom. Right there. (audience laughs) That's the inside of my brain coming out. I see that. I can feel it. Yeah, that's it. Oh, that's awesome. (buzzer) And that's it. Okay, let's take a look at what we've done. I'm gonna start over here with RC since we've gone the other direction. Tell us a little bit about your wishes for the, we watched yours quite a bit, but tell us your favorite thing that you did and what you would do from here. Probably the favorite thing that I did was, it sounds stupid, but if you see right here this one section, the individual light, if we were to go back to this one individual layer here, it's an option click, just the eyeball. You can see the chair. Option click it again, it turns it back on. Like this chair right here isn't really the right chair for it, but what happens is we tend to look at everything at 400% and what you'll do is you'll obsess over the detail of that chair. And you're like "Ah, I can't get that chair right." When truthfully, all I did was just use a curves adjustment layer and drop that part of the chair. And by dropping that, it takes the focus off of the chair. And now you're not worried about masking, and you're back in the story. So that part, sometimes you don't really have to really do a lot of stuff. You just have to try to, you're doing smoke and mirrors anyway, just add a little bit more smoke. Right. And truthfully, the eye goes to the light thing, not that dark thing so darken things you don't want people to look at, they go away. Yeah, so then, probably the only thing that I'd wanna do, the difference between good and great, in any work thing you're doing, really is dodging and burning, bringing in contrast and bringing in shadows. So if it were me, I'd probably put in a couple more curves adjustment layers to be able to darken a little bit more of the face to make sure it doesn't seem so specular. It's a little bit brighter here, but it's okay because this wall is bright. So you're kind of motivating the practical, in that sense. Right. So it's a good thing, but probably not as much. So can we give kudos to our photographer, Casey? Casey, thank you. There, he's back there. (audience applauds) It was a pleasure working with you. At least that's what the model says. Thank you, RC. That was fantastic. Show us what you did, Lisa. Alright, well you're the giant man in the pink wig. Yeah, I'm a little weirded out by how giant I actually am. Yeah, it's a little departure here, but look at you, sweetie. You're not small. I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed having hair for the last couple-- You're a big man. You're a big man. You need to be revered. Can I get, like, a thirty foot poster of that? Absolutely, I can do that for you. Awesome, that'd be great. So I think you just need a little more rim light to separate you so if I had a little bit more time, I'd put that to separate you from the background would be good, so a painted rim light and just-- So you would've just painted the edge a little white, or something? Yeah, yeah, there's some tricks for it but, let me see if I can do something quick for you. So you're putting it as a clipping? Yeah, then you just kind of go in and paint your edges. Oh, nice, look at that. Paint some different colors if they're specular. And that's the difference between good and great. Yeah, it just needs a little bit of somethin'. So yeah, it just needs a little more attention and finesse. That's beautiful. But I like you big. I know it's a scale thing, but we're selling smoke and mirrors anyway. That's right. Well, I'm a big man of Havannah. The big man of Havannah. Give it up for Lisa. Thank you, Lisa. Alright. Jesus, so you're using the happy version of the telephone story. Although not too happy when the car comes around the corner. He's happy he's on the phone. He's been kidnapped. He's ready to get home, okay. So tell me what your favorite thing that you did here was and what you would do to finish it. I guess favorite thing was putting it all together using Camera RAW. So what I did was I pushed Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E which makes a duplicate copy of all the visible layers so there it is: all the layers below are now on that layer. Then I went to filter, Camera RAW filter, and I used Camera RAW to add grain. I think you were talking about that earlier, adding grain to images just a little bit to bring it together, make it seem like it's one image. I also added a little bit of sharpening and adjust the color temperature to make it all seem more cohesive. I adjusted the contrast, highlights, shadows, and added clarity which is contrast in the midtones and just added that extra pop to make it all come together. Bringing in the other style. The style, exactly. That's beautiful, so using Camera RAW at the beginning for the actual raw photo but then using Camera RAW at the end for that top layer, and quite frankly Camera RAW is the simplest possible tool to use so I want to live there so I find myself constantly going back to RAW as much as possible when I'm in Photoshop. But then I'm a photographer so that's all I want to do. Thank you, Jesus. Give it up for Jesus. (audience applauds)