3.3 Adding Pyramids Using Perspective Warp

Hello and welcome to Creating a Fantasy Book Cover. This is less number five. And in this lesson we're going to be adding in our pyramids and finishing off basically our back landscape. Okay, so this is where we left off with the alligators. Of course, it's not looking amazing yet. We need a bit more of a bit of a highlights on the edges here to make the blend in a little bit more. So what I'm gonna do, add in an adjustment layer of levels and attach it to the alligator layer, holding alt on my keyboard between the two layers. Here, let's bring out this levels adjustment here. Now what I'm going to do is bring out the highlights a little bit, just so that water just blends in just a little bit more. This green bit over there, basically, it's a bit more over there. That's a bit better. Go to green channel add a little bit of a green to make a bit more like alligator so we've got little bit on the left in the mid tint in the shadow as well. A bit of highlight's as well. That's fine. Then we could do go on the actual mask Ctrl+I or Cmd+I on a Mac. Get your white brush and just reveal it in certain places you want. So of course on the other from here is very dark. Let's get the flow up 100%, so that just gets rid of that, fixes that. Let's go around the edges of that alligator as well to fix all the blending issues. I'm pretty happy with that. It's quite subtle but that's what we want, okay? So now we're gonna add in some pyramids now. You could still add some more alligators which we'll probably do between courses, I will do. Now you don't have to do that. I don't have to show you that again. Okay so let's bring in some pyramids now. So I'm gonna bring in these ones here. Okay so they're a little bit blurry, but we're not gonna much about that cuz it's gonna be quite in the distance. And in effect, are seen a way that's a little bit blurry. If you were worried about that, we have to go to is Filter > Sharpen > and Shape Reduction. But even then, it's not gonna do much to it so what we're gonna do is sharpen edges go to Filter > Sharpen > and then Sharpen more. Just leave it like that. That'll be completely fine, basically okay on the unlock it. What we're gonna do is get the polygon on the lasso tool. It's a one corner of the next. Quite an easy a cow this one. So right to the top here. As best we can. Okay, and get down. It said share. Don't worry about the leaves cuz they're gonna be blended in the scene. Okay, it's this one rock for us one, one pyramid, smashed out. Okay, let's just bring in the next pyramid as well. Let's make sure we get all of them done. So, same way just cut out. So, if you wanna match to the colors, all you do is you can bring this into this next scene I've cut out first though. Okay, so this one down here, corner to corner. Especially kind of, if you did a good job mostly later on. Okay, so we got that selection done. Hit Ctrl+C on your keyboard. Bring into the upper pyramid stock we got. Paste that in. So, we're gonna get the other one as well, just to make sure that we got all three. Maybe a few- maybe five pyramids or maybe two of the on our scene. So again, click on the layer to mask it. And then lock it. And I'm just gonna just take out this pyramid here. So, as you can see, we've got bit of a graph at the top here from the leaves in the branches. So we're gonna fix that. So let's get the selection first and hit Ctrl+ C. And then Ctrl+V. Delete the bottom layer, so it doesn't seem to work. So CTRL+C, CTRL+V. There we go. Delete the bottom layer. Okay, so now this top bit here, of course we've got a bit of an error here. So this bottom bit over here, we can easily fix that. So before we do that, hit Ctrl and hit in the thumbnail of your image. And then it'll create the selection all around it. So anything we do will only work with the inside of this image. Okay, so now with the actual Clean Stamp tool, did you get this part here? And I make sure that our flow is at 100%. And then just take out this area here. Or I could just use this brick here. Take out that bit there, that's a bit easier, little bit better. Same with the top bit, but I'm just gonna actually add a selection here so I don't actually have to do this myself. So on the corner of the edge of the pyramid, which is this edge here, which is not very evident but you might have to change. Bring it back to the top. Okay, and then down here give the line of the actual pyramid as well. So we just get rid of this selection here, so just Select on this area here. Go here, click here, go right to the top like so. And do the same to this section here, so we're gonna click on here down this spot here where that line meets. Make sure we get a selection of the whole pyramid. Okay, that should be fine. Same again. The section here, this section here, this section here. You get the idea? Okay, that's not too bad. So also we've got a little bit of a green going on here as well. In the corners get rid of that. So just take off part of the pyramid, that would be fine. And that green will be gone. I guess that's not