- Overview
- Transcript
Learn how to use Adobe Photoshop in this comprehensive course. Go from beginner to pro in 23 videos exploring all the essential Photoshop tools and techniques.
In Adobe Photoshop for Beginners, you'll work through a series of free Photoshop tutorials for beginners, each delivered in easy-to-watch video format and aimed at teaching you a new Photoshop feature or skill.
You'll start at the absolute beginning and work quickly into more exciting techniques. Learn how to use Photoshop layer styles, how to change color levels, how to retouch and manipulate images, and much more. Whether you're a photographer, marketer, or designer, this collection of basic Photoshop tutorials will give you the core skills you need to take your work to the next level.
Learn Adobe Photoshop
We've built a complete guide to help you learn Photoshop, whether you're just getting started as a designer or you want to master advanced Photoshop skills.
1.1 Welcome to the Course
Hi, there. My name is Dan Scott, and I'm an Adobe certified instructor here at, Envato Tuts Plus. And together, me and you are going to learn everything you need to know to get started with Adobe Photoshop. Now, this course is for absolute beginners. There is no need to have any previous Photoshop knowledge, or any photography or design knowledge for that matter. We're gonna start at the beginning and work our way through, step by step. Now, we're not gonna go through every single tool and every one of its features. What we're gonna do is, we're gonna work through real world practical examples in Photoshop. Then, we'll learn the tools and features necessary to make it a really amazing image. We'll start by getting the most out of our photographs. Correcting the lights and the color. Also, how to change the colors completely in Photoshop. We'll spend some time with text, showing you how to distort it, along with all of its effects. I'll share some amazing cropping and resizing tricks as well as exciting ways to transform and distort images so we can fake mock ups like this. I'll show you all my special retouching tricks. Cleaning up small imperfections as well as removing larger parts from images. Before the end of this course, you'll be able to make simple masks like this. But you'll also have the skills for a super tricky masks like this, out of focus, here. There's lots more as well, like mastering layers, knowing the best practices for exporting images and sharing them. So it's just a really good foundation for getting started with Photoshop. I set some exercises through the course so that you can practice the skills while you're learning. So if you've never opened up Photoshop or you've opened it and you've struggled with it, follow me and I will show you the best ways to make beautiful images in Adobe Photoshop.
1.Introduction
1.1Welcome to the Course01:50
1.2Getting Started01:19
2.Layers
2.1How Photoshop Layers Work08:56
2.2Combining Multiple Images08:34
3.Color and Adjustment Layers
3.1Tone Adjustment With Levels04:36
3.2Color Adjustment04:03
3.3Hue Adjustments08:21
4.Text
4.1How to Work With Type11:54
4.2Warped Type and Type on a Path17:40
5.Layer Styles
5.1Layer Styles and Effects17:28
6.Cropping and Resizing
6.1How to Crop07:21
6.2Resizing and Resolution09:40
7.Selections and Masking
7.1Rectangle and Elliptical Marquee Tool06:09
7.2Clipping Masks04:28
7.3Quick Selection Tool07:51
7.4Layer Masks06:07
7.5Select and Mask12:12
8.Smart Objects
8.1Understanding Photoshop Smart Objects11:30
9.Transform & Warp
9.1Transforming and Warping Layers07:49
10.Retouching
10.1Retouching With the Photoshop Healing Brush07:56
10.2Content Aware Scale08:16
11.Exporting
11.1Exporting Images10:37
12.Conclusion
12.1What Next?02:11
- Overview
- Transcript
In this video, you will find out how to download the source files and reset your workspace so that you can complete all the Photoshop tutorials in the rest of the course.
Related Links
- Discuss This Course on the Envato Forums
- Unsplash.com
- Share Your Work! @tutsplusdesign on Twitter
- @danlovesadobe on Twitter
- @bringyourownlaptop on Instagram
1.2 Getting Started
All right, it is time to get started. Now the first thing you can do is you can download the source files. The source files are just the files that we use throughout the course, so you can download those and play along. And there are projects that get set during the course, okay? Not homework, there are super exciting things to do together, okay. But if you wanna share those with us, okay, there is a forum post to use. So go to the forums and search for Adobe Photoshop for Beginners. Also you can share on social media. Twitter, we are Tuts+ Design or Dan Loves Adobe, okay? Or on Instagram, it's bring your own laptop. Okay, so share what you get up to. Next thing we need to do is we need to reset our work space. We'll jump into the computer now and yeah, we'll do that now. All right, so first thing we need to do is, let's just get our screens all looking the same so you can follow along easily. So first just got up to Window, down here to Workspaces. And doesn't really matter what yours is set to, let's change it to Essentials. Okay, so what we're also gonna do is we're gonna reset essentials. So back up to Window > Workspaces and just click this one that says Reset Essentials. And that's just gonna get yours looking like mine. So yeah, it's a little easier to follow along. All right, so boring stuff over, exciting stuff next video. Let's start looking at Layers in Photoshop.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson you will learn about some basic image adjustments: Auto Tone, Auto Color, and Auto Contrast. You will then use these adjustments to explore how to add layers in Photoshop and how to edit them.
