IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi! I am Deke McClelland.
| | 00:05 | Welcome to Photoshop Masking and
Compositing Hair, my unflinching guide to
| | 00:11 | isolating that most delicate detail
in all of digital imaging, human hair.
| | 00:17 | To you and I a strand of hair is an
admittedly fine, but ultimately discrete object.
| | 00:23 | To Photoshop, it's the usual series of
pixels, and such thin strands of pixels.
| | 00:29 | They come, they go, and they
mingle with the surrounding environment.
| | 00:34 | One hair may be darker than its
background and the next one lighter.
| | 00:37 | The transitions may be obvious
and abrupt, or so subtle you can
| | 00:42 | hardly distinguish them.
| | 00:43 | And here's the worst part, hair
grows and shrinks when set against
| | 00:47 | similar luminance levels.
| | 00:49 | So a dark hair will appear slim against
the light background and thicken up as
| | 00:54 | the background darkens, even
though the actual hair never changed.
| | 00:58 | It's a photographic illusion that
creates special challenges when masking.
| | 01:03 | The upshot is that hair doesn't
respond well to Photoshop's automated tools,
| | 01:08 | which is why I'll be showing you a
handful of advanced manual approaches, all of
| | 01:13 | which produce excellent results.
| | 01:16 | I'll start by introducing you to the
commands that do the best job of seeing
| | 01:20 | hair, Calculations and Apply Image.
| | 01:23 | Then I'll show you two unique Blend modes;
| | 01:26 | Add and Subtract and their
supporting options, Scale and Offset.
| | 01:31 | From then on, we'll examine
hair in a series of four projects.
| | 01:35 | First, we'll isolate hair set
against a blue screen or sky.
| | 01:40 | Then we'll work on dark hair, even
going so far as to paint in missing strands
| | 01:45 | with the Wacom Tablet.
| | 01:46 | In Chapter 3, we'll select blonde
hair, and just for fun we'll mask
| | 01:51 | a translucent flame.
| | 01:53 | And finally, we'll take on the tough
stuff, hair of all luminance levels set
| | 01:58 | against an almost identically
colored and very busy background.
| | 02:03 | Over the next three hours we'll start
simple and then get very, very complex.
| | 02:09 | Here is how to masking
composite hair in Photoshop.
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1. Calculating a Hair MaskIntroducing the hair masking options| 00:00 | In this exercise, I'll introduce
you to the topics I will be discussing
| | 00:04 | throughout this chapter.
| | 00:05 | Mainly two commands;
| | 00:07 | Calculations and Apply Image; two Blend modes;
| | 00:10 | Add and Subtract;
| | 00:11 | and then two numerical options,
Offset and Scale, all of which are uniquely
| | 00:16 | suited to masking hair and
other details inside Photoshop.
| | 00:20 | It's a lot to take in, which is why
we'll be discussing all of these options in
| | 00:25 | more detail in future exercises.
| | 00:27 | Let's start off with the two
commands, Calculations and Apply Image.
| | 00:31 | Calculations lets you blend two channels
to create a new Alpha Channel that will
| | 00:36 | serve as the basis for a mask.
| | 00:38 | So instead of trying to create a mask
exclusively from the Red Channel or the
| | 00:43 | Green Channel, for example, you can
blend those two channels together to create
| | 00:47 | a better base Alpha Channel.
| | 00:49 | Meanwhile, the Apply Image command
blends the channel with the active channel or
| | 00:54 | an independent layer.
| | 00:56 | Now, I should mention, both of these
commands are found in the Image menu and
| | 01:00 | they're both pretty similar to each
other in the way that they are structured.
| | 01:02 | In other words, the dialog boxes
look a lot alike, which is why even very
| | 01:07 | advanced Photoshop users sometimes
have problems telling them apart.
| | 01:11 | The similarities between the two
commands are that they both blend channels
| | 01:15 | to facilitate masking.
| | 01:16 | The differences are that the
Calculations command generates a new channel or
| | 01:21 | selection, while Apply Image
modifies an existing channel or layer and it
| | 01:26 | respects the selection.
| | 01:27 | In other words, the Apply Image command
goes ahead and modifies the contents of
| | 01:32 | the selected area of the image.
| | 01:34 | Both of these commands provide
access to all of the Blend modes that we
| | 01:37 | discussed back in the Advanced Blending course.
| | 01:40 | However, there are two unique Blend
modes provided by both commands and those
| | 01:44 | Blend modes are these, Add and Subtract.
| | 01:47 | Add is a lightening mode,
like Screen and the others;
| | 01:51 | while Subtract is a darkening
mode, like Multiply and so forth.
| | 01:55 | Add goes ahead and adds the luminance
of a pixel in one channel to that of the
| | 01:59 | same pixel in another channel.
| | 02:01 | These channels are known as Source 1
and Source 2, and strictly
| | 02:05 | speaking, for what it's worth, the
formula is Source 2 plus Source 1.
| | 02:09 | The blended result is brighter,
useful for selecting foregrounds.
| | 02:13 | Because after all when you brighten a
portion of a mask, you add to the selected region.
| | 02:17 | The Subtract mode is exactly the opposite.
| | 02:20 | It subtracts the luminance
of a pixel in the top channel;
| | 02:23 | Source 1, from that of the same
pixel in the bottom channel, Source 2.
| | 02:28 | So the formula is Source 2 minus
Source 1, for what that's worth.
| | 02:32 | The bright areas in the top
channel darken more than the dark areas.
| | 02:37 | So in other words, when you have
white in the top channel, that's going
| | 02:40 | to darken absolutely;
| | 02:42 | black will not darken at all, so black
becomes neutral, making the Blend mode
| | 02:46 | useful for masking away backgrounds,
because after all you're adding to the dark
| | 02:50 | area of the mask, so you're masking areas away.
| | 02:53 | Now, strictly speaking,
these Blend modes are not unique.
| | 02:56 | After all, Subtract is a Blend mode
that's found in the layers panel and Add is
| | 03:01 | exactly the same as the Linear Dodge mode.
| | 03:04 | What makes them unique where
Calculations and Apply Image are concerned is that
| | 03:08 | you can mitigate their
behavior using a couple of options.
| | 03:11 | And these options are Offset and Scale.
| | 03:15 | The Offset value adds or
subtracts a constant amount of luminance.
| | 03:19 | That is, you enter say a 100, and
you're going to add a 100 luminance levels to
| | 03:25 | each and every pixel in the blended image.
| | 03:28 | So for example, if the Add mode
results in an overly bright effect, which it
| | 03:32 | most assuredly will, then you can enter a
negative Offset value to deepen the shadows.
| | 03:37 | Also worth noting, the Offset value results in
sharper transitions inside the Alpha Channel.
| | 03:43 | Whereas, the Scale value goes ahead and
divides the blended result by as much as two.
| | 03:49 | So you can enter any value between one and
two, including decimal values, by the way;
| | 03:54 | The result is always a dimmer image.
| | 03:57 | So you're always darkening the
composite image, and it includes softer
| | 04:01 | transitions than you can
achieve using Offset on its own.
| | 04:05 | Now, I realize that's an awful lot to
take in, which is why we'll be discussing
| | 04:09 | Calculations and Apply Image, as well as
the Add and the Subtract modes, and the
| | 04:13 | Offset and Scale values in more
detail in the following exercises.
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| Calculating with the Add mode| 00:00 | In this exercise, we'll take a first
look at the Calculations command combined
| | 00:04 | with the Add Blend mode.
| | 00:06 | I'm working inside a file called
Faux diver.jpg, found inside the
| | 00:10 | 01_calculations folder.
| | 00:11 | Over the course of this chapter we're
going to take this model with her hair
| | 00:15 | billowing upwards, set against this
blue backdrop, and we're going to set
| | 00:18 | her against an authentic undersea
background in order to create this final composition.
| | 00:23 | Now, this is a pretty simple
compositional effect to pull off.
| | 00:27 | After all, our model has very dark, if
not absolutely, black hair, and she is
| | 00:31 | set against a homogeneous backdrop.
| | 00:34 | I am keeping things simple upfront on
purpose here, so we can get a sense for
| | 00:38 | how these complex commands and options work.
| | 00:41 | Now, when you're first initiating a
mask, you want to go at it with the
| | 00:44 | Calculations command.
| | 00:46 | Apply Image is useful for refining a
mask that you already have in progress, but
| | 00:51 | first you need to take a
look at your Color Channels.
| | 00:53 | So switch over to the Channels panel and
then go ahead and click on the Red Channel.
| | 00:57 | Now, because our model is a human being, her
skin tones show up brightest in the Red Channel.
| | 01:02 | The background is relatively dark because it's
blue, so it doesn't have a lot of red going on.
| | 01:07 | And then the hair is dark.
| | 01:09 | Now, the hair is going to be dark in
all three of the channels, because after
| | 01:13 | all it doesn't contain an
awful lot of red, green, or blue.
| | 01:17 | So hair is the least of our problems.
| | 01:19 | It's the skin tones that
are going to be the most work.
| | 01:22 | Notice that the skin tones show up generally
brighter than the background, but not always.
| | 01:27 | In the shadow regions and the
shoulders, our contrast fades away.
| | 01:30 | If I switch over to the Green Channel,
you can see that once again the hair is
| | 01:34 | darker, the background is brightened up,
the skin has become a little darker,
| | 01:37 | especially in the shadow region, and
as a result we're losing a lot of the
| | 01:41 | contrast between the flesh
tones and the background.
| | 01:44 | And then finally, in the Blue Channel,
the hair is once again very dark, the
| | 01:47 | background has brightened up
incrementally, and the skin tones have become
| | 01:51 | darker, once again,
especially in the shadow region.
| | 01:54 | So you might argue that the skin tones
are generally darker than the background,
| | 01:58 | but again not always.
| | 01:59 | At this point you have to make a
determination about which two channels you
| | 02:03 | want to blend together, and the
reasoning works out like this, you either want
| | 02:07 | to blend the two channels that contain the
most contrast when compared to each other.
| | 02:12 | So for example, the channels that are
the most different where this image is
| | 02:15 | concerned are the Blue and Red
Channels, so it would make sense to blend
| | 02:19 | those two channels.
| | 02:20 | Or, you want to take your detailed
channel, which is the Green Channel and then
| | 02:24 | blend that with the strongest of the two.
| | 02:27 | Now, for the purposes of my demonstration here,
I am going to go with the latter approach.
| | 02:31 | We're going to treat the Green Channel
as being our best channel, the detailed
| | 02:35 | channel, and we're going to mix it with the
strongest opposing channel, which is Blue.
| | 02:39 | So I'll go ahead and switch back to
the RGB image, and then I'll go up to the
| | 02:43 | Image menu and choose the Calculations command.
| | 02:46 | Now, remember in the previous exercise
I was talking about how we have an S2
| | 02:50 | Channel, a Source 2, Channel and
then a Source 1 Channel as well.
| | 02:54 | The Source 1 Channel sits on top of Source 2,
where the compositing process is concerned.
| | 03:00 | So you can think of Source 2 as being
kind of the background image and then
| | 03:03 | Source 1 is the layer on top of it, as
affected of course by the Blend mode,
| | 03:08 | which is located right here
next to the word Blending.
| | 03:10 | Now, the most complicated
options are these guys right here;
| | 03:13 | Source 1 and Source 2, because
they begin with the name of the image.
| | 03:17 | 99 times out of 100 you're going to
be blending channels inside of the
| | 03:22 | foreground image with each other, so
you're not going to change the image name.
| | 03:26 | Next, you drop down to these layer
options, which are both Background in our
| | 03:30 | case, because we're
working inside of a flat image.
| | 03:33 | However, if we were working inside of
a layered image, we would have access
| | 03:36 | to all of the layers.
| | 03:37 | You generally want layer set to
either Background, or in the case of a
| | 03:41 | multi-layer image, Merged.
| | 03:44 | And we'll see how that works later.
| | 03:45 | Then you want to go ahead and set
your Channels to the channels that you
| | 03:48 | determined just a moment ago.
| | 03:50 | So I decided that my base channel of
strength was the Green Channel, which is
| | 03:55 | why I am going to change Source 2 to Green.
| | 03:58 | Then I'm going to set the Source 1
Channel to the next best channel, which
| | 04:02 | in our case is Blue.
| | 04:03 | So I've got the Blue Channel sitting
on top of the Green Channel and they're
| | 04:07 | both by default getting multiplied together.
| | 04:10 | Now, at this point you want to get a
sense for whether you should Invert either
| | 04:14 | of your channels, and the best way
to determine whether an inversion is
| | 04:17 | necessary or not is to view
each one of the channels by itself.
| | 04:21 | For example, let's say you want to see
the Source 1 Channel, the one that's on
| | 04:25 | top, you want to see what that Blue Channel
looks like exclusively of the Green Channel.
| | 04:29 | You would change the Blending
option from Multiply to Normal.
| | 04:32 | Now you're seeing the Blue Channel by itself.
| | 04:34 | The black hair is darker than the background;
| | 04:37 | we presumably want the opposite effect, so
I'll go ahead and turn on the Invert checkbox.
| | 04:42 | Now what to do about the Green Channel?
| | 04:43 | Well, to determine that I need to see
that channel, and the best way to do that
| | 04:47 | is to reduce the Opacity value to 0%.
| | 04:50 | That way we're seeing through the
Blue Channel to the Green Channel below;
| | 04:53 | again, the hair is dark against the
bright background so I'll turn on the Invert
| | 04:57 | checkbox for this channel as well.
| | 04:59 | Now I'll go ahead and
increase the Opacity value to 100%.
| | 05:02 | When you're working in Calculations and
in Apply Image, 99 times out of 100 you
| | 05:07 | want to leave that Opacity value to 100
%, except when checking out the contents
| | 05:12 | of the channels independently, which
means you are going to do all of the
| | 05:15 | blending using the Blend mode.
| | 05:17 | If you click on this Blend mode
option, you'll see all of your Darken and
| | 05:20 | Lighten and Contrast modes listed,
they work just as we discussed in the
| | 05:24 | Advanced Blending course.
| | 05:26 | These guys right here though, Add
and Subtract, include special options.
| | 05:30 | So notice if I change the Blend mode
to Linear Dodge (Add), which is the Add
| | 05:34 | mode, we see an Opacity value, but that's it.
| | 05:37 | However, if I switch from Linear
Dodge to Add, which is exactly the same
| | 05:42 | formula, the effect does not change
on screen, however we do see Offset and
| | 05:46 | Scale values, which we need to take
advantage of, because after all the
| | 05:50 | composite image is way too bright.
| | 05:52 | So we need to darken up the composition,
and I'll show you how that works in
| | 05:56 | the next exercise.
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| Using the Scale and Offset values| 00:00 | In this exercise, we'll take a look at
the Offset and Scale values when combined
| | 00:04 | with the Add Blend mode here
inside the Calculations dialog box.
| | 00:08 | I am still working inside that Faux
diver.jpg file, gone ahead and chose the
| | 00:12 | Calculations command, and we're working
with Inverted versions of the Blue and
| | 00:16 | Green Channels set to the Add Blend mode.
| | 00:18 | As you can see, the result is much too
bright, so we need to darken things up.
| | 00:23 | And there is one of two
options available to you here.
| | 00:26 | One is to go ahead and divide the
results of the calculation by the Scale value.
| | 00:31 | Now, by default the Scale value is 1, when
you divide anything by 1, it doesn't change.
| | 00:37 | However, if I take that value up to,
let's say, 1.5, you can see that the image
| | 00:41 | darkens up in the background.
| | 00:43 | I am going to go ahead and take that
value all the way up to its maximum, which
| | 00:47 | is 2, and you can see that we're not
only darkening the image, we're also
| | 00:51 | mitigating its contrast a little bit,
and as a result we're ending up with some
| | 00:55 | soft organic transitions.
| | 00:57 | However, we're not darkening up the
background nearly enough, which is why we
| | 01:01 | need to follow things up
with a reduced Offset value.
| | 01:04 | I am going to click inside that
Offset value and press Shift+Down Arrow, in
| | 01:07 | order to reduce the value in
increments of 10, and you can see that I'm
| | 01:11 | darkening up that background quite a bit.
| | 01:13 | So I'll go ahead and take it
down to -100, which darkens up that
| | 01:18 | background quite nicely.
| | 01:19 | But you can see that we're also darkening the
bright areas inside the hair. I don't want that.
| | 01:24 | That's a function of the
Scale value, by the way;
| | 01:27 | If I go ahead and reset the Scale to 1,
then I bump back up that contrast so
| | 01:32 | that we have nice bright hair
set against a dark background.
| | 01:36 | So the moral of the story is this.
| | 01:38 | If you want contrast and you want
sharp delineation between details, then you
| | 01:43 | want to modify the Offset value.
| | 01:45 | If you want less contrast, if you want
to reduce the contrast across the board
| | 01:50 | and you want to soften the transitions,
then you increase that Scale value.
| | 01:54 | In my case, this is the effect I want,
a reduced Offset value of -100 and a
| | 01:58 | default Scale value of 1.
| | 02:00 | Now, notice that the areas inside the
hair are still absolutely white, which
| | 02:05 | might not make that much sense, given
that I just reduced the Luminance of every
| | 02:09 | single pixel by -100.
| | 02:10 | You'll recall that a Luminance
level of 0 is black and 255 is white.
| | 02:16 | So how can I subtract a big, huge
value like -100 and still end up with white
| | 02:22 | details inside of my Alpha Channel?
| | 02:24 | And the answer is that the Add
Blend mode had increased those Luminance
| | 02:27 | Levels to beyond 255.
| | 02:30 | So they were so very bright that taking
them down a 100 Luminance Levels still
| | 02:35 | resulted in white in the end,
once again they are inside the hair.
| | 02:39 | Now notice down here at the bottom of the
dialog box, the Result says New Channel.
| | 02:43 | You can change it to New Document, if
you want to send the Alpha Channel to
| | 02:47 | an entirely new image.
| | 02:49 | Or you can choose Selection if you want
to create a selection outline instead.
| | 02:53 | However, because we're building a mask,
we want New Channel, so that we're
| | 02:56 | creating a new Alpha Channel.
| | 02:58 | Then you click OK and you create that
new Alpha Channel here at the bottom
| | 03:02 | of the Channels panel.
| | 03:03 | I'm going to go ahead and rename that
channel and I'm going to call it iG+iB,
| | 03:10 | that tells me it's an inverted Green
plus an inverted Blue set to the Add Blend
| | 03:15 | mode, with an Offset of -100.
| | 03:18 | And then I'll go ahead and press the
Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in
| | 03:22 | order to accept that name.
| | 03:23 | Now, you do not have to name your Alpha
Channels that way if you don't want to.
| | 03:27 | I have just found over time that it's
very helpful to know how I arrived at a
| | 03:32 | base Alpha Channel, in case I have to
back up and repeat a step. All right!
| | 03:37 | So that's how you create a base Alpha
Channel using the Calculations command,
| | 03:40 | combined with the Add Blend mode.
| | 03:42 | In the next exercise, I'll
demonstrate how to work with the Subtract mode.
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| Calculating with the Subtract mode| 00:00 | In this exercise I'll show you how to
create an alternate-base mask using the
| | 00:04 | Calculations command
combined with the Subtract mode.
| | 00:07 | I've saved my progress so far as
Initial add mask.tif found inside the
| | 00:11 | 01_calculations folder.
| | 00:12 | I'm going to go ahead and click on RGB
here inside the Channels panel to switch
| | 00:16 | back to the RGB composite image, and
then I'll go up to the Image menu and once
| | 00:20 | again choose the Calculations command.
| | 00:23 | Now, this time around I'm going to go ahead
and switch the Blend mode from Add to Subtract.
| | 00:29 | Now you may well ask, how do
I know which mode to use when?
| | 00:33 | And that is one of the insane great
mysteries of using the Calculations command.
| | 00:38 | There really is no way to absolutely
know the Blend mode that's going to
| | 00:43 | definitely get you the right results.
| | 00:45 | So there's a little trial and error
involved, and I'll be providing you with
| | 00:48 | some pointers as we work
our way through this course.
| | 00:51 | But for now, know that Add and
Subtract are your primary modes inside of
| | 00:55 | Calculations, your when in doubt modes.
| | 00:58 | You just have to take a
different approach when using the two.
| | 01:01 | So let's say we just want
to try something else out.
| | 01:04 | We just want to compare the results,
see if we can get something different,
| | 01:07 | hopefully better using Subtract.
| | 01:09 | I'll go ahead and choose the subtract
mode and initially I end up getting this
| | 01:13 | very dark foreground image
against the brighter background.
| | 01:17 | Part of that's due to the fact that I
have the Invert checkboxes turned on for
| | 01:20 | both the Source 2 and Source 1 images.
| | 01:24 | But bear in mind that where subtract is
concerned Source 2 is our base channel,
| | 01:29 | and we're subtracting Source 1 from it.
| | 01:31 | Therefore, it's going to be helpful if
the Blue channel is dark where we want it
| | 01:36 | to be neutral and bright
where we want it to go dark.
| | 01:39 | So in other words, we want to turn the
Invert checkbox off, and you can see, as
| | 01:44 | a result we get some bright
hair set against a dark background.
| | 01:48 | Now you may wonder why in
the world is this working.
| | 01:50 | I just don't get it.
| | 01:51 | Well, let me show you what's up here.
| | 01:53 | I'll go ahead and reduce the Opacity
value to 0% so that we can see what the
| | 01:58 | Source 2 channel looks like.
| | 01:59 | It's an inverted version of the
Green channel, so we have bright hair set
| | 02:03 | against a relatively dark
background, some dark skin tones as well.
| | 02:07 | All right, now I'll go ahead and
increase the Opacity value to 100% and change
| | 02:12 | the mode back to Normal so that we can
see what the Blue channel looks like when
| | 02:16 | it's not inverted, we're not going
to be subtracting the hair this time.
| | 02:20 | It's already very bright in the Green
channel, so we want it to be black in the
| | 02:24 | channel that's going to be subtracted,
so that that black region is neutral.
| | 02:28 | Meanwhile, the background is very bright.
| | 02:31 | Anything that's bright in the channel
on top when blending is set to Subtract
| | 02:35 | will darken up that Green Channel
behind it, and so sure enough, as soon as I
| | 02:41 | change that Blend mode back to
Subtract, that bright background in the Blue
| | 02:45 | Channel is subtracting away where the
dark colors in the hair are remaining
| | 02:49 | neutral and allowing the bright hair
from the Source 2 Channel, the Green
| | 02:53 | Channel to show through.
| | 02:55 | Now we need to adjust our
Scale and Offset values.
| | 02:58 | Now in this case by itself Scale is
not going to do us any good, because it's
| | 03:02 | just going to darken up the image further.
| | 03:04 | So if I raise that Scale value to its
maximum, you can see that I am darkening
| | 03:08 | up the bright luminance levels inside
the hair, that's not at all what I want.
| | 03:12 | So I'll go ahead and
restore that Scale value to 1.
| | 03:15 | What I want to do is brighten up the
image overall so that we can regain some of
| | 03:19 | these skin tones, we definitely don't
want these shadows going black like this,
| | 03:22 | and I am going to send the Offset value
to +100 this time, and you can see that
| | 03:27 | we've got some bright edges showing up
now, and those will be useful when we try
| | 03:31 | to build the mask, and we still have a
nice dark background, even though we've
| | 03:35 | added a Luminance of 100 across the
board, because the Subtract mode had ended
| | 03:39 | up syncing those Luminance levels to
beyond the Black to negative values.
| | 03:44 | When we add 100, many of those
pixels remain nice and black.
| | 03:49 | Now at this point, if you've felt like
the transitions were too harsh, this is
| | 03:54 | when you might come in
with a higher Scale value.
| | 03:56 | So for example, I could take that
Scale value up to 2 in order to soften the
| | 04:00 | transitions, as you can see here in the hair.
| | 04:03 | However, once again, I start
losing some of that contrast, which is
| | 04:06 | not something I want.
| | 04:08 | So I am going to take the
Scale value back down to 1.
| | 04:11 | So, it works like this.
| | 04:12 | If you haven't already gotten a sense
for it already, it's very rare that you're
| | 04:15 | going to use the Scale value.
| | 04:16 | I was going to add it on maybe just a little
bit here and there to soften some transitions.
| | 04:21 | The value you're really
going to rely on is Offset.
| | 04:24 | And in fact, you have my permission to
ignore the Scale value altogether if you like.
| | 04:29 | All right, now I am going to click OK
in order to create that new alpha channel
| | 04:33 | and I'm going to go ahead and rename it
by iG, little i big G, because we have
| | 04:37 | an inverted version of the Green
Channel, minus B, no little I this time,
| | 04:42 | because we did not invert the Blue
Channel, Subtract this time, just so I know
| | 04:47 | the Blend mode I used and then plus
100, because I went ahead and added an
| | 04:51 | Offset of 100 Luminance levels
across the board (iG-B Subtract+100).
| | 04:54 | And now we can see the difference.
| | 04:55 | This is the Add version of that base mask
and this is the Subtract version of the mask.
| | 05:01 | I would go so far as to say the
Subtract version is more successful, but we are
| | 05:07 | missing a lot of details around this
snorkel and we have some very dark skin
| | 05:11 | tones going on as well.
| | 05:12 | We are going to solve those problems
using an application of the Apply Image
| | 05:16 | command in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Enhancing a mask with Apply Image| 00:00 | In this exercise I'll show you how to
restore the skin tones inside of this
| | 00:04 | alpha channel using the Apply Image Command.
| | 00:06 | I've saved my progress as Alternate
Subtract mass.tif found inside the
| | 00:11 | 01_calculations folder and I have this final
alpha channel selected as you can see here.
| | 00:15 | I am going to make a couple of copies of
it, so that we can compare and contrast
| | 00:19 | the behavior of Apply Image.
| | 00:21 | So I'll start by dragging the channel
onto the page icon, and I'll go ahead and
| | 00:25 | rename this new channel Add Red,
because we'll be adding the Red channel and
| | 00:29 | I'll explain why in just a moment.
| | 00:31 | Now I am going to duplicate this
channel again by dragging and dropping it onto
| | 00:34 | the page icon and I'll call this guy
Add Red within Red and you'll see why that
| | 00:40 | is in just a moment.
| | 00:42 | Now here is why I am
going to add the Red Channel.