too bad. But I think in the shadow on the left hand side of the pyramid is not relevant, so I'll actually just add one in quickly. So just get the line in the diagonal over the actual- the line of the crease in the pyramid, if that make sense. And then just get yourself a gradient tool. Make a new layer, hit D on your keyboard to go back to black, that'll change it to black. Make sure it's on the black-to-transparent, the second one. And then just drag a line from right to left. And that'll just create a nice shadow for us, so something like that. Maybe a bit more to the top, cuz that's where the errors are, mostly, or are lacking. Something like that. So attach it to the pyramid, holding alt between its layers. And just go to Multiply just lower down the opacity to 0 and then bring up until you like what you're looking at. Something like that, you want it a bit subtle, we just want to give that edge a bit more evident. That's fine. Ctrl+ E now, or just go to the right-click and curate smart object, if you have ever after change the shadow you can. So I'm gonna bring this into our other pyramids which is this layer here. Okay, so this one and the first one is pretty similar in color and shape. But the second one is quite dark. So to do that, very simple, go to Image> Adjustments > Brightness > and Contrast. Bring up the brightness, and then layer the contrast. Something like that. Another way to do this, if you want to, go to Image. If I actually just duplicate that. So I'm just gonna draw a box around it. Ctrl+C. And I can go back to Ctrl+V. So I've still got the one I've just done, but I can now show this other way. If you want to do this a different way, this works with multiple object, you'll try and get a entire scene to look the same, in terms of all the objects in the scene get the same sort of color balance, the same sort of saturation. Then what you can do is go to Image> Adjustments> Match color. And then change this to Pyramid. So one of the pyramids we've got, so it's probably this last one here. As you can see it changed it completely towards this right-hand pyramid here and it's matching in tone. It's matching in color. It's matching everything, that's a really good technique. I hit OK. Let's see the difference between the one we saved just using the brightness and contrast. It's pretty similar, you got pretty similar effects but obviously that is exact copy of that in terms of all the tones and all the colors, so just a little tip there. Okay, so let's bring these into our scene, make sure they're all Smart Objects. So right-click, Convert to Smart Object. Right-click, Convert to Smart Object. Okay, so now we've got that we just wanna place it in our scene now, so group all these together and then just drag these into our course file. Okay, so let's hit Ctrl+T, resize this a little bit. So now I have to think of where we actually want these to be in our scene. And now, normally I'd want one spear closer, and then one mid, and then one very far away but I'm thinking, these have to be quite far away on this scene, cuz we don't want it too close to our subject area. So let's switch to one by one. So this one in here, I think this is the best one in terms of its shape and its coordinates to the scene, it looks right. So let's try and add this in a place where it looks good so Ctrl+T, and I'm holding Shift and Alt on my keyboard to make sure I've got in proportion. So I'm thinking over here maybe. She's a pretty small pyramid, really, but in terms of the scene and how the scale. That's fine. Or something like that. Just leave that one there for a minute and then just add in the other ones first. So this one here is quite a nice one as well. I like the angle here. At this somewhere. Maybe a little bit closer. Is it gonna look good here or not? Let's see. Stretching out the book text on the back as well. Cuz we don't wanna add cover to that. I'm thinking again, this will look better in the back. So it's like a little village of pyramids in the back here, so somewhere over here will be fine. Let's try to see what we looked at here. So these are quite close, and the angles are completely different, so let's try and change that. So on this left-hand side one, I'm thinking that we need to change the angle to match, to make it a bit more flat, a bit more similar. I'm sure that if the builders would've made the pyramids look similar in dimension, but we haven't got the luxury of that, so we have to try and do it in Photoshop. Something like that, it's not too bad. Maybe a bit smaller this one, try and get a bit of a perspective. Maybe even down here, that looks farther away. Zoom out, see if that looks any good. That's not too bad, so if it's setting down there obviously that'll need to be smaller than this one over here. That's fine where that is. For this next one, okay, this one here. Let's try and add this to a decent spot. So this possibly would go behind our character or far in the distance. Let's see where we could place this. Maybe a bit bigger this one, possibly, maybe in the stem. The stem, the spine of a book. Somewhere