6.2 Finishing Colour Correction and Adding Text

Hello, welcome back to lesson 18 of creating a fancy book cover. So in the last lesson, we nearly got a finish of our color correction. We just got a few more things to do before we can call it finished. So we're gonna get right into it. So you've got out adjustments at the top here. We've got levels, we've got fog, and we've got a photo filter and our dodge layer. Let's group this into a group called CC. This way you keep it all organized. Open up that group, now above the levels, I'm gonna add another levels adjustment. Then go to our blue channel. What we're gonna do, is add a bit more blue into this, cuz I think it's too yellow, I don't like the way it's so highly saturated with yellow. So add in a bit of blue, so go to the left hand side of this black level here. Bring it up. As you'll see, it adds a bit more blue into there. Gets the right hand side one and add a bit more yellow as well. And bring that up a little bit, too much there. Yellow as well. As you can see, it creates this sort of nice dramatic effect. It's a good mix of blue and yellow, it just looks really good to me, I think it looks nice. Something like that, looks good. Okay, so now we're gonna add a little bit more of a Color Dodge to the grass, cuz it's looking a bit flat at the moment, little bit like the light is not having any effect on it. So zoom in a little bit, so on the Color Dodge layer that we have before us, name this Dodge just to be sure. Get a brush with the same color as the sky around the sun. A low opacity about 9%, and just go over the grass slightly in different areas, just to bring a little bit more bright to it, like it's having an effect, the sun. Maybe you could lighten up this alligator slightly, by going over its back, like that. And then go around to the character, as well, a little bit, just around the edges. Something like that, a bit brighter. There you go. This will make it a little bit more brighter around there. Something like that. Okay. Happy with that? That looks good. Okay, so now what we're gonna do, is actually make this into a stamp layer. And what a stamp layer is, it's basically all the layers joined up to one image. So, from here on out, you won't be able to change anything. So if you need to do a light quick run over of all the area of the image and make sure there's no errors, you could do that. Just quickly give it once over. So I'm looking at this and it looks all good. Yup, looks good, looks good. Okay, happy with that. So just make a new layer above everything. And then go to Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E, once again, it's Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E. If you can't remember that, then you can group all the groups together, Ctrl + J, and then Ctrl + E that entire group and that'll make a flat image of it. I wouldn't advise that as it takes a little while and it's not very beneficial. Okay. So on this layer, I'm gonna right click and convert to smart object. Now to get a filter, blur or blur gallery and get to iris blur. But add a little bit of a blur around our image so you could just add it to him so make him the center and all the rest be blurry, if want that type of effect. So you don't want all the rest of it to be in focus you can do that. Then lower the blur radius slightly, blur your edge. Go to high quality. Okay, and then bring these points in slightly. Give it a bit of more of a faded blur, something like that, click OK. If you want that type of look, you can do that, let's have a look, see if that looks okay. So we got a blur on the edges here and then over here is in actual focus. Or alternatively, you go to Filter, Blur Gallery, then Iris Blur. Just around the very edges of the page. So something like that. Click OK, and not everything is in focus, the edges aren't in focus. But the main character is and the scene is well. Okay, so when you've done that, now go to filter, creative or camera raw filter. If you haven't got this, and you're using an earlier version, than everything I do inside of this program you'll have to use in the adjustment layers. And they're all available as an adjustment layer. It's just easier to have it all in one program. Okay so from here, it's pretty much creative freedom on your part. I'm going to a few things that a little bit more appealing. So on the highlights, I'm gonna bring the highlights up slightly. Contrast, I'm gonna leave where it is. Shadows, I'm gonna leave some of the shadows be a bit brighter in the center here. Something like that. A bit more of the white. Not too much, otherwise, the sun will be too brown out. Okay, so watch your exposures here. So something like that. Blacks again are shadows and leave the blacks where it is maybe a bit dark on the blacks. So shadows are still clear. But the darks are still there, basically. Something like that. Clarity, now clarity is sort of an HDRI effect. So bring up the clarity here. It did sharpen the image, as clarity obviously says, but it's also adding a bit more of a tone to the