2.6 Creating the Background Stadium

Hey guys welcome back to Event Flyer Design. My name is Kirk Nelson. We are working our way through this sporting event flyer. This is lesson number 8, where we work on developing the background stadium. Last lesson we created this fantastic flag ball. It took many layers to do so. Let's get these out of the way by grouping them all together. All the way from the grass shadow layer at the top, all the way down to the blank ball layer at the bottom. I'm selecting them all, pressing Ctrl or Cmd+G, and that's a single group now. So we have two field layers already in here. So in the sort of foreground field and then the background field. The next idea is to create a stadium wrapping around this field so it doesn't look like this ball is sitting out here in the middle of a lonely practice field but it is the central focal point of a massive sporting event. Now, I know I spoke at length about the importance of taking your own photographs. Unfortunately, I am not permitted down in the middle of a field during a major sporting event. So I have to rely on photographs of others. In the course files is this photo. Now I know this is taken of a baseball team, and it's already in the crowds, but we're going to make this work for us. Let's drag this over and deposit it into our composition. And I'm actually going to position it beneath that field layer. I'm going to call this stadium. And I'm also going to turn it into a smart object through right-click, convert to smart object. And I know it's behind this field layer, and we can't really see it. So let's adjust the mask of the field so it includes only the field elements. That's a fairly easy task to do, we just create a selection right along that horizon area of the field, select completely around it. Make sure we're on the mask, and fill that with black. Now we can see the stadium a lot better, which means we can position it about where we're probably gonna want it to be. In order to give this stadium some real sense of size and make it look like it's this huge, massive, grand stage, let's add some forced perspective to it. We'll do that with the Warp tool. So Ctrl, or Cmd+T for the transformation. Then right-click to warp. For the warp setting, we're gonna use a bulge which doesn't seem like something that we'd want to do, but we can make it a negative bulge, which essentially works as sort of like a squeeze. Pull it down. If we want to go back to the regular transformation handles, we can click this icon at the top here. So, now we can scale it out a little bit. And right-click to add some Perspective. So we wanna look, make it look like it's kind of leaning back. So it's this really large, grandiose stage. So it's something about like that. Then let's add a Layer Mask, and paint out these areas that's causing some problems for us. Use a soft brush for that there, and down here. Now the issue is that the focus of that stadium looks way too sharp, we can see in the grass field that the focus is up close, as it should be, on the flag ball here, and then it fades off as it gets further away. And even though that stadium is apparently very far away, it's still in too sharp of a focus, so let's add a blur to fix that, we're going to use a field blur under the Blur Gallery menu. So I've got the center of the blur positioned almost directly in the center of the canvas. It's set at 11 pixels, I'm going to hit OK and it applies that blur to the stadium smart object. Which looks pretty good, but the only issue I have with this is that the blur is too consistent throughout the whole stadium. Those stands should be really, really big, which means the point that's furthest away is gonna be in significantly more blur than the ones that's a little bit closer here. But fortunately, the Blur Gallery Smart Filter comes with a mask. So we can use a Gradient set to Reflected. And set the color to a midtone grey instead of a black. And so, we can fade that blur out from the edges, just like that. So now, let's add a little bit more contrast to the stadium. Going to clip a Curves Adjustment layer. And then just add a little more washed-out, just a very slight S curve, so it skews into the lighter area, but still accentuates the contrast some. So that's the basics for setting up that background stadium. Now there's a handful of other elements I'm going to add, and they're not difficult elements to add, so I'm going to go through them quickly and tell you the steps that I used in order just to get them. First of all, if this is a soccer game, we need to have some sort of soccer goal. So, I'm grabbing a rectangular tool. Set to shape. The stroke should be white. Fill set to zero. And, I'm setting the stroke width at 1.5. Then, I'm drawing a very quick rectangle, which is difficult to exactly see what it is doing, until I zoom in or click off from it, which is going to be the soccer goal there. Grab my Path Selection tool to make some adjustments to the perspective of