2.1 How Photoshop Layers Work
Hi there, in this video, we're going to look at layers. We're gonna do some adjustments to this image all on different layers, so we can see the different effects, and really just get to understanding how layers work. All right, let's get started in this video. Okay, so first thing to do is, let's go up to File and let's go to Open. Now from the files that you've that downloaded, open up 01-layers. Okay, this image comes to us free from Milos Tronchenski, I practiced that. Let's open them up, thanks Milos. So the first thing we need to do is make sure you can see your layers panel, mine's over here. If you can't see it, go to Window and just make sure the tick is on Layers. What we might do is, see this libraries panel here? We're gonna look at him later in the course, but he takes up quite a lot of screen real estate. Now, my screen's quite big, yours is probably not. When I'm working on my laptop, see these little double chevrons, I always go through and just close this down, okay, just to give yourself a little bit more room. Okay, so down here in my layers panel, I've got one layer. By default, when you're opening up a JPEG, you'll get given the word background, it'll be locked, okay? What we wanna do is right-click the background, okay, and go to this one that says Duplicate Layer. We're gonna give it a name, we're gonna call ours Auto Tone. Okay, and that's the first of the automatic features, we're gonna click OK. Now, it hasn't changed anything, I've just got two layers sitting on top of each other, okay, I've got auto tone and auto background. Now, with the auto tone layer selected, okay, it's kinda this light gray, or in earlier versions of Photoshop, it's kinda a blue color. So we're gonna select it, let's go up to Image and let's go to Auto Tone. You ready, stand back, and pretty cool? Pretty cool little automatic feature. Now, what auto tone's doing is, it's looking at the highlights, midtones, and shadows, and trying to find kind of a better than the original we had. Okay, so it goes and does that for us, a nice little quick automatic feature. When do I use that, I use that quite a lot when I'm doing maybe images that they're not gonna be the front cover of a magazine or the hero image for a design. It's just, I want a quick fix, okay, I've taken them on my phone or something, and they're just not quite perfect. I'm gonna go through and use something like auto tone before I, say, upload them to social media. So over here in my layers panel, the thing to look at is auto tone, okay, it's a little hard to see, the thumbnails are slightly different. What we can do is turn the eyeball off on this auto tone layer, just click the eye right in the middle. Okay, and now we can see the layer underneath, which is the background. So the background's still there, he's protected, he's not being wrecked. Okay, and I can turn this top one on and off easily to compare the two. Now when you're working with layers, you're always looking from the top down. So imagine you're always a bird flying above, and you can see auto tone. And I can turn the eye on and off for background, but nothing happens, okay? It's because auto tone's covering it, okay, so I could turn you off and then you off. Okay, so that's I guess what we're doing this video, is getting an understanding of layers. Let's do the next of the automatic features, so let's turn off the eyeball, okay, so I turned off auto tone. Let's select the background layer and right-click it again and go to Duplicate Layer. Let's look at the other feature, okay, it's called Auto Contrast, and let's click OK. Then with that layer selected, it should be automatically, let's go to Image and then let's go run the other options. Okay, it's better, okay, the colors are a bit strange still. And so note that we've used auto contrast and it's given us a result. Now let's compare it to auto tone by turning on this auto tone layer, on, off, on, off. Sometimes it can be a little hard in this course to see the differences, depending on the video quality that you're kind of receiving. And I can see a real clear difference between, I like auto tone better, stronger darks. Now, don't think auto contrast is just broken or it doesn't work. Okay, what you'll find is, it depends on the image. Sometimes I open up stuff and auto tone does a horrible job, auto contrast does a great job. So open up your image and basically test all three of these. Okay, figure out which is the best, and then say you've got another ten images to do. Then as long as they're kind of photographed in a similar sort of situation, you can often not have to try all three, just go to the one that works. So we've got auto tone, which is nice, my favorite, auto contrast, and background. So let's turn the two eyes off on these top ones. Let's look at the last of those automatic features. Right-click background, let's go