image. So add a little bit, not too much though. Something like that, like 10%. Vibrance, you can bring up as well. Make it a bit more vibrant. About 20% or 20 points or saturation. Saturation and vibrance are pretty similar. The vibrance increases the colors vibrancy of course and saturation just adds more the color. Okay, so let's go to our detail. Some sharpening here, so let's say about 20 sharpening radius, let's keep it about two. And then the detail, let's leave it to about 15. Leaving it starts basically in noise reduction. We don't need any noise reduction cuz there's quite good details on our images. Okay. Let's see what else we can do, so remove Chromatic Operation, don't worry about that, that's just into camera. So Dehaze, Dehaze is a really good tool to use, it sort of gets rid of all the haziness. We don't wanna get rid of much of it but let's see if any of this will have a good effect. You can see, it gets rid of some of the haziness in the background here. We don't want that so I'm gonna go to 0. I'm happy with that. Let's click OK now, let's see what it's done. Okay, so I'm really happy with this, looking like a really nice complete image. One last thing to do is add a nice big net around the edge of our page. Let's do that, there's multiple ways you can do that. I'm gonna do that a different way just so I can actually add a few more shadows in certain areas. So what I'm gonna do, go to a levels adjustment. Change this to multiply. Okay. And then invert the mask. Now with a brush of white, really low opacity, just go around the edge of the page, adding a nice blend it out like that. Then go on the left hand side of the page as well, and that bottom maybe if you want as well, like that. Now because it's on that layer, then I can just go into the shadows and add a few more shadows around our character, if you wanted to. So obviously the shadows would be on him now, so I'm just gonna add a few more, just in the center here. Like that, and around these rocks. Especially, that rock there. Put bigger opacity the on this one, like that. Let's zoom out, to see what we've done, turn it off and on. Yeah, I'm happy with that. Okay, so I'm really happy with this. I just wanna add one more thing. I know I did say it was one thing to do, but I always think there's something that could need more. So what I'm gonna do, is add a new layer, and then go to Ctrl+Alt+Shift and make a new stamp. This is a way to just finish off our images. Go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. A blur about, let's say, six. Change the layer to soft light. Opacity down to zero. This basically, just adds a bit more contrast, a bit more tone. When it's a blurred tone, it just looks really nice. So something like that, you can see what it does all ready. That was good like that. And I'm gonna add a little bit more yellow so go to filter, and then filter. Go to yellow and just add a bit more yellow, I'd like a bit more yellow in here. Something like that, 16, that looks good. Okay, so now it's time to actually add in some text to our scene. So first of all, bring back your guides, so Ctrl bring the values guides in the middle here. So that's the spine of our book, so now I'll add some text on this rock here, our main title. So I'm gonna add in this MOSS MAN, and it's called The adventures of MOSS MAN. Okay, so then if you wanna know the font I used, I used Sitca. Okay, so if you want to pause it and guess that this stage or use one of the fonts you're in. Control T I made it the same size as the adventures of. Okay, so I'm gonna place a little bit more to the right. Somewhere around there, so it's got the same equal distance between the stem and the right hand side of the book. So like there. Okay, now there's a few effects you can do. Maybe change this to overlay. Something like that. You could duplicate this, Ctrl+J, and change the opacity down to something a bit more visible, a bit more reasonable, something like that. That looks good. Then duplicate again, Ctrl+J, change this to normal, bring down the opacity. Zoom in to the actual area, let's see if we can get a good part of this so it's gonna be about there. Okay now, bring up the opacity on the normal layers to see what looks best. So I don't want it to fully merge with the rock. But something like that could look good. Okay, so now on the bottom, Moss Man, go to Blending Options. Add a drop shadow, full opacity and the size, on there I have quite a big, so just one on the Moss Man to stand out quite a lot. Choke is that's to make it a bit more deeper, the dark around the letters. The distance, I want to use a distance of 90% and get down a little bit. Just a little bit more shadow at the bottom. Size, let's bring it down a bit more. So, something like that. Let's click OK. See what it looks like. Let's zoom out. I don't want it to look too much like there's a massive shadow there. So, we're going to zoom out, so we can see what we're doing. Go back to Blending Options. Drop Shadow, and then bring that down to a more reasonable level. To something