All language subtitles for 4. Compositing Continued & Color Levels

One thing you want to make sure you're doing as we work through this project.

Make sure you're saving frequently just in case Photoshop crashes where your computer fails and some

catastrophic event because that will happen at some point you have some kind of a deadline and then

it'll crash.

So make sure you're saving All right back to this PAHs window real quick as you make your work path

and as you're working through it you'll have us work path option here.

If you DoubleClick you can name this path whatever you want.

I just call mine cut out.

It's just easy to remember and it's basically my workflow and how I do everything and simply by giving

it a name that path will stay with this image when you save it.

So now I'm going to go in that file save and I will drop this into my design files folder and I just

name it whatever the image was.

In this case when I actually cut out a photo for my camera Dasch cut out so whatever the name Dasch

cut out.

And the reason why I do that.

You don't have to do that.

But the reason why I do it that way is so if I ever needed to find the original I could do a quick search

for that I m g underscore 7 3 0 9 and find the original of everything to go back to it.

So that's why I do that save.

Again make sure on format you've got the format you've set the Photoshop and you've got your layer selected

.

That way you can come back through and grab his Assa at any time.

So I'm going to close that right now and let's make a new document command and or click on the new button

here and I'll make another letter sized paper that worked really good.

If you want to do that or you are free to deviate and create your own size whether you want to make

something for maybe a web background like a desktop wallpaper or something.

OK.

And I have my paper size and what I want to do I actually want to change it.

I didn't want to be vertical or horizontal so I'm going to come over here to Image image rotation and

I'm just going to move rotate this 90 degrees clockwise since I have anything on here yet and then feel

free to drop in whatever background image you want to work with or in this case you and some of the

assets I've provided you and I'm going to scale this up a little bit and get it ready to go here.

Perfect.

Now what we need do is start creating this visual effect by adding in our layers or our assets so I

will open up that file that I just closed I could of left it open but good practice for you to find

where your part of your files will open up that photoshop file we just cut out.

Click on that image.

Drag and drop over into your new file and then let go.

Once we've got it in there let's go and hit command S to save this now and let's call it whatever you

want.

Composite image is great and I'll save it in that design folder.

All right.

Now that we're back in here.

Let's start with some simple housekeeping here.

I'm going to Comanche and shrink this down and get it kind of close to size.

And then what I want to start working with now is the coloring of this piece.

So I'll come up here to filter Kamaraj filter and this will apply to whatever layer I had selected.

So this camera filter is a great filter to use on any image especially photography but you can come

in here and adjust the temperature adjust the tint maybe it's a little underexposed or overexposed when

you add contrast doing really come through here and and control exactly how our image looks.

But before you get too far on the road here let's just let's just study this a little bit here let me

command to shrink this down a little bit get them a little more into the scene and let's just think

about where the light is coming from.

Think about how bright things are so the lights come out from top down top left or top top left down

to the bottom right.

If we were to put this over here on the right side to really put him into the scene we would probably

have to deal with these windows shining at some point so we wouldn't need to.

For example I could make a quick selection around his leg here.

It command returned to get that selection.

I mean hit command L to get my levels panel.

And I'm just going to brighten it up a little bit.

OK.

Commanded a de-select and now it looks like he's standing behind that sunlight which is great.

But the problem is is now soon as I go to move him back over here his leg has been messed up.

I didn't create a way for me to work in a non-destructive manner so what that means is as you work through

things sometimes you maybe let's say you want to save this like you were pretty happy with it but you

wanted to try and add that light effect here.

I could hit command J to make a new layer.

And to that effect we just did use my pen tool to just kind of make a quick selection here Commander

turned to get it command L to open up my levels.

And I just brightened up the whites a little bit so that way if for some reason I want to go back to

the other version I can turn that layer off and open a new layer.

Didn't cost me anything to do that.

You can have as many layers as you want.

So it's a good idea to save layer's at good stages along the way.

So looking at this again though he's a little bit lighter than the background.

And I could actually probably make the background a little more dark and ominous as well so what I'll

do here is I'm going to click on this industrial layer to filter and jump to my camera raw filter and

I'm going to go ahead and bring that contrast or the exposure down just a touch I could crank the exposure

or I'm sorry the contrast up bring you back to soften it up maybe read the highlights down so it's not

quite so bright.