to Duplicate Layer, call it Auto Tone, nope, we're using Auto Color, and let's click OK. Let's go to Image and let's just set this one. Pretty good, okay, it's pretty close to auto tone. Now if I turn them all on, what I want to do is, I know auto contrast is not that great, so I'm gonna turn it off. And what happens is, if I have this off, remember, you're the bird flying on top. If I wanna compare auto tone with color, okay, I can turn auto tone at the top. And as long as auto contrast is off, if I turn this eyeball off, you'd imagine you're seeing auto color. Turn it back on, you can kinda see I'm toggling between these two here, okay, to see the difference. You have to experiment a little bit and play around. Okay, and if it makes it a little easier, sometimes this guy here, you can just click on him and click on the trash can, okay, if he's wrong. Okay, keeps the layers a little bit tidier, you can also drag them. Let's say that we want auto contrast on the bottom. So we want it underneath auto color, not underneath background, okay, he's at the back. So click, hold, and drag auto contrast, and you'll see this little blue line appears. Okay, that little blue line, it's a little hard to see, that's where it's gonna go. Okay, I would like you to play around, I'm gonna set you a little task. I would like you to have them in alphanumeric order. So auto, my ABCs, auto color's at the top, then auto contrast, and then auto tone at the bottom, okay? Just to practice dragging them, that's all I want you to do, really. And you'll notice that the difference between, say, auto color and auto contrast, on the video, it might be so minutely different, just a slight color change. Then it's kind of up to personal preference, do you like auto color better or auto tone better? Now, if you go through, open up a bunch of images, and just run that one automatic feature. All right, so that's a basic introduction to layers, and we looked at some of the cool little automatic features in Photoshop. Now we're gonna use layers all throughout this course. So if you're finding, man, that was confusing with layers, don't worry. We're gonna kind of work through them every video, looking at layers, and you'll get a bit more comfortable with them. One of the things we'll have to do before we go, though, is save this document. Now we opened it up, remember, it was a JPEG when we opened it. Now if I go to File > Save, okay, it's gonna say, you can't be a JPEG, why is that? A JPEG can't have more than one layer, JPEG just had the background layer, and that's it. If you had not created these other layers, it would have just saved over top of the original. Okay, but Photoshop says, hey, you can't be a JPEG, so you're gonna have to be this Photoshop file, it's a PSD, there he is there, okay? And I'm happy for you to save it straight back into the source files using the same name, the only thing different will be the PSD. Don't change any of the settings, okay, and just click Save. This little Photoshop format options opens up every single time. Don't worry about this, okay, it just means that Photoshop's asking, if i save this as a PSD, do you want me to save it as a maximum compatibility version? And all that means is that it's more likely to open in really old versions of Photoshop. Okay, so I always leave this on, it makes the file size slightly bigger, but just leave it on and click on don't show again. Because it's not something that needs to pop up every time. I'm gonna leave mine on cuz I'm an instructor and I need to explain this thing. It's a pain, but let's leave it on there, let's click OK. Cool, so let's finish this off by going to File and Close. And before you go, let's practice that, so let's go to File and go to Open. And I want you to, on your own, open up the 02-layers, the Tevin Dodson, thank you very much for the image, click Open. And I'd like to set you a task, I want you to go through, duplicate the background layer, you'll end up with four layers in total. Okay, and I want you to practice with these three different automatic features. And then I want you to reorder them to the one at the top that you feel is the best. Remember, it's not always 100% perfect, okay, it's a bit of personal judgment. But drag the one that you think is the best to the top of the layers group, okay, and stack them up, just a bit of practice. All right, and I'll see you in the next video, where we are going to look at a little bit more of Photoshop kind of foundations. Where we show you how to work with multiple images, kinda copy and paste from one to the other, and how that works. All right, I will see you in the next video.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson you will learn about some basic image adjustments: Auto Tone, Auto Color, and Auto Contrast. You will then use these adjustments to explore how to add layers in Photoshop and how to edit them.