| | 00:43 | If I switch over to the Red Channel you
can see that it's very bright where the
| | 00:47 | skin tones are concerned.
| | 00:48 | So it makes the most sense to grab those
skin tones and add them to the existing mask.
| | 00:54 | That is to say Add Red.
| | 00:56 | So I'll go ahead and click on the Add
Red Channel in order to make it active,
| | 00:59 | then I'll go up to the Image menu
and because I want to affect the active
| | 01:03 | channel, I'll choose not Calculations
which generates a new channel, but rather
| | 01:07 | the Apply Image command.
| | 01:09 | This time around you can see that we
have a single source, so not two sources
| | 01:13 | because after all we're adding that
single source to the active channel, which
| | 01:18 | becomes the other source.
| | 01:20 | I'm going to change that source to
the Red Channel, and then I am going to
| | 01:23 | change the Blend mode to Add.
| | 01:25 | And you can see that gives
us an extremely bright effect.
| | 01:29 | We end up not only brightening
the foreground of the image, but the
| | 01:31 | background as well.
| | 01:32 | Now if I were to take that Offset
value to let's say -100, in order to
| | 01:37 | darken things up, I not only
darken the background, but I also end up
| | 01:41 | darkening the hair.
| | 01:43 | Why in the world is that
happening? Well here is why.
| | 01:46 | Because we're adding the Red Channel
and we're not inverting it, we're not
| | 01:49 | adding anything to the hair, because
the hair is dark in the Red Channel.
| | 01:54 | Then when we turn around and subtract
Luminance from that hair, we darken it up
| | 01:57 | by -100 which takes the hair down to a
fairly medium gray, and we get what I
| | 02:02 | would term an undesirable effect.
| | 02:05 | So just so we can compare our results
in a moment, I am going to restore that
| | 02:08 | Offset value to 0, so we have the bright
hair, pretty bright background as well,
| | 02:12 | and then I'll click OK in
order to accept that result.
| | 02:16 | Now the thing to bear in mind about
Apply Image is that it always delivers its
| | 02:20 | results inside of the
selected region of the image.
| | 02:23 | So it's going to behave better if we
have a selection in the first place and
| | 02:27 | that selection should be
based on the Red Channel.
| | 02:29 | If I go ahead and switch to the Red
Channel, you can see that if I were to
| | 02:32 | load those highlights as a selection
outline, then I would load up the bright
| | 02:36 | areas inside of the flesh tones, and I
will not load up the hair, so the hair
| | 02:40 | will be unaffected.
| | 02:41 | And I am going to do that by pressing
the Ctrl key or the Command key on a Mac
| | 02:45 | and clicking on that Red Channel.
| | 02:46 | That goes ahead and loads it up as a
selection outline, now I'll switch to the
| | 02:50 | Channel called Add Red within Red,
which is the duplicate channel that we
| | 02:54 | haven't modified so far and I
hope its meaning is clear now.
| | 02:57 | We are going to add the Red Channel
within the Red selection outline, I'll go
| | 03:01 | ahead and press Ctrl+H or Command+H on
the Mac to hide that selection, then I'll
| | 03:04 | go up to the Image menu and
choose the Apply Image command.
| | 03:08 | Once again I'm going to set the Blend
mode to Add, however, I need to switch
| | 03:12 | that channel to the Red Channel,
so we end up with this effect here.
| | 03:15 | I don't need to reduce the
Offset value, I could though.
| | 03:18 | If I take that Offset value down to -
100 for example, notice this time I do not
| | 03:22 | affect the hair, because it is not
selected, so it's not being affected by the
| | 03:26 | command, I end up
darkening the background instead.
| | 03:29 | However, I am going to
leave the Offset set to 0.
| | 03:32 | Then I'll click OK in
order to accept the effect.
| | 03:34 | Now I'll press Ctrl+D or Command+D on
a Mac to deselect the image and I just
| | 03:38 | want you to see the
difference that that selection made.
| | 03:40 | Here is what the Apply Image Command
did with no selection outline and here's
| | 03:44 | what it did with the selection outline.
| | 03:47 | The next step would be to increase the
contrast of the image and I'll just do
| | 03:50 | that in a standard way by going up to
the Image menu, choosing Adjustments and
| | 03:53 | then choosing Levels or pressing Ctrl+L
or Command+L on a Mac, and you can use
| | 03:58 | these eyedroppers, by the way, in
order to set your black and white points.
| | 04:02 | They are very helpful when
creating masks inside Photoshop.
| | 04:05 | So I'll go ahead and grab that black
eyedropper and click somewhere in the
| | 04:09 | background of the image, and then I'll
grab the white eyedropper and I'll click
| | 04:12 | somewhere in the foreground.
| | 04:14 | In my case I ended up with a black point
value of 48, I am going to take that up
| | 04:18 | to 65 and I ended up with a white point
value of 218, I am going to take that up
| | 04:23 | to 225, and then I'll click OK
in order to accept that result.
| | 04:28 | That now becomes our base mask,
though we've managed to create using a
| | 04:31 | combination of the Calculations
command along with the Subtract Blend mode
| | 04:36 | followed up by the Apply Image
command set to the Add Blend mode, here
| | 04:40 | inside Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Traditional blue screen masking| 00:00 | All the approaches we've seen so far
are interesting and they help demonstrate
| | 00:03 | how to use the
calculations in Apply Image commands.
| | 00:06 | However, in this exercise, I am going
to show you the more traditional and
| | 00:09 | surefire approach to masking a
portrait shot against the Blue background.
| | 00:14 | So this might be an image shot against
the Blue screen in a studio setting, or
| | 00:17 | it might be a photograph of a person
captured against, say a cloudless Blue sky.
| | 00:22 | So this is one of those skills that
comes in handy on a regular basis.
| | 00:26 | Start things off here inside the
Channels panel, just by examining the channel,
| | 00:29 | so you have a sense of what's going on.
| | 00:31 | You may recall the Red Channel
contains the brightest flesh tones and
| | 00:34 | the darkest background.
| | 00:35 | And the Blue Channel contains
the darkest flesh tones and the
| | 00:39 | brightest background.
| | 00:40 | So the two channels complement each
other, which means they are an opposition
| | 00:43 | to each other and they can be played off
each other to render out an effective mask.
| | 00:49 | Now because that background that we
want to mask away is brightest in the Blue
| | 00:52 | Channel the Blue Channel will
serve as the base for our calculation.
| | 00:56 | So it will be the Source 2 Channel and
then the Red Channel will be the support
| | 01:00 | channel, so it will be Source 1.
| | 01:01 | All right, so I am going to go ahead
and click on RGB to restore the full-color
| | 01:05 | version of the image, then I'll go
up to the image menu and choose the
| | 01:09 | Calculations command.
| | 01:10 | So we'll start things off by making
sure the Source 1 Channel is set to Red, as
| | 01:14 | it is, and then I'll change
the Source 2 Channel to Blue.
| | 01:18 | Now back in the old days, what you
would do, is you would change your Blend
| | 01:21 | mode from Subtract to Color Dodge,
and then you would turn on the Invert
| | 01:25 | checkbox for the Blue Channel.
| | 01:27 | So you're just inverting Blue and not Red.
| | 01:30 | However, now that we have the Divide
Blend mode to work with down here at the
| | 01:33 | bottom of the stack, I think the
easier recipe to remember is to go ahead and
| | 01:38 | set just as we have Source 1 to Red,
Source 2 to Blue, then change the Blend
| | 01:43 | mode to Divide and turn on the
Invert checkbox for both of the Channels.
| | 01:48 | Either way you get exactly
the same effect, by the way;
| | 01:51 | And you can see that we end up with
this bright foreground set against a dark
| | 01:56 | background, both the hair and the
flesh tones have turned absolutely white.
| | 02:01 | Now I'll go ahead and click OK
to create that alpha channel.
| | 02:04 | Next, I'll go up to the Image menu,
choose the Adjustments command and then
| | 02:08 | choose Levels, which you can also get by
pressing Ctrl+L or Command+L on the Mac
| | 02:12 | and you want to go ahead and move that
black slider triangle all the way to the
| | 02:17 | other side of whatever big lump
you see there in the histogram.
| | 02:22 | I decided where this image is
concerned that a black point value of 185
| | 02:26 | worked out best, and then I'll go ahead and
click OK in order to accept that modification.
| | 02:31 | Now I am going to rename the channel
and I am going to call it little i big B
| | 02:35 | which indicates an inverted Blue channel,
a slash to indicate the fact that we
| | 02:39 | used the Divide mode, then a little i
big R to indicate that we divided by an
| | 02:43 | inverted Red channel and then
finally 185, 1, 255 to indicate my Level
| | 02:49 | settings (iB/iR 185/1/255).
| | 02:50 | And that friends, is the basic recipe for
masking an image set against a Blue background.
| | 02:55 | We still have yet however to finalize the mask.
| | 02:58 | We've got to integrate the goggles into
the selection, as well as the snorkel,
| | 03:02 | and we'll perform both of those
manual adjustments in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Painting in the missing details| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to go
ahead and mask in the missing details, which
| | 00:03 | in our case includes the rim around
the mask, as well as the snorkel tube.
| | 00:07 | And these are the kinds of details
that aren't necessarily going to be
| | 00:10 | automatically accounted for by the
Calculations command or Apply Image for
| | 00:14 | that matter, so we are going to take
advantage of the automated selection
| | 00:17 | functions inside Photoshop.
| | 00:19 | I've gone ahead and saved my progress
as Blue screen mask.psd, found inside the
| | 00:23 | 01_calculations folder and I am going to
switch back to the RGB composite image.
| | 00:28 | Now there is couple of ways
that we might select these items.
| | 00:31 | One is we can go up to the Select
menu and choose the Color Range command.
| | 00:35 | Because after all, the snorkel tube is
fairly uniformly white and the rim around
| | 00:39 | the mask is uniformly blue.
| | 00:41 | However, color range isn't going to
work too well, because after all we've got
| | 00:45 | all kinds of other blues associated
with the background and we are going to end
| | 00:48 | up picking them up with this command.
| | 00:50 | Now, you may ask at this point, as
long as we're on the topic of Color
| | 00:53 | Range, why we didn't use it in the
first place to select the entire image,
| | 00:57 | after all the background is uniformly blue, so
we ought to be able to select it quite nicely.
| | 01:01 | The reason we're not working with Color
Range is because the Color Range command
| | 01:05 | doesn't do very well where filigree
details are concerned, especially hair.
| | 01:10 | You end up getting some
pretty gummy masks out of it.
| | 01:12 | That's why Calculations is the better approach.
| | 01:15 | However, for these missing details we
are going to take advantage of one of the
| | 01:19 | simplest selection tools there is
which is the Quick Selection tool and the
| | 01:22 | reason is that while I am not that
big a fan of this tool per se, it does a
| | 01:27 | pretty good job where these sort
of rounded contours are concerned.
| | 01:30 | So I'm going to start off by painting
down the tube like so, and that's going to
| | 01:35 | select most of it, as well as this
little bit of blue in the background, and
| | 01:39 | then I'll go ahead and paint around the
rim of the mask in order to pick it up,
| | 01:44 | and I might click here and there in
order to add a few missing details.
| | 01:48 | I'll increase the size of my cursor by
pressing the right bracket key a couple
| | 01:51 | of times and click at this point.
| | 01:53 | And then I'm going to click over at
this location along the tube a couple of
| | 01:57 | times in order to add back in those
missing details and I'll press the left
| | 02:01 | bracket key a few times to reduce
the size of my cursor and then while
| | 02:04 | pressing the Alt key or the Option key
on the Mac, paint away that little bit
| | 02:09 | of blue background.
| | 02:10 | That should do the trick quite
nicely assuming, by the way, that the
| | 02:14 | Auto-Enhance checkbox is turned on.
| | 02:17 | That's very important, so that we get some
reasonably smooth edges out of this tool.
| | 02:21 | All right, then go ahead and switch
back to the mask in progress and what I'd
| | 02:24 | like to do before I make this kind of
manual change is duplicate the mask.
| | 02:28 | So I'll go ahead and drag the alpha
channel down and drop it onto the little
| | 02:31 | page icon so that my
original base mask is protected.
| | 02:35 | And I'll go ahead and rename this one
final mask, and then I'll press the D key
| | 02:40 | in order to establish my default
masking colors, that is white for the
| | 02:43 | foreground, black for the
background and I'll press Alt+Backspace or
| | 02:46 | Option+Delete to fill the selection with white.
| | 02:49 | Now I'll press Ctrl+D or Command+D
on the Mac to deselect the image.
| | 02:53 | Now I am going to switch to the Brush
tool, which you can get by pressing the B
| | 02:56 | key, I'll right-click inside the
image so that you can see that I have the
| | 03:00 | hardest value cranked up to a 100%.
| | 03:02 | My size is a 150 px that doesn't really matter;
| | 03:05 | I'll be changing that on the fly.
| | 03:06 | I'll go and press the Enter key or the
Return key on the Mac in order to hide
| | 03:09 | that panel, make sure your Blend mode
is set to Normal and once again that you
| | 03:13 | are painting with white, so white
should be your foreground color.
| | 03:16 | I am reducing the size of my cursor
slightly by pressing the left bracket key
| | 03:19 | and then painting away
these details inside the image.
| | 03:22 | And I'll go ahead and increase the size
of my brush a little bit, so that I want
| | 03:25 | to paint away the top of the mask, may
be not quite that much, let me zoom in
| | 03:28 | here to make sure that I'm
doing a halfway decent job.
| | 03:31 | Click at this location, Shift+Click
over here in order to paint a white
| | 03:35 | line with my brush.
| | 03:36 | Then I'll reduce the size of my cursor
by pressing the left bracket key once
| | 03:40 | again, paint away some of these details.
| | 03:42 | We've got some jagged areas of black
here toward the center of the face that
| | 03:45 | need to be painted away.
| | 03:47 | Some details perhaps inside the tube as
well, looks like we have something going
| | 03:50 | on in that region of the face.
| | 03:52 | Now I'll zoom out, so that I can take
in the top of my image, which has all
| | 03:55 | these bubbles right there.
| | 03:56 | I need to paint them away by pressing
the X key to make my foreground color
| | 04:00 | black, I'll increase the size of my
cursor quite a bit, and just paint all of
| | 04:04 | that junk away there, may paint
these stray hairs away as well.
| | 04:08 | And that is the final version of the mask.
| | 04:10 | Now, here it's looking a little scrappy,
but it's actually going to serve us
| | 04:14 | very well when we composite this image
against its new aqueous background which
| | 04:19 | is exactly what we'll be
doing in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Compositing dark hair| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to take
the diver and we're going to composite her
| | 00:03 | against this authentically aqueous
underwater background, in order to create
| | 00:08 | this final composition,
and here is how it works.
| | 00:11 | I'll start off inside the file in
progress, which I've called Final masked
| | 00:14 | diver.psd found inside the 01_
calculations folder, and you can see here in the
| | 00:19 | Channels panel that I have an
alpha channel called final mask.
| | 00:22 | I'm going to load it as a selection
outline by Ctrl+clicking on it here on the
| | 00:26 | PC or Command+Clicking on
that channel on the Mac.
| | 00:28 | Then I'll switch back to the layers panel.
| | 00:30 | We've got to convert this
background into an independent layer by
| | 00:33 | double-clicking on it and then inside
the New layer dialog box, I'll call this
| | 00:37 | layer diver and click OK and then
finally I'll drop down to the Add layer Mask
| | 00:42 | icon down here at the bottom of
the panel, and I'll click on it.
| | 00:45 | Now we have a masked version of the diver
and we can add her into the composition.
| | 00:49 | Assuming that one of your Selection
tools is active, in my case it's the
| | 00:52 | Rectangular Marquee tool.
| | 00:54 | You can right-click inside the image
window and choose the Duplicate layer
| | 00:57 | command and then go ahead and change
the document from the current one to
| | 01:01 | Aqueous background.psd and
then click OK. All right!
| | 01:05 | Now I'll switchover to that Aqueous
background image and you can see that things
| | 01:09 | are not looking too good at this point.
| | 01:12 | We've got some pretty scrappy
hair details set against this
| | 01:16 | underwater background;
| | 01:17 | it doesn't look right at all.
| | 01:18 | However, because we are working
with a dark-haired subject we can take
| | 01:21 | advantage of a compositing technique
that involves the Multiply blend mode and
| | 01:26 | here's how it works.
| | 01:27 | With the diver layer selected here at
the bottom of the stack, go ahead and
| | 01:30 | press Ctrl+J or Command+J on the
Mac in order create a copy of it.
| | 01:34 | Then scroll back down to the original
diver layer, right-click on its layer mask
| | 01:39 | and choose Delete layer Mask to get rid of it.
| | 01:42 | Now I'll go ahead and rename this layer
darken, and then finally, we'll change
| | 01:46 | the blend mode from Normal to Multiply
in order to darken up the composition and
| | 01:51 | you can see that now we've
got these great hair details.
| | 01:54 | So whereas before without that layer,
we had this sort of scrappy hair effect
| | 01:58 | and we were missing a lot of the hair as well.
| | 02:00 | We weren't able to mask it all in, and
if we had, by the way, then we would have
| | 02:04 | ended up bringing over all
kinds of color artifacts.
| | 02:07 | But by virtue of the fact that we
can reinstate that dark hair into the
| | 02:11 | background using the Multiply blend
mode, we have no problems whatsoever.
| | 02:15 | Notice however that we do need
the masked version of the image.
| | 02:19 | I want to make this clear.
| | 02:19 | If I turn off the mask version of the
diver, you'll see that we lose all the
| | 02:23 | flesh tones and so forth.
| | 02:25 | So in other words, we need both of these
layers in order to pull off the effect. All right!
| | 02:29 | I'm going to do ahead and press Ctrl+0
or Command+0 on the Mac in order to
| | 02:32 | center the image on screen.
| | 02:34 | Now at this point we've done too much darkening.
| | 02:36 | We brought back the bubbles for one
thing, which I don't want, and we're
| | 02:40 | covering up the highlights inside of
the sky, and so we're going to bring those
| | 02:44 | highlights back using the luminous
slider bars, and we're going to apply them to
| | 02:48 | this base darken layer.
| | 02:50 | So find an empty portion of the layer,
double-click on it in order to bring up
| | 02:53 | the layer Style dialog box and I'm
going to start things off by forcing through
| | 02:58 | the brightest colors in the underlying layer.
| | 03:00 | So I'll go ahead and take his bottommost
white slider triangle to the left until
| | 03:04 | the second value read 70.
| | 03:06 | So in other words anything with the
luminance level of 70 or brighter in the
| | 03:10 | water layer below will force through
the display of this darken layer and as a
| | 03:15 | result we regain those highlights,
which looks great, however we've got these
| | 03:19 | harsh transitions here.
| | 03:20 | So I'll press the Alt key or the Option
key on the Mac and drag the right half
| | 03:24 | of that white slider triangle
all the way over to 180, like so.
| | 03:29 | So your value should read 0 for the black
point and then 70 to 180 for the white points.
| | 03:34 | So anything with the luminance level
of 180 or brighter is going to force
| | 03:37 | through entirely, anything between 70 and
180 is going to incrementally force through.
| | 03:43 | So we end up getting
this great highlight effect.
| | 03:45 | Now, things are still
darker than I'd like them to be.
| | 03:48 | So I'm going to perform a similar
modification on the This layer slider.
| | 03:52 | I'm going to drop out the highlights
for This layer as well and it just so
| | 03:57 | happens that the exact same
settings work well for this specific image.
| | 04:01 | It won't be that way for every
composition you encounter but this one it
| | 04:04 | works quite nicely.
| | 04:05 | So I'll set the white slider to 70,
and then I'll Alt+Drag or Option+Drag
| | 04:09 | the right half of that white slider back up
to 180 and we end up with this effect here.
| | 04:14 | Now, I'll go ahead and click the OK
button in order to accept the effect and
| | 04:18 | just to give you a sense of what we've
done I'll press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on
| | 04:22 | the Mac, that's the original
version of that multiplied layer.
| | 04:25 | And if I press Ctrl or Command+Z
again this is the version with the
| | 04:29 | highlights restored thanks to the
adjustments that we applied using the
| | 04:33 | luminous slider bars.
| | 04:34 | Now there may be those of you are
thinking, well you know what Deke, this looks
| | 04:37 | great, that's fine, however, this
wasn't the most remarkable compositing feed
| | 04:42 | on earth, given that we started with an image
set against a blue background in the first place.
| | 04:47 | I'll go ahead and Shift+Click on
that layer mask to turn it off.
| | 04:49 | So she was already set
against the blue background.
| | 04:52 | Can't be all that hard to composite her
against the different blue background,
| | 04:57 | which is why I've gone ahead and
included this complement layer.
| | 04:59 | I'm going to go ahead and click on it
to select it and drag it below the darken
| | 05:03 | layer, so it's sitting just above the water.
| | 05:05 | And now I'll turn it on so that you
can see her set against an entirely
| | 05:09 | differently colored background.
| | 05:11 | It's still a flat background that
doesn't really matter for our purposes here.
| | 05:15 | You can see though, because we've
done such a fantastic job of masking and
| | 05:19 | compositing this image that it works
against any colored background whatsoever.
| | 05:24 | So the moral of the story is regardless
of how similar your backgrounds are the
| | 05:29 | original background and the new
background, you still have to do a decent job on
| | 05:33 | the masking and compositing front in order to
pull off a credible composition. All right!
| | 05:38 | I'm going to go ahead and
turn that complement layer off.
| | 05:40 | In the next exercise, we'll turn on the
remaining layers and I'll also show you
| | 05:44 | how to create this in text reflection.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating an in-text reflection effect| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to turn on
the support layers that are associated
| | 00:03 | with this composition.
| | 00:04 | I'm also going to show you haw to
create this in-text reflection effect that
| | 00:08 | we're seeing inside the product name,
which involves the Gradient Overlay layer
| | 00:12 | effect, as well as some
advanced blending settings.
| | 00:14 | I've saved my progress as
Underwater diver.psd found inside the
| | 00:18 | 01_calculations folder.
| | 00:19 | I'm going to scroll up my layers panel,
turn on this little fish layer that I've
| | 00:23 | created and masked in advance.
| | 00:25 | It's a pretty simple mask
if you take a look at it.
| | 00:27 | I'll go ahead and Alt+Click or Option+Click
on the layer mask so that we can see
| | 00:30 | it independently of the rest the image.
| | 00:32 | I created the mask for what it's worth
using the Color Range command. All right!
| | 00:35 | I'll go ahead and Alt+Click or Option+Click
on that layer mask again, so that we
| | 00:38 | can see the full-color fish
integrated into the scene. All right!
| | 00:41 | I'll go ahead and zoom-out by pressing
Ctrl+0, Command+0 on the Mac, and then I
| | 00:45 | wanted the fish to have a kind of
cartoon thought bubble, as it was looking at
| | 00:48 | the diver, and I created this
thought bubble as a Vector Shape.
| | 00:51 | With that layer selected I'm going to go
ahead and reduce the Fill value to 0 by
| | 00:55 | Shift+Dragging to the left on the
word Fill there at the top of the layers
| | 00:58 | panel, and that way we're seeing
just the Outer Glow layer effect that's
| | 01:02 | assigned to the layer.
| | 01:03 | Got this little question mark that's
sitting on top of it, I'll go ahead and
| | 01:06 | select it, Shift+Drag to fill value to
the left in order to reduce it to 0 as well.
| | 01:11 | So we're left with the Outer Glow effect there.
| | 01:13 | And then I'll turn on this text elements group.
| | 01:15 | Now you can see every one of these text
layers inside of this group contains an
| | 01:20 | Outer Glow effect, that's just a slight
bit of bluish outer glow, and that to me
| | 01:25 | it just helped to emphasize the
overall underwater feel of this composition.
| | 01:28 | Now I'm going to select that gillTube
layer right there and I'm going to drop
| | 01:32 | down to the fx icon at the bottom of
the panel and choose Gradient Overlay.
| | 01:37 | Then inside the layer Style dialog
box I'll go ahead and click on the down
| | 01:40 | pointing arrowhead to the right of the
Gradient bar and I'll click the right
| | 01:43 | pointing arrow head and
choose the Load Gradients command.
| | 01:46 | If you're working along with me, go
ahead and navigate your way to the
| | 01:49 | 01_calculations folder and there you'll
find a file called Dark reflection.grd.
| | 01:54 | Go ahead and click the Load button to
load it on up and then click on that final
| | 01:58 | gradient, which is called
reflection in order to apply it.
| | 02:01 | Now for those of you who don't have
access to this file, I want you to see how
| | 02:04 | the gradient is put together.
| | 02:05 | I'll go ahead and click on the
Gradient bar in order to bring up the Gradient
| | 02:08 | Editor dialog box, and you can see at a
Location of 30%, I have this dark gray.
| | 02:14 | So it has a Brightness value of 15%,
both the Saturation and Hue are set to 0.
| | 02:19 | I'll go ahead and Cancel out.
| | 02:21 | Then at a Location of 45%, I have black,
that's an absolutely black color stop,
| | 02:27 | and right next door to it at a
Location of 46% is a lighter gray with the
| | 02:31 | Brightness value of 45% as you can see here.
| | 02:34 | I'll go ahead and Cancel out once again.
| | 02:36 | And the reason these two color stops
are located where they are is because I
| | 02:41 | wanted the reflection to sit right at
the base of the bar in the 'e,' but you
| | 02:45 | definitely want them right next to each other.
| | 02:47 | So notice that the color stops are
located within one percentage of each other,
| | 02:51 | so that we have just a slight bit of
gradient at that location, and then finally
| | 02:54 | at a Location of 70% we have another
absolutely black color stop. All right!
| | 02:59 | Now I'll click OK in order
to accept that modification.
| | 03:02 | The default Opacity, Angle
and Scale values are just fine.
| | 03:05 | All we need to do now is multiply
this effect into the background.
| | 03:09 | So I'll go ahead and click on the
Blending Options item over here on the
| | 03:12 | left-hand side of the dialog box and
change the Blend mode from Normal to Multiply.
| | 03:17 | But when I do, I want you to
keep an eye on those letters.
| | 03:19 | Notice that nothing changes, nothing
whatsoever happens, and that's because even
| | 03:24 | though I just got done multiplying the
white text, which is going to make it
| | 03:27 | invisible, the layer effect
remains absolutely opaque.