like that, click OK. Do the same thing to aventures of. Add a bit of a shadow. Just bring this down a little bit more. Drop Shadow there, full opacity. Size down and add in a little bit a shadow there underneath, something like that. Hit OK, see what it looks like. Okay, so I'm gonna add one more text layer, Ctrl+J, change this to normal and delete any clear opaque, the layer style. Bring it down to the bottom. I'm gonna call this, just like the author's tag, so written by, I'm gonna say, yourself and I, cuz we've both written it. Okay, and then just made it smaller and changed this to, let's say, metallic. And I'll bring out the tracking so 100 on the VA, which is the tracking. Need a bit more than that, so 150. And let's change the size of this to a bit smaller again. Something like that. It just adds a little bit more, like that. So that's good. Okay, now for the back, we're going to make a big text box, so get the T. Make it reasonably big, but make it like a half an inch or an inch around it. So that's a bit too small there, let's delete that. Okay, so again, in the corner here like that, I should be fine. Make it just above the pyramids, don't wanna affect the pyramids so about half an inch on each side, like that. Ctrl+V and I've pasted this text in. Now where I've got this text, it looks like Italian, it's placeholder text. So if you look on Google, Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, you can do that or use your own text. Or write it yourself. Now as you can see, if I zoom in here on the edges, every paragraph, every single sentence, if it doesn't meet the edge, it adds a line here. So what we're gonna do, go to the text, get a paragraph, and then turn off hyphenate. And that just makes the text nice and full like that. Okay? So maybe change this to center aligned. Okay, so when you've done that let's add in like, a sort of bar code, this one here, I've added this in the course files. So add that down here. Ctrl + I to invert it into a white, or you can just put a box around it, which is probably how it would be anyway. So, a box around it like that. Lunair, and then just fill with white. Like so. That's our bar code. Place this somewhere, wherever you want. Don't really want to allocate here, but looks like we're gonna have to, so let's put a small, keep it real. There you go. Maybe some text like, let's see, change this text to, let's put cover design by yourself and I from www.website.com. Okay, so you've got a bit of a there, so then just change the tracking to auto and it'll place it all nice and neat like that. Put this on the right hand side, in line with that text there. If you need to bring out rulers to make sure you're getting that line right, you can, like that. Bring that in, like so. Now, it looks good. So, let's change this to a normal banner, like that. Maybe change the color to the more yellow, a little orange. And we're good to go. Okay. So we've also got to do the center of the spine for the book. So let's make sure we do that so, The Adventures of Moss Man, let's duplicate that. That's what the book's called. Okay. So move this into place. This actually changes to filoplasty and let's delete that to a layer style we have. On each of these. Clear the layer style and right click, clear the layer style. Bring this right message over. Control+t, and let's place this on that stem. Somewhere like there. Make it a bit smaller. Make the bottom of the the reach that bar code. If you need to, get a ruler. So bit more up about there, so it matches the written by and the barcode and the, that's fine. And you want the T at the top so the man at the top to reach the edge of the text on the top. So it's good to me. Now let's put this in the middle of that line there. I'm gonna hide the rules now. Okay. So that's good. But now The adventures of looks fine, but the MOSS MAN doesn't. And I want The adventures of man to look similar to the one on the front cover. So let's change The adventures of copy to Overlay. Duplicate it, Ctrl+J, change the normal. Lower the opacity. Some of that comes through the the grass and all that, but that's good. It's similar to the one on the rock, is what you want. Now the MOSS MAN is a bit more tricky. Okay, to make the MOSS MAN stand out a little bit more. Right click on blended options. And a little bit of a drop shadow. Not too much. Click on a couple of these levels, you can, I think that's fine how it is. Okay, and then underneath all the text layers, make a new layer. Grab the Rectangular Marquee tool, just draw around this area, not all the way to the bottom but just a lot of it. Get the gradient of black, go right down, like that. We could leave it like that, it would look quite nice. But I'm gonna add a blur to this, so Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. 100, that'll be fine. Opacity down to 0, and bring it up until you can see MOSS MAN as clear as day. Okay, so something like that. That looks fine. Okay, so that's the end of this lesson. So, please go ahead and open up in design, ready for the next lesson.