From the course: The Making of Amsterdam Mist: The Structures

Refining railings in Photoshop

From the course: The Making of Amsterdam Mist: The Structures

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Refining railings in Photoshop

So here we go. We've got our railing that we created in the last movie. We're now going to bring it into Photoshop and give it some life. So we're going to go in there and select the whole thing. Select it, and I'm going to copy it. Now I switch over to Photoshop, where I'm going to go in and create a new file. Let's create a whole new file here. Now, the file's going to know what's in the clipboard. See, it knows what's in the clipboard. I want it to be in RGB and I want it to be much bigger. So I'm going to say, let's make it 900 by 900. Nice big square. There it is. And I say paste. And I want to paste it as pixels, because I created the lines, I gave them the, the thickness that I wanted. So I'm going to bring them in as pixels. There are many times where I will bring them in as paths because I'm going to use those paths to then colorize them or stroke them or whatever is necessary in Photoshop. But in this particular case, the railings were given there pixel look. So I'm going to bring them in as pixels. I click okay. And there they are. I'm going to make them a little bigger before I bring them in place. There they are. Make it happen. So there's the railing. It's in a layer by itself. So, let's get in a little closer here and see what's going to happen next. I'm going to give them a little depth. I'm going to give them a little depth. So I'm going to go in there and go into my free transform, Cmd+T. And I'm going to say let's tighten 'em up a bit like that and they're going off in perspective. So I'm going to go in there and if I have perspective lines, I would then conform these edges to those perspective lines. See? But I'm going to go in here and, kind of jumps on you a bit. And there, the railing is now in perspective. So now, since my railing is in perspective, it needs to have some depth. If we're looking straight on, you don't see the edges of it. But now, we're looking at it from the side, which means we're going to see the little edges on the side. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this. Let's call it the railing. We'll call it rail face. And I'm going to duplicate it behind. Option click it until that little line appears between the two layers and click, and there it is. And this one we're going to call rail side. So, I'm going to go in and block the transparency on it. Now this side of the railing is going to have let's say that the railing is a, a green. In fact, let's do that now. Let's go in here and take the front rail face, lock its transparency and let's pick a deep green. A lot of the railings are a deep green in Amsterdam. So I'm going to go in there and get this really deep green and go ahead and fill it. And there you can see that it became green. So now on the rail's side, what I'm going to do is pick a lighter version of that green, because it's picking up a little bit of that sunlight, right? So there. And I go ahead and fill it. There's the one in back. Okay? In fact we can make it even lighter. Let's go in there and make it even lighter. So what we'll really see is going to happen when I start to give it dimension, true dimension. So, now that have I have it, what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it into a selection. With this selection, I'm going to hold down my option and my command keys and hit the cursor keys to the right once, right there. It's established a copy, right? Let me turn off my margin edge, so you can see how that's going to look. I'm going to do that same thing again and again, and again, and again and again. And you see what's starting to happen? See how the railing is starting to get a nice little edge to it? And I'm going to go one more, maybe one more. There we go. So now the thickness seems to equal the front. So it's starting to look like, yes, this rail does have some depth to it. So now, it's startin' to see it. That's all one layer, right there. That's all one layer so, there's no problem with it. So what's going to happen next, is I'm going to go in there and start to give this more dimension. And let's get in real close here and I'm just going to work on one section. If you're doing this, you can do all the other parts on your own. So what I'm going to do is, right in here, this, I'm still in that background. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my burn tool and, make it a little bigger. And what I'll do is I'll start to throw some tones right in here, and this is set for highlights, we'll set it for mid tones. And start to darken that edge right in there, see? And right in here. And right in there. And right in here. This whole thing should be dark right in there. Now, in some cases you might need to protect parts. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go in here and let me deselect what I had, and I'm going to go in here and just go in there and select this little section right there. And let's deselect. Don't want to have this part exposed at all. So there, I'm dealing just with that area. So now I can go in there and really darken that area because it's completely hidden. Now we'll go really dark on it. See? There we go. And then we can go in there and just continue to darken the parts that we want to darken and so on. And we go down here and we darken this and we darken under here and there. See how we went over? That's what we're trying to avoid. So let's go in here and let's just go way back to where we messed that up. All right. So here's where we need again to segregate that part. So I'm going to go in here and select this. See I selected? because I want to darken that part too. So I'm going to go in there and start to darken this right through here and then this whole part here can be darkened. And then in there, there we go, deselect. Now in certain parts, what we need to do is to lighten them. So I'm going to go in there with my dodge tool, make it a little bigger, and make sure it's dealing with the mid tones as well. And right here, I might want to lighten that little edge right there. Come up here. Make the, brush a little smaller. And lighten that little edge right up there. And lighten in there. And lighten up here. And there you could see where we're starting to get that nice three dimensional look to our railing. It's a lot quicker than if you were to go and try to do it in 3D, and establish all the light sources, and blah blah blah. But this way, what we're doing is we're creating a nice even kind of tone. And yes, I noticed that, too. We saw it. No problem. We can easily fix that. I select that area, make sure I got that light green, and I'm in my railing. The opacity, the transparency's still locked, and I can click okay. And look, look how it easy it was to clean a little mistake, because it's all in the layer. But then I would do the same effect to all the others to create the final look that we see. And the building itself where we're getting close and we start to look at some of these railings. And you see that they have in fact have the little shad, shading and so on. Now, this is a very tiny building in the overall painting which is why it's starting to get so pixellated once we get this big. But there you can see where we have all this little shading and stuff has been added to the railings. On all the railings, different parts and so on. And you can see how the 3D effect was added to the railings.

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