| | 03:30 | So what we need to do is turn on this
checkbox Blend Interior Effects as Group,
| | 03:34 | so that the gradient is applied first,
and then the Blend mode Multiply is
| | 03:39 | applied second and that ends up
integrating the gradient into the scene.
| | 03:43 | Now I'll go ahead and click the OK button in
order to accept that final effect. All right!
| | 03:48 | Now I'll go ahead and press the F key
a couple of times in order to fill the
| | 03:50 | screen with the image and there we
have it, the completed version of that
| | 03:53 | composition, thanks to a blue screen
calculation combined with dark hair
| | 03:57 | compositing, here inside Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Masking Dark HairCreating a contrast mask| 00:00 | In this chapter we'll be masking and
compositing dark hair, just as we have many
| | 00:04 | times so far, and I'm focusing so much
attention on dark hair, because it is by
| | 00:09 | far the most common variety of
hair that you're going to encounter.
| | 00:12 | However, we're stepping things up a
notch, instead of having a darker subject
| | 00:16 | against a solid color background;
| | 00:18 | we have this model who is
set in a natural environment.
| | 00:21 | So we have all kinds of luminance
values going on in the background, and yet,
| | 00:25 | we'll be able to isolate this subject
and set her against an entirely different
| | 00:30 | background as you see here.
| | 00:32 | And notice one of the most striking
things about this composition is not only
| | 00:35 | do we have dark hair against a bright
background, but we also have bright hairs
| | 00:41 | that are catching the highlights set
against a darker background, and that can
| | 00:45 | be very important to a credible composition, is
that you retain that sense of natural lighting.
| | 00:51 | So let's see how it works.
| | 00:52 | I'm going to switch back to this
image that's called model on beach.psd, it
| | 00:56 | contains both the model and the
background inside of a single composition and
| | 01:00 | it's found inside the 02_dark folder,
let's take a look at the channels that
| | 01:04 | we have to work with.
| | 01:05 | I'll switch over to the Channels panel
click on the Red Channel and you can see
| | 01:09 | that just as you'd expect, her skin
is very bright inside of this channel.
| | 01:14 | Her hair is mostly dark, although we are
picking up some highlights and then the
| | 01:17 | background is relatively dark.
| | 01:19 | Whereas, where the Green and Blue
Channels are concerned the background
| | 01:23 | brightens up significantly and
the skin ends up darkening down.
| | 01:28 | We lose a lot of luminance inside of
that skin in the Green Channel we lose even
| | 01:31 | more inside of the Blue Channel;
| | 01:33 | the background brightens up as well.
| | 01:36 | The thing is we're going to lose that
blouse no matter what we do, because
| | 01:38 | it's bright in all three channels, just
as the waves and the sea foam brighten
| | 01:43 | the background as well.
| | 01:44 | So what I'm going to go for, my
initial calculation is isolating the skin and
| | 01:49 | the hair, and both the Green and Blue
Channels are going to work well for that.
| | 01:53 | So I'm going to switch back to the RGB
image, then go up to the Image menu and
| | 01:57 | choose the Calculations command and
notice what a mess Photoshop is making by
| | 02:02 | default of this multi-layered image.
| | 02:05 | It is set by default Source 1 to the layer
merged, which means all layers merged together.
| | 02:12 | Whereas it's at Source 2 to the
Future City layer, which is a background,
| | 02:15 | that's not what we want.
| | 02:17 | We're looking for this model layer
right here, so you can either set the layer
| | 02:21 | option to Merged, which
will work fine, or to model.
| | 02:24 | Now next I want to go ahead and set my
channels and the strongest channel for
| | 02:29 | this image is the Blue Channel, it
provides us with the most contrast, so I'll
| | 02:33 | set it up as the Source 2 Channel,
and then I'll set Source 1 to Green.
| | 02:37 | We want both of the Channels inverted,
so that we have bright here against the
| | 02:42 | dark background, so I'll turn on the
Invert checkbox for both of those channels,
| | 02:46 | and then finally, I need
to choose the Blend mode.
| | 02:48 | Now I could settle on the Multiply
blend mode, which is the default setting,
| | 02:52 | or I could select one of the light modes such
as Screen to brighten the hair and the skin.
| | 02:57 | What I want though is to enhance
the contrast, I want to sync that that
| | 03:01 | background make it as dark as possible,
while making the skin tones and the hair
| | 03:05 | as bright as possible.
| | 03:07 | I'm going to switch over here to
Overlay or Hard Light, both of them are going
| | 03:10 | to provide the same effects, since
we're blending the image with itself.
| | 03:14 | Choose either one of them, I'm going
to go with Overlay, leave the Opacity
| | 03:18 | set to 100% and then go ahead and click OK
in order to create that new alpha channel.
| | 03:23 | Now I'm going to go ahead and rename
this alpha channel iG+iB and then Overlay,
| | 03:30 | so I know what mode I used.
| | 03:32 | Now let's enhance the contrast of this
channel and I'm going to do that using
| | 03:36 | the Levels command, but I'm going to
apply levels to duplicate of this channels.
| | 03:39 | So I'll go ahead and drag the channel
and drop it onto the little page icon, and
| | 03:43 | then I'll press Ctrl+L or Command+L on
a Mac in order to bring up the Levels
| | 03:47 | dialog box and I'm going to take this
white point value way down to ultimately a
| | 03:53 | 160, so that we are brightening up the
hair and the skin tones like crazy, and
| | 03:59 | then I'll darken up the background a
little bit by taking that black point value
| | 04:02 | up to 30, and naturally you can go your
own way with these modifications if you
| | 04:06 | want to, but these are the values I settled on.
| | 04:09 | Now I'll click OK in order to accept
my changes, and I'll go and rename this
| | 04:13 | layer 30/1/160, just so that
I remember the level settings.
| | 04:19 | That's our base mask, of course it
looks terrible, because we have all this
| | 04:23 | stuff going on in the background, her shirt is
black where ultimately we need it to be white.
| | 04:28 | We have some very iffy details up
here in the hair and we're going to begin
| | 04:31 | resolving those problems in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cleaning up a base mask| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to set
about cleaning up the masks such as it is,
| | 00:04 | and I have save that mask inside the
file called Base beach mask.psd found
| | 00:08 | inside the 02_dark folder.
| | 00:11 | I'm going to start things off by
grabbing that last alpha channel I created and
| | 00:14 | duplicating it by dragging it and
dropping it onto the little page icon, and
| | 00:18 | then I'll go ahead and
rename this channel Cleanup.
| | 00:22 | And we'll start off with a fairly
traditional approach, I'll select the Brush
| | 00:25 | tool, which you get by pressing the B
key, right-click inside the image window,
| | 00:29 | reduce the Hardness value to 0%, then
press the Enter or the Return key a couple
| | 00:34 | of times, in order to accept that change.
| | 00:36 | I am also going to press the D key in
order to establish white as my foreground
| | 00:40 | color and I'll press Shift+Alt+O or
Shift+Option+O on the Mac to change the
| | 00:45 | blend mode to Overlay.
| | 00:46 | Now let's go ahead and zoom in on this
lower right region of the image and I'm
| | 00:51 | going to paint fairly carefully around
here in order to brighten up the details
| | 00:56 | inside of her shirt, then I'll press the
X key in order to switch the foreground
| | 01:00 | color to black and click just once
inside that area between her arm and her
| | 01:05 | shirt to darken it up, press the X key
again to make the foreground color white,
| | 01:09 | and paint above that black
area just to brighten it.
| | 01:12 | Then I'll paint over in this region in
order to try to brighten up that sleeve a
| | 01:16 | little bit and I'll have
to apply a few passes here.
| | 01:20 | In another words, I'll have to brush
this area a few different times in order to
| | 01:24 | brighten it up significantly.
| | 01:26 | Then I'll press X key in order to make
my foreground color black and I'll paint
| | 01:30 | this area away and try to see if I can
get rid of as many of those background
| | 01:34 | details as possible.
| | 01:36 | Don't worry about the fact that you're
losing all kinds of precious little hairs
| | 01:41 | that is just going to happen, there is
really no way to retain them, we'll try
| | 01:45 | to bring some of them back later,
but these here is in particular.
| | 01:50 | I am, by the way, zoomed in on the
right-hand side of her head here and the
| | 01:55 | reason that we're getting this weird
transition between no hairs upstairs and a
| | 02:00 | bunch of hair downstairs here is because
of the luminance of the original image.
| | 02:04 | If I switch back to the RGB image for
a moment, you can see that this is the
| | 02:08 | horizon line right there at
which the water breaks to the air.
| | 02:12 | So, we have darkness below and
brightness on top, and then actually affects the
| | 02:16 | brightness of these tiny details of hair,
because the background always informs
| | 02:22 | the foreground when you're working with
these photographic images, so I'm going
| | 02:25 | to switch back to clean up.
| | 02:27 | The upshot is that we're just going to
go ahead and lose those guys like so,
| | 02:31 | so I'm going to paint them away, I'll comeback
and get rid of the remainders in just a moment.
| | 02:36 | I'm going to reduce the size of my
brush and paint that area away as well.
| | 02:39 | We end up with his hook of a hair;
| | 02:41 | we're going to have to address that
later, by the way; I'll zoom out.
| | 02:45 | right-click inside the image window,
increase the Hardness value to 100%, press
| | 02:49 | the Enter key or the Return key in
order accept that change, press Shift+Alt+N
| | 02:53 | or Shift+Option+N on the Mac
to change the mode to normal.
| | 02:57 | And now I'll paint this stuff away,
and I'm just doing normal painting, this
| | 03:02 | background stuff that I don't want to
black, so that it's out of the picture, go
| | 03:07 | and paint this details way
down here at the bottom as well.
| | 03:09 | I'm going to click right there next to the
sleeve to get rid of that little bit of garbage.
| | 03:14 | click over here as well, I'll go up to
this area and paint that little bit of
| | 03:19 | hair away, paint that guy
away as well. if I can.
| | 03:22 | That looks goodish over here on the
left-hand side of the image, not great,
| | 03:27 | quite a few details we need to take
care of, but I'm going to increase the size
| | 03:32 | of my brush fairly dramatically here
and press the X key to make the foreground
| | 03:36 | color white, and then I'm
going to paint away that face.
| | 03:38 | Notice this is the collar right there,
so I can paint into it like so, then I'll
| | 03:44 | drop down to this region, paint away
these details without painting away that
| | 03:48 | little tiny thing under her
arm, we want to keep that.
| | 03:51 | Paint away these areas of shirt and
paint over into the left arm like so.
| | 03:56 | Now that's not a good shirt mask,
we'll be taking care of that detail
| | 04:00 | independently in the future exercise.
| | 04:02 | I'll go ahead and zoom down into this
region here, and then I'm going to turn on
| | 04:06 | the RGB image, either by clicking on
its eyeball, or I could press the tilde
| | 04:10 | key, and I'll go ahead and
zoom in a little bit more.
| | 04:14 | Notice that little bit of hair that's
kind of sticking out from the right-hand
| | 04:17 | shoulder, here is the problem with that hair.
| | 04:19 | I'm going to turn off my mask for a moment.
| | 04:21 | So we can see it independently.
| | 04:23 | the hair is blurry.
| | 04:24 | Now that doesn't really provide us
with that big of a challenge where the
| | 04:28 | masking is concerned, we could mask it.
| | 04:30 | However, I don't want to mask it,
because if I do, I'll give away the fact that
| | 04:36 | we're losing our depth of field over
here on the right-hand side of the image
| | 04:40 | where the woman is concerned, and
yet the background is in sharp focus.
| | 04:44 | I want to keep them both
in absolute sharp focus.
| | 04:47 | So anything that's declining in focus
needs to go away, I'm going to turn on
| | 04:52 | the Cleanup mask once again, I'll go
and press the X key to make my foreground
| | 04:56 | color black, and I'll just paint away
along the side of the shoulder here,
| | 05:02 | don't have to get it exactly right,
because after all she has this kind of
| | 05:05 | rumply shirt effects going.
| | 05:06 | However, we do want to make sure
all of the background is out of the
| | 05:09 | picture, and we've got some issues up
here as well, we'll solve those later
| | 05:14 | during the compositing phase.
| | 05:15 | Let's go ahead and paint in this little
bit of shirt over here on the right-hand.
| | 05:20 | So I'll just paint with white, by the
way, I went ahead and press the X key to
| | 05:24 | switch the foreground color to white.
| | 05:25 | I'll press the X key to switch the
foreground color to black again and paint in
| | 05:29 | those details right there, press the X
key to switch to white once again, and
| | 05:34 | paint up the shirt line like so.
| | 05:37 | Let's go ahead and turn off the RGB
image so that we can focus on the mask by
| | 05:41 | itself, a couple little
details I want to firm out there.
| | 05:44 | That works pretty well for the
right-hand side of the image.
| | 05:49 | The left-hand side is still a big mess,
which is why we'll working on it in
| | 05:53 | the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Reinstating missing details| 00:00 | In his exercise we're going to
clean up the left portion of the mask.
| | 00:03 | We're also going to reinstate
this missing blouse line over here on
| | 00:07 | the left-hand shoulder.
| | 00:09 | I've saved my progress as Right side
okay.psd down inside that 02_dark folder.
| | 00:14 | I'm going to increase the size of my
cursor and right-click inside the image
| | 00:18 | window, reduce the Hardness value to 0%,
press the Enter key or the Return key a
| | 00:23 | couple of times in order to accept that change.
| | 00:25 | Press Shift+Alt+O, Shift+Option+O on
the Mac to switch to the Overlay mode, and
| | 00:30 | in my case I need to press the X key in
order to make my foreground color black
| | 00:34 | and now I'll zoom on in on these
details over here, and begin painting away all
| | 00:40 | this stuff that needs to
be part of the background.
| | 00:44 | At this point I need to rethink my
approach here actually, so I'll press Ctrl+Z
| | 00:48 | or Command+Z on the Mac to undo that change.
| | 00:50 | I need to lighten the arm before I
darken it, so I'm going to press the X key in
| | 00:55 | order to switch my foreground color to
white, and now I'll go ahead and paint
| | 00:58 | down that arm like so in order to
entirely reinstate it to make sure that arm is
| | 01:03 | in great shape, and then I'm going to
press the X key, in order to switch my
| | 01:07 | foreground color to black.
| | 01:08 | I'm going to do some normal painting
here by right-clicking inside the image
| | 01:11 | window, increasing the hardness value
to 100%, and then I'll press Shift+Alt+N
| | 01:16 | or Shift+Option+N on the Mac to
switch to blend mode to Normal.
| | 01:19 | And I'll go ahead and click and Shift+Click
down this arm like so, in order to
| | 01:24 | connect those two points with a straight-line.
| | 01:27 | Fill in some missing details here and
there, and I'll ultimately get this affect.
| | 01:31 | So I've got a nice line here where the
arm is and I can confirm that by turning
| | 01:36 | the RGB image on for a moment.
| | 01:38 | So you can see the blouse is a mess,
although not enough of a mess actually.
| | 01:43 | I'll go and press the X key in order to
make my foreground color black and I'll
| | 01:46 | paint into that shoulder.
| | 01:47 | I want to make sure that all
of the background is deselected.
| | 01:51 | However, the arm is in great shape,
we'll bring back the blouse in just a moment.
| | 01:56 | I'm going to turn off the RGB image,
let's go and zoom out here in order to take
| | 02:00 | in more of the image at a time.
| | 02:02 | I want to be able see the far left-hand
side of the image like so, and I'm just
| | 02:06 | going to paint down in order to get rid
of all that stuff in the background, my
| | 02:12 | paint with a larger brush over
in this left-hand region as well.
| | 02:15 | Looking at it so far, one of the few
problems that are remaining is that we're
| | 02:20 | missing so much of the blouse.
| | 02:21 | So I'm going to go ahead and
switch back to the RGB image.
| | 02:23 | I really want you to be able to
identify which tools to use when, inside an
| | 02:28 | image, and in this case, the blouse does
not provide much in the way of color or
| | 02:34 | luminance distinction from the background.
| | 02:37 | Therefore, the Color Range command is
ill-suited to this project that also
| | 02:42 | rules out the magic wand.
| | 02:44 | Now you might be able to select this
edge using the Magnetic Lasso, but because
| | 02:48 | it has this round contouring and these
pretty obvious edges, there is a very
| | 02:53 | good chance we can get away with once
again using the Quick Selection tool.
| | 02:57 | So I'm going to go ahead and
grab that Quick Selection tool.
| | 03:00 | Make sure the Auto-Enhance checkbox is
turned on up here in the Options bar and
| | 03:05 | then paint down that neck like so.
| | 03:08 | Now what in the world is going on,
what is the Quick Selection tool seeing
| | 03:13 | that looks like this?
| | 03:15 | It has this big sort of winged edge
over here, and the answer is that we're
| | 03:18 | working on wrong layer.
| | 03:20 | If I switch to the layers panel, even
though we're seeing the model layer,
| | 03:22 | because she's opaque, she's not selected.
| | 03:24 | So I'll go ahead and select the model
layer, press Ctrl+D or Command+D on the
| | 03:28 | Mac to deselect the image, and then go
ahead and paint down that collar again.
| | 03:33 | So the Quick Selection tool by default
is working from the active layer that
| | 03:38 | assumes, by the way, that the
sample layer's checkbox is turned off.
| | 03:41 | Now I'll switch back to the Channels
panel, click on the Cleanup Channel in
| | 03:45 | order to make it active and press the
D key in order to make the foreground
| | 03:48 | color white and then press Alt+Backspace
or Option+Delete in order to fill the
| | 03:54 | selection with white, and now I'll go
ahead and press Ctrl+D, Command+D on the
| | 03:57 | Mac to deselect the image.
| | 03:59 | Switch back to the Brush tool.
| | 04:00 | I'm going to reduce the size of my
cursor of course, it's way too big, and zoom
| | 04:05 | in here, click around here just to get
rid of those extraneous lines, and maybe
| | 04:10 | click inside of the arm as well.
| | 04:12 | In order to tidy things up just a bit,
I am working with a hard edge brush, by
| | 04:17 | the way, the blend mode is set to
Normal, so I need to work carefully.
| | 04:21 | That pretty well takes care of it,
the one problem is, look at the top of
| | 04:25 | our head right there.
| | 04:26 | If I switch back to the RGB image, you
can see that that's a reflection on her
| | 04:31 | hair and if I go back to cleanup, we
are missing all kinds of hair details over
| | 04:35 | here on the left-hand-side.
| | 04:36 | Now granted we are on the right-hand
side as well, not really much we can do
| | 04:41 | about the right-hand side however,
because we've got just that terrible
| | 04:45 | degree of contrast going on in the
first place, these hairs are just too
| | 04:48 | delicate to retain.
| | 04:50 | And even if were to work very hard to
try to keep some of these hairs, there
| | 04:54 | would be all of the sudden change at
this location, either vanishing into the
| | 04:57 | darkness of the sea or
growing quite a bit thicker.
| | 05:01 | But these hairs over on the left-hand-
side are in good shape and we can get
| | 05:05 | them, but we just have to create yet
another alpha channel, and I will show you
| | 05:09 | how that works in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building a second-pass mask| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to take
a second pass at our mask, with the
| | 00:03 | intention of reinstating some of
the hair that's missing over here on
| | 00:07 | the left-hand side.
| | 00:08 | I've saved my changes as First-pass mask.psd,
found inside the 02_dark folder,
| | 00:13 | and in fact I'm going to go ahead and
rename this final Alpha channel, first
| | 00:17 | pass, and now let's go back to the Blue channel;
| | 00:20 | I just want you to see that this
Blue channel provides the most contrast
| | 00:25 | where the hair especially on the left-hand
side of her head is concerned in the background.
| | 00:30 | Compare that for example with the green
version of the image which is slightly
| | 00:33 | brighter where the hair is concerned and
then the red version is brighter still.
| | 00:39 | We'll go ahead and grab that Blue
channel and make a duplicate of it by dragging
| | 00:43 | it and dropping it onto the little page icon.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to press Ctrl+I or Command+I
on the Mac to invert this channel,
| | 00:50 | and then I'll press Ctrl+L or Command+L on
the Mac in order bring up the Levels dialog box.
| | 00:55 | I'll take the black point value up to
25 and I'm going to take the white point
| | 00:59 | value down to 100, so that we're brightening
up the hair dramatically, then I'll click OK.
| | 01:06 | I know this seems encouraging, over here
in the right-hand side, those hairs are
| | 01:11 | standing out beautifully.
| | 01:13 | However you end up losing them very quickly.
| | 01:16 | So what I'm saying is it's tempting to
go after these hairs on the right-hand
| | 01:19 | side of the image but you may end
up wasting a lot of time if you do.
| | 01:23 | I'm going to grab the Brush tool just
to demonstrate and press the X key so
| | 01:27 | that my foreground color is black, and notice
that I've already set the Blend mode to Overlay.
| | 01:32 | If I right-click inside the Image
window the Hardness is set to 0% and if I
| | 01:37 | start painting in the image, look at
that, those hairs go away instantaneously.
| | 01:42 | If I press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the
Mac to bring it back and I switch the
| | 01:46 | Blend mode from Overlay to Soft Light,
which is going to provide me with a more
| | 01:50 | subtle effect, and then I paint some
of those hairs that are going survive,
| | 01:55 | however they're barely surviving as you
can see, and then we've got this harsh
| | 01:59 | transition where the ocean
appears at the horizon line.
| | 02:02 | You can go that way if you want to, I'm
going to take a different approach as we'll see.
| | 02:07 | For now what I'm going to do is switch
over here to the left-hand side of the
| | 02:10 | image, I'm fairly zoomed in as you
can see my Blend mode is set to Soft
| | 02:13 | Light, by the way;
| | 02:14 | It is the best approach for these fine hairs and
I'm going to paint-away just in the background.
| | 02:18 | Notice I'm not trying to get too close
of the hair, in fact, I just did get too
| | 02:22 | close, so I'll press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
on the Mac to undo that change, and
| | 02:25 | then I'll paint fairly far way so you
can see here because I want to keep those
| | 02:30 | hairs intact if I can.
| | 02:32 | Now I'll go ahead and zoom out just a
little bit here and press the X key in
| | 02:37 | order to switch my foreground color to
white, and now I'll paint along these
| | 02:40 | hairs like so, and I'm bringing out
the hairs pretty nicely over here in the
| | 02:46 | left-hand side of the image.
| | 02:46 | However, I'm losing that
detail right there at the horizon.
| | 02:50 | So I'm going to have to press Ctrl+Z or
Command+Z in the Mac, because I need to
| | 02:53 | paint-away that horizon first, so I'll
press the X key to switch to foreground
| | 02:58 | color back to black, and then I'm
clicking a few times around here in order to
| | 03:02 | paint-away that background like so,
maybe reduce the size of my cursor a little
| | 03:06 | bit and click once again.
| | 03:08 | Now I'll try pressing the X Key to
change that foreground color to white
| | 03:13 | and paint up those hairs in order to
reinstate them, and that looks pretty darn good.
| | 03:18 | Now I'll press the X key in order to
make my foreground color black, so it's a
| | 03:21 | lot of back and forth in here which of
course is the way it works when you're
| | 03:25 | working with these kinds of fine details,
that looks pretty darn and good to me.
| | 03:29 | Now I'm going to zoom in, now notice
that we've got this area of hair that is
| | 03:35 | the reflection that bright
reflection on the top of her hairline.
| | 03:39 | I'm going to grab my Lasso
tool here for a moment so I can
| | 03:41 | demonstrate something.
| | 03:42 | I think this area right there is
actually inside of her hair as opposed to
| | 03:47 | showing through some background because
after all the top region of hair, right
| | 03:51 | about there, is reflecting all
sorts of bluish colors as well.
| | 03:57 | So let's go ahead and see if
we can paint those areas away.
| | 04:00 | I'm going to click on that Blue Copy
channel right there, which I should go
| | 04:04 | ahead and rename something like
let's say Invert Blue 25/1/100, so I just
| | 04:11 | remember what in the world I did.
| | 04:13 | Now I'm going to switch to my Brush
tool and I'm going to right-click inside
| | 04:17 | the Image window, increase the
Hardness value to 100%, press the Enter key a
| | 04:21 | couple of times, press Shift+Alt+N or
Shift+Option+N on the Mac to switch to
| | 04:25 | the Normal mode, then click not with
black, wrong color, so I'll press the X
| | 04:30 | key in order to switch the foreground
color to white, and then I'm just going
| | 04:34 | to kind of click my way down inside of
the hair like so, taking it easy to make
| | 04:39 | sure that I'm staying inside of that
area that I recalled to be inside the
| | 04:44 | fully opaque area of the hair.
| | 04:46 | And I'll click there as well,
paint some of these face details away.
| | 04:50 | Let's go ahead and paint this
area away as well inside of her face.
| | 04:54 | And finally I'm going to kind of paint
right there, in order to paint-away that
| | 05:00 | little bit of collar.
| | 05:01 | All right, now we need to merge these
details together, that is my first pass
| | 05:05 | mask along with this hair area
over here on the left-hand side.
| | 05:09 | So I'm going to grab the first pass
mask, make a duplicate of it by dragging
| | 05:13 | it and dropping it onto the Page icon and
I'll go ahead and rename this guy second pass.
| | 05:18 | I'll click in the Invert Blue channel, go
ahead and grab my Rectangular Marquee tool.
| | 05:25 | I'm going to marquee this region right
there, going down into the blouse-line
| | 05:29 | where the hair in the
blouse intersect each other.
| | 05:32 | Right there at the neckline, I'll press
Ctrl+C or Command+C on the Mac in order
| | 05:37 | to copy that detail.
| | 05:38 | I'll go ahead and switch
to the second pass channel.
| | 05:42 | Notice that my Selection Outline
survives, and that's great because it means
| | 05:47 | when I go up to the Edit menu and
choose the Paste command, or press Ctrl+V or
| | 05:51 | Command+V on the Mac, Photoshop goes
ahead and pastes that hair inside the
| | 05:55 | selection, so it's
exactly registered in the place.
| | 05:58 | Now I'll click off the selection in
order to deselect it, and I'll go ahead and
| | 06:02 | grab my Brush tool once again it should
be set to Normal still and my Hardness
| | 06:07 | value is still 100%, and so I'm going
to click right about there with white as
| | 06:12 | my foreground color in order to paint that
little detail away, and we now have a mask.
