From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

898 Blending images with a hand-drawn vignette

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

898 Blending images with a hand-drawn vignette

- [Instructor] All right, so far we've got this beast layer right here, which contains the leopard seal from last week, and then we have the underside of these little icebergs on this top layer called ice. What we want to do now is better integrate these layers, so that that they look like they're actually part of the same scene using a hand-drawn vignette. All right, so the first step is to go ahead and select the CAF layer, which stands for content aware fill, which again, we assigned last week, and if you want to see why we needed that layer, go ahead and turn it off, and then zoom in on this top-left region right here, and you'll see a bunch of garbage over here in the water, better known as backscatter, and then we have this little bit of checkerboard transparency right there, which is an area that's been left transparent between the ice and beast layers. So notice, if I turn that CAF layer back on, then we lose that transparency and we lose some of that backscatter as well. All right, we'll go ahead and and press control zero, or command zero on the Mac, to zoom out, and I'll actually zoom out just a little further, and I'm going to create a new layer by pressing control shift N, or command shift N on the Mac, and I'll name it vignette, and then I'll go ahead and click OK. All right, now what you want to do is switch to the brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key. Go ahead and tap the D key to instate your default colors, so that black is the foreground color, and then you want to press the right bracket key a few times in order to increase the size of your brush, and notice, if I were to right-click inside the image window, that my hardness value is set to 0%, so we'll get a nice soft brushstroke. And now I'm just going to brush like so in order to create that hand-drawn vignette in the top-left and top-right corners of the image. All right, now clearly, we don't want a black vignette, we want it to be colorful. However, I'm going to go ahead and and paint a little more, because I can see over here in my layer thumbnail that I was missing a region. Now we need to colorize that vignette by clicking on the FX icon down here at the bottom of the layers panel, and next you want to choose color overlay. And so notice that I'm seeing the color that I assigned in the previous movie. I don't want the color blend mode, I want normal, so that I'm just colorizing this vignette, and I'm going to crank the opacity value up to 100%, so that we end up with this effect here, which is to say, the color of the vignette more or less matches the color of the water. I want it to match a little better, however, so I'll go ahead and click on the color swatch, and I'll then click on the hue value and take that value down to 190 degrees, at which point I'll click OK to accept that change. Now you want to switch to your blending options, over here on the left-hand list, and notice the blend mode is set to normal. This is the blend mode that's assigned to the entire layer, by the way. Notice it also appears in the top-left corner of the layers panel. Once again, we're seeing normal. I want to switch it, however, to multiply, so that we're burning that vignette in, and notice, that changes the blend mode in the layers panel to multiply as well. Now, we're not actually seeing any difference, because by default, the way layers work is that the blend mode is assigned to the layer itself, so those black pixels that we painted in just a moment ago, and then the color overlay is added on top of that, and because color overlay is set to normal, we're not seeing any integration. What you need to do is switch back to blending options, and then, notice this checkbox right here, blend interior effects as group. That will apply color overlay first, and then assign the multiply blend mode. And so, notice what happens when I turn on that checkbox. We go ahead and burn in that vignette, at which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. And now, if you were to brush in some more, notice that you're brushing in with that multiplied shade of blue. All right, I don't want to go that far, however, so you can undo, of course, by pressing control Z, or command Z on the Mac, or you can erase by switching to the eraser tool, which you get by pressing the E key, and then right-click inside the image window and take the hardness value down to 0%, very important. And then you would just go ahead and brush in order to erase the portion of the vignette that you don't need. And then I'm going to add some back by once again switching to the brush tool, and then I'll just go ahead and paint inside this region right here. All right, so we'll go ahead and press the end key to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool and zoom in on the image as well. All right, now so far, this may seem like a pretty subtle effect. This is how the composition looks before that vignette layer and this is how it looks after. But in the end, it'll help us to achieve this final effect, as you will see in the very next episode of Deke's Techniques.

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