3.1 Document Setup and Foreground

Hello, welcome back to creating a fantasy book cover. This is lesson number three. And in this lesson, we're gonna be starting to make our background elements. It's just the swamp and the sky. As well as possibly adding in our moss rock in the center. Let's get straight into it. So, first off, you're going to want the image of the actual swamp lake. So it's this one, here. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is actually, while it's actually in this mode, which is basically the smart object mode, hit shift on your keyboard and drag in the left right hand side top corner. Something like this. Control j to duplicate that layer. Go to edit, transform, and then flip horizontal. Drag it over. Now, on this right hand side one we're actually gonna stretch it a little bit, something like to there, just so now it doesn't completely match to what we've got over there. If you want to try the other way as well you can do that. So flip horizontal again and try to match it up, but I'm gonna match it like this. So what I wanna do now is actually mask out this left hand side one so that that line is in there. Hit on the mask tool down here. Coin your gradient. Make sure it's black and white, if you're not on a different color an easy way to get back to color is I'm gonna show you. I'm on a red now, I'm gonna hit on the D because what's normal. Go to black so switch these together. Is round. Make sure you're on black transparent. If you're not, click on that or actually just go on this little drop down here. Click on the second one. Make sure you're not on one of these. Make sure you're on this left onside one here. Okay and that's gonna drag left to right holding shift as a straight line, until I like what I'm looking at basically. You want it to be like a complete reflective edge, one that will be a bit different. If you want to stretch it even more, you can to try and get rid of some of the similarities, so even something like this. Okay, and zoom in. So now we have got like this blurry edge now, and we don't want that tool, so what we're going to do is go into the brush setting on the brush, right click, now I've got the default brushes. That's all you need really in this course. You might use the grass brush done here a bit, but for now let's use the soft round. Size quite high, about 170, mastiff 50%, flow 50% around that area, that's fine. And just try and blend these two together to get the best result we can. Now, we don't need to spend ages on this because it's gonna be behind the moss giant, the moss person and the rock in the center, so it's not gonna actually affect our scene overly much. Maybe the center will, so make sure you get that right. I see very quickly, it blends in pretty well. Alternate between white and black. White reveals, black conceals. Remember that. Here on the X every time you want to change and just see what will work better. So go over quite a lot and see if it looks better with the white or reveal it so it doesn't obviously. There, going to go back to the white reveal. Zoom in a bit on the far back, just make sure we're not getting any ghosts in there. So we have a bit here. So the black. Make sure we get rid of that. Make the brush smaller. If you want to know how to make a brush smaller just on your keyboard, use the bracket keys. So left bracket is obviously down in size, and up on the right bracket. So let's try and match this together. Obviously the rotation isn't exact on, so let's try and change that. So maybe up here, zoom in a bit more. So that's about there. That should be a bit easier for us to get rid of that edge. Make the brush even smaller. And that's good enough, definitely. Okay, so any other areas you think a bit of ghosting is going on, like in the center here as well. That. And because he's so far away as well you're not gonna see any of this. It'd be completely fine. When you're designing something you have to try and choose the lesser of two evils type thing. You're gonna sacrifice the quality or your time for something that is not gonna actually be seen in the final image. Now you also have to remember that this left area is actually going to be the back cover. And the center is going to be in the stem. In the actual spine of the book, I keep saying the stem. So the right hand side is actually going to be our main focus. Let's turn on the actual rules again, so control and semi colon. So this right hand side here, is actually our front cover. So, if you didn't like that then change it. So we might want to actually just move a few things. Enlarge things a little bit. So obviously the rocks gonna be here somewhere. This maybe not too bad actually, just change that and stretch it up a little bit more. So something like that maybe. Use the transform tools to distort and askew, try to see if you can create a bit of perspective here. Something like that will be fine. Okay so let's get rid of the actual sky. So now I'm gonna actually right click and convert to Smart Object. Again if you are not happy with that tool, reflected image here we got going then just change it, or just use the one layer you can just hide that a minute. You could just use this. Stretch out and use that, and just completely find it. It'll be exactly the same thing. I'm not going to cuz I want a bit more detail in the image. Okay, yes, fine. So now I'll start in the sky here, so let's bring in this one here. So let's make sure this stretches across our scene. I'm not worried about perspective on the sky. Okay. So the zoom out control, and minus key. Drag that down a little bit. Okay. So what we're gonna do with the mask tool. Gradiant again. Just go up, up, up, up. Don't do too much cuz I actually like the effect that it's having on the actual scene, but not so it just looks fade. Like this area of here. Okay. Got brush tool again. Holding B on your keyboard, say I want soft round and just get rid of that, over there on the trees. Okay, so it's a bit strong, the sky, I don't want it to be fully, you know, in your face. I also want this left hand side to be actually on the right hand side. So we're going to transfer flip horizontal I want that side over there. Okay. I want to stretch this a little bit more. I don't like this left hand side sky. It's a bit too dark and oppressive. So something like that. Okay, I like that sky there. That would be good for the front cover. Okay, so to make this a little bit less dramatic, little less in your face, what we're gonna do is hide this for now. I'm gonna actually convert these two and group them as a one smart object so right click convert to smart object. Get your mask, and with the black, just go down on the sky and get rid of it. Just do it a few times, just until the blue goes, that will be fine like that. There's still a bit of blue there but it will not be noticeable at all. Underneath this layer, make a new layer, go to your gradient again, we're using the gradient a lot in this course. So we've done the black brush. It gives like a nice cream or like a creamy orange, like a sky color or like a sunset color, so it's more like this. Okay, and then from the top or bottom, it's up to you. Let's try the bottom first. See