| | 06:16 | So I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+0 or
Command+0 on the Mac in order to center
| | 06:20 | my image on screen.
| | 06:21 | All right, we've got a mask.
| | 06:23 | In the next exercise we'll apply this
Alpha channel as a layer Mask and we'll
| | 06:27 | begin our compositing work.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Bringing back the most fragile hairs| 00:00 | In this exercise, we will apply our mask
as a layer Mask, and then we will clean
| | 00:04 | up some of the hairs over here on
the right-hand side of the head.
| | 00:07 | I have saved this image as Second-pass
mask.psd found inside the 02_dark folder.
| | 00:12 | I am going to start things off by
loading this mask as a selection, and I will
| | 00:16 | do that by Ctrl+Clicking or Command+Clicking
on this final Alpha channel in the list.
| | 00:21 | And then, I will scroll up to the top
of the panel, click on RGB to make it
| | 00:24 | active, and then switchover to the layers panel.
| | 00:27 | In order to reinstate these fine
hairs that we are seeing over here on the
| | 00:31 | right-hand side, I am
going to need a multiply layer.
| | 00:34 | I will go ahead and make a duplicate
of this model layer before I mask her,
| | 00:38 | however if I try to do so by pressing
Ctrl+J or Command+J on the Mac, then I
| | 00:43 | will just go ahead and jump the selected
portion of the image, which is not what I want.
| | 00:47 | So I'll press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the
Mac to undo that, and instead I'll just
| | 00:51 | go ahead and right-click on an empty
portion of the layer, choose a Duplicate
| | 00:55 | layer command and then click OK, in
order to create that duplicate layer.
| | 00:59 | Now I'll dropdown to the Add layer
Mask icon at the bottom of the panel and
| | 01:03 | click on it in order to apply
the selection as a layer Mask.
| | 01:07 | And it ends up looking like this;
| | 01:08 | I will have to turn off the
background model layer so that you can see
| | 01:12 | what we've got here.
| | 01:13 | And notice that these left
side hairs look absolutely great.
| | 01:16 | I will just go ahead and Ctrl+Drag
or Command+Drag this layer over to the
| | 01:20 | right, so that you can see how these light
hairs look against the solid blue background.
| | 01:26 | They end up looking quite nice indeed.
| | 01:28 | Go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z in
order to move this layer back to where it was.
| | 01:33 | It's just that those bright details
don't show up that well against that cloud.
| | 01:36 | They will by the time we are done with
this composition as you'll see because
| | 01:41 | we are going to have to modify the
background in order to make things work out properly.
| | 01:44 | But we have all kinds of rough details
going on over here on the right-hand side.
| | 01:48 | I am going to go ahead and turn on
that model layer, the unmasked one in the
| | 01:53 | background, click on it to make it
active, double-click on its name, and I am
| | 01:57 | going to call it filler, because it's just
going to fill in a few minor details here.
| | 02:00 | I will set the Blend mode to Multiply
so that we are darkening those hairs into
| | 02:05 | the background, and you can see that
it does a great job of reinstating those
| | 02:08 | hairs, however now we've got this sea
that's inexplicably showing up down here
| | 02:13 | toward the bottom portion of the image.
| | 02:14 | We don't want that.
| | 02:15 | The first thing I am going to do is mask
away the entire layer by pressing the
| | 02:19 | Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
and clicking on the Add layer Mask icon so
| | 02:24 | that we mask-away the entire image, and
now I will get my brush, which I get by
| | 02:28 | pressing the B key of course, right-click
inside the Image window, crank the
| | 02:32 | Hardness value down to 0%, so that
we've got a very soft brush, increase the
| | 02:37 | size of the brush by pressing
the right bracket key a few times.
| | 02:41 | Go ahead and press the D key in order
to make sure your foreground color is
| | 02:44 | white and then let's paint in some of
these details like so, in order to bring
| | 02:49 | back some of those hairs.
| | 02:51 | Now I am bringing back too much
information, I am bringing back some of the sea
| | 02:53 | as well, and you can see that I'm
incrementally darkening the image over in
| | 02:58 | this unmasked area.
| | 03:00 | So I want to drop out some of the
Luminance levels of this layer, and I'll do
| | 03:04 | that by double-clicking the layer Mask
thumbnail to bring up the layer Style
| | 03:08 | dialog box, and then I'll go ahead and
drag this white slider triangle, the one
| | 03:13 | that's associated with this layer
slider Bar and I'll take it down to 175.
| | 03:18 | So I am saying anything with the
Luminance level of 175 or brighter is going to
| | 03:23 | disappear, turn invisible.
| | 03:24 | That gets rid of all those
hairs that I'm trying to keep.
| | 03:27 | So I will press the Alt key or the
Option key on the Mac and drag the right side
| | 03:32 | of that white triangle over to 230 which
ends up producing a pretty good result.
| | 03:37 | I will now go ahead and click OK.
| | 03:39 | Notice we still have a little bit of
darkening going on, we will have to paint
| | 03:43 | that away, and obviously we're
seeing the sea, which is no good.
| | 03:46 | So I am going to reduce the size of my cursor.
| | 03:48 | Make sure the layer Mask is selected,
very important, so I will go ahead and
| | 03:51 | click on that thumbnail.
| | 03:52 | I'll press the X key to switch my
foreground color to black and I'll paint that
| | 03:57 | sea away like so, and I'm going to
increase the size of my brush a little bit
| | 04:02 | and paint in some other locations, I am
just clicking here and there in order to
| | 04:06 | paint some of those details away.
| | 04:08 | Just that little bit of
multiply layer, is all we need.
| | 04:11 | It looks to me from the appearance of
my layer Mask thumbnail that I have a
| | 04:15 | little bit of extra white sticking
out here on the far right side, I will
| | 04:19 | Alt+Click or Option+Click on
that layer Mask, so I can view it
| | 04:22 | independently, and I will just go
ahead and paint that region away, paint
| | 04:25 | this area away as well.
| | 04:27 | Alt+Click or Option+Click again, so
that we can see the RGB composite image.
| | 04:32 | And just to give you a sense of the
contribution being made by this filler
| | 04:36 | layer, I will turn it off.
| | 04:38 | So that's how the composition looks
without that additional darkening layer.
| | 04:41 | Here's what it looks like
with that darkening layer.
| | 04:44 | We've got some nice hairs going on here.
| | 04:47 | It might be that I have a little bit
too much darkening going on in this
| | 04:50 | detail right there.
| | 04:51 | I am going to press the 3 key to reduce
the Opacity of my brush to 30%, and then
| | 04:57 | I am going to click right about there
and there as well, in order to somewhat
| | 05:02 | mask those details away.
| | 05:04 | Things are definitely looking better;
| | 05:06 | however they are not looking best.
| | 05:09 | We've got a terrible detail going on
down here at the bottom portion of this
| | 05:13 | hair, and I will show you how
to fix it in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Smudging bad transitions| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to
take care of this monstrously bad detail
| | 00:05 | right there, where the hair suddenly grows
because it's set against that Dark Sea background.
| | 00:11 | I have saved my progress as Fragile
hairs.psd found inside the O2_dark folder.
| | 00:15 | I am going to click off the image to
deselect it, and we are going to start off
| | 00:19 | by taking care of some of these bad
transitions along the far right side of the
| | 00:24 | lower portion of the hair.
| | 00:26 | I will do that by grabbing my Smudge
tool, which I can get from the Blur tool
| | 00:31 | fly-out menu there, and I will increase
the size of my brush, make sure that the
| | 00:35 | mode is set to normal.
| | 00:36 | The strength is 50% as by default, and
we will just kind of do a back and forth
| | 00:40 | number, not on this layer however.
| | 00:43 | Press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac.
| | 00:44 | I have the Filler layer selected.
| | 00:46 | I want the model layer selected, so I
will make sure to click on its layer Mask
| | 00:50 | to make it active, and then I will kind
of drag back and forth like so in these
| | 00:55 | regions, just a little bit of back and
forthing should help smear those details
| | 01:00 | a little bit, so the
edges aren't quite so chunky.
| | 01:03 | That takes care of those problems such as
they are, however, this issue still persists.
| | 01:08 | And here's how we'll get rid of it.
| | 01:10 | Go ahead and select the Elliptical
Marquee tool from the Rectangle Marquee
| | 01:14 | fly-out menu, and I'm going to select
the inside edge of this hair like so, and
| | 01:20 | maybe bring it up just a little bit.
| | 01:22 | It's kind of hard to exactly match that
hair, by the way, so you are just going
| | 01:25 | to have to do your best.
| | 01:27 | Once you have selected that inner area
like so, go up to the Select menu, choose
| | 01:31 | the Modify command and choose Feather.
| | 01:34 | Let's go with a Feather
Radius of one pixel, click OK.
| | 01:37 | Now, I'm going to switch over here to
the Rectangular Marquee tool, press the
| | 01:42 | Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
and deselect the left-hand portion of
| | 01:45 | the oval, so just this area remains
selected, and then let's go ahead and fill it in.
| | 01:50 | Black is my foreground color, so I will
press Alt+Backspace or Option+Delete to
| | 01:54 | fill that area like so.
| | 01:55 | Now let's just move the selection over
to the right-hand side there, to right
| | 02:00 | about there should do what I think,
and then go up to the Select menu and
| | 02:05 | choose the Inverse Command, or you can press
Ctrl+Shift+I in order to reverse that selection.
| | 02:11 | Once again, armed with Rectangle
Marquee tool, press the Shift+Alt keys or
| | 02:15 | Shift+Option keys on the Mac and drag
like so in order to select this region
| | 02:21 | right here, and then once again press
Alt+Backspace or Option+Delete on the Mac
| | 02:25 | to fill it with black.
| | 02:27 | Let's see what that looks like, I will
go ahead and Press Ctrl+H or Command+H on
| | 02:30 | the Mac in order to hide the selection outline.
| | 02:33 | I imagine, we can move the selection
over just little bit, and I am going to do
| | 02:36 | that by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow or
Command+Option+Left arrow on the Mac in
| | 02:42 | order to nudge that selection
over there inside of the mask.
| | 02:46 | So we are masking into the hair just slightly.
| | 02:49 | Now I'll click in the image to
deselect it, I am going to Alt+Click or
| | 02:52 | Option+Click in the layer Mask
thumbnail, so that we can see that layer Mask
| | 02:56 | independently of the rest of the image.
| | 02:58 | We've got this kind of break
in the hairline right there;
| | 03:00 | we are going to fix that once
again using the Smudge tool.
| | 03:03 | But instead of having the mode set
to Normal, I want you to change it to
| | 03:07 | Lighten, and that way, we will exclusively
lighten details inside the image as we paint.
| | 03:12 | All right, now I am going to press the
Escape key, so that the mode Option is no
| | 03:16 | longer active here on the PC.
| | 03:17 | I will reduce the size of my cursor by
pressing the left bracket key a few times
| | 03:21 | and I'll just go ahead and paint
down inside this region like so.
| | 03:26 | It's possible I still have a selection
active, so I am going to Press Ctrl+D or
| | 03:29 | Command+D on the Mac, and try
again here, and that was my problem.
| | 03:33 | I should be able to paint, notice
exclusively by brightening the image, I'm
| | 03:38 | smearing into this region.
| | 03:40 | Now Alt+Click or Option+Click once
again on that layer Mask thumbnail to view
| | 03:45 | the image instead of the mask, and I'm
going to switch over here to the Brush
| | 03:49 | tool, but before I do, I might as well
reinstate the mode to Normal by pressing
| | 03:53 | Shift+Alt+ And or Shift+Option+N on the Mac.
| | 03:56 | Then I will select the Brush tool.
| | 03:58 | Notice that my Opacity value is still 30%.
| | 04:00 | I will press the Zero key to change it
to 100%, then I will right-click inside
| | 04:05 | the image window and let's take the
Hardness value up to 75% let's say, press
| | 04:10 | the Enter key a couple of times in order to
hide that panel, reduce the size of my cursor.
| | 04:15 | I have got a problem with this edge
right there, I don't quite like it, so I am
| | 04:18 | going to click up above it and then
Shift+Click down below, that looks like it's
| | 04:22 | sculpted off too much.
| | 04:24 | So I will press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
on the Mac to undo that change.
| | 04:26 | Click and then Shift+Click like that,
then Click and Shift+Click right about
| | 04:31 | here, in order to paint a couple of
additional straight lines, and then
| | 04:35 | finally, notice that we've got this
awfully choppy edge going on at the very
| | 04:39 | bottom of the hair.
| | 04:40 | So I will click there, Shift+Click
like so, Shift+Click like that and then
| | 04:45 | Shift+Click down here as well, in
order to paint those areas away.
| | 04:50 | Press Ctrl+Zero or Command+Zero on
the Mac, in order to center the image on
| | 04:54 | screen, and I will go ahead and switch
back to the Rectangle Marquee tool as well.
| | 04:58 | That's a lot better.
| | 05:00 | We have a lot better hair information
going on, here along the right side of the
| | 05:04 | head, but it's not the best.
| | 05:06 | I'd like to bring back some more hairs
but we are really not going to be able to
| | 05:10 | do that, by drawing the
hairs from the original image.
| | 05:13 | So we are going to have to fake it
and I'll show you how that fakery works
| | 05:17 | in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Painting in missing hairs| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to bring
back the last of the hairs over here on
| | 00:03 | right-hand side of the head, and we
are going to do so the old-fashioned way.
| | 00:07 | We are going to paint them in
manually, but first, we need to make some
| | 00:11 | adjustments to the existing hairs.
| | 00:14 | I have saved my progress as Still needs
work.psd found inside the 02_dark folder.
| | 00:18 | I am going to click on
layer Mask for the model layer.
| | 00:21 | To make it active, I will switch to
the Brush tool and I will right-click
| | 00:26 | inside the image window, so you can see my
Size value is 145 pixels and my Hardness is 75%.
| | 00:32 | Now, I will press the 5 key in
order to reduce the Opacity to 50%, my
| | 00:38 | Foreground color is Black, and so I
will just go ahead and paint right about
| | 00:42 | there, with just a single click I
will paint right about there as well, and
| | 00:46 | that helps to smooth off the
transition of that big hair right there, just so
| | 00:51 | it doesn't look so faky.
| | 00:52 | I will click on layer Mask thumbnail
for the Filler layer, to make it active, I
| | 00:57 | will press the 2 key to reduce the
Opacity value to 20% up there in the Options
| | 01:01 | bar, increase the size of my cursor a
little bit and then click just once, right
| | 01:06 | about at that location, and that
ends up smoothing out the transitions.
| | 01:10 | Now for the good stuff.
| | 01:13 | If you're thinking of painting in hairs,
you only have the paint in hairs if you
| | 01:17 | feel like the existing hair details
don't look good, or you just cannot mask
| | 01:22 | them or the masked hairs end up looking
chunky and they don't look right at all.
| | 01:27 | You'll need a wacom tablet or some
pressure sensitive input device, so that you
| | 01:32 | can paint naturalistic brushstrokes.
| | 01:34 | So here's what I did.
| | 01:35 | I went ahead and created a layer in
advance for you, just in case you don't
| | 01:38 | have such a tablet, and you can get
to it by turning on this group, that's
| | 01:42 | called For Later Use, and if you
twirl it open, you will see there is this
| | 01:46 | layer called Stylus Lines.
| | 01:47 | And so this is what the image looks
like without those lines, this is what it
| | 01:50 | looks like with those lines.
| | 01:52 | You can see that it helps to
fill out the hair quite nicely.
| | 01:54 | Well, I will just go ahead and add a few more,
so you can get a sense of how I did this.
| | 01:58 | First of all, I went with a much smaller brush.
| | 02:01 | So I will right-click inside the image,
and I will change the Size value to 8
| | 02:05 | pixels, this is going to depend on
resolution of your image, by the way,.
| | 02:08 | This image is only 1900
pixels wide by 1200 pixels tall.
| | 02:12 | So 8 pixels works nicely, if you had a
much higher resolution image, you might
| | 02:16 | double the value or go even higher.
| | 02:19 | We want the Hardness value to be 0%.
| | 02:21 | Now these are the values that are
going to work with a drawing tablet.
| | 02:24 | If you're trying to paint hairlines
with a mouse, good luck, because you are
| | 02:29 | going to have a harder time making it
happen, and you will want to work with
| | 02:32 | a smaller size value.
| | 02:34 | Go ahead and press the Enter key or the
Return key on the Mac a couple of times.
| | 02:37 | Then I need to lift a representative
hair color, and I will do that using the
| | 02:41 | Eyedropper tool, and I will go ahead
and click someplace inside a dark portion
| | 02:45 | of the hair, and the values I ended up
coming up with, when all was said and
| | 02:49 | done, is a Hue value of 30 degrees, Saturation
value of 30%, and a Brightness value of 10%.
| | 02:56 | Now I will go ahead and
grab my Brush tool once again.
| | 02:59 | Got that very tiny brush, I have got
my Drawing Tablet right here, the Stylus
| | 03:03 | Lines layer is selected and so now I
can go ahead and paint some brushstrokes.
| | 03:07 | That didn't work however, and that's
because my Opacity value is so low.
| | 03:10 | I will go and press the 0 key to reinstate
an Opacity of 100%, and then I will try again.
| | 03:16 | What you want to do is match the natural hairs.
| | 03:20 | To get a sense of how this woman's
hair sort of falls in the place, you can
| | 03:24 | Shift+Click on layer Mask thumbnail for
the model layer, and then you'll see how
| | 03:28 | her hairs are pretty random.
| | 03:29 | They tend to sort of curl inwards in
certain locations, and then elsewhere, they
| | 03:34 | might kind of wave out in
a fairly straight fashion.
| | 03:38 | So those are the kinds
of hairs we are going for.
| | 03:40 | I will Shift+Click on that layer Mask
thumbnail in order to turn it back on,
| | 03:44 | and then I will paint in a few lines,
and you only want to watch out for the
| | 03:48 | grossest lines, like if you make a big
line like that, obviously that's a problem.
| | 03:51 | Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac, but if
you paint like brushstrokes like so, and
| | 03:56 | you just keep painting in a lot of
different hairlines here and make them curl
| | 04:02 | back into the hair, as opposed to just
always going completely out like that,
| | 04:07 | that would be a bad hair line.
| | 04:08 | Go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
on the Mac, we want hairs that come back
| | 04:11 | in every once in a while, as well
as some hairs that just fly out.
| | 04:16 | You just want to kind of go for it,
it's basically what it comes down to.
| | 04:19 | Just try it, your hand at this,
see how it ends up working.
| | 04:23 | Again, a wacom tablet or some other
pressure sensitive input device is going to
| | 04:27 | be your best bet, and the more
hairs you add, the better up to a point.
| | 04:31 | You don't want to totally over do it,
so it looks like she never has gotten
| | 04:34 | around combing her hair or something.
| | 04:36 | But you do want it to look fairly
natural and you might even want to add some
| | 04:40 | hairs up above, where you already have
hairs, just so that you're establishing
| | 04:44 | these dark hairs interwoven with the
natural hairs from the photographic image.
| | 04:48 | Now I am going to press Ctrl+0 or
Command+0 on the Mac to center my zoom, and
| | 04:53 | this gives you a sense of just
what a dramatic difference it makes.
| | 04:56 | This is how the image looks without those hairs;
| | 04:58 | this is how it looks with the hairs.
| | 05:00 | So they do help to have the effect of
credibility to the overall composition
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Matching the light source| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to fix
the one remaining problem with this
| | 00:04 | composition, it's beautifully masked;
| | 00:06 | we have these nice hairs over
here on the right-hand side.
| | 00:09 | We've got these highlight
bounces around the left-hand side.
| | 00:12 | In terms of the masking and compositing, I
would say this image is nigh on impeccable.
| | 00:17 | However, compositionally,
it's totally messed up.
| | 00:20 | And here's the problem.
| | 00:22 | Notice the light sources, where she is
concerned the light is coming in from the
| | 00:27 | upper left side, because it's
reflecting off the upper left side of her cheeks
| | 00:31 | and her shoulder and so forth, whereas
in the background, the light source is
| | 00:36 | coming in from the upper right-hand side.
| | 00:39 | Check out the shadows over here that
are being cast by the grass, also the
| | 00:43 | highlights over on the
building and so forth. That is bad.
| | 00:47 | You may not have noticed this problem
at first, as soon as we reconcile it,
| | 00:51 | their overall composition
ends up looking much better.
| | 00:54 | And here's what we are going to do.
| | 00:55 | We are going to go ahead and
take this future city layer.
| | 00:57 | The layer in the background and we
are going to flip it, by going up to the
| | 01:01 | Edit menu and choosing Free Transform
or pressing Ctrl+T or Command+T on a Mac,
| | 01:06 | and then right-click inside the image
window and choose Flip Horizontal, in
| | 01:11 | order to flip that image.
| | 01:12 | So now that light is coming in from
the upper left-hand side, the shadows are
| | 01:16 | being cast in the proper
direction from the grass.
| | 01:18 | And I am going to
reposition this image a little bit.
| | 01:21 | I am going to turn off that delta up
there in the Options bar, and I am going to
| | 01:26 | press Shift+Right Arrow several times
here, until that X value reads 986.5
| | 01:33 | pixels, as it does in my case right now.
| | 01:36 | If you're working along
with me, that's what you want.
| | 01:39 | You want your image at
this location right there.
| | 01:42 | And then go ahead and press the Enter
key or the Return key on a Mac in order to
| | 01:46 | accept that modification.
| | 01:47 | Now we need to move her into a
better position so she is not blocking the
| | 01:51 | City of the Future.
| | 01:52 | So I am going to go ahead and click on
the filler layer and Shift+Click on that
| | 01:56 | group right there at the top of the stack.
| | 01:58 | We are going to remove all
these layers to the left 300 pixels.
| | 02:02 | And the easiest way to do that is to go
up to the Edit menu and choose the Free
| | 02:06 | Transform command once again, and
then turn on that little delta symbol up
| | 02:11 | there in the Options bar and change
the X value to -300, and then press the
| | 02:17 | Enter key or the Return key on a Mac a couple
of times in order to accept that modification.
| | 02:22 | And now you can see that both the
foreground and the background appear to share
| | 02:26 | a common light source, which is very
important, because the only possible light
| | 02:30 | source in this case is the sun.
| | 02:31 | All right, just a couple of more
tweaks that I want to make here.
| | 02:35 | I am going to click on the layer Mask
Thumbnail for the model layer to make it active.
| | 02:38 | I'm going to switch to my Brush tool.
| | 02:40 | I am going to press the D key in order
to instate white is a foreground color.
| | 02:45 | Notice that my Blend mode is set
to Overlay, which is important here.
| | 02:48 | And I will right-click inside the image
window, my Hardness value is set to 0%,
| | 02:51 | and I will paint with white inside of
this layer Mask in order to bring out some
| | 02:56 | additional highlights inside of
this left portion of the hair.
| | 03:01 | So it appears to be
reflecting that light source.
| | 03:04 | Now I'll go ahead and click on the
layer Mask Thumbnails for the filler layer.
| | 03:07 | Notice that that we have a little bit
of darkening showing up here, that's the
| | 03:10 | function of that multiplied later there.
| | 03:12 | And I don't want that dark blue showing up.
| | 03:15 | So I am going to press the X key in
order to switch my foreground color to
| | 03:17 | black, and then I will paint up
into this region of the head and down a
| | 03:22 | little bit as well.
| | 03:23 | And let's see if that made
the difference I am looking for.
| | 03:25 | This is before and this is after,
pretty subtle modification, but I need a
| | 03:29 | little more, so I am going to darken
this is up with a couple of additional
| | 03:33 | clicks up there toward the top of the head.
| | 03:35 | And this is the final
version of the composition.
| | 03:38 | I will go ahead and press the F
key a couple times and zoom on in.
| | 03:41 | And that friends, is at least one way
to masking composite dark hair that was
| | 03:45 | formerly set against the complex
background, here inside Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Masking Light HairCalculating blonde hair| 00:00 | In this chapter we are going to take on
light hair, which as you might imagine
| | 00:04 | requires a different approach than dark hair.
| | 00:07 | And over the course of this project,
we will take this image of this platinum
| | 00:12 | blonde woman and we will composite her
against this photograph of the Valley
| | 00:16 | of Fire, in Nevada, in order to create
this final composition, complete with
| | 00:21 | this nice bright flame.
| | 00:23 | Now along the way, we're going
to encounter a few challenges.
| | 00:26 | For one thing, even though this is a
fairly homogeneous background, that is it's
| | 00:31 | a solid color, we've got a lot of
different light happening in the background,
| | 00:35 | so we have this kind of hot spot
over here in the center left region.
| | 00:40 | And we are going to have to account for that,
independently of the rest of the background.
| | 00:45 | Also she's warm on warm, so
that presents some challenges.
| | 00:48 | She doesn't have a complementary color
background or a white background or a
| | 00:52 | black background, something
neutral, it's easy to remove.
| | 00:56 | Then of course, she's got the blonde
hair and we have some fairly fragile
| | 00:59 | tendrils of hair going on.
| | 01:00 | And then finally of course, we've got
this flame which even though I suspect
| | 01:06 | it might be entirely artificial, we are
going to turn into something very special indeed.
| | 01:12 | So we are going to heat up that flame and
make it look great against its new background.
| | 01:16 | Let's take a look at the
Channels that are available to us.
| | 01:19 | And these channels, I should say
are not in terribly great shape.
| | 01:23 | And that's going to increase the
complexity of her mask slightly.
| | 01:28 | We've got the Red Channel in which of
course she is extremely bright across the
| | 01:32 | board, but so is her background,
because the background is after all red and
| | 01:37 | especially this little region
right here, very, very bright indeed.
| | 01:42 | Next we have the Green Channel.
| | 01:44 | And the Green Channel provides us with
some very nice contrast across the board,
| | 01:49 | except once again, in this region which
as you can see here is heavily jpeged,
| | 01:55 | lot of posterization going on as well,
some choppy edges around the hair and the
| | 02:00 | hair doesn't even appear to
grow in consistent directions.
| | 02:03 | You can see right about this location,
we've got hair that's going upward,
| | 02:08 | which suggests that there is some editing
that has happened to the stock image in advance.