2.2 Combining Multiple Images
Hello friends, in this video we're going to look at kind of basic navigation of Photoshop. Okay, we learned a little bit in the last videos with layers, but now we're going to start moving things around and resizing them, okay? So, we're going to combine one, two, three images and put them all together on this one in these nice little cubes, okay? So, few little shortcuts, I promise not too many, but just the things that get used quite a lot. It's best to use the the teeny, tiny shortcuts. I promise not to overwhelm you much, all right? Let's get started now. All right, so to learn our kind of workflow features, we need to open up all of those images that we want to combine. So we're gonna go to File and we're gonna go to Open, and we're gonna be using these from Jessica Nolan. Okay, thank you very much, Jessica. And it's the three, okay? There's A, B, C, and D. Now, you can click one and just click Open, and open them all individually if you find that more useful. A little trick though, is select the first one, hold Shift, click the last one, okay? And they should all be selected, and click Open. Now, what's happening is, you can see along the top here I've got these tabs. So all the images are open in tabs. If for some reason, yours doesn't, okay, that's the default, but if it doesn't, go to Window > Arrange, and just click Consolidate on All Tabs. Now there is, there's probably three or four ways of combining images. Now, I'm just going to show you the one that's the most bulletproof and reasonably easy. So we want to, this first image here, this is where we want to get those little squares. So this first one here, and the way to kind of drag it to this tab here is actually kind of dragging it. So we're going to grab the Move tool, which is the first one in our little tool bar here. And you click and hold with your left mouse arrow, okay, click and hold the center of this image and drag it to this other tab. It's a bit weird, okay? And so click hold drag, drag, drag, drag, drag. The mouse is down the whole time and I just hover above this tab and Photoshop automatically switches to this one. I've still got the mouse down the whole time and then I move my mouse key down here and let go, okay? So, the big thing for that, it does feel a little weird, okay? I'm gonna drag it into place, and now it is, you have the mouse down the whole time. Okay, if they went horribly wrong or didn't work at all, okay, I'm gonna go to Edit and I'm gonna go to Step Backwards. It just kind of undoes and keep going step backwards until it's gone, okay? And I'm gonna practice again with you guys, so back to this tab, Move tool, click hold, drag in the center. I'm just holding down my mouse key holding it down, holding it down, holding it down. Okay, you do get used to it after a while, [LAUGH] it's a strange one. Okay, so, and what we'll do is, we'll do the same for this 03c, okay? So, click hold, drag the center of it, and then move it in here okay? I'm going to try and line them up nicely. Okay, you'll notice that Photoshop is pretty clever and tries to kind of automatically align things, okay? If yours doesn't align, go to View, come down and just make sure Show and the Smart Guides is on. It's probably on by default, but just in case it's not. Okay, so View > Show > Smart Guides. Great, so that works for all images and it's gonna be quite protective when we look at things later on called layer masks and adjustment layers. That dragging option is the best way to do it, in my opinion. Okay, the last one is gonna throw us a little bit, this one has a different size. So the same technique works, right? So I click hold, drag it to my first tab, let go, but it's ginormous. Okay, so, this is gonna happen to you where sometimes the images can be really, really big, it can go two kilometers that way, okay? So you need to kinda get them down to a proportionate size. So this is gonna be our kind of next bit of navigation. Now, we're gonna be learning zooming in and out first, okay? So for this to work, I need to zoom out a little bit. So there is a magnifying glass over here, okay, which you can click once to zoom in, and over here you can click it to minus. And now this thing when you click once will zoom out. So you just toggle between these two here. Now, you can definitely do it that way, but what you'll find is that, it's such a common thing you do in Photoshop, everybody learns the shortcut quite early. Now, if you hold down the Cmd key on a Mac or the Ctrl key on a PC and just tap the plus button on your keyboard, okay? Just up on the top of your keyboard there, plus to zoom in, minus to zoom out, okay? We're not gonna go through too many shortcuts here, but there's just a couple that you really need to know early on. What I'd like you to do, is zoom