over here. Three little pyramids over there. Just leave it over here somewhere, zoom in over here. Trying to place this correctly. So, again, the angle is probably a little bit off. Try and play with that a little bit. So, if you want to play with the angles a little bit more drastically, you could use the perspective warp. So if I get this and then just create a box. Now because it's obviously a triangle, it's a pyramid you can't, you've got four points of reference, we cannot do that, so let's try make it as best we can in terms of the angle. Something like that, and let's do the same for this upper side. Now, you can control the points basically. It's gonna warp, and you just play with these points but of course to top bit is not going to be selected, so again it's not really the best way to layout. Trying to increase this little bit on our height so you can get most of this in, like that. And then just play around with this if you want to. So you could do something like that, a bit more realistic. Trying to get the angles right, so complete text see what that looks like. That's not bad. Now the right hand side of the pyramid is still off quite a lot. So again, let's try and play with that a little bit. Hit Distort. Let's play with that. So it's okay, but it's a little bit too tall now and a little bit thin. So let's widen this out a bit. And that is not bad. I'm happy that. Okay, so this middle one here, I'm thinking that needs to be a lot smaller again. This is pretty big this one on the left. So even though up close it probably won't look in perspective. From far away it will a fine, a little like it's gone off into the distance. I think it's somewhere around here for this one. Okay, now we need to blend them into our scene, okay? Doing so doing different sized pyramids as well. So, this left-hand side one the start with on first. Okay, so get a mask on it. Go to your Brush. Right-click, go to a Grass Brush which should be down here. And a grass, you can do Dune Grass or Grass Image. Click on Grass. Go to your Brush Presets. As we've done before, take off Color Dynamics and Transfer. And then what we're gonna do is go to Shape Elements. Bring up the angle gester a little bit. Or down and then go to your Scattering and add in some count as well, make it a bit more dense. Okay, so at the bottom flow 100%, 100% the black brush. Just get rid of that bottom edge. First of all like so, make it just plain like that. And made the brush a little bit bigger and certain areas just click a few times. Not that big.. But certain areas just click a few times and it was just like a little it is a bit more grass coming out. Bit more realistic. Obviously, because grass isn't going to be the same height. Unless it's trimmed, but I doubt it. Okay something like that would be fine. Once you've done that, now you get to see everyone's as well. So repeat that same process in the pools and I'll repeat that now. Okay, so you might to wanna pause the course now and just create that and just take a few seconds. Okay, so then now we're gonna make sure that these are all matching in exposure. So what we're gonna do is group these together, Ctrl+G, call this Pyramids. Now we've got this in the background group here, let's just add it above the filter. Or we could just leave it underneath actually, cuz the color is actually matching quite well with this, that's fine. I just noticed this middle one's a bit tilting, so let's change that, this middle one here. Like that. I'll be fine. Cool. So now we're gonna add in a exposure layer here, so Exposure Adjustment Layer. So go down here. Exposure. All we're gonna do to this is just lower down the offset. Or increase the offset. Okay, I'm going to attach it to our group, so bring it above the pyramid group, attach it to the group entirely. Okay, so then let's bring this where we can see it, so offset, this'll make it fade into our scene. Same again, we use the gamma correction as well, that'll basically get rid of all the shadows. Something like that will be fine. Okay, so now how to make this blend in even more. It's got a little bit of a smokey like haze to it. So add a new layer. Get your brush to a soft brush. If your flows about 6%, something like that you'll be fine. And now we'll just let the Color from the skies to hold out on your keyboard and click on this Yellowy Cream. And then we do. To a lower pass at your low flow. Just go over the pyramid slightly. And that will fade into our scene quite nicely. Same again over here and that looks good. You could use like a smoke or a haze brush for this. And it might make it look a bit more realistic. Okay, so we also want to drop the blues, cuz there's a bit of blue in the our pyramids. So what I'm gonna do, go to Dye Adjustments > Color Lookup > Drop Blues, and I'll completely get rid of the blues, attach it to our pyramids, then turn it back on. It's a pretty good effect there. Okay. So that is basically the end of this lesson. So note on the next lesson, we're gonna continue working with our scene and then maybe start to work on our main character.