| | 02:12 | It's good editing, looks pretty nice,
but it does present us with some
| | 02:16 | additional challenges.
| | 02:17 | And then we've got the Blue Channel,
which if I go ahead and zoom out here.
| | 02:22 | You can see it provides an even higher
degree of contrast than the Green Channel.
| | 02:26 | However, we've got massive problems
over here in the left side of the image.
| | 02:31 | So the background is really falling apart.
| | 02:33 | That's not necessarily the biggest
problem, but this kind of posterization can
| | 02:38 | get in our way when we are masking the image.
| | 02:41 | So I just assume, go ahead
and rule this channel out.
| | 02:44 | So the approach I'm going to take is
to merge the Green and Red Channels with
| | 02:49 | each other, once again using a calculation.
| | 02:51 | Now obviously, the Green Channel is
in the better shape, so that's going to
| | 02:55 | service our base Source 2 Channel.
| | 02:57 | And then the Red Channel
will service a Support channel.
| | 03:00 | It does after all offer
an awful lot of contrast.
| | 03:03 | So I am going to switch back to the RGB image.
| | 03:06 | Then go up to the Image menu and
choose the Calculations command.
| | 03:10 | And let's go ahead and set
our channels up in advance here.
| | 03:13 | So the Source 1 Channel is already
set to Red by default, that's great!
| | 03:16 | Presumably, your file is set to Woman with
flame.jpg and layer is set to Background.
| | 03:21 | I am going to go ahead and drop down to
the Source 2 Channel and change it from
| | 03:24 | Red to Green, there is no need to
Invert the channels, because after all the
| | 03:28 | foreground subject is already
brighter than the background, in the case of
| | 03:32 | everything, but the Red Channel
whereof, they are pretty much the same.
| | 03:35 | Now let's go ahead and add
these two channels together.
| | 03:38 | We could choose one of the brightening
modes, which is going to work out pretty well.
| | 03:42 | You can see the Screen mode for example,
produces a pretty good effect, it's
| | 03:44 | a little too bright.
| | 03:46 | So I am going to switch to Add, which is
still a lighten mode, but gives us more control.
| | 03:50 | And then I am going to take down that
Offset value and ultimately I am going to
| | 03:55 | take it down to -70 and that does a
great job of distinguishing the hair over
| | 04:01 | here on the right-hand side.
| | 04:02 | We've got some big problems over here on
the left-hand side, and we are going to
| | 04:06 | have those address those independently,
because we are going to solve those
| | 04:09 | problems here inside the
Calculations dialog box.
| | 04:12 | At this point go ahead and click OK.
| | 04:14 | You will create a new channel.
| | 04:15 | Let's go ahead and rename this channel.
| | 04:17 | I am going to call it G+R, no little i,
because we didn't Invert, and I will go
| | 04:22 | ahead and list the Add mode as well, and
then -70 to indicate that Offset value.
| | 04:28 | And that will service as our base calculation.
| | 04:30 | From this point, we are going to have
to apply a couple of different levels
| | 04:34 | iterations, one to account for
the right set of the image and this
| | 04:38 | left-hand shoulder.
| | 04:39 | And then we are going to have to create
another levels iteration for this area
| | 04:43 | of highlight over here, and we will
perform both of those modifications, in
| | 04:47 | the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating two contrasting iterations| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going
to take our base calculation.
| | 00:03 | And we are going to apply a couple of
contrast iterations, one of which will be
| | 00:07 | designed to accommodate the larger
mask and the other of which needs to
| | 00:11 | accommodate this area of low contrast
over on the left side of the woman's head.
| | 00:15 | I am going to start things off here in
the Channels panel by grabbing the one
| | 00:19 | and only Alpha channel and making a
copy of it, so that we can come back to the
| | 00:23 | calculation if we need to in the future.
| | 00:25 | Then I am going to increase the
contrast of the image using the Levels command,
| | 00:29 | so I will press Ctrl+L or Command+L
on the Mac to bring up levels.
| | 00:33 | And I am going to increase the
darkness just a little bit here so I am taking
| | 00:37 | the black point value up to 20 and I
should actually move this over a little bit
| | 00:41 | so that we can see these areas
of jet-black in the background.
| | 00:45 | And that's pretty important, you may
figure, oh gosh, this region over here on
| | 00:49 | the right-hand side was
already pretty darn black.
| | 00:52 | In fact, if I take that value down to
zero, you'll see if you look closely that
| | 00:56 | there are these weird areas of gray
surrounding the hair and again that might be
| | 01:01 | a function of some asking them if
happened before with this image or maybe JPEG
| | 01:07 | artifacts, you never know.
| | 01:08 | In any case, I'm going to go ahead and
take this value up to get rid of that stuff.
| | 01:12 | We'll go ahead and zoom back out
so that we can see the entire image.
| | 01:16 | And then I will tab over to the white
point value and take it down to 235.
| | 01:22 | So we are just adding a little bit of
balance to the lightness so that we are
| | 01:25 | creating large areas that are clipped to white.
| | 01:28 | And then I'm going to Shift+Tab back to
the gamma value, and I want to take it
| | 01:33 | down because we need to
deepen some of these midtones.
| | 01:36 | And so I'm pressing Shift+Down Arrow,
ultimately four times in a row, to reduce
| | 01:40 | that gamma value to 0.6.
| | 01:42 | And we end up with this result here
which nicely accommodates everything except
| | 01:48 | this spot highlight on
the left side of the match.
| | 01:51 | All right, so we will go ahead and click
OK in order to accept that modification.
| | 01:55 | Let's go ahead and annotate what we've
done in the filename and I will go ahead
| | 01:58 | and enter a new filename of 20/0.60/235.
| | 02:04 | Now let's apply a contrast
modification that accommodates this area
| | 02:08 | exclusively at the expense of the
rest of the image, and then we will later
| | 02:12 | merge the two together.
| | 02:13 | So I'll go ahead and grab that original
calculation and drag it and drop it on
| | 02:18 | to the little page icon.
| | 02:20 | And so I will once again press Ctrl+L
or Command+L on the Mac, to revisit
| | 02:24 | the Levels dialog box.
| | 02:25 | I am going to take that white point
value again down to 235, that's just fine.
| | 02:30 | It nicely accommodates all of
the highlights inside the image.
| | 02:33 | However, we are going to take
this black point value up like crazy.
| | 02:36 | I will click inside of it and press
Shift+Up Arrow, a total of 16 times
| | 02:41 | ultimately because I want to take this
value up to 160 and that's the point at
| | 02:45 | which this area finally turns black.
| | 02:48 | Now this is a big modification.
| | 02:51 | However, it's going to
service well in the long term.
| | 02:54 | I do need however to bump up the gamma
value a little bit, so I will tab over to
| | 02:58 | it and press Shift+Up Arrow three
times in a row to change it to 1.3.
| | 03:02 | And then click OK in order to
accept that change and rename the new
| | 03:06 | Alpha channel 160/1.30/235 and
then press the Enter key in order to
| | 03:13 | accept that change.
| | 03:15 | And the result is too contrast
iterations, that we can then merge together and
| | 03:19 | I'll show you a way that you can do
that and create yet a new Alpha channel,
| | 03:23 | using calculations in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Merging two iterations inside a mask| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to take
those two contrast iterations, the one
| | 00:04 | that best accommodates the larger image
and the one that's better suited to this
| | 00:08 | area to the left of the flame.
| | 00:10 | And we are going to merge them
together and create a new channel using the
| | 00:14 | Calculations command.
| | 00:15 | So we are going to start things of by
selecting the region that's good, inside
| | 00:20 | of this final Alpha Channel.
| | 00:22 | If you're working along me go ahead and
select that final Alpha Channel and then
| | 00:26 | grab the Lasso tool.
| | 00:28 | And press and hold the Alt key or the
Option key on the Mac then go ahead and
| | 00:32 | drop polygonal selection outline
around the areas that's good, where this
| | 00:37 | channel is concerned.
| | 00:39 | And then I will go ahead and release Alter
Option in order to complete that selection.
| | 00:43 | Now I have selected a little bit too much.
| | 00:45 | If I zoom in on this knuckle here,
you can see that it goes into a kind of
| | 00:49 | decline where this channel is
concerned as we move from the top side of the
| | 00:53 | finger to the left-hand side.
| | 00:55 | So I am going to remove some of this
selection by pressing the Alt key or the
| | 00:59 | Option key and a Mac and
dragging through this region right here.
| | 01:04 | And I think I have gone a little bit
too far so now I am going to press the
| | 01:07 | Shift key and drag around like so.
| | 01:10 | So the basic nature of the
selection doesn't matter that much.
| | 01:13 | In other words, it doesn't have to look good.
| | 01:15 | We just want to make sure we are selecting
the stuff that's good inside of this channel.
| | 01:20 | I am going to back out a little.
| | 01:23 | And next what I want to do is add
some softness, so we have a little bit of
| | 01:26 | transitional blur between these two
iterations and I will do that by going up to
| | 01:31 | the Select menu, choosing Modify
and then choosing the Feather command.
| | 01:35 | And I would say a Feather value of about
6 pixels is going to work out beautifully.
| | 01:40 | So go ahead and click OK
to accept that modification.
| | 01:44 | And, by the way, if you are ever trying
this with your own images, you have to
| | 01:48 | remember, because that
Feather Radius is a pixel value.
| | 01:51 | It will change depending on
the resolution of the image.
| | 01:54 | This is a fairly low res image, if you
have a higher res image, you would go
| | 01:57 | with a higher feather value.
| | 01:59 | You may feel the best thing to do at
this point would just be to go ahead and
| | 02:03 | copy this region and paste
it into the other channel.
| | 02:05 | So I would go up to the Edit menu,
choose the Copy command or press Ctrl+C,
| | 02:09 | Command+C on then Mac, then go over
here to the other channel, then switch to
| | 02:14 | the second to last channel, which is
the first iteration and go up to the Edit
| | 02:17 | menu and choose the Paste command or
press Ctrl+V or Command+V on a Mac.
| | 02:21 | And that does give us the
effect we are looking for.
| | 02:23 | The problem is we are damaging this channel.
| | 02:25 | I would rather apply this
change to a brand new channel.
| | 02:29 | And you can do that using a function
that I haven't explained so far inside the
| | 02:33 | Calculations command.
| | 02:34 | And here's it works.
| | 02:35 | I am going to go ahead and press Ctrl+Z,
Command+Z on a Mac, to undo that modification.
| | 02:40 | And then I will go up to the Image
menu, choose the Calculations command.
| | 02:44 | And what we are looking for here is to
merge these two iterations together and
| | 02:49 | because the one that's called 20/0.6/235,
because that's the channel that's in
| | 02:56 | the best shape overall, that needs to
be our base channel that is the Source 2
| | 03:01 | channel, just as it is by default in my case.
| | 03:04 | Then we need to change the Source 1
channel to the iteration that need to appear
| | 03:07 | inside the selection.
| | 03:08 | So I will go ahead and change the
Source 1 channel to that final channel which
| | 03:13 | is called 161/1.3/235.
| | 03:16 | And then next we want to change the
Blend mode believe it or not to Normal
| | 03:20 | because we don't want any
interaction inside of this area.
| | 03:23 | We just want the Source 1
channel to appear by itself.
| | 03:26 | Now currently, as things stand, the
Source 1 channel is taking over everything.
| | 03:32 | That's because by default the
Calculations command does not respect selections.
| | 03:36 | However, you can tell it to respect the
selection, by turning on this Mask checkbox.
| | 03:41 | And then as opposed to masking our
modification inside of another Alpha
| | 03:47 | Channel, we will change Channel to
Selection and then the Selection itself
| | 03:52 | serves as that Mask.
| | 03:53 | So in other words, the Source 1 channel
will appear inside the mask region and
| | 03:59 | the Source 2 channel will
appear outside the mask region.
| | 04:02 | And in our case, the Mask is the selection.
| | 04:05 | If you ever doing this is on your own
and you get the equation wrong, the wrong
| | 04:09 | thing appears on the inside for example,
I wasn't thinking and I changed Source
| | 04:13 | 1 to the first iteration, and I changed
Source 2 to the second iteration and I
| | 04:18 | got exactly the opposite effect that I
was looking for, then I had to do is drop
| | 04:22 | down to this Invert checkbox and turn it on.
| | 04:25 | And you will get the exact effect you want.
| | 04:27 | So now at this point go ahead and
click OK in order to create that new Alpha
| | 04:31 | Channel and I'll call this one merged
iterations, because that's what it is, and
| | 04:36 | this will now serve as our base channel
for our selective modifications, which
| | 04:41 | we will begin in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Performing selective edits with Dodge and Burn| 00:00 | In this exercise we'll
selectively modify the contrast of the mask.
| | 00:04 | However, instead of using the Brush
tool set to the Overlay mode, as we have in
| | 00:08 | the past, we'll take advantage of the
Dodge and Burn tools, which give us even
| | 00:12 | more selective control.
| | 00:14 | And I have my final Merged
iterations alpha channel selected.
| | 00:18 | Before we set in making modifications
to it, I'm going to make yet another
| | 00:21 | duplicate by dragging and dropping it
onto the little page icon, and then I'll
| | 00:26 | move it to the top of the alpha channel
stack right there, so it's easier to get to.
| | 00:29 | So I don't have to scroll up and down
this list so much, because this will be
| | 00:34 | our final mask, which is of
course why I'm naming it so.
| | 00:38 | I'm going to zoom-in on this knuckle
here, and notice that it has a little bit
| | 00:42 | of a bounce above it.
| | 00:44 | However, it does need to be brightened,
so if I went ahead and grabbed my Brush
| | 00:48 | tool, as I normally would, which is the
quickest approach, by the way, I should
| | 00:53 | tell you that, so I'm not
knocking this approach at all.
| | 00:56 | It's just that it does get better
than this if you need better control.
| | 01:00 | Anyway, if I right-click inside the
image, you'll see that the hardness is
| | 01:03 | cranked down to 0% and now I'll go ahead
and press Shift+Alt+O or Shift+Option+O
| | 01:08 | on the Mac in order to switch to the
Overlay mode, my foreground color is white.
| | 01:12 | And now notice if I paint along the
knuckle, not only do I brighten that
| | 01:16 | knuckle, but I'm adding a lot of bounce
here in the background, and if I paint a
| | 01:20 | second time, I'm almost turning that
background bounce white, which is most
| | 01:25 | certainly not what I want.
| | 01:26 | So I'll go ahead and back up by
pressing Ctrl+Alt+Z or Command+Option+Z, a
| | 01:31 | couple of times to undo those modifications.
| | 01:34 | Now, just for the sake of comparison
I'll press Shift+Alt+F or Shift+Option+F on
| | 01:38 | the Mac to switch to the Soft Light
mode, and I'll paint that area again, and
| | 01:42 | notice even those Soft Light is
ostensibly a more subtle Contrast mode, it does
| | 01:47 | a real number on that bounce in the
background, has an even bigger effect than
| | 01:51 | the Overly mode did.
| | 01:53 | So neither of those is really
the approach we're looking for.
| | 01:56 | I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
on the Mac in order to undo that change.
| | 02:01 | Here is the better way to work.
| | 02:03 | Now, I presume most of you are
familiar with the Dodge and the Burn tools.
| | 02:06 | The Dodge tool allows you to brighten
areas of an image as you paint over them,
| | 02:11 | and the Burn tool allows you
to darken portions of an image.
| | 02:14 | You can also use them with
extremely expedient results inside of masks.
| | 02:19 | So I'll go ahead and switch to the Dodge tool.
| | 02:21 | By default, if I were to just start
painting in here you'll see that I'm doing
| | 02:25 | almost nothing to the knuckle
whatsoever and I'm incrementally brightening that
| | 02:30 | background bounce, which is
absolutely not what I want to do.
| | 02:33 | So I'll go ahead and press
Ctrl+Z or Command+Z once again.
| | 02:36 | The problem is that the range is set to
Midtones, which is fantastic when you're
| | 02:41 | working inside the full-
color continuous tone image.
| | 02:44 | However, when you're working in a
mask that's not what you want at all,
| | 02:47 | instead you want to change the
Range to Highlights, so that you're only
| | 02:50 | brightening the brightest staff.
| | 02:52 | Go ahead and choose that option and
then paint, and notice that you're doing
| | 02:56 | almost nothing to that
background bounce whatsoever.
| | 02:59 | You are changing it slightly.
| | 03:00 | The luminance levels are getting
slightly elevated, but not like they were
| | 03:04 | before with the Brush tool.
| | 03:05 | I'm going to press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z
once again, because I want you to see.
| | 03:09 | We've got this Exposure option.
| | 03:11 | When you reduce the opacity when you're
Overlay brushing inside of a mask, then
| | 03:17 | you eliminate your options of getting
absolute whites and absolute blacks.
| | 03:22 | So, in other words, instead of
reducing the impact of the brush you're just
| | 03:25 | muddying the results, that's not true
for exposure, this is a very different
| | 03:30 | control, which means you have all sorts of
latitude when working with the Dodge tool.
| | 03:35 | So for example, let's say I'm
frustrated by the fact that I'm getting slower
| | 03:39 | results out of the Dodge tool than I
got with the Brush tool for example, which
| | 03:43 | is true, because this is an
inherently more subtle tool.
| | 03:46 | I will go ahead and press Ctrl+Z,
Command+Z again, and press the 0 key in order
| | 03:51 | to crank the Exposure value up to 100%
and now I will paint over this region and
| | 03:57 | you're going to get faster results but
I'm still not harming that bounce in back
| | 04:02 | of the knuckle, so I'm still getting
exactly the kind of effect I want. All right!
| | 04:07 | So in the end I'm painting over in the
knuckle twice with an Exposure value of 100%.
| | 04:13 | Now I'm going to turnaround in order to
get rid of that bounce in the background.
| | 04:16 | I'm going to switch over to the
Burn tool, which darkens details.
| | 04:20 | However, instead of setting the Range
to Midtones, which isn't going to produce
| | 04:24 | the effect I'm looking for.
| | 04:25 | I'll change the Range to Shadows, and
then I'll paint over that little bounce
| | 04:30 | back there in order to paint it away.
| | 04:32 | So there is another way to work and I
also want to show you a couple of keyboard
| | 04:36 | shortcuts just for those of
you who like that kind of thing.
| | 04:39 | If you want to switch back to Midtones,
which you will want to do if you're
| | 04:42 | painting inside of a full-color image,
then you can press Shift+Alt+M or
| | 04:46 | Shift+Option+M on the Mac in order
to change the Range back to Midtones.
| | 04:51 | As you might expect Shift+Alt+H or
Shift+Option+H on the Mac takes you to
| | 04:54 | Highlights and Shift+Alt+S or Shift+Opuion+S
on the Mac takes you to Shadows.
| | 04:59 | You can also press Shift+Plus to cycle to the
blend mode or Shift+Minus to cycle to the previous one.
| | 05:07 | And that friends, is how you achieve
even more selective control over increasing
| | 05:12 | the contrast of your masks using the
Dodge and Burn tools here inside Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Painting in Airbrush mode| 00:00 | All right! Here I am still working away inside
that file called Merged iterations.tif and
| | 00:05 | I'm going to show you one more trick
where Dodge and Burn are concerned.
| | 00:09 | Notice if I were to switch back to
the Dodge tool and I painted over this
| | 00:14 | shoulder right here, that each time I
scrub back and forth over the shoulder, I
| | 00:19 | make bigger and bigger modifications.
| | 00:22 | However, let's say I don't
want to do all that scrubbing.
| | 00:25 | Here's another way to work.
| | 00:27 | I'll press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the
Mac to undo that change and I'll turn on
| | 00:31 | this airbrush mode icon
up here in the Options bar.
| | 00:34 | Now, if I just click and hold over
certain areas you can see that I'm
| | 00:39 | incrementally modifying those areas
on the fly, and that gives you a little
| | 00:43 | better control, because that kind of
scrubbing back and forth you can very
| | 00:46 | easily go too far at a point, where if
you are just clicking and holding in a
| | 00:50 | specific location until you get the
results you want and at a point it will
| | 00:55 | top out, you won't get any more
modifications after you hold for say about three seconds.
| | 01:01 | However, during those three seconds
you can gauge exactly the degree to which
| | 01:05 | you want to move forward.
| | 01:07 | That's my first brush stroke, now I'm
going to go ahead and click and hold again
| | 01:11 | at certain locations and you can see
now I can move pretty quickly through here
| | 01:15 | until I get to this strap and there I
need to hold for a couple seconds until I
| | 01:19 | get the final result I'm
looking for. All right!
| | 01:21 | That looks pretty good and I'm going
to paint up in this area, the hair,
| | 01:25 | paint this region as well, paint up into the
top region in the left-hand side of the image.
| | 01:32 | And notice that we've got some kind of
choppy edges at some points over here in
| | 01:39 | this left-hand region that has
created so many problems for us in the past.
| | 01:43 | We're going to deal with those
independently in the next exercise, just want you
| | 01:46 | to see they're there.
| | 01:47 | We've also got this big
area of gray under the flame.
| | 01:50 | I'll press the O key to switch over to my Burn
tool, and then I'll paint some of the stuff away.
| | 01:56 | Now at this point I'm not really
interested in getting the flame exactly right,
| | 01:59 | so I'm not going to worry about it too
much, might paint up this side of the
| | 02:02 | hair just a little bit, otherwise
that area is looking pretty good.
| | 02:06 | Over here on the right-hand side we've got
some very decent results right off the bat.
| | 02:10 | So I'm going to switch over to the Dodge tool.
| | 02:13 | I'm not going to have to make too many
modifications in other words, and then
| | 02:16 | I'll scroll down here or might
kind of paint down this region.
| | 02:20 | I don't want to go too far outside the
hair, that way I don't want to paint over
| | 02:24 | the hair because I'll end up expanding
it and that's not what I'm looking for.
| | 02:28 | I'm going to click and hold on this
dress strap and see what kind of changes I
| | 02:31 | can make here, and then I'll click
and hold again in order to basically
| | 02:35 | completely mask it in to shape.
| | 02:36 | It looks like we've done a pretty good
job on the edges, so let's just go in
| | 02:41 | with the standard application of the Brush tool.
| | 02:43 | I'm going to select the brush, right-click,
increase the Hardness to 100%
| | 02:47 | this time, press the Enter key a
couple of times to accept that change, press
| | 02:51 | Shift+Alt+N or Shift+Option+N on the Mac
in order to switch to blend mode to Normal.
| | 02:56 | My foreground color is still white, so
I'm just going to paint inside the image
| | 02:59 | taking care of course, not to get too
close to the edges, I just want to paint
| | 03:04 | away the stuff that is obviously,
supposed to be, Oops! I always do that.
| | 03:08 | You have to be careful about that.
| | 03:10 | I'm going to press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac.
| | 03:12 | I have a habit of trying to paint too
much at a time and then if you end up
| | 03:16 | going too far or making mistake,
you've to undo the whole darn thing.
| | 03:19 | So another reason I advocate
short brushstrokes where possible.
| | 03:23 | Looks to me like we got some weird junk
going over here and I'll explain what's
| | 03:28 | up there in a moment.
| | 03:30 | In the meantime, let's just go ahead
and paint this stuff away, might as well
| | 03:33 | zoom-in here and make sure
I didn't damage the knuckle.
| | 03:36 | Looks pretty good actually.
| | 03:38 | And then I'll go ahead and drag down
into the hand region, click right there on
| | 03:42 | that strap in order to
make it go away, all the way.
| | 03:45 | Had a little bit of something there
that was left over, otherwise I think we're
| | 03:49 | in pretty good shape.
| | 03:50 | I'm going to go ahead and press Ctrl+0 to zoom-out
and that is very nearly our final mask.
| | 03:57 | The one problem is I'll go ahead
and grab my Rectangular Marquee tool.
| | 04:02 | We've got this area right here.
| | 04:03 | I'll go ahead and zoom-in on it and you
can see that we're calling attention to
| | 04:07 | those hairs that are growing in the
wrong direction and we've also got a lot of
| | 04:11 | scraping going back and forth here.
| | 04:13 | That's just not acceptable,
especially if you take a look at the RGB image,
| | 04:17 | which shows an opaque region
of hair at that exact location.
| | 04:21 | So we're going to have to rebuild that
small area of the mask manually and I'll
| | 04:27 | show you how to do that in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Repairing details with a warped ellipse| 00:00 | So here I am looking at that alpha
channel called final mask and you can see
| | 00:04 | that this entire region of hair is a mess.
| | 00:08 | I suppose things are okay in the center,
but up at the top it's awfully scrappy
| | 00:13 | and down here at the bottom
it doesn't even make sense.
| | 00:15 | So we are going to essentially re-
create this section of the mask using
| | 00:19 | the Elliptical Marquee tool, but this area
isn't really strictly speaking elliptical.
| | 00:24 | It's more of a shorter ellipse on
the bottom than it is at the top.
| | 00:27 | So we are going to peel the ellipse
into two pieces and stretch one of those
| | 00:31 | pieces independently.
| | 00:33 | And here's how it works.
| | 00:33 | I am going to switch back to the RGB
image so we can see the actual hair, and I
| | 00:38 | will go ahead and switch to the
Elliptical Marquee tool, and then I am going to
| | 00:41 | position my cursor right about here.
| | 00:43 | Notice this would be the center
point for any sort of ellipse we would
| | 00:47 | draw around this region.
| | 00:49 | So I am going to move my cursor directly
in from that center point about yay far
| | 00:54 | from the match, and I'll press and hold
the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
| | 00:58 | and draw an ellipse from the center
outward and I'm trying to make sure that the
| | 01:02 | bottom left portion of the
ellipse matches the hairline.
| | 01:07 | So I'm altogether concerned
about this region right now.
| | 01:10 | Now you can plainly see at this
point that I'm not matching the top left
| | 01:14 | portion of the hair.
| | 01:16 | So I need to stretch the top portion of
the ellipse independently of the bottom
| | 01:19 | portion and I am going to do that
with the help of the Quick Mask mode.
| | 01:23 | So I will press the Q key in
order to enter the Quick Mask mode.
| | 01:27 | Now if you believe as I do that the
fact that we have a rubylith overlay over a
| | 01:31 | red image is inherently a bad idea,
then scroll to the bottom of the Channels
| | 01:36 | penal, so you see the Quick Mask item.
