Adding shading for filters - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] I've got an illustration filled with flat color. Let's bring it to life by adding texture with a filter. Now before we can get into it, we need to address the shading. Alright let's add some dimension and texture to this by using filters. Before we get into that, there's a couple of things we need to discuss though. If you didn't do shading on your illustration using dodge and burn, like I covered in the beginning course; and let me just do this really quickly. So low exposure, let's grab the burn tool and maybe go into the pants layer and throw some shading on the pants. And I'm not in burn, I'm in smudge so nothing's happening. Let's try that again. Throw some shading on the pants with the burn tool. This only gives me the option of adding texture in a very destructive way. I would have to add the texture directly to the pants in order to not lose the shading I did. Like I said, it's very destructive and it's not really the best way to work if you're going to be doing this. So when you get to these slightly more sophisticated techniques, it's a lot better to do the shading on a separate layer. So I'm going to just back up and undo this fern that I did on the pants. And show you a better way to approach the shading so that it can be on a separate layer. And here's what that would look like on a new layer. It also gives you more flexibility because in this layer, I could play around with the opacity and lower it or raise it as necessary. So let me show you how I created this. In a layer that is just below my sketch layer, I'm going to make a new layer and the layer, actually is there anything in here? There's nothing in here. Let's get rid of this one. So in a layer just below my sketch layer, I am going to make a new layer and I am going to fill it with curves. And that is a layer adjustment. So to do that we're going to click on the black and white cookie, select Curves, and the way curves works is if you raise it up, it lightens things. And if you raise this down, it darkens things. So I want to keep this on the darker side. Maybe not crazy dark, let's see. If this is normal, let's do something like that. And let's go back to our layers. So now I've darkened everything. Now I don't want it to be dark. I'm going to paint the shadows in. So we're going to go to the layer mask for the curves layer and we're going to invert it, which is cmd+i for invert. And now it basically looks like there's nothing there at all and I can go ahead and paint in my shadows. Now this is going to be a little counterintuitive but in order to paint shadows on a mask, I need to paint white, because the shadows are already there. They're being hidden under this black. We're going to paint white to reveal them. So I'm going to grab a paintbrush. A soft edge brush. I'm going to lower the opacity so I could build it up, and I'm going to start painting in my shadows. When I do shadows, I like to start with the bigger ones first kind of lightly shading the body around itself. So we know this side of the image is going to be darker than the other side. We'll throw some shadow there. Coat sort of folding here. It's going to be very dark in here. And then I'll go back in and build up all the little detail shadows. So maybe the shirt is going to be shadowed here. And then I'll zoom in and throw in some more detail shadowing with the smaller brush. It's going to be dark under the jacket here. So now I've got my shadow layer in there for my curves. And I'm going to rename this shadow just so I know which layer it is. If I want highlights, I can repeat the same process. So I would make a new curves layer. And this time, when we go over to properties, instead of making everything darker, I'm going to make everything much lighter for my highlights. Go back to my layers. Let's call this one my highlights layer. Now I'm going to invert this mask, so cmd+i to invert. And now I'll paint white. This time it makes a little more sense. To bring up the highlights. But it's not going to actually paint white on here it's going to show me the lighter version of what's going on. So I can throw some highlights in different areas. To bring out some of this. Now as I'm doing this I can see my highlights seem kind of heavy handed. But that's not a problem, because with this technique it's really easy to go back and edit things. Lighten this up here a little bit maybe. Actually I don't like that so I'm just going to undo. One of the awesome things about Photoshop is we get do-overs. So maybe we'll lower the opacity a little bit and I can throw some light on the shirt over here. A little bit on the edge of the jacket. And that is how I would go about doing it. So if we turn this off, you can see there are my highlights. And we'll turn off the shadows and combined we get a really nice mix and a lot of depth in the illustration. So now that we've got our highlight and shadow layers set up I don't need the original demo layer anymore. I'll get rid of that one. And we can move on to actually adding texture.