out to kind of this level, doesn't really matter. Just so you can see the edges, because what we'd like to do is shrink this guy down, okay? So I've got that layer selected. I'm gonna go to Image, nope, I'm gonna go to Edit. I'm gonna go to Transform and we're gonna use Scale. So scale is one you use quite often. We're going to cover all of these in a later tutorial, but for kind of fundamental navigation, you're gonna need to move things and scale it, okay? So we'll just cover this quickly now. So Edit > Transform > Scale. You'll see, that's what we zoomed out, so we can see the edges of these boxes. Okay, so what you can do is if you grab the edge, you drag it around, you can re-scale it down. The only trouble doing it this way, is that you can see it kinda distorts the image. So I'm gonna go to Edit > Undo. And what I wanna do is, I'm gonna hold down a shortcut, okay, so I'm gonna hold down the Shift key. We won't do too many shortcuts, I promise, okay? But hold down the Shift key and grab any of the corners before you start dragging, okay? And that just means it will scale the height and width, kind of a fundamental Photoshop thing. Okay, so once you get it to a size you kind of like, okay, sometimes if you're new. You're sitting here like me, looking at your hands [LAUGH] and going, do I let go of the Shift first or the mouse key first, okay? It's always the mouse, okay? Anytime you're thinking that, it's always the mouse. Let go of the mouse first, okay, and then you can let go of the Shift key. Now I'm gonna drag mine in kinda close and you see it kinda lined up nicely. And what I might do now is just drag it so it's the perfect width to match these other guys. Now, zooming in a little bit, who remembers the shortcut? You all do, okay, so on a Mac, its Cmd+, if you are on a PC, its Ctrl+. Okay, and zoom into a nice kind of size. And this brings us on to our next kind of fundamental navigation feature that we need to learn in Photoshop, okay, and it's just moving around this canvas. So you can see I can't see the bottom here. Now, the long painful way is grab any of these sliders, drag it down. And that is fine when you're really new. Okay, and I threw a lot of shortcuts into this tutorial, just one mor,e okay? Hold on the Spacebar key, see my little arrow here? The Spacebar key transforms into a little hand, okay? So Spacebar key and just kind of click, hold, and drag your mouse. So, the Spacebar + Down, click, hold, drag around, okay? Or use these little slider handles, they are totally fine. All right, and what I'd like to do is just resize it a little bit more, so it matches these sizes. So what's the key I hold down to make sure the height and width is the same? You remember, it's the Shift key. So holding Shift, drag it up and just get it kind of close, we're not looking for perfection right at this moment. We'll cover that a little bit more later on. Okay, get it close. And when you're finished, you need to kinda say, Photoshop, I am done to get rid of these like little marks that are on the outside. Because you'll find that, you see my menus just don't work now, okay? Cuz it's saying I'm halfway through this thing, please. Then, finish it off by hitting Return on your keyboard or the Enter key. Okay, and then it just kinda gets it to where I need. I'm gonna zoom out a little bit, which is you remember, Cmd- or Ctrl-, okay? And what I'm going to do is with my Move tool, okay? I'm depending on, if you've turned yours on or off, make sure auto select's on. Okay, and I can click and drag this one up here. I'm gonna drag this one here, and this one here. Beautiful, all right, my friends, that is going to be it. So just to recap, to move things from one image to another or at least one tab from another, use your Move tool. Click hold, drag it up to the tab, hold the mouse key down the whole time and let go of it. Now, if you end up with problems with it being the wrong size, you go to Edit, go to Transform and use Scale. And if you want to lock the height and the width together, what do you do? That's right, Shift key, hold that down, okay? And the other two things we learned were some shortcuts, okay? Zooming in, which is Cmd+ or- on a Mac, or Ctrl+ or- on a PC. And once you're in really close okay, you can drag around with these guys or hold down the Spacebar key to move around. Click, hold, and drag your mouse. All right friends, let's get on to the next video, where we start looking at something called levels. Probably the thing I use the most in Adobe Photoshop. All right, let's go there now.
- Overview
- Transcript
Get to grips with Photoshop levels in this lesson. You'll learn that the first step in correcting any photograph is getting the highlights, mid tones, and shadows correct. We will use Photoshop’s level adjustments to make this happen.