| | 01:39 | Double-click on its thumbnail to bring
up the Quick Mask options dialog box,
| | 01:42 | click on the color swatch, let's go ahead
and change the hue value to say 210 degrees.
| | 01:47 | That's good enough.
| | 01:48 | Click OK, click OK again, and now we
can better see the distinction between the
| | 01:53 | elliptical mask and the image itself.
| | 01:55 | Now I am going to switch back to the
Rectangular Marquee tool and I'd estimate
| | 02:00 | right about here is the center of the ellipse.
| | 02:02 | That's what we are looking for.
| | 02:04 | We want to cut it exactly in two vertically.
| | 02:07 | Then with that area selected, go up
to the Edit menu and choose the Free
| | 02:10 | Transform Command or press Ctrl+T,
Command+T on the Mac, and let's give
| | 02:15 | ourselves a little more room to work
here, and I'm going to stretch this
| | 02:18 | area upward like so.
| | 02:21 | Now you don't want to go too far with it,
because you don't want to expose this
| | 02:24 | area of red in the background there.
| | 02:26 | So you want to take it kind of easy.
| | 02:28 | I am going to cut it down just a little bit.
| | 02:30 | Actually, you know what, I might take it higher.
| | 02:32 | I am going to try something else here.
| | 02:34 | Press and hold the Ctrl key or the
Command key on the Mac and drag this top
| | 02:39 | handle just slightly over to the right
like so, in order to achieve this effect,
| | 02:45 | and that looks pretty good to me.
| | 02:47 | Now we are leaving a sliver behind;
| | 02:49 | we will take care of that in a moment,
but that does look pretty darn good.
| | 02:53 | My one thought and I am kind
of going out on the limb here.
| | 02:56 | I'm thinking that I'm exposing some
red in this region and what might really
| | 03:00 | help that is if I applied a slight warp,
but what I don't want to do is lose the
| | 03:05 | registration down here at
the bottom of my marquee.
| | 03:09 | So let's see how it goes.
| | 03:10 | I will go ahead and turn on the Warp
icon up here in the options bar and I am
| | 03:15 | going to drag on of these control
handles in just a little bit like so, and that
| | 03:20 | looks to me like I've taken
care of the problem. That's it.
| | 03:23 | Now I'll press the Enter key in
order to accept my modification.
| | 03:26 | That'd be the Return key on a Mac.
| | 03:28 | Click off the selection to deselect it,
select this little wedge area, and
| | 03:32 | because my foreground color is black,
I'll press Alt+Backspace or Option+Delete
| | 03:36 | to fill that area with a blue
overlay and now we are done.
| | 03:40 | So go ahead and press the Q key in
order to escape out of the Quick Mask mode.
| | 03:46 | This looks pretty darn good to me.
| | 03:47 | Now I'll go up to the Select menu,
choose Modify, and choose the Feather command
| | 03:51 | because I want to add a little bit of
softness to the tune of a Feather Radius
| | 03:55 | value of just 1 pixel, click OK, and now
let's go back to our final mask channel
| | 04:02 | right there, and assuming that
your foreground color is white press
| | 04:05 | Alt+Backspace or Option+Delete
to fill that region with white.
| | 04:10 | We've got one remaining problem, this
little bit of junk down here in the bottom
| | 04:15 | right corner of this left shoulder.
| | 04:19 | To fix that the first thing I am going
to do is go up to the Select menu and
| | 04:23 | choose the Inverse command or press
Ctrl+Shift+I, Command+Shift+I on the Mac to
| | 04:27 | reverse the selection, so everything
outside of the ellipse is now selected.
| | 04:31 | Then I will go ahead and grab my Lasso
tool and I'm going to press the Shift+Alt
| | 04:36 | keys or the Shift+Option keys on the
Mac and I'm going to draw an intersecting
| | 04:41 | selection about yay big in order to
constrain my selection outline a little bit,
| | 04:46 | and then I am going to press and hold
the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
| | 04:49 | because we need to deselect the shoulder
region and I'll begin dragging like so.
| | 04:54 | Then release the Alt or
Option key and repress it.
| | 04:58 | So release Alt and then press and hold it.
| | 05:01 | On the Mac you'd release Option and
then once again press and hold it.
| | 05:05 | Now I'm going to draw polygonal
selection outline like so around this region
| | 05:11 | and then come back around and release, so that
just this area is selected, just that little wedge.
| | 05:17 | Now I will press Ctrl+H or Command+H on the
Mac in order to hide the selection outline.
| | 05:22 | You might think, okay, we will fill this
with black which is a foreground color.
| | 05:25 | So you'd press Ctrl+Backspace or
Command+Delete on a Mac, but notice that the
| | 05:30 | edge goes inward a little bit right
there at the corner of the selection
| | 05:33 | outline, and that's not what we want.
| | 05:35 | So I'll press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z
on the Mac to undo the change.
| | 05:39 | Press Ctrl+H or Command+H once
again to hide that selection outline.
| | 05:42 | Go ahead and get the Brush tool and
right-click to make sure you've got your
| | 05:47 | Hardness value set to 100%.
| | 05:48 | I am going to take my Size value down
quite a bit, and then I'll press the X key
| | 05:54 | to switch my foreground color to black
and I'll paint like so, just kind of next
| | 05:58 | to the edge like so in order
to fill in that area. That's it.
| | 06:03 | I will press Ctrl+0 or Command+0 on
the Mac in order to center my zoom.
| | 06:07 | In the next exercise we are going to
take this absolute final mask and we are
| | 06:13 | going to use it to composite this
light-haired woman against an entirely
| | 06:16 | different background.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Pulling a background with Apply Image| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to take
our finished mask which we are currently
| | 00:04 | seeing on screen and we are going to
use it to composite the light-haired woman
| | 00:07 | against a new background.
| | 00:09 | I also have opened this image called
Valley of Fire.jpg and we are going to go
| | 00:14 | ahead and mask the image and
introduce a new background blind.
| | 00:19 | So we are going to essentially
work the most efficient way possible.
| | 00:23 | I just want you to see what that
looks like and we are going to be taking
| | 00:26 | advantage of the Apply Image command as well.
| | 00:28 | So your first thing is to make sure
that your final mask is the first alpha
| | 00:32 | channel in the list so that it has a
keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+6 or Command+6
| | 00:37 | on the Mac, and notice whichever alpha channel
is on top, ends up getting that keyboard shortcut.
| | 00:44 | So if I just grab final mask, move it
directly below blue, it's automatically
| | 00:48 | Ctrl+6, again, Command+6 on the Mac.
| | 00:51 | Now let's switch to the RGB image,
and I will switch over to layers panel.
| | 00:56 | We will not need to go back to the
Channels panel now, because we are going to
| | 01:00 | do everything from the keyboard.
| | 01:01 | So double-click on the background item
to bring up the New layer dialog box and
| | 01:05 | we will call this layer WWF and click OK.
| | 01:09 | Next press Control+Alt+6 or Command+Option+6
on the Mac to load up that first
| | 01:16 | alpha channel as a selection outline,
then drop down to the bottom of the layers
| | 01:20 | panel, and click on the Add layer Mask icon.
| | 01:23 | So that's step number one.
| | 01:24 | Step number two is to introduce the
background image and we will do that by
| | 01:29 | first creating a new layer below the active one.
| | 01:31 | So press and hold the Ctrl+Alt keys or
the Command+Option keys on the Mac and
| | 01:36 | click on the little page
icon at the bottom of the panel.
| | 01:39 | Because you have the Alt or Option key
down that invokes a New layer dialog box.
| | 01:44 | Let's go ahead and call this later
VOF or Valley of Fire and click OK, and
| | 01:49 | thanks to the fact that you have the
Ctrl or Command key down, when you click
| | 01:53 | the page icon you end up creating
the new layer below the previous one.
| | 01:57 | Now let's introduce Valley of Fire into
this new layer by going up to the Image
| | 02:02 | menu and choosing the Apply
Image command. Notice its source.
| | 02:06 | By default it's going to be
set to the foreground image.
| | 02:09 | You want to change it to Valley of Fire.jpg.
| | 02:12 | In order for that to happen both of
the images have to be exactly the same
| | 02:17 | physical size, so they have to measure
the same number of pixels wide and the
| | 02:21 | same number of pixels tall just as my images do.
| | 02:25 | So I'll go ahead and choose Valley of Fire,
the image also has to be open, by the way;
| | 02:30 | Next, you want to change the Blend
mode to anything besides Add or Subtract,
| | 02:36 | even something as wacky as Hard Mix is
just going to plop the image down there.
| | 02:40 | Presumably you would want to use the
proper mode which would be Normal, but
| | 02:44 | you're going to get exactly the same effect.
| | 02:46 | Make sure Opacity is set to 100%,
your Channel should be set to RGB, so
| | 02:51 | you're loading in the full color
composite image, and all of the checkboxes
| | 02:54 | should be turned off.
| | 02:56 | Then go ahead and click OK
in order to add the image.
| | 02:59 | That really is the most expedient way
to composite an image against a different
| | 03:03 | background, but because I narrated the entire
thing that might've gotten lost in the shuffle.
| | 03:07 | So I am going to press the F12 key
and I'll just run through the steps very
| | 03:12 | quickly here so that you can get a
sense without me narrating what's going on
| | 03:16 | how quickly I can actually create this
composition and how quickly of course you
| | 03:21 | can go ahead and create
such a composition as well.
| | 03:24 | Final step is to go up to the
Apply Image command and click OK.
| | 03:27 | So it really is a matter of a few
seconds once you have a mask in place in order
| | 03:33 | to create a full-fledged composition.
| | 03:35 | Now the composition does need some work.
| | 03:37 | I will go and zoom in over here, on the
right-hand side, you can see that next
| | 03:41 | to these nicely masked blonde hairs,
we have this unnatural dark edge and we
| | 03:46 | are going to get rid of that edge using
a special technique that relies on the
| | 03:50 | screen mode, but is very different from
anything we've seen so far, in the next
| | 03:55 | exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Blending clipped layers independently| 00:00 | So here we are confronted by this dark
unnatural edge around the hair and this
| | 00:04 | is a very common problem when you're
masking and compositing light haired people
| | 00:09 | against different backgrounds and the
solution at least where this particular
| | 00:13 | case is concerned, is to create a
duplicate of the layer, clip it inside the
| | 00:17 | original and then set those two
layers to independent blend modes.
| | 00:21 | Now you may recall that when we are
working with dark-haired people, you can
| | 00:25 | often times reinstate some of the
more fragile hair details by creating a
| | 00:30 | duplicate of the layer and
setting it to the Multiply Blend mode.
| | 00:32 | So you might figure with light hair we
would apply multiple's opposite, which is
| | 00:37 | Screen, and that to a certain extent is correct.
| | 00:40 | So I will go ahead and click on this WWF
layer here and change its Blend mode to
| | 00:45 | Screen, so that you can see that
does indeed get rid of those dark edges.
| | 00:49 | The problem is it brightens the background.
| | 00:53 | Now dark hair does actually darken the
stuff behind it, but bright hair does not
| | 01:00 | create some kind of glow.
| | 01:02 | It's opaque after all.
| | 01:04 | So we shouldn't be seeing these sorts of
radiant edges, and yet this does end up
| | 01:08 | being the first step.
| | 01:09 | The second step is to go ahead and press
the Escape key in my case, to make sure
| | 01:14 | that the Blend mode is no longer active,
and then you want to duplicate this
| | 01:17 | layer by pressing Ctrl+Alt+J
or Command+Option+J on the Mac.
| | 01:22 | I am going to call this layer Normal,
because we do need to reinstate a normal
| | 01:25 | version of the image and I'm going to
change the Blend mode for this layer to
| | 01:30 | Normal as well, and here is the big
difference, vis-a-vis what we saw what we
| | 01:34 | were working with a Multiply mode, you
go ahead and turn on this checkbox, Use
| | 01:38 | Previous layer to Create Clipping Mask,
so that we are clipping the normal
| | 01:42 | version of the image
inside of the screen version.
| | 01:45 | Then go ahead and click OK.
| | 01:47 | Now you'll immediately notice nothing
about the composition is different, if I
| | 01:52 | zoom out by pressing Ctrl+0
or Command+0 on the Mac.
| | 01:55 | Even if I turn that layer Off, turn it
back on, we are not getting anything in
| | 02:00 | way of a different effect and that's
because by default Photoshop goes ahead and
| | 02:04 | mixes the clip layers together and then
goes ahead and apply as in our case the
| | 02:08 | Screen mode to the entire group of
clipped layers and that's now what we want.
| | 02:13 | So here is how to solve the problem.
| | 02:14 | Go ahead and double-click on the
thumbnail, for the base layer the WWF layer in
| | 02:19 | order to bring up the layer Style
dialog box and then turn off this checkbox,
| | 02:25 | Blend Clip layers as Group, that way
the screen mode is first applied to this
| | 02:31 | base WWF layer and then the normal
mode is applied to the clipped layer
| | 02:36 | afterwards and we end up
getting the effect we are looking for.
| | 02:40 | Now I am going to zoom in so you
can see that it has made a difference.
| | 02:43 | This is going to be a subtle
modification, I want you to notice that, but it is
| | 02:47 | a credible one as well.
| | 02:48 | So I will press the Alt key or the
Option key on the Mac and I am going to
| | 02:52 | unclip these layers just for a moment
for the sake of comparison by clicking on
| | 02:55 | that horizontal line between them.
| | 02:57 | This is the before version, what we were
seeing a moment ago, actually it looked
| | 03:01 | like this, because it was even darker.
| | 03:03 | Then when you turn on the screen
layer behind it, it gets slightly lighter,
| | 03:07 | doesn't make as much of a difference as
we were seeing with multiply though and
| | 03:11 | then once you clip the normal layer by
Alt or Option clicking between those two
| | 03:14 | layers you ended getting a better effect still.
| | 03:18 | Now it can be even better if you wanted to.
| | 03:22 | I am going to go ahead and
zoom all the way out again.
| | 03:25 | The thing is over here on the left-hand
side of the image, everything looks
| | 03:28 | pretty darn good and the knuckle looks
great and the shoulders also look great,
| | 03:33 | but I think we could make the hair over
here in right-hand side, which is where
| | 03:38 | most of the sort of individual tendrils
of hairs are hanging out, I think we can
| | 03:42 | make them look even better.
| | 03:44 | By using the Elliptical Marquee tool, to
select from this point down here -- and
| | 03:49 | notice this is the intersection of this
hairline right there and the shoulder so
| | 03:54 | where the hair meets the flesh and go
ahead and drag upwards to the top of the
| | 03:58 | image like so, so that we are
selecting this entire region.
| | 04:02 | Go ahead and click on the layer mask
thumbnail for that top normal layer to make it active.
| | 04:07 | Then go up to the Filter menu,
choose Blur and choose Gaussian Blur.
| | 04:12 | That will allow us to soften the edge
of the mask just a little bit and I am
| | 04:16 | going to set the Radius
to 3 pixels and click OK.
| | 04:18 | Now you may well ask at this point,
well, if you were going to blur the mask,
| | 04:22 | why didn't you just use that
feather value inside the mask panel?
| | 04:25 | Two reasons, first of all that would
affect all of the edges of the mask, not
| | 04:30 | just this area inside the selection
and secondly I want to use that blur to
| | 04:35 | exclusively darken the mask so that we
are scooting the mask inward and that
| | 04:41 | means I need to fade it by going up
to the Edit menu and choosing the Fade
| | 04:45 | Gaussian Blur command and I'm to change
the mode from Normal to Multiply, that
| | 04:50 | way we are moving the edge in and we
are actually adding brightness because we
| | 04:55 | are revealing the screen
layer in the background.
| | 04:59 | Now go ahead and click OK in order to
accept that affect and I just want you to
| | 05:04 | see what we have managed to accomplish here.
| | 05:06 | I am going to zoom in on this detail
once again and so you can see the version
| | 05:10 | of the image from the outset
of this particular exercise.
| | 05:13 | I am going to press the F12 key which
invokes the Revert command so now you can
| | 05:18 | see that dark unnatural edge around
the hairs and then if I press Ctrl+Z or
| | 05:23 | Command+Z on the Mac you can see how it
altogether goes away and is replaced by
| | 05:28 | these very natural transitions.
| | 05:31 | You can see these individual strands
of hair against the background which
| | 05:35 | looked absolutely great.
| | 05:36 | Now there is just one area
that I'm not too happy with.
| | 05:39 | It's like this little glitch in the
upper left-hand corner of the image and I'm
| | 05:44 | going to get rid of it manually by
grabbing the Lasso tool, selecting the layer
| | 05:49 | mask for the base layer, the WWF layer,
and I am going to Alt click or Option
| | 05:54 | click around this little region like so,
just go ahead and select this little
| | 05:59 | triangle if you are working along with me.
| | 06:01 | Go ahead and press the D key to
establish the default foreground and background
| | 06:04 | colors, that makes the background color
black so I will press Ctrl+Backspace or
| | 06:08 | Command+Delete to get rid of that
little glitch, and then I will click off the
| | 06:12 | image to deselect it and thanks to the
fact that this mask is clipping the layer
| | 06:17 | and its mask above it that goes ahead
and removes that little area for the top
| | 06:22 | layer as well and there you have it.
| | 06:24 | We have a beautifully masked image with
one exception, this flame looks terrible.
| | 06:30 | It's absolutely opaque and
that's not the way flames work.
| | 06:33 | Flames actually do screen the things
behind them, and I'll show you how to
| | 06:38 | better mask that flame in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| | Building a flame mask | Compositing and coloring the flame| 00:00 | In this final exercise we're going to
take our flame mask and we're going to use
| | 00:04 | it to build a bright shining
flame in our final composition.
| | 00:07 | If you're working along with me, make
sure the Flame channel is selected here
| | 00:11 | inside the Channels panel and when I
went to use this mask, I noticed that it
| | 00:15 | was a little dimmer than I'd like it to be.
| | 00:17 | So I'm going to brighten it up by
pressing Ctrl+L or Command+L on the Mac and
| | 00:22 | reducing that white point value to 125.
| | 00:24 | In other words, any luminous level, 125
or brighter will be clipped to white and
| | 00:30 | that basically doubles
the brightness of the mask.
| | 00:33 | Now I'll go ahead and click OK
in order to accept that change.
| | 00:36 | Notice, by the way, that because the
Flame channel is the second alpha channel
| | 00:41 | it has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+7
or Command+7 on the Mac that will be
| | 00:46 | important in just a moment.
| | 00:47 | I'm going to click on RGB to return to
the composite image then switch to the
| | 00:51 | layers panel and I need to reassemble
my composition by pressing the Alt key
| | 00:56 | or the Option key on a Mac and
clicking the horizontal line between the top
| | 00:59 | two layers, and then I'll Shift+Click on the
layer mask thumbnail in order to turn it back on.
| | 01:05 | With the top layer selected go ahead and
press Ctrl+Alt+7 or Command+Option+7 to
| | 01:11 | load up that Flame mask, and then we're
going to jump to an independent layer by
| | 01:15 | pressing Ctrl+Alt+J or Command+Option+J
on the Mac which will bring up the New
| | 01:20 | layer dialog box, let's go ahead and
name this layer Flame and change its mode
| | 01:25 | from Normal to Screen, so that we're
creating a brightening effect and then
| | 01:29 | click OK and we end up with a much
brighter flame as you can see something much
| | 01:34 | more credible I think.
| | 01:36 | Now notice because we have had a
selection active before we press Ctrl+Alt+J or
| | 01:40 | Command+Option+J we end up with the
static layer, in other words, it's not layer
| | 01:44 | with the layer mask this time, which
gives us less flexibility if we wanted to
| | 01:48 | modify the flame in the future.
| | 01:50 | However, because it's such an incidental
item, that's not going to cause this problems.
| | 01:54 | However, I do want to brighten the
flame still further, so I'm going to press
| | 01:57 | the Alt key or the Option key on a
Mac, click the black white icon at the
| | 02:01 | bottom of the layer panel and choose
Brightness/Contrast, this is just going to
| | 02:05 | serve as a dummy layer, we're going to
be applying the brightness exclusively
| | 02:09 | using a blend mode.
| | 02:10 | So let's call this layer X2,
because we're essentially doubling the
| | 02:14 | brightness of the flame.
| | 02:15 | Turn on the Use Previously layer to
create clipping mask checkbox, so that we're
| | 02:20 | brightening the flame independently of
the rest of the image and then go ahead
| | 02:23 | and change the mode from Normal to
Screen and click OK and you can see that we
| | 02:28 | have a brighter effect still.
| | 02:30 | I'm going to go ahead and collapse the
Adjustments panel so I've a little more room to work.
| | 02:34 | It seems to me that flame is now little
bit too bright, so I'll press the 7 key
| | 02:39 | in order to reduce the opacity
of that adjustment layer to 70%.
| | 02:42 | Now I'm going to click on the Flame
layer, because this one more thing here
| | 02:47 | thanks to the interaction of this orange
flame with a blue background, we end up
| | 02:52 | with these pinks around the flame and I
don't like that at all, so I want to add
| | 02:56 | a little additional color to the flame
and I'm going to do that using a layer
| | 03:00 | effect I'll drop down to the fx icon and
choose Color Overlay very important, by
| | 03:05 | the way, that the Flame layer is
selected and not the Adjustment layer and then
| | 03:10 | inside the layer dialog box go ahead
and click on the Color swatch and let
| | 03:13 | change that Hue value to 30 degrees for
orange and make sure the Saturation and
| | 03:18 | Brightness values are set to a
100% a piece and then click OK.
| | 03:22 | And now I'm going to change the
blend mode from Normal to Overlay and as
| | 03:27 | giving us the best effect.
| | 03:28 | Now we have this extremely orange
flame indeed, I'm going to back it off by
| | 03:32 | taking the opacity value down to 50%
and that is the final effect folks.
| | 03:39 | I'll go ahead and press the F key a
couple of times in order to switch to full
| | 03:42 | screen mode and then zoom out by
pressing Ctrl+0 or Command+0 on a Mac and the
| | 03:48 | result is some impeccably masked blonde
hair along with this bright shining flame.
| | 03:53 | Thanks to the wide range of masking
and compositing options available to you
| | 03:58 | in Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Masking the Tough StuffMaking a first-pass calculation| 00:00 | Now the images that we've seen so far presented
us with certain challenges, but it gets worse.
| | 00:06 | So I want you to have a sense for what
you do when you have to hunker down with
| | 00:10 | a really tough image, like
this one here for example.
| | 00:13 | We have this woman whose hair is
sometimes brighter than the background,
| | 00:17 | sometimes darker than the background.
| | 00:19 | Every once in a while we have this
fraggy wispy details, other time we have
| | 00:23 | hairs that look likes it has
product in it, and the hair is almost
| | 00:27 | invariably the exact same Hue as the
background, with the exception of this
| | 00:32 | lower left region which happens to be
the toughest area to mask, because the
| | 00:37 | luminance levels are so close to each
other, and then we this someone out of
| | 00:40 | focus earrings and so forth, and we'll
ultimately mask her against this background here.
| | 00:46 | Now I consider this to be a pretty darn
successful composite, we have lost some
| | 00:50 | hair over in this lower right region,
but we're managing to keep all kinds of
| | 00:55 | wispy details at the top, we've got
some lovely details over here on the
| | 00:59 | left-hand side and then this lower left
region considering what we have to work
| | 01:03 | with is a pretty darn good
shape, so let's see how it works.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to switch over to the
base image which is called Variable
| | 01:09 | background.psd and we've got this
layer with a model on it and then in the
| | 01:14 | background there is layer with the castle.
| | 01:16 | All right I'll go ahead and turn on the
model layer, because we need to generate
| | 01:20 | the masks from her of course, then I'll
switch over to the Channels panel, let's
| | 01:24 | take a look at what we have worked with.
| | 01:26 | We've got this Red channel in which she
is extremely bright of course, because
| | 01:31 | it's a portrait shot and the hair is
pretty bright in places although it's dark
| | 01:35 | in places as well and the wonderful
thing about it is that it's bright and
| | 01:40 | exactly at the same places that the
background is bright, and it's dark in the
| | 01:44 | very same places that the background is dark.
| | 01:46 | So this channel probably isn't going
to initially do us all that much good.
| | 01:51 | Switch to the Green Channel and
you can see that we have some better
| | 01:54 | differentiation where
the hair edges are concern.
| | 01:58 | The hair is looking pretty darn good
at top although we do have some issues
| | 02:02 | right there where the hair all of a
sudden gets darker than the background, and
| | 02:06 | then we've got some pretty good
delineation over on the right-hand side
| | 02:10 | downright pretty bad, down left
horrible and then over here on the left-hand
| | 02:17 | side and the center it's looking pretty good.
| | 02:19 | And then finally in the Blue
Channel actually we probably have the best
| | 02:23 | differentiation overall, because we
have some light edges down right and down
| | 02:29 | left that might prove to be helpful.
| | 02:32 | So my initial feeling was that the Blue
channel should serve as a base channel
| | 02:35 | that is Source 2 and then the Green
channel should serve as a support channel
| | 02:40 | that is Source 1, so let's take a swing at it.
| | 02:43 | I'm going to click on RGB, so
we can see the full-color image.
| | 02:45 | Now go up to the Image menu and
choose the Calculations command and I'll
| | 02:50 | establish blue as the Source 2 channel.
| | 02:52 | Make sure, by the way, because the two
images and I have open on the exact same
| | 02:56 | size, you want to make sure that both
Source 1 and Source 2 are set to Variable
| | 03:00 | background.psd if you're working along
with me and the layer out to be merged.
| | 03:06 | So we've got blue as Source 2, I'll go
ahead and say Green as Source 1 and then
| | 03:11 | that change the blend mode to Add,
because presumably we want more brightness
| | 03:16 | out of this composition and
they'll go ahead and add up everything.
| | 03:21 | In other words we're brightening the
background and the foreground so the
| | 03:24 | hair is becoming very bright which is good,
especially toward the top of the models head.
| | 03:29 | The background however is becoming
quite bright in places, let's try to settle
| | 03:33 | things down by taking the offset
value down to -50 and we're going to work
| | 03:38 | strictly with the offset value we're
not going to modify the Scale value,
| | 03:41 | because if we were to do that then we
start softening the hair details and I
| | 03:44 | want to keep those hairs nice and crisp.
