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

899 Creating a photographic painting

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

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899 Creating a photographic painting

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques, episode 899. Here I am in my 10th season and I already have more episodes than The Simpsons and Little House on the Prairie combined. OK, so previously on Deke's Techniques, while scuba diving in Antarctica we encounter a large and unpredictable leopard seal, not sunbathing on an iceberg, but full on frisky in the water. Also in the water is Emmy award winning nature photographer Becky Kagan Schott, who captured these remarkable images. Consumed with professional envy and armed with nothing more than a GoPro I steal her idea to create this two image compositions. Becky learns of my treachery, well, because I show it to her. But rather than defend my Photoshop fakery, I pledge to her that I will convert my photographic hoax into what I'm calling a largely hand- painted work of pixel based imagery. She agrees to my terms as long as I swear to name my first child Becky Kagan Schott. Sorry, Max. And so here at long last let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final version of the photographic painting, just so you have a chance to see it on screen, and here's where we are now. I'll go ahead and tap the F key in order to switch out of Photoshop's full screen mode, and then I'll press Control + zero or Command + zero on the Mac in order to center my zoom. All right, now what you want to do is merge everything that you've done so far to an independent layer and you do that by clicking on the top layer in the stack, this guy right here, ice, and then you press the keyboard shortcut mash your fist + E, that is to say, Control + Shift + Alt + E here on the PC or Command + Shift + Option + E on the Mac. There is no Command equivalent. All right, now notice that creates a new layer called Layer 1. I'll just go ahead and change its name to Merged, so that I know that it's the merged result of all the layers below. And now, just so I can apply some non-destructive Smart Filters, I'll go ahead and right-click inside the image using my Rectangular Marquee Tool, which is selected up here at the top of the toolbox, then right-click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object. At which point you'll see a little page in the bottom right corner of the layer's thumbnail here inside the Layers panel. Now what we want to do is once again apply Camera Raw, just as we've done a couple of times in the past, and you can do that here inside Photoshop by going up to the Filter menu and choosing this guy right here, Camera Raw Filter. And that will bring up the Camera Raw interface. Now I'm not concerned about the White Balance, that's just fine as-is. But I want to darken the image up, so I'll click inside the Exposure value and I'll press the down arrow key until I achieve a value of negative 0.25. Now I'll scroll down until I can see the Clarity value, I'll click inside it and press Shift + up arrow until I achieve a value of plus 50, which is going to firm up those details very nicely. Now I want to reinforce the vignette that I painted last week and so I'll go ahead and switch to the FX icon right here and then I'll select the Amount value down here in this Post Crop Vignetting area and I'll change it to negative 33 in order to create a dark vignette around the entire image that reinforces, once again, that hand drawn vignette that I created last week. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch to the Detail value and I'll zoom in as well, so that we can see the image, in this case, at 200%. Notice we still have a ton of noise. And so I'm going to click inside the Luminance value and press Shift + up arrow a bunch of times in order to take that value up to 70. And as you can see, that does a nice job of settling down some of that noise. And now I'm going to zoom out so that you can see that we have some fairly aberrant colors around the creature's snout and so I'll click in the Color value down here in the Noise Reduction area and I'll take it up to 70 as well. And now I'll go ahead and firm up some of the details by cranking up the Sharpening amount value to its maximum of 150. And I'll also crank the Radius value up to its maximum of 3.0, so that we get some nice firm edges. The Detail value however is bringing out the noise, so I'm going to take that Detail value down to its lowest setting, which is zero. All right, that's all I'm going to do with this filter, so I'll go ahead and click OK in order to assign my changes non-destructively to this editable Smart Filter. All right, now I don't need this white filter mask, so I'll just go ahead and right-click inside it and choose Delete Filter Mask to get rid of it. All right, we still have an awful lot of gunk in the background here, including some blobs around the tiny icebergs. And I'm going to eliminate those by creating a Smart Object inside of this Smart Object. So I'll go ahead and double-click on this thumbnail in order to open the Smart Object as a static image, and then I'll right-click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object. And that way I have a Smart Object nested inside of a Smart Object and that way I can apply a Smart Filter to this image if I like. But first I'm going to double-click on it to open it up. So notice that we have a few title tabs open now. We've got Hand-drawn vignette.psd, which is the image I created last week, plus merged1, which is the contents of the first Smart Object, and now merged2, which is the contents of the second one. All right, now I'm going to zoom in on this guy and we're going to use the Spot Healing Brush to get rid of some of this junk. And I'm going to do so on an independent layer by pressing Control + Shift + N or Command + Shift + N on the Mac, and I'll call this layer spots and click OK. And now I'll go ahead and switch to the Spot Healing Brush. You want to make sure up here in the options bar that the Mode is set to Normal, the Type is set to Content Aware, and you also want to turn on this checkbox, Sample All Layers. And that way you can heal from the merged layer onto the spots layer. All right, now I'll zoom in a little more here and I'll reduce the size of my cursor by pressing the left bracket key and I'll click there. And now I'll just click on anything I like in order to get rid of it. And you may see every once in a while a kind of doubtful transition around your brush, but it's generally not worth worrying about. All right, so I'll just keep clicking in order to get rid of whatever gunk I want to get rid of inside this particular image. I don't really see that we need to get rid of much in the top left corner, but I will get rid of that guy and maybe that as well. Just trying to calm that detail down. Now I'll just go ahead and scroll over to the right until I can see this thing. What you want to do is make your cursor pretty big, so I'll press the right bracket key a few times, like so, and then just click on it and hope for the best. And notice, it kind of messes up the transition, but you can go ahead and paint over that if you like. And you don't have to get everything exactly right, by the way. We're just trying to get rid of the grottier stuff inside the water that may be attached to some of these otherwise pristine icebergs. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and toss the image down to its bottom, as we're seeing here, and I'll paint over a few more details down here in the bottom left corner next to the seal's fin or flipper or whatever it is. And then I'll go ahead and paint away a few more bits of big noise, like so, including this stuff below the seal, possibly up here and around this area as well. And so you can paint as much as you like and I might paint just a little more. That's what I like to do. And so I'll go ahead and get rid of these guys, like so. But even if you spend a fair amount of time you're still going to have a pretty rough background. So I'll go ahead and press Control + zero or Command + zero on the Mac in order to center my zoom, maybe paint just a little more, and then finally I'll go ahead and close this image. At which point Photoshop will ask me if I want to save my changes. I'm going to click Cancel actually, because I'm seeing a few more things over here that I want to get rid of. So I'll just go and paint over these details a little more and actually the tail, I forgot about the tail. There is definitely a kind of shadow going on up above it, so I'll paint that away. Looks like I painted in some more tail, which is not what I want, so I'll just go ahead and click a few times more and then I will close this image. And when Photoshop asks me if I want to save my changes back inside the second Smart Object I'll click Yes here on the PC, that would be the Save button on a Mac, and that will update your changes, not inside this image, but rather inside the new Smart Object you just created. Now the reason I created this Smart Object is because I want to blur away the background. So I'll press the M key just to switch back to the Rectangular Marquee Tool, then I'll go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. And I came up with a very high value of 20.0 pixels, which blurs the heck out of everything. At which point I'll click OK. All right, this filter mask, this white thumbnail inside the Layers panel, we want that, because it's going to let us paint back in the seal. And we're going to do so using the Brush Tool. So go ahead and grab that tool, it has a keyboard shortcut of B. And then you want to make sure the filter mask thumbnail is selected, so that you're painting inside the right area of the image. So go ahead and click on that guy here inside the Layers panel. And notice my foreground color is black, which is exactly what I want. But if yours isn't then tap the D key for the default colors, which makes the foreground color white, and then tap the X key in order to swap those colors, so that the foreground color is now black. And then make sure up here in the options bar that the Opacity value is 100%. Mine's 50%, so I'll just tap the zero key in order to make it 100. You want the Mode to be Normal. You want to be using a soft brush, so if you right-click inside the image window, crank the Size value up to 500 pixels and set the Hardness value to 0%. And then just go ahead and paint the seal back in, like so. So by masking away the Gaussian Blur effect you are reinstating the seal. And now I'll go ahead and zoom in here and I'll reduce the size of my cursor by pressing the left bracket key and I'll go ahead and paint around this thing, the flipper, and I'll paint around this guy as well I order to get those details back, paint along the animal's belly. And then scroll up to the tail right here and I'll go ahead and paint the tail back into place. You want to make sure as much of that tail is reinstated there, 'cause you don't want a bunch of soft details, like so. So I'll just go ahead and paint that in. And then what you want to do is switch to the layer mask by Alt or Option + clicking on its thumbnail here inside the Layers panel. And that will allow you to see the areas that you haven't painted back in. So I'll just go ahead and paint in anything that's inside of these thick gooey lines that I've created right here. So I'll go ahead and paint this guy as well and that should work out pretty nicely. And then I'll Alt or Option + click on that thumbnail once again in order to view the full color image. All right, now I'm going to increase the size of my brush by pressing the right bracket key and at this point I want to reinstate the ice, but if you paint with an Opacity of 100% it's going to come back a little bit too much, so I'll undo that brush stroke and instead I'll reduce my Opacity value to 50% by tapping the five key. And now if you paint back along the top of the image, like so, you'll just basically half reinstate the focus of those little icebergs. At which point, assuming you like what you see, just go ahead and close the image. And then Photoshop will ask you if you want to save the changes back into the larger composition. At which point click the Yes button here on the PC or the Save button on the Mac and you'll end up with this effect right here. At which point I'll just go ahead and turn on this text group that I've created in advance to bring back the text, which credits photograph Becky Schott, as well as my signature. And that, my friends, is how you combine a couple of low quality photographs in order to create a hand-painted work of pixel based imagery here inside Photoshop. Wasn't that great, just to feel the closure? Next week we'll be switching over to Illustrator in which I'll show you how to draw a gradient sphere as a 2D shape in order to render this perfectly serene cue ball, which, as you may know, is an artifact of the all together dry land game of pool. You got vectors folks, right in Boulder City, vectors with a capital V and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool, which rhymes with D for Deke's and T for Techniques. I'm going to be perfectly frank, friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground. You got to keep watching.

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