I could bring the shadows down or expose the shadows to make the shadows seem brighter which then makes

my highlights not seem quite as bright and balancing out the image.

So again just play with it you know just play with it and see what makes sense for your image.

And when you get to a spot that you're happy go and hit OK.

And now if I hit command Z I can toggle between what it was and what it is now.

So you see you make it a little bit darker a little more contrast.

But now he really stands out.

So let's go back and adjust as layer as well.

I'll come back to that filter camera filter and going to zoom in a little bit here so I can see him

a little better.

Going to move things around just so I can see what the background looks like and try and get a better

match.

So we definitely to bring down our exposure a little bit too much but definitely a little bit and the

contrast.

You know it's probably fine where it's at.

I usually come through and I grab each slider and scribble away the right of the left to try and find

a good balance for where things need to be.

So the whites obviously need backdown just attached blacks.

Same thing with Arcanum up a little bit.

Bring up the clarity

and we'll hit OK and see what that does for us.

So already it's looking a lot better like he belongs in that environment.

Now a few more things to seal the deal here.

There's no shadows.

If he was truly standing in the space if you look at where some of these other shadows are coming across

the room we would need some kind of a shadow.

So there's a lot of things we can do here.

I could add a layer down below command click at the letter Flutterby to get my brush to and let's jump

here and grab my brushes will grab a soft brush bring my size down a little bit maybe a little bit bigger

than that from a hardness down turn up my spacing and up here we got opacity and flow we turn this down

a little bit.

If it's at 100 percent and I start painting with what does this do.

GREEN So you can see it you'll see that I get a really opaque green.

Now if I bring this opacity down and start scrubbing you see it builds up and I could keep building

and adding to it.

So what I can do here I'll leave that layer.

I had a new one.

I mean I hit the letter D to get my default swatches over here which turns it back to black and white

or I could have double clicked on here and select a different color.

But anyway I'm looking for black.

So what I can do with his layer below the one above it is start to paint and you'll notice that it doesn't

paint over the top of him.

It paints behind so you can build up this effect and it becomes a lot more believable if I do it that

way so we can add some drop shadow here to really kind of anchor him down to this scene so you can paint

this by hand if you want to.

Another way that I works sometimes I'll click once on this layer command Jaida to duplicate it and I'll

grab the layer below.

I command t click while holding down the mouse.

Now I had the command to send the command button and I can warp this and bend it down you know the pain

where the light is in this case.

I don't want him back behind but I'll just show the effect here and now I'll hit the return key to commit

it.

Now what I do is lock.

Right here there's this tiny lock icon.

This looks like it I'm locking the transparency so now that I can do this at all.

Delete fill my foreground color and it'll only fill pixels that are there it won't fill anything around

it.

Now if that wasn't selected and I hit delete it fills the whole entire layer.

So Command Z makes sure my my alpha transparency channel here is locked utterly to fill that now.

So now what I've done I'm going to delete these layers.

Now what I've done is I've created kind of a shadow here.

And to further make that look real I can bring my opacity down a little bit maybe change my blend mode

from normal to multiply and I could even work backwards and start you know maybe erasing away some of

the shadow because a true shadow wouldn't necessarily go all the way across the whole thing.

What I like to do is I'll add a mask layer mask here at the letter G to get my gradient tool up here

I'm painting from the foreground color to transparent with a linear gradient.

So what I'm going to do is in a mask black will hide and white will reveal so get a click from the head

come down to here and now it's going to paint with a gradient from dark to light.

So now I'm painting on this mask layer and this mask if I hold and shift and click all this doing is

masking that shadows on actually destroying it.

But there I get a smooth transition from his shadow.

So go ahead and bring in your subject into whatever image you have.

Start getting your colors right.

Start playing with the levels so that was command L to bring up maybe the brightness or the whites and

the blacks to darken it up where your levels here.

So play with that effect a little bit play with your camera.

Come up here to filter camera and try and get your background in your foreground color to be closer

so they feel like they're in the same scene.

We're going to do some more facts here in just a minute.

But let's start there and then start painting in your shadows wherever you think there should be some

shadows.