it. And when I'm happy with that, I'm going to rasterize it and add a blur. And so that looks like a decent soccer goal out in the distance. So next, let's add some darker color to the sky area, which will make this a little bit more dramatic of an appearance, and give it a little bit more color to work with. Add a new layer underneath the field layer. Be the night sky. Create a selection, and then I'm going to fill this with a gradient. I've got a nice, deep midnight color over here to a lighter more saturated blue, all the way down to white. And then using the linear gradient, add that in. Deselect, change this to multiply, and then I'm going to warp it so that it fits that nice arch shape to match the curve of the stadium. [BLANK_AUDIO] Until it looks something about like that. The next step is adding some glowing stadium lights around the rim of the stadium here. Now there's a great feature in Photoshop that's actually overused called lens flare. We're going to use that, but that feature has some very notorious shortcomings in that it can't be rendered on an empty layer, so we have to kind of trick it. We're going to add a new layer here. This is just gonna be the first flare, and I'm filling this with black. And then running the filter, it's under Filter > Render > Lens Flare. I'm gonna use the 105 millimeter prime and move it to about where I would expect that first flare to be, along that top left edge. I've clearly missed, but that's fine. Cuz I'm going to set this to screen, and reposition it. And then I will do that exact same process to create four more flares going around the edge of the stadium so it looks like there's actual stadium lights. And there they are. Now they are looking rather hot. They've kind of blown out the sky in the top part of that stadium. And I want some of that in there, but I don't want it to be nearly that drastic. And the way to fix it is to bring that sky down a little more. And that does help some but we need to add a little bit more to it, in fact, the entire composition is looking a little washed out with that step so let's adjust that. But first let's group all these stadium lights together. And now we can address the washed out appearance of this background. The flag ball still looks pretty good. So, I want to add a curves adjustment layer directly underneath that, and I will just bring that curve down a little bit. That's a little bit more oomph and contrast to those elements. I'm really pleased with the way this composition is working out but there's a couple other quick steps I want to make to adjust some of the lighting on the ball before we finish off this lesson. I like the way this looks but I think the edge is just a little bit too sharp. I think with all this ambient light sort of floating around in here, we would see a little bit more glow to the outer edge of this ball. And I want to create my own glow because I want to be able to fade it off as it goes down. The top of it should be emanating a little bit more glow effect than the sides or the bottom should be. So I'm going to create a selection from that same ball shape that we did before, and actually add a new layer underneath it for the ball glow. And I'm going to fill this with a nice bright blueish color, pressing Alt+Backspace, or Opt+Backspace on the Mac, to fill that in. You can't really see it there, but if I remove it around, you can see what it looks like. Okay, from there, I'm going to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. A nice strong blur, probably about nine pixels or so. Okay, set it to screen. And then I'm going to move the layer upwards just a little bit, so you can see a touch of that glow coming off. And as I said, it doesn't really look right to have the glow coming down along the edge here. So, I'm adding a layer mask to that glow layer, and using a black to white gradient to fade that glow effect out. It's a subtle difference. In fact, I want to make it even more subtle with lower opacity. But it really does help with the appearance of that way-too-sharp edge of the ball. The other problem area that I want to address is the bottom here. Now, I know that a bottom hole and weird glows of that ball is in the bleed area, but it still really bugs me. So I want to attend to that. In the flag ball group, I'm going to create a new layer at the top. And this is just gonna be the ball's shadow. Set it to multiply, grab a nice, thick, soft edge brush set to a low opacity, maybe about 40% or so, with a default black and just very gently add some dark shading in there. So it's just some shadow areas from that ball. And that looks really great. Turn off those guides again and take a look at this. So that's it for Lesson 8. We've added a stadium to the background. We've done some tricks with lighting. This composition is really starting to pull itself together now. Next lesson, lesson 9, we'll deal with some of those cloth effects, and have some silk scarves sort of floating down in the background.