2.5 Developing the Scene

Okay, so we're back for another lesson. In this lesson, we're going to work on our scene a little bit more. We've done a lot of work on the robot. But we're going to build out our scene with a few more effects for that just to bring the two elements of our composite together. So we'll jump back into it now and get started. Okey-dokey, so this is where we left off. We've got our robot done, quite a lot of work actually. And now we're gonna do some work on our scene. So let's collapse our Robot folder, expand the Scene folder. And first of all, I'm going to add a hue and saturation adjustment there. We'll just bring this down a little bit like so. You can just see we're just desaturating a little bit of color from the scene, some of that orange. And kind of over here, this sort of teal-turquoisey vibrancy, we're just removing some of that. Next, what I'm going to do is add another adjustment layer, Levels. We need to darken our scene just to try and make it a bit more moody so it matches some of the shadows and the darker areas on the robot. So I'm gonna bring this down and bring the whites down. We don't have to make it too dark, but you can fine-tune these and you could adjust them at any time. So there we go, we've darkened our scene. Now, we're also going to add another adjustment layer. We've not done this one yet, this is called Color Lookup. Essentially, this enables you to apply a LUT to your image. LUT stands for lookup table, think of it as like a color profile. So we can click on this, lots to do here, I would play around with all of these. You can turn night into day with some of these, they're fantastic. But we're gonna go with Futuristic Bleak, I do like this one. So there we go, it's pretty bleak, a bit too bleak. So I'm gonna just drop that opacity down, make it slightly less bleak. We'll go with about 60%, something like that. But then what I can do is I can actually go back to my robot, go back to that color balance adjustment layer. And just maybe adjust this a bit more so it's not so red. [MUSIC] So I'm just kind of trying to balance all of these adjustment layers so there's much more harmony between my subject and the scene that I'm putting the subject in. [MUSIC] So there we go, we've added a few adjustment layers to our scene. We could actually click on these, all of them selected, right-click and go Create Clipping Mask. But because they're at the bottom and there's nothing below our scene, it doesn't really matter. But what we're gonna do now is, because we have a Smart Object for our scene, we can apply a blur effect. So if we didn't have this as a Smart Object, like we did the beginning, applying this blur effect would be permanent. But because it's a Smart Object, we can actually go up to Filter > Blur Gallery and select a variety of different blurs. So we'll go with Tilt Shift. These are quite demanding on the computer, as well. So I would recommend disabling preview unless you've got beast of a computer. Because every time you make a change, it will update that change and it can take a little while. So I'm gonna bring this down. Now, what this allows me to do is click a starting point and then have a blur graduate across a certain distance. So I could have part of this image in focus, and as it goes towards the distance, I could then blur it out. So it's really useful for adding some blur effects, some depth of field to a composite. So I'm gonna move this circle down here, this starting point. I want all of this to be in focus because this is around where my subject is. Now, you can add multiple points by clicking anywhere else and add multiple blurs that kind of go into the distance. But it can get incredibly complicated. You can spend a lot longer with this if you want to kind of have a certain type of blur effect. I'm gonna do something pretty simple, and I'll turn on preview so you can see what's happening. It might just take a minute to load. So you can see there, we have focus here, and then it just gradually blurs out towards the distance. [MUSIC] So something like this. Now, I could add another point at the top so I have the scaffolding up here a bit more in focus. And as I say, you can add multiple points, so you can really try and control that depth of field a bit more. We could add another one, and I could rotate it to the side, and then maybe add another one over here. My computer's handling this very well. [MUSIC] And then just bring that in like so. So you can see I've added multiple blur points, you can spend a lot longer doing this. I'm gonna try and do this really quickly just to kinda show you the technique. So there we go, just bring those out to the edge. So as we move further away from the subject, we're getting more blurry. Now, if you want to delete one, just select it and press Delete or Backspace. Okay, that'll do for now, you can of course crank up the blur if you want something incredibly dramatic. That highlights there how quick a job I've done. But if I bring this down to seven pixels, it's very, very subtle. So if I turn preview off and back on, you can see it just adds a subtle bit of blur. And then I can go and maybe fine-tune this a bit more, I could even get rid of this top one. So something like this, click OK. And you can see it's listed as an effect under here, as well. And what I can actually do is double-click this and go back and make changes. Or I can just drag this effect to the trash down here, let go, and it will delete it altogether. So we get that flexibility with Smart Objects. Now, what I'm also gonna do is just go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and just add a little bit of blur to the entire scene. Just because I don't want everything to be too crisp and sharp, so something really subtle, like even maybe just one pixel. It depends on your document size. But you can just see, switching from before we had the blur to after the blur, it just puts a bit more focus on the subject and makes the whole thing look a bit more dramatic. And it's the kind of effect you would actually get if it was a photo, you would get some degree of depth of field. Okay, so let's just collapse this down now. So we have our robot, we've done quite a lot of work. As you can see, we've done a bit of work on our scene. We have nothing in our Effects folder, and that's what we're gonna do in the next and final video. We're gonna add some effects to really finish off our scene and just make the whole thing a bit more dramatic. So there we go, I'll see you in the next lesson.