| | 03:47 | So these are the settings, Source 2
is Blue, Source 1 is Green, Blending is
| | 03:52 | set to Add, Offset is set to -50, go
ahead and click OK in order to create
| | 03:56 | that new channel, and then I'm going
to follow things up with an application
| | 04:00 | with the levels Command.
| | 04:01 | So I'll press Ctrl+L or Command+L on a
Mac naturally we want to increase the
| | 04:06 | contrast of what we have so far.
| | 04:08 | So I'm going to take the black point
value up to 30 to try to sink some of those
| | 04:12 | luminance levels in the background, and
then I'm going to take the white point
| | 04:16 | value all the way down to 175, which is
going to brighten the heck out of those
| | 04:22 | regions of hair that are currently not
going to do us any good, which is to say,
| | 04:26 | these areas toward the top of the head.
| | 04:29 | Now I'll go ahead and click OK in order
to accept that modification and let's go
| | 04:33 | ahead and annotate what we've done,
I'm just going to call this B+G and since
| | 04:37 | it's add I'm not going to write down
the mode -50 for the Offset value and then
| | 04:42 | 30/1/175 for the Levels value.
| | 04:46 | That'll serve as our base first past mask.
| | 04:50 | In the next exercise we'll
clean it up with the Burn tool.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making a second-pass calculation| 00:00 | In this exercise, we're going to refine our
first pass calculation using the Burn tool.
| | 00:05 | I've saved my progress as
First-pass calculation.psd, it's found inside
| | 00:09 | the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:11 | And because I don't want to harm this
base channel, I'm going to go ahead and
| | 00:13 | duplicate it by dragging it and
dropping it on that little page icon, and then
| | 00:17 | I'm going to call this one 1st Pass.
| | 00:20 | And now I'll go ahead and select the
Burn tool from the Dodge tool fly-out menu.
| | 00:24 | Make sure that the Range is set to
Shadows and the Exposure for the best results
| | 00:29 | here should be set to 50%.
| | 00:31 | Go ahead and paint in the background
like so, in order to get rid of these areas
| | 00:36 | of gray over here in the right-hand
side and then just sort of click toward the
| | 00:41 | hair in order to dim this area down
so that we're just left with the hair
| | 00:45 | details as much is possible.
| | 00:47 | Now you don't want to carve in too far
so, if you leave a little bit of extra
| | 00:51 | gray over here in the side of a hair
that's okay, then you can feel free to just
| | 00:55 | paint around the earrings,
because we'll reestablish those later.
| | 00:59 | We've got this little detail up at the
top here, I want to rid of it and that's
| | 01:04 | about it, otherwise we are fine, you do
not need to burn left-hand side of the
| | 01:08 | image, and don't you dare brighten anything.
| | 01:11 | We do not want to brighten any
of the details at this point.
| | 01:15 | Now let's generate a second pass that
will fill in these missing details along
| | 01:19 | the bottom of the image.
| | 01:22 | My thinking here was that the Red
channel might actually prove to be useful.
| | 01:26 | I'm going to go ahead and switch to
the Red channel and press Ctrl+I or
| | 01:30 | Command+I on the Mac to temporarily invert it.
| | 01:33 | Obviously that messes up the full-color
image so that's not anything to worry
| | 01:36 | about because anytime you invert the
image, all you have to do is press Ctrl+I
| | 01:41 | again or Command+I on the
Mac in order to reinstate it.
| | 01:44 | It's a nondestructive modification
because every pixel gets mapped to an
| | 01:49 | opposite pixel and then right back again.
| | 01:51 | Anyway I'm going to press Ctrl+I,
Command I on the Mac in order to invert the
| | 01:54 | image, so I could just get a sense of
what this image would look like rendered
| | 01:59 | as a mask and notice that the hair
starts to get brighter than the background
| | 02:03 | toward the bottom of the image.
| | 02:05 | And that's not something that's
necessarily evident when you're looking at the
| | 02:09 | standard view of the image, but it
sometimes becomes more obvious when you take
| | 02:14 | a look at that inversion.
| | 02:15 | What that tells me is we might have
some luck by taking an inverted version of
| | 02:19 | this Red channel and then somehow
merging it with the Blue channel and I'm
| | 02:25 | thinking actually, we could subtract
the Blue channel because those regions
| | 02:30 | down here at the bottom are very dark
where the hair is concerned we have a
| | 02:33 | little bit of brightness in the
background, if we subtract out that brightness,
| | 02:37 | you may recall when you subtract
black nothing happens, when you start to
| | 02:40 | subtract actual luminance, then
you'll end up darkening, in this case that
| | 02:45 | background even further.
| | 02:46 | So I'm going to press Ctrl+I or
Command+I on the Mac to re-invert that Red
| | 02:51 | channel which resets the image of course.
| | 02:54 | Now I'll go ahead and click on RGB,
and then I'll go up to the Image menu and
| | 02:58 | choose the Calculations command.
| | 02:59 | And I want to make sure that my layer
options are both set to Merged, and my
| | 03:03 | Sources are set to the
foreground image which they are.
| | 03:06 | Now I'm going to change the Source 2
Channel to Red and the Source 1 Channel to
| | 03:10 | Blue, and then I'll go ahead and
change the Blend mode to Subtract.
| | 03:15 | And I'm not getting anything even
mildly like what I want, and that's because I
| | 03:20 | haven't inverted the Red channel, so
go ahead and turn on the Invert checkbox
| | 03:23 | for Red, and lo and behold, we end up
getting this awesome result, and it's too
| | 03:28 | bright, where the background is concerned.
| | 03:30 | So let's go ahead and take this Offset
value down, and I'm going to take it down
| | 03:34 | to -50 like so, in order
to achieve this effect here.
| | 03:37 | Now let's click OK in
order to accept that image.
| | 03:41 | Now, I do need to brighten up the
highlights here, so that they're absolutely
| | 03:45 | white, and I'm going to do that as usual
using the Levels command, so I'll press
| | 03:49 | Ctrl+L or Command+L on the Mac.
| | 03:52 | Notice that spike right there, we
basically lose luminous levels from this point on.
| | 03:58 | And so you can see, if I move that
white point value to essentially the end of
| | 04:02 | the histogram, I get a white point value of
205, and that's great, that's all I need to do.
| | 04:07 | Go ahead and click OK.
| | 04:09 | And now I'll go ahead and rename this
channel, iR-B then -50, the minus already
| | 04:17 | implies we use the Subtract mode,
and then 0/1/205 for the levels values.
| | 04:23 | Well, that takes care of our second calculation;
| | 04:26 | in the next exercise we'll refine this
calculation to create a second pass mask.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining and combining the two passes| 00:00 | In this exercise we'll selectively
edit our second pass calculation, and in
| | 00:04 | doing so, we'll end up with
an effect like this one here.
| | 00:08 | And you can see that the mask will
be much darker which is perfectly fine
| | 00:12 | because all we're interested in doing
is filling in those details toward the
| | 00:16 | bottom of the image that are
missing in our first pass mask.
| | 00:19 | So I'll go ahead and switch over
to my image in progress, it's called
| | 00:22 | Second-pass calculation.psd and
it's found inside the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:27 | Then I want to protect my second-pass
calculations, so I'll make a duplicate by
| | 00:31 | dragging it and dropping it on to the
little page icon, and let's go ahead and
| | 00:34 | name this guy 2nd pass.
| | 00:37 | Switch over to the Burn tool and
assuming that it's a last toning tool you used,
| | 00:41 | you can get to it by pressing the 'O'
key and then press the '0' key in order to
| | 00:46 | increase the Exposure value to 100%.
| | 00:49 | And now I'm going to increase the size
of my brush and paint down over here on
| | 00:53 | the right-hand side of the image, go
ahead and zoom in closer to the collar
| | 00:57 | and reduce the size of my cursor
because I want to be a little more careful
| | 01:01 | down in this region.
| | 01:02 | It's very important that we
keep that collar in good shape.
| | 01:05 | Not concerned about the earrings
right now you're just going to ruin those;
| | 01:08 | we'll come back to them later.
| | 01:10 | Now, we'll go ahead and zoom out by
pressing Ctrl+0, I'll increase the size of
| | 01:14 | my cursor fairly dramatically there
and burn away the top of the image.
| | 01:19 | We don't care about any of this stuff up
here because we've already got it covered.
| | 01:23 | Now you do have to be a little more
careful as you come down toward the
| | 01:27 | left-hand side of the image because
after all these details aren't pretty
| | 01:31 | fragile shape and in fact, they're not
really terribly representative of what's going on.
| | 01:38 | For example, what is this line right
there, now ideally what we'd be able do
| | 01:44 | is click that eyeball in front of RGB
in order to compare the mask as a Ruby
| | 01:48 | with overlay, but of course the Red overlay
is not going to work for such a warm image.
| | 01:53 | So you might go ahead and double-click
on the thumbnail for that second-pass
| | 01:56 | mask, and then click on its color and
change it to a complement such as the Hue
| | 02:01 | value of 210 degrees, click OK, click OK again.
| | 02:05 | I'm not sure that does us any
good however, here's the way I work.
| | 02:09 | When I'm trying to figure out these
details, I'll switch to the Lasso tool, and
| | 02:13 | then I'll turn off that darn RGB image
for a moment, and I'll just go ahead and
| | 02:16 | select the thing I'm wondering about.
| | 02:18 | What is this wedge right there for example.
| | 02:22 | It should be part of the hair, right.
| | 02:24 | Because it's bright, against the
dark background but it's also kind of by
| | 02:28 | itself, it's not connected to the rest of
her head, so that doesn't make that much sense.
| | 02:32 | Then click on RGB in order to see
the RGB image, and you'll see, oh!
| | 02:37 | By golly that's part of the background.
| | 02:39 | So the calculation didn't quite go the way
I expected it to and that's a bad detail.
| | 02:45 | Meanwhile, I'll switch back to second pass here.
| | 02:48 | What is this guy just upstairs a
little bit, switchback to RGB and I see that
| | 02:54 | that's a shadow that is
actually part of the hair.
| | 02:57 | Theoretically, am I want to keep that
detail but I don't think I'm going to get
| | 03:01 | it from what I have so far.
| | 03:02 | So I'm going to switch
back to 2nd pass edit there.
| | 03:05 | I'm going to click off the image to
deselect it, press the 'O' key to switch
| | 03:09 | back to the Burn tool and I'm going to
burn that stuff away, because it's not
| | 03:14 | anything that's going to do us any good,
and then I'm going to burn heavily into
| | 03:18 | this base portion of the hair because
frankly, I'm going to need to reinstate it
| | 03:23 | with a third pass mask.
| | 03:24 | I already know that after all
because what I had was not something that I
| | 03:29 | can actually trust.
| | 03:30 | So now I'll press Ctrl+0 or Command+0 on
the Mac in order to zoom out, I'll grab
| | 03:35 | my Lasso tool once again.
| | 03:37 | I'll go ahead and draw selection
outline around the stuff that I want to keep.
| | 03:42 | Being careful of course to make sure
that I drag through that the black alley
| | 03:45 | that I've created, then I'll go up to
the Select menu and choose the Inverse
| | 03:48 | command, I'll press Ctrl+Shift+I on
the Mac, and black is my background
| | 03:53 | color, so I'll press Ctrl+Backspace
or Command+Delete in order to fill that
| | 03:57 | selection with black.
| | 04:00 | Click to deselect the image;
| | 04:01 | I'm going to zoom in a little bit here.
| | 04:03 | At this point, I want to combine my
first pass mask along with the second pass
| | 04:07 | mask, and of course, I want to
brighten up the masks in the process.
| | 04:11 | I'll go ahead and click on 1st pass
channel to select it, then I'll go up to the
| | 04:15 | Image menu and choose the
Calculations command because after all we want to
| | 04:19 | generate a new channel.
| | 04:21 | By default both of the sources
will probably be set to the selected
| | 04:25 | channel which is 1st pass.
| | 04:26 | Make sure one of them is and
then set the other one to 2nd pass.
| | 04:31 | And then at this point you could go
ahead and add them together by choosing
| | 04:35 | the Screen command.
| | 04:37 | However, well that produces a very
similar effect to what we're looking for.
| | 04:41 | It does result in some dim
patches inside of the Composite channel.
| | 04:46 | The best way to work when you're
performing this kind of operation, when you're
| | 04:50 | trying to build one calculation pass
on top of another is to switch the Blend
| | 04:55 | mode to Add, and then make sure the
Offset value is zero and that the scale
| | 05:00 | value is one, of course the
opacity value should be 100%.
| | 05:03 | We want to put the results in a new
channel, go ahead and click OK in order to
| | 05:08 | make it so, and then I'll go ahead
and rename this channel 1st + 2nd.
| | 05:11 | We're in pretty darn good shape
obviously, we're going to need to dodge some of
| | 05:17 | the details in order to
brighten the interior of the mask.
| | 05:19 | However first, before we do, we need
to somehow isolate this region here, and
| | 05:24 | we'll be doing exactly
that in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Painting and editing the third-pass mask| 00:00 | In this exercise, we're going to try
our hand at selecting these hairs in the
| | 00:03 | lower left region of the image, and
we're also going to try to build out some of
| | 00:07 | the hairs in the lower right region
and we'll do so by building a third pass
| | 00:11 | mask from the blue channel.
| | 00:13 | I've saved my progress as Combined
calculations.psd dfound inside the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:20 | The reason we're going to work from
the blue channel is we've pretty much
| | 00:23 | exhausted our calculation options here.
| | 00:26 | You could try some others if you like
but it seems to me that only the blue
| | 00:31 | channel provides any hope for this
lower left region, because after all if you
| | 00:37 | zoom-in on it and take a close look
you'll see that the dark areas inside the
| | 00:41 | channel are actually representative of
the background and the bright areas, the
| | 00:46 | relatively bright areas that is are
representative of the actual hair.
| | 00:51 | Now that's not always the case of course.
| | 00:53 | Once we start getting into some of
these regions, the hair ends up darkening up
| | 00:58 | and we've got some real problems right
here, we are going to pretty much build
| | 01:02 | those areas by hand.
| | 01:04 | However, the blue channel
does give us our best shot.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to go ahead and duplicate
that channel by dragging it and dropping it
| | 01:11 | onto the little page icon down
here at the bottom of the panel.
| | 01:14 | I'm also going to increase the contrast
by pressing Ctrl+L or Command+L on the
| | 01:18 | Mac and I'm going to take the black
point value up to 20 just to darken up the
| | 01:23 | background a little bit, and then I'm
going to take the white point value down
| | 01:27 | to 60 to brighten the heck out of
those hair details, and then I'll click OK.
| | 01:33 | Now, at this point you may look at the
result, and say couldn't we have built
| | 01:38 | the entire mask from this channel?
| | 01:40 | After all we've got some bright details
around the hair all the way around, and
| | 01:45 | we have a lot of dark background?
| | 01:47 | You could try that if you wanted
to but you would end up with a very
| | 01:51 | gummy looking mask.
| | 01:52 | Check out some of these details like
these big thick noodle like hairs are not
| | 01:58 | going to translate well
in the final composition.
| | 02:01 | We're much better off taking
this measured multi pass approach.
| | 02:05 | I'm going to go ahead and zoom-out once again.
| | 02:09 | Let's start things off for the Burn tool.
| | 02:11 | It's set to an Exposure of 100%, let's
take it down to 50% by pressing the 5 key.
| | 02:17 | Of course, the Range is set to the
Shadows, which is very important and now
| | 02:20 | I'll go ahead and paint in just a
little bit in the lower left region, and then
| | 02:25 | I'll go over here to the lower right region
and just sort of click around these hairs.
| | 02:31 | We do want the background to get
completely black, by the way, but we want
| | 02:36 | to leave as many of those hairs
intact as we can down once again in this
| | 02:41 | lower right region, where we're missing a
little bit of detail as things currently stand.
| | 02:47 | Go ahead and paint away all this
junk down here, that's very important.
| | 02:51 | And you want to make sure to paint
away the background about midway up.
| | 02:55 | You don't need to worry about the top of
the image because we're not going to be
| | 02:59 | using it or just going to be combining
the bottom portion of this mask with the
| | 03:02 | first and second passes. All right!
| | 03:04 | I'm going to zoom in to the
lower left region of image like so.
| | 03:09 | I'm going to switch to the Dodge tool
by selecting it from the fly-out menu.
| | 03:13 | My Exposure is set to 100, the Range
is set to Highlights, very important.
| | 03:18 | I'll increase the size of my cursor and paint
what I can back in where the hair is concerned.
| | 03:23 | But that's about as much as I'm going to get.
| | 03:25 | You can take a second pass, if you
want to but you're not going to get this
| | 03:29 | black stuff to turn white, no
matter how many times you pane over it.
| | 03:33 | So here's what I did and this is
something of an unorthodox and I might even
| | 03:38 | argue a slightly sloppy approach.
| | 03:40 | It's at least a lazy man's
approach but I got the job done.
| | 03:43 | I went ahead and grabbed the Brush
tool and you know how I'm always advising
| | 03:48 | you, that if you're going to paint
with the Overlay mode why then, you want a
| | 03:51 | soft brush and if you're going to
paint with the Normal mode you want a hard
| | 03:55 | brush because after all you don't
want to introduce any artificial edges.
| | 03:59 | Well, in this case, if I right-click
inside the image you'll see that I've
| | 04:03 | split the difference.
| | 04:04 | I've set the Hardness to 50% and the
reason is that I want to introduce some
| | 04:08 | artificially soft edges because I don't
have any real edges to work with here.
| | 04:13 | I'll show you what I mean.
| | 04:14 | I'll go ahead and press the Enter key
or the Return key on the Mac to hide
| | 04:16 | the panel, and then I'll press Ctrl+2 or
Command+2 on the Mac to switch to the RGB image.
| | 04:22 | Check out this detail down
here in the bottom left corner.
| | 04:26 | There really is no obvious edge
between the hair and the background, it just
| | 04:31 | sort of dissipates and so I
need to paint that area in.
| | 04:36 | I'm going to switch back
to my channel in progress.
| | 04:39 | I'll reduce the size of my cursor
because after all, if you paint with a big
| | 04:44 | cursor with a Hardness of 50%, then
you end up with a lot of fuzziness that
| | 04:49 | softness is a relative value.
| | 04:51 | However, if I press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
on the Mac to undo that change if I
| | 04:55 | reduce the size my cursor and then click,
you can see that that's 50% translates
| | 05:01 | to just a slight bit of softness
and that's what I'm looking for.
| | 05:04 | So I'll press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on
the Mac, and then I'll just paint like
| | 05:08 | so around this region.
| | 05:10 | To paint what I think is haired into
place and believe it or not, this is
| | 05:14 | actually going to work out pretty darn nicely.
| | 05:16 | I'll increase the size of my cursor, now
that I'm farther away from the edge and
| | 05:21 | I'll paint up like so.
| | 05:22 | I don't want to paint over this
wedge eight there that is authentic
| | 05:26 | background going on.
| | 05:27 | However, I do want to paint away some
of these details, and then I'll scooch
| | 05:32 | in here and paint that stuff away as well,
might as well get rid of those details too.
| | 05:37 | Press Ctrl+0 or Command+0
on the Mac to zoom-out.
| | 05:40 | That is going to serve as our third at a
pass, might as well paint some of these
| | 05:45 | guys away as well, and of
course we should rename that channel.
| | 05:49 | So I'll go ahead and double-
click on it and call it 3rd pass.
| | 05:54 | Now, at this point we need to somehow
combine the bottom portion of this 3rd
| | 05:59 | pass with the overall first and second
pass because after all we don't want to
| | 06:04 | ruin these delicate details we've
established at the top and that means that
| | 06:08 | we're going to have to calculate these
masks inside of another mask, and I'll
| | 06:12 | show you exactly how that
works in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Merging channels inside a mask| 00:00 | In this exercise, we're going to combine
our 1st and 2nd pass along with the 3rd
| | 00:04 | pass and we're going to do so
inside the confines of a gradient mask.
| | 00:09 | I've saved my progress as Third-pass mask.psd.
| | 00:12 | It's found inside the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:14 | And currently we're looking at
the combined 1st and 2nd masks.
| | 00:19 | Compare those to the 3rd mask and
notice that things brighten up in this
| | 00:24 | region right there.
| | 00:26 | We get some better detail essentially
going around this product treated hair, so
| | 00:31 | in other words we have a few
hairs are glommed together.
| | 00:34 | From about this point on the hairs are
just too thick inside of the 3rd pass
| | 00:41 | where they look much more natural
inside of the combined 1st and 2nd pass.
| | 00:46 | What we want to do is we want to
gradually dissipate the merging of these
| | 00:51 | two channels over the course of this area,
which means that we want to create a gradient.
| | 00:56 | To do so, go ahead and drop down to
the little page icon at the bottom of
| | 01:00 | the Channels panel, Alt+click or Option+click
on it in order to bring up the
| | 01:05 | New Channel dialog box.
| | 01:06 | Let's go ahead and call
this guy gradient and click OK.
| | 01:08 | Now, it's going to come
in as solid black at first.
| | 01:12 | I want you to turn on the 1st and 2nd
second channel as well, so that you can
| | 01:17 | see through one channel to the other.
| | 01:19 | So we can keep track of what we're doing.
| | 01:21 | Go ahead and grab the Gradient tool,
which you can get by pressing the G key.
| | 01:25 | Make sure that the very first gradient
option is selected, which is Foreground
| | 01:30 | to Background and also make sure that
your foreground color is white and your
| | 01:33 | background color is black.
| | 01:35 | If you've got the opposite, then just
press the X key and I want you to drag
| | 01:39 | from this point here.
| | 01:40 | Notice the top of this little glom of hair.
| | 01:43 | I want you to drag upward like so while
pressing the Shift key to this location,
| | 01:48 | and then go ahead and release To give
you a sense of what the gradient looks
| | 01:51 | like, I'll go ahead and turn off
the 1st and 2nd channel once again.
| | 01:55 | So we've got white down at the
bottom and black up at the top.
| | 01:58 | That means that we'll merge the two
channels together down here at the
| | 02:01 | bottom, we will not merge them at
the top and we will create a soft
| | 02:06 | transition in the area in between.
| | 02:09 | The next step is to click on the 1st
and 2nd channel to make it active, that's
| | 02:13 | very important, by the way,
it expedites the process.
| | 02:16 | Now I'm going to switch to the
Rectangular Marquee tool, and then I'll go up to
| | 02:19 | the Image menu and choose
the Calculations command.
| | 02:22 | By default you should see both Source
1 and Source 2 is set to the foreground
| | 02:26 | image, which is Third-pass mask in my case.
| | 02:29 | The layers don't matter because we're not
working from the Color channels anymore;
| | 02:34 | we're working from the alpha
channels, which are layer independent.
| | 02:38 | However, the Channel options are very important.
| | 02:41 | Notice in my case, they're
both by default set to 1st +2nd.
| | 02:44 | That's okay for Source 2
because it's the base channel.
| | 02:48 | However, for Source 1 because we're
placing it inside of this gradient mask you
| | 02:53 | need to change that Channel setting to 3rd pass.
| | 02:56 | Next, what we need to do is add them
together, that's just fine and the Offset
| | 03:01 | value should be 0 and the Scale should be 1.
| | 03:04 | We need to turn on the Mask checkbox.
| | 03:06 | Make sure that the image
is set to the right image.
| | 03:09 | For some reason this option frequently
likes to look to the other image that's
| | 03:13 | open, which in my case is Woman & castle.
| | 03:15 | I'm going to switch it back to 3rd pass
mask, which is the foreground image, and
| | 03:20 | then the Channel should be
that final channel Gradient.
| | 03:23 | So we're essentially merging these two
channels together subject to the Add mode
| | 03:28 | down here in the lower region of the image.
| | 03:31 | Up toward the top of the image, there
is no merge and we're seeing through to
| | 03:36 | the Source 2 channel, which is
the combined 1st and 2nd pass.
| | 03:40 | Now, assuming that you're seeing the
same thing on your screen that I'm seeing
| | 03:43 | on mine go ahead and click the OK button
in order to create that new channel and
| | 03:48 | I'll go ahead and call this one 1st+2nd
+3rd to indicate that we've now merged
| | 03:55 | every single one of our three passes.
| | 03:57 | We finally have a base for our mask;
| | 04:00 | in the next exercise, we'll apply
some much needed selective modifications.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cleaning up with Dodge and Brush| 00:00 | In this exercise, we will use both
the Dodge and Brush tools to selectively
| | 00:04 | enhance this Alpha channel
and develop a bonafide mask.
| | 00:08 | I have saved my progress as Merged
passes.psd found inside the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:14 | And the first thing I am going to do is
duplicate this channel by dragging and
| | 00:18 | dropping it onto the little page icon,
and then I am going to move that copy all
| | 00:23 | the way up the list, so that it's the
first Alpha channel and it has a keyboard
| | 00:28 | shot-cut of Ctrl+6 or Command+6 on the Mac.
| | 00:30 | That way I can switch back and forth
easily between the mask and the full color
| | 00:35 | image from the keyboard.
| | 00:37 | Now I will go ahead and
rename this channel mask.
| | 00:39 | I will zoom in on the image as well
because we need to take it easy where our
| | 00:44 | modifications are concerned here because I
don't want to needlessly thicken up the hairs.
| | 00:49 | All right, I am going to grab the Dodge
tool which you can get by pressing the O
| | 00:53 | key, the Range is set to Highlight so
I have gotten an exposure of a 100%.
| | 00:56 | I will increase the size of my brush,
and then I will paint-away in the hairs on
| | 01:01 | the right side of the image.
| | 01:03 | Now I am going to paint all
these guys away as much as possible.
| | 01:08 | These hairs are actually not all that fragile.
| | 01:11 | You can paint over them fairly
vigorously in several times as well if you like.
| | 01:15 | The earring is a big math
so we will come back to that.
| | 01:17 | We have got this detail right here next
to her neck, between her neck and collar
| | 01:22 | and I'm not sure what that is.
| | 01:23 | So I am going to press Ctrl+2 or Command+2
on the Mac to switch back to the RGB image.
| | 01:28 | It appears to be some hair so
that's great, I will leave it alone.
| | 01:32 | Now I will press Ctrl+6 or Command+6 on
the Mac to switch back to the Alpha channel.
| | 01:36 | I will go ahead and paint-away a few
more details here, in the collar, and
| | 01:41 | along the neck as well, maybe get rid of this
line, right there between the chin and the hair.
| | 01:47 | Again we will come back to the
earring but I am going to fuse the earring
| | 01:51 | into the rest of the mask here just
by painting over it a couple of times
| | 01:55 | with the Dodge tool.
| | 01:56 | We've got these details along
the jaw that need to go away.
| | 01:59 | We've got some other stuff inside the
face we will remedy that in just a moment.
| | 02:02 | Now I'm painting up into the top region.
| | 02:05 | This is the area that I
don't want to overemphasize.
| | 02:09 | For example, if I increase the size of
my brush, and then I start painting over
| | 02:13 | these top hairs, then I am going to turn
them into these big thick noodles and I
| | 02:18 | really don't want that.
| | 02:19 | So I will press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on
the Mac in order to undo that change.
| | 02:23 | Instead I will stay well within the
hairline here and just try to paint away the
| | 02:28 | stuff that is obviously inside the hair.
| | 02:31 | We've got this weird area over here
in the top left corner of the image.
| | 02:35 | I am going to go ahead and zoom on in a
little bit, because notice this region
| | 02:39 | of black right there, that really ought
to be part of the hair, that ought to be
| | 02:45 | white, and notice if I press Ctrl+2 or
Command+2 on the Mac, I will go ahead and
| | 02:49 | switch to my Marquee tool.
| | 02:51 | Sure enough this region is
actually inside of the hair.
| | 02:55 | As is this massive stuff right there, that hair
and then this stuff over here is hair as well.
| | 03:02 | So somehow I need to get that into the mask.
| | 03:04 | So I will press Ctrl+6 or Command+6 on
the Mac in order to switch back to the mask.
| | 03:08 | I am going to go ahead and grab my
Brush tool, and notice that is set to the
| | 03:11 | Normal mode, I'll right-click inside
the image, it still have the Hardness set
| | 03:15 | to 50% so that I am basically
fudging in some details here.
| | 03:19 | All right, with white as my foreground color?
| | 03:21 | I am going to reduce the size of my
cursor a little bit and just paint this area
| | 03:25 | in like so, and I will paint in some
other details over here, just try to stay
| | 03:30 | inside the lines if you can so that you
don't end up adding too much blur to the
| | 03:35 | hair, although, you can tell that
most of this hair is in low focus.
| | 03:39 | Now I am going to press the O key to
switch back to my Dodge tool and I am
| | 03:43 | going to dodge into these regions
right here to make sure that they are
| | 03:46 | included in the mask.
| | 03:48 | Let's zoom out a little bit, dodge
these areas as well in order to include them
| | 03:54 | and I am going to increase the size of
my brush a little bit and paint some more
| | 03:58 | just to make sure that I am
getting rid of everything I possibly can.
| | 04:02 | We have another detail that is curious,
not sure if it's part of the hair or not.
| | 04:07 | This whole thing should go away,
but what about this region right here.
| | 04:12 | Not so sure about it.
| | 04:13 | So I will go ahead and select it
with the Lasso tool and press Ctrl+2 or
| | 04:17 | Command+2 on the Mac, there is that
shadow inside the hair, so I definitely want
| | 04:20 | to paint that away and actually all of
this stuff right here appears to be hair
| | 04:24 | detail, so I will go ahead and close
all of it, and then I will press Ctrl+6 or
| | 04:28 | Command+6 on the Mac in order to return
to the mask, fair enough, I can now see
| | 04:33 | where I need to paint, I will go
ahead and grab my Brush tool this time as
| | 04:36 | opposed to the Dodge tool.
| | 04:38 | I will press Ctrl+D or Command+D on the
Mac in order to deselect this region and
| | 04:42 | I will start right there and paint that
whole thing back into the mask so that
| | 04:47 | it is definitely part of the hair detail.
| | 04:50 | All right, let's go ahead and zoom out and
see what else we are going to work with here.
| | 04:53 | I want to leave that nice and
soft so I am not going to touch it.
| | 04:56 | I will go over and paint
this region back in like so.
| | 05:00 | I am painting it white and when I say,
painting back in, I mean, I am painting
| | 05:04 | it into the mask, that is, it will
become part of the revealed area, and now I
| | 05:10 | will go ahead and paint-away the face,
which is of course as usual very easy to do.
| | 05:14 | Let's just make sure we got
everything that we need to.
| | 05:17 | I am going to go ahead and press Ctrl+0
or Command+0 on the Mac to zoom out.
| | 05:21 | I am going to switch to my Magic Wand
tool, set the Tolerance value to 0, turn
| | 05:26 | Anti-alias Off and then drop
down it to the image and click.
| | 05:31 | Just to check if there is any weird
little details that aren't white, that ought
| | 05:35 | to be white of course, and there are
in my case, I have a few marching ants
| | 05:39 | showing up here and there.
| | 05:40 | So I will go ahead and switch to my
Rectangular Marquee tool and I will
| | 05:43 | Shift+Drag around those areas in order
to include them in the selection and I
| | 05:48 | want all this stuff down here at the
bottom of the image to be included.
| | 05:51 | I will go ahead and Shift+Drag
around this stuff too.
| | 05:54 | There seems to be a detail right
there that needs to be included in the
| | 05:58 | selection, let's go ahead and zoom in
a little more, Shift+Drag around that
| | 06:03 | detail in order to select it,
this stuff, this stuff as well.
| | 06:07 | That probably is good enough for now.
| | 06:08 | I will go and zoom out again and with
all that selected, white is my foreground
| | 06:13 | color, so I will press Alt+Backspace
or Option+Delete on the Mac in order to
| | 06:17 | fill that region with white.
| | 06:19 | Now I am going to press Ctrl+D
or Command+D on the Mac.
| | 06:22 | There is one more detail that I want to work on.
| | 06:26 | Notice this little region down here
below the hair and above the shoulder, what
| | 06:31 | in the world is going on there.
| | 06:33 | If I zoom in, and then I switch to the
RGB image by pressing Ctrl+2 or Command+2
| | 06:38 | on the Mac, you could see just some
little thing in the background, it's not
| | 06:41 | actually part of her.
| | 06:42 | This is the hair up above and this is
her collar and the shoulder of her jacket
| | 06:47 | over here along the right-hand
side in the bottom.
| | 06:50 | But that little detail needs to go away.
| | 06:52 | I will go ahead and press Ctrl+D, Command+D
on the Mac in order to deselect the image.
| | 06:56 | Press Ctrl+6 or Command+6 on the Mac in
order to switch back to the Alpha channel.
| | 07:01 | And now I am going to grab my Brush tool.
| | 07:03 | I will press the X key in order to
switch my foreground color to Black, reduce
| | 07:07 | my cursor to a very small size here
and just paint that region away and then
| | 07:12 | increase the size of my cursor just a
little bit and kind of paint up into the
| | 07:16 | hair region like so.
| | 07:18 | Now I will switch from the Dodge tool to
the Burn tool and reduce the size of my
| | 07:23 | cursor a little bit and click right
about there a couple of times in order to
| | 07:26 | fill in that detail.
| | 07:27 | All right, that looks great.
| | 07:29 | The only thing left where this
particular mask is concerned is the earring and
| | 07:36 | I will show you how to fix that
earring and put the mask in play in the next
| | 07:39 | exercise.
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| Adding the earring to the mask| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to
address the one remaining element of the mask
| | 00:04 | which is earring, and then we will go
ahead and apply the mask, there is a layer
| | 00:07 | Mask and begin the work on our composition.
| | 00:10 | I have saved my progress, this is
all but the earring.psd found inside
| | 00:13 | the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:15 | As it's so often the case here, these
last-minute details are best accommodated
| | 00:20 | by the Automated Selection tools and in
this case we are going to once again use
| | 00:24 | the Quick Selection tool.
| | 00:25 | So I am going to click on the RGB image
in order to view the composite image and
| | 00:30 | then zoom in on her earring and you
can see that it's in low focus which is
| | 00:35 | exactly the kind of stuff that the
Quick Selection tool does quickly.
| | 00:39 | So I am going to switch from the
Magic Wand to the Quick Selection tool.
| | 00:43 | Using a very small brush notice that I
have cranked the brush size down to 8 pixels.
| | 00:48 | I will go ahead and paint inside
of this black region right there.
| | 00:52 | Now you will see that the earring
actually descends out of view here, it
| | 00:57 | features a long chain.
| | 00:59 | I am not going to worry about the
chain that's descending out of the image.
| | 01:02 | I am just going to paint upward like so.
| | 01:05 | Into this sort of light-colored
fragment, and then I'll paint all the way up
| | 01:09 | into this region as well, make sure
that you get this black region selected
| | 01:15 | and that's probably going to do it,
if you are going too far out and try to
| | 01:18 | get too accurate, then you are
going to end up selecting some of the
| | 01:21 | background as I just did.
| | 01:22 | So I will press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z
on the Mac to undo that modification.
| | 01:27 | Now I do have the Auto-Enhance
checkbox turned on, so extensively I should be
| | 01:32 | getting a halfway decent
selection out of the tool.
| | 01:35 | Let's make sure by clicking
on the Refine Edge button.
| | 01:39 | My View Setting is set to On White,
which is perfect actually, so that I can get
| | 01:42 | a sense of what's going on.
| | 01:44 | The edges are actually in pretty good
shape but they are a little choppy if we
| | 01:48 | zoom in, if that concerns you, which you
well might for some of the future steps
| | 01:53 | here, go ahead and take the Smooth
value up to 2, and that will both round off
| | 01:58 | and firm up those edges quite nicely.
| | 02:00 | Now I will go ahead and click the OK
button in order to accept that modification
| | 02:04 | and now we need to add this
selection to the mask by clicking on the mask
| | 02:08 | channel here in the Channels panel.
| | 02:10 | Press the D key in order to ensure that
your foreground color is white and press
| | 02:14 | Alt+Backspace or Option+Delete
to fill that selection with white.
| | 02:19 | Then press Ctrl+D or Command+D on
the Mac in order to deselect the image.
| | 02:22 | I'm not sure exactly what's going on
right there, so I will press Ctrl+2 or
| | 02:27 | Command+2 on the Mac in order to switch
to the full color image, it looks like
| | 02:31 | that region right there should be part
of the mask, it's part of the earring.
| | 02:35 | I will switch to the Brush
tool by pressing the B key.
| | 02:38 | I will press Ctrl+6 or Command+6 on the
Mac in order to switch back to the Mask.
| | 02:44 | Notice that I left my cursor more or
less in place which is an advantage of
| | 02:48 | being able to take advantage of those
keyboard shortcuts, that way I know, all
| | 02:52 | right, I had my cursor, add a
location, I was inside the earring.
| | 02:55 | So if I paint right now, that
stuff is inside the earring.
| | 03:00 | And what about this little wedge there,
if I press Ctrl+2 or Command+2 on the
| | 03:03 | Mac, I can see that it is
also part of the earring.
| | 03:07 | So if I press Ctrl+6 or Command+6 on
the Mac in order to switch back, I can go
| | 03:11 | ahead and paint that little bit away.
| | 03:13 | Now I am not sure anybody is going to
notice it, but might as well be accurate
| | 03:17 | as long as we're here.
| | 03:17 | I am going to paint away some other
details again as long as I'm here in the
| | 03:22 | collar and so forth, and then
I'll go ahead and zoom back out.
| | 03:26 | Now that we've selected just about
everything we want to select where this image
| | 03:31 | is concerned let's go ahead and apply
the mask to the layer, I will just go
| | 03:35 | ahead and Ctrl+Click or Command+Click
on that mask channel in order to load it
| | 03:40 | as the selection outline.
| | 03:42 | Then I will switch to the RGB image,
switch over to the layers panel and with
| | 03:46 | the model layer selected, I'll drop
down to the bottom of the layers panel and
| | 03:50 | click the Add layer Mask icon.
| | 03:53 | And with that we have managed to mask
this very tough image against an entirely
| | 03:58 | different background.
| | 03:59 | The problem is, even though we spend a
good amount time on this mask, I would
| | 04:03 | not call this composition all that
successful, but we still have some
| | 04:08 | compositing work to do, but we're
ultimately going to make the composition look
| | 04:13 | this good starting in the next exercise.
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| Tweaking and integrating the hair| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to
refine our composition to get rid of some of
| | 00:04 | these chunks of hair, they almost look
like tiny little sticks coming out of her
| | 00:08 | head and better integrate this
foreground image with its new background.
| | 00:13 | I've saved my progress as Clumpy hair.
psd, found inside the 04_tough folder.
| | 00:18 | As is so often the case, I am going to
integrate the image using two versions of itself.
| | 00:23 | So I will start by selecting this model
layer here inside the layers panel and
| | 00:27 | pressing Ctrl+J or Command+J on the
Mac in order to jump it to a new layer.
| | 00:31 | Then I will turn that duplicate
layer off, click on the original layer to
| | 00:35 | select it, and let's go ahead and
rename this layer brighten because that's the
| | 00:39 | purpose it will serve.
| | 00:40 | I am going to click on the layer Mask
thumbnail in order to select it, and what
| | 00:45 | I want to do is spread this mask outward,
so basically, allow the mass to better
| | 00:49 | bleed into the hair details
associated with that original foreground image.
| | 00:55 | To do that I will go up to the
Select menu and choose the Refine Mask
| | 00:58 | command, or you can press that
keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+R or
| | 01:01 | Command+Option+R on the Mac.
| | 01:04 | What I found worked best was to
increase this Radius value here and notice as I
| | 01:08 | take it upward, I am Shift+Scrubbing
on the word Radius.
| | 01:11 | You can see that I am somewhat
disintegrating the edges of those hairs.
| | 01:17 | Once I got to a value of 50, I
got in the fact that I really liked.
| | 01:23 | It does end up bleeding out the hairs,
you can see that, so we are getting some
| | 01:27 | haloing where we are integrating some of
the background that we masked away, but
| | 01:32 | that's actually not going to be a problem.
| | 01:35 | And part of the reason, it is not
going to be a problem is that I am going
| | 01:38 | to turn on the Smart Radius checkbox which
is going to help settle down that effect.
| | 01:42 | So as soon as you turn Smart Radius
on, some of that haloing goes away.
| | 01:46 | We will get rid of the rest of
it when we apply a Blend mode.
| | 01:49 | But for now just go ahead and set
Radius to 50, turn on the Smart Radius
| | 01:53 | checkbox, make sure you're
outputting to the layer Mask and click OK.
| | 01:58 | Now at this point I wanted to make sure
that I was refining exclusively outward.
| | 02:03 | For example, if I had applied Gaussian
Blur to the mask and I wanted to blur
| | 02:08 | outward only, not inward, well, then I
would apply the blur filter, and then I
| | 02:12 | would go to the Edit menu and choose
the Fade command and apply something like
| | 02:17 | Screen or Multiply, depending
on the effect I was looking for.
| | 02:21 | But Refine Mask is that one pixel level
command that is not compatible with the Fade command.
| | 02:27 | So I can't perform a standard Fade,
instead here is what I am going to do.
| | 02:30 | I'll go ahead and Alt+Click or Option+Click
on the layer Mask for that brighten
| | 02:35 | layer so that I can see the mask
independently of the rest of the image.
| | 02:38 | Then I am going to load the original
mask by Ctrl+Clicking or Command+Clicking
| | 02:42 | on the layer Mask for the model layer.
| | 02:45 | Now press Ctrl+H or Command+H on the
Mac to hide those marching ants, and
| | 02:50 | assuming that your foreground
color is white, press Alt+Backspace or
| | 02:53 | Option+Delete in order to
fill the selection with white.
| | 02:57 | Now notice that we have a larger
mask and all of the refinement has gone
| | 03:02 | outward, none of it has gone inward.
| | 03:05 | The next step is to click on the layer
thumbnail to once again select it, and
| | 03:09 | I'm now going to change the Blend mode
from Normal to Screen, in order to use
| | 03:14 | the foreground image to brighten the background.
| | 03:17 | You may think I'm using screen because
after all she does have some light here,
| | 03:21 | it's more sort of medium hair territory.
| | 03:24 | However, that wasn't actually my
reasoning, my thinking was that this is a
| | 03:28 | bright day and I want the hair that's
being revealed on this brighten layer to
| | 03:33 | appear illuminated, as if it's
reflecting sunlight, and as you will see, once we
| | 03:37 | are done here, that's the effect we will get.
| | 03:39 | Next I am going to go ahead and click on
the model layer to make it active, turn
| | 03:43 | it on as well and select its layer Mask,
because we want to refine it, and then
| | 03:48 | I will go up to the select menu
and choose the Refine Edge command.
| | 03:51 | I've got a problem here, that command
should read Refine Mask, and the reason
| | 03:57 | it's reading Refine Edge is
because I forgot to deselect the image.
| | 04:01 | If I press Ctrl+H or Command+H on the
Mac, I have got a selection active, and
| | 04:06 | that's what's going to get
refined and I don't want that to happen.
| | 04:09 | So I will click off the image to
deselect it, again make sure that layer Mask is
| | 04:13 | active, which it is.
| | 04:14 | Then go out to the Select menu, now
it's a Refine Mask command, that is a big
| | 04:19 | gotcha in Photoshop, by the way,
it's something to watch out for.
| | 04:22 | Anyway, I will choose Refine Mask,
this time around, when I decided to do was
| | 04:27 | first of all view the effect against
the layer, so make sure On layer is
| | 04:31 | selected, and then I applied a little
bit of Feather here, I'll go ahead and
| | 04:36 | take the Feather value up to 4
pixels and that softens the edges pretty
| | 04:41 | dramatically as you can see.
| | 04:43 | Now, normally I'm not a big fan of
feathering things, not for the sake that is
| | 04:49 | of making my masks look better, I
don't want to just feather the edges and
| | 04:53 | fudge the differences.
| | 04:55 | However, I went ahead and followed up this
feathering with a negative shift edge value.
| | 05:00 | So I reduced the shift edge value to -50%
which went ahead and chocked the mask
| | 05:05 | and you can see that what were
formerly these little sticks coming out of her
| | 05:09 | head, now look like actual hairs.
| | 05:12 | So I will go ahead and turn
on the Show Original checkbox.
| | 05:14 | You can see what I am talking about.
| | 05:16 | We have got haloing all over those hairs,
all sorts of edge artifacts and then
| | 05:20 | when I turn Show Original off, which
means I'm seeing a preview of my settings,
| | 05:24 | everything looks much, much better.
| | 05:26 | Make sure that you're outputting to the
layer Mask once again and then click OK
| | 05:30 | to accept that change.
| | 05:31 | All right, I am going to zoom out by
pressing Ctrl+0, Command+0 on the Mac.
| | 05:35 | All right, so everything looks pretty
darn good, except here's some problems.
| | 05:39 | We've got some softness down along the
front of her collar, the edges around
| | 05:43 | the earrings are now very soft, thanks
to the feather value we just got done
| | 05:47 | applying, and this area in the top left
section of her hair doesn't look that great.
| | 05:51 | We are going to fix all of those
problems using the History Brush in the
| | 05:55 | very next exercise, so be sure to
watch that exercise immediately when you
| | 06:00 | finish this one.
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| Restoring the mask's focus with History| 00:00 | In this exercise we are going to
finalize our composition, starting by restoring
| | 00:05 | some of the focus to this top mask.
| | 00:08 | I am still working inside Clumpy hair.psd
and you should be working inside of
| | 00:12 | your same file as well, because we are
going to be taking advantage of history,
| | 00:17 | which is only stored so
long as the file is opened.
| | 00:19 | I am going to go ahead and grab my
History Brush, which you can get by pressing
| | 00:23 | the Y key, and the idea is, we want to
go ahead and brush back to its previous
| | 00:28 | state, where the earrings and the collar
and some of the hair up in the top left
| | 00:33 | corner of the head are concerned.
| | 00:35 | However, right now I am getting the
little Ghostbusters icon, which is telling
| | 00:38 | me that I cannot paint inside of this mask.
| | 00:41 | So I'll go ahead and bring up the
History panel by going to the Window menu and
| | 00:45 | choosing the History command.
| | 00:47 | Notice in my case that the history
source state is set to this particular
| | 00:51 | version of the image when I first
opened it, and when I opened this image, it
| | 00:55 | didn't even contain this layer, so
there's nothing to brush back to.
| | 00:59 | I need to move my source state to the
one directly before the most recent state,
| | 01:04 | in my case it's the Deselect state, but
whatever it may be for you, it should be
| | 01:08 | right before that last
application of Refine Mask.
| | 01:12 | Go ahead and click in front of that
state, then close the History panel, and
| | 01:16 | now we can brush-away.
| | 01:18 | Make sure, by the way, that you're
working with a soft brush, so I went ahead
| | 01:21 | and right-clicked inside the Image
window, cranked the Hardness down to 0% and
| | 01:25 | that your Opacity value is 100%,
the mode is Normal and so forth.
| | 01:30 | And now, I'll go ahead and zoom in to
this bottom portion of the image where the
| | 01:34 | earring is and I will go ahead and
paint that back to its previous state.
| | 01:38 | Notice, by the way, that the layer Mask
thumbnail is active, that's very important.
| | 01:43 | Now you might figure that you'd also
want to go ahead and paint the shoulder
| | 01:48 | of her Jean Jacket there, but that doesn't
work so well, might as well leave that alone.
| | 01:52 | I will go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or
Command+Z on the Mac to undo that change.
| | 01:56 | And then I am going to increase the
size of my brush quite dramatically here,
| | 02:01 | and just click a couple of times in
order to restore some of that original mask
| | 02:06 | where the upper left
portion of the head is concerned.
| | 02:10 | Now I will press Ctrl+0 or
Command+0 on the Mac to zoom out.
| | 02:14 | Now I figured this hair is looking
pretty choppy downright, and I want to
| | 02:18 | make it look better.
| | 02:19 | So I am going to grab my Smudge tool.
| | 02:22 | I am going to increase the size of my
brush quite dramatically, and I'll go
| | 02:26 | ahead and just kind of smear
that hair outward just a little bit.
| | 02:30 | I think I'm too close to the earring
actually, so I'll press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
| | 02:34 | on the Mac to undo that change, and
then I will go ahead and smear down from
| | 02:39 | about there, ends up looking pretty good.
| | 02:40 | It might be worthwhile to do a
little smearing where these details are
| | 02:45 | concerned, probably with a bigger brush
however, let's try doing this, because
| | 02:49 | I just want everything to look nice and natural
up in this section, that looks pretty good to me.
| | 02:55 | The remaining steps are to reduce the
focus of the castle in the background.
| | 02:59 | After all there is low depth of field
where she is concerned, much of the hair
| | 03:03 | that's in the rear, that is farther
away from the lens, it's out of focus;
| | 03:07 | and so most assuredly this castle
would not be in perfect focus either.
| | 03:11 | So I am going to click on the
castle layer to make it active.
| | 03:14 | Then I will go up to the layer panel
fly-out menu and I will choose Convert to
| | 03:18 | Smart Object, so that I
can apply a Smart Filter.
| | 03:21 | And you know, just to get rid of that
Ghostbuster icon, I am going to press the
| | 03:25 | M key to switch to the Rectangular Marquee tool.
| | 03:27 | Then I will go up to the Filter menu,
choose Blur and choose Gaussian Blur.
| | 03:32 | I went ahead and set the Radius to
4 pixels, and then I'll click OK, in
| | 03:36 | order accept that change.
| | 03:37 | Now I didn't want the castle to be
totally uniformly blurry, so I went over to
| | 03:44 | this little slider icon to the
right of the words Gaussian Blur, I
| | 03:48 | double-clicked on it and I just took
the Opacity value down to 90%, just a
| | 03:52 | slight lowering of that opacity, so we
can see a little bit of sharpness in the
| | 03:56 | background, and then click OK
in order accept that change.
| | 04:00 | And then my final thought was that the
scene looks a little bit hot, in other
| | 04:05 | words, it's a little bit too bright.
| | 04:07 | So even though none of the highlights
are blown or anything like that, I still
| | 04:10 | feel like we need to sync
the brightness a little bit.
| | 04:12 | I went ahead and clicked on the very
top layer, the model layer, and then I'll
| | 04:16 | press the Alt key or the Option key
on the Mac, click that black-white icon
| | 04:20 | and choose the Brightness Contrast command,
and I'll go ahead and call this dimmer, click OK.
| | 04:27 | And for once I'm not going to assign
a Blend mode to this adjustment layer.
| | 04:31 | I am just going to click inside the
Brightness value and press Shift+Down Arrow
| | 04:35 | three times in a row in order
to reduce the brightness to -30.
| | 04:38 | And that might be a little too far, maybe
we should take it up to -25, how's that?
| | 04:43 | All right, and then I'll press the
Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in
| | 04:46 | order to accept that change and we are done.
| | 04:49 | Press the F key a couple of times here
in order to switch to the Full Screen
| | 04:53 | mode and zoom on in, and that folks,
is one way at least to select a really
| | 04:59 | tough hair image here inside Photoshop.
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ConclusionNext steps| 00:00 | A few years ago I presented a masking
lecture to an audience in Holland, toward
| | 00:05 | the end I was running out of time, so
I showed the final example, which was,
| | 00:09 | every bit is complex as the one in the
previous chapter from beginning to end
| | 00:14 | in about five minutes.
| | 00:15 | I worried I went too fast, but instead
I got this huge applause, and a woman in
| | 00:20 | the audience shouted out, you are hired.
| | 00:23 | That's how I want you to feel.
| | 00:25 | I want you to be that person who is so
fearless, so absolutely confident that
| | 00:30 | whatever the image, you know you can mask it.
| | 00:34 | Ultimately boil down your approach
to five minutes, then show that to a
| | 00:38 | potential client and knock their socks off.
| | 00:41 | We all know Photoshop is magic, with
any luck, after these last few hours, you
| | 00:46 | know how to wheel that magic with even
more awesome and terrifying authority.
| | 00:52 | And please remember that this course is
part of a larger and ever expanding series.
| | 00:56 | It all starts with my
Essentials Course, Photoshop Masking and
| | 01:00 | Compositing Fundamentals.
| | 01:03 | I have a follow up course on
Advanced Blending, and keep your eye out for
| | 01:06 | another one on the Pen tool.
| | 01:09 | Wherever your interest take you,
on behalf of lynda.com, this is Deke
| | 01:13 | McClelland saying, see ya!
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