that does that. From the top, though. Right down to the bottom. Like that. Make the sky visible again. Now what we're gonna do is lower the to zero and then bring up until you like what you look at. So it's not as big now, this fact. You can try soft light as well, see what edities work. So that's the top and let's down the lists to see if any of these look better. That's quite nice to multiply and then just change the not too much but I don't want to add too much effect on it. Okay just something like that will be fine. Okay so we're sitting about 75-8%, I mean 80% and actually we're gonna leave it at, there we go, that's fine. So now to get the actual sky have an effect on the actual scene, what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually gradient wipe away this back section. What I mean by that is we're gonna add like a sort of foam effect coming from the sky onto the scene to make it integrate a bit more. So on the actual swamp layer your gradient tool with the black brush. I'm just gonna drag down to somewhere around here. As you can see is all that does is amazing, it looks really cool but maybe it's a bit too dark. So maybe it down. 56%, let's try that. Looks good, maybe a bit more. Not too much. Let's go out to 25% just so we can add a bit more to this, and a bit more again. Okay, I'm liking that. So something like that okay, so now I'm gonna actually add an adjustment layer above everything here. So go down here, and go to Photo Filter. And I'll bring this layer here, and I'll change it to yellow, okay? So we got like a nice yellow fill to this, so you can leave Preserve Luminosity on. [INAUDIBLE] yeah, bring it up until you like what you're looking at. I don't want to affect it, cuz we're gonna [INAUDIBLE] effect later on, at the final episode, so [INAUDIBLE] let's go with 20. Let's be happy with that and let's leave it. That's completely fine. I think our horizon is a little bit too high though. I think we did a bit too high. I'm gonna drag this down a bit. So I'm gonna drag this down to around, let's say, about here. So we'll have to do the same for everything else. So, sky. Drag it down. To about there. That's fine. Let's zoom and see if we got any errors going on, cuz there's gonna bound to be some. So looks okay actually. I can't see any anomalies going on. Looks good. Okay, perfect. Zoom out, see what it looks like. Okay so now let's bring in our actual moss, like our stone in the center and our counter. So first of all let's get in our moss stone here which is gonna be this big rock here which looks amazing by the way. I think it looks amazing. As you can get rid of this. There's the new tool in Adobe Photoshop CC which is the focus area which might be a possibility. Let's see what that does to this. Basically what this does is anything blurred will be the background and anything sharp will be selected. But it looks like there's too much sharpness all over the image. We can't use that. So what we're gonna try and use is the actual, the quick selection tool. Now with this image it's quite even ranges in color, so it might be difficult as well, but I want to show you the different ways to do this. If you haven't had a selection tutorial, watch one of those. It's quite simple really, just go around the shape you wanna cut out. This is an advanced course, so I'm sure you already know how to do this. It's looking pretty good. It's working out. Go along the bottom here. Go really slow. I don't want to just slack too much. Let go of the mouse just in case I need to go back, otherwise I have to it all over again. Okay, so go around there. It's this section here which makes most of the trouble. Okay so we've got a roughly good selection. Here on this quick mouse button down here is this little box with the circle rings. So this is basically our selection now. Wherever the red is, that's our selection, okay? So now we've a brush. What we're gonna do, is just complete the selection basically. So bring up the flow 10%, and the. Right-click, and it's a hard round, and just fill in the selection. Don't worry about being too close to the bottom cuz we're gonna be basically masking this out with grass to make it blend in with the scene. Just wanna get the edges of the rock looking good. Okay, so we're gonna include this here. We might not include this section here cuz it looks like it's behind the rock. Let's add it in anyway to see if it looks good or not. Okay. So if you wanna zoom in, you can. So Ctrl and the plus, I usually use the keyboard shortcuts to zoom in. I find that a bit easier. Course you could use a pen tablet to make it a bit more easier for you to do this. The other way of doing this, which a lot of people didn't even use. But I think it's quite a good technique. Holding shift on your keyboard. What you can do, is hit on one section. So if I hit here, if I want to stack this tree here, hit once at the bottom. Hold down the mouse. Hold shift. Go to the top. Click again and that selects that like that. It basically joins it up. You can do that with the selection. You can hit on here, hold shift, hit here and then you've got a selection. It's a bit easier than just using your hand movement. So this part up here is a bit easier, doing that technique. Push that to completely straight on this edges here ever. Of course this moss. So get rid of that section there. Okay that's okay. Don't worry about being too close to the edge. It's quite hard to get everything in. You don't need to get everything in. Okay. That's looking pretty good. The section on here is a bit less [INAUDIBLE] as you get a little bit in. Okay. Go down. Looks okay. Okay so when you've completed your selection and you're happy with it. Zoom out, control and then the minus. That's pretty good. We can let go of the mask now, the quit mask, so hit that button. Now we've got a selection here. Go to refine edge, now we're gonna feather it a little bit, so it's like 0.2, just to give it a bit of a softer edge. Now, what you can do, try and get some of that green moss in. Hit Smart Radius, get it sized to about 50, and just go round where the moss is, and it might select some parts of the moss, which you like. You don't want, obviously the rock to be feathered but the moss parts can something like that and that's, I selected some of the trees up here, the leaves. Okay, I want to contrast a bit. Let's get rid of that little fade, that little ghosting. Again 0.2 to 0.4 now. Click OK. Now as you can see the actual selection we have, which was the red, is basically the black, so it's actually taking away the rock. So what we gotta do now is go on the actual format of the mask, and select and then invert, or actually control I which is a bit easier to use, and drag this into our template, into our actual file. Remember the right hand side is where the actual book cover is going to be. As you see when you fold a book, of course, the right hand side is the cover. So, control t. Drag this down to a more reasonable size so you can get it looking good. So we're gonna leave it about there. Okay, so we haven't got time for the end of this lesson, so we're gonna adding our character in the next lesson. So please join me in lesson to continue this course.