3.1 Tone Adjustment With Levels
Hi there, in this video, we're gonna look at something called levels. Basically, they get the shadows, and the highlights, and the midtones all to look really nice, okay? Let's take this image here, okay, it looks great. But then we add levels, and, looks more amazing. Right, it's the foundation. It's the thing that I do most in Photoshop when opening up a new photograph. Let's go learn how to do that now in Photoshop. All right, so first up, let's go to File and go to open and then your source files open up. O4a, okay this one here. It is a photograph by Erol Ahmed, okay? And let's click Open. All right, so let's look at opening the levels. Now there's a couple of ways of opening it in Photoshop. And if you've done Photoshop a long time ago, you might have used this method here. Let's not use these, these here are very destructive. So we're going to use the non destructive methods, okay, which is basically there's adjustments panel here. If you can't find it, let's go to window, and let's open up adjustments, and you're going to hover above them after while you work out what these little icons do. But can you see here, I've hovered above it with my mouse and you can see. Oop, there is where levels is written. Okay, so now click on this one here. This is definitely for me as a amateur photographer but professional designer, I use this one the most when I'm fixing up my images, cuz I need a lot of work with my imagery. Now this complicated looking thing opens up it's called the histogram. And it's not complicated. Well, it's not very hard to use with, which is nice. And basically what we're looking at is information from images. This is all the see this little dark house here and the White House. This is everything that is really dark in the shadows and this is everything that's really bright light lights. Okay, you can see here, it's missing a little bit of information there and a little bit there. Now what you do with labels is you basically just drag this black slide up on to the first little mountain here. Okay so click hold and drag up and you'll notice here my image, if I click, hold and drag. As I drag it, can I get closer to this kind of peek here the blacks become a lot stronger. If I go too far past this like first Ryan's watch this, I started so that's kind of like getting kind of weird. Okay, so there is not a perfect adjustment, but you just drag it here basically the beginning of the first Hill, okay? The same on the other side. So there are whites in here, but they're not super strong to make them nice and strong. All we do is grab this white little kind of house thing here, drag it to the left. And do I want to drag all the way in here? No because it start over exposing some of these whites and they start blurring together. So it's kind of the beginning of the first little hill. There it is them. Okay, so often distracting those two in taking the two ends and we'll get you your strong whites and your strong blacks. Now the middle slide here the gray sliders all you mid tones. Now this will depend on the image basically every image that open up I often tech names, okay, and they both come in. Now where does this middle slide ago depends on the image. If I drag it all the way to the right, can sit down all the way the left it lines it up and this will really depend on your image and what look you're looking for. Okay, so I'm just dragging my back and forth and I'm looking at my image, not my slider over here. Okay, looking at the image and just finding where I feel it's nice. Now I didn't need to move it much at all. And that is correcting an image kind of one on one. I do this, the first thing I do before I do anything else in Photoshop is just get the levels right. Now to check whether you made this thing better or worse than when you opened it. You can see here this is coordinate adjustment layer. So these levels, you can see it's appeared in my Layers panel. The cool thing about that is that I can turn it on and off. Okay, like we did earlier on when we did our automatic features, and you can turn this on and off. Okay, so turn the layer off, I can see the background underneath. And that's what it sounded like and I look fine when we open it. So until we do the levels that you like, okay, man, there was a bit more in that image I could have got okay, so yeah that is Labels. What I'd like you to do now is save this image, okay? It's gonna ask you to call it a PSD, and that is great, a Photoshop Document. And I'd like you to open up the second example, okay? And I'd like you to practice on your own. So it's 04B, okay? And open up this one here and practice the same thing. Create adjustments layer, okay and the levels and see how you go attacking the two ends and then decide where that middle slider goes. And this will be a cool time to share what you've done and kinda what your end result would be. So check us out on social media, and that's at tuts plus design. Daniel loves Adobe. And on Instagram, I am bring your own laptop. So take a screenshot, save a JPG, I'd love to see what your end result with that second example is. All right, so let's get on to the next video, where we look at vibrance. Okay, getting and extracting amazing color from your images. All right, let's go and do that now.
- Overview
- Transcript
Continuing our work with Photoshop levels, we'll look at how to change color levels in Photoshop. Using Photoshop’s Vibrance and Saturation, we will correct the color in an image. The second step for achieving beautiful images is ensuring your colors are the best they can be!
3.2 Color Adjustment
Hi there, in this video we're going to look at vibrance, and we're gonna do this, before and really after. Okay, I've gone a little level board to exaggerate the effect for the intro, okay, but let's back it off a little bit, and let's look at kind of some real world use in this video. All right, let's get started. All right, first up, let's go to File > Open. And if you did the previous tutorial, and you did the homework that I set, which was this one here, 04B, have that one open, cuz we're gonna use that one. And if you didn't, and you skipped ahead, you can open up 05A. And I've done the homework for you. Click Open. And basically this is the image we want, open, and you might have done the levels yourself. You might skip to this one here, where I've done them for you. So levels is the first thing that I do. The next thing is vibrance, okay. So with the layer selected, let's go to our Adjustments panel. And it is kind of V here. Okay, it's the last one on the top right, click on Vibrance. Now vibrance, if you were like maybe old school Photoshop and you're kind of getting back into it, saturation was the only option before. And saturation and vibrance are, I guess, interesting things to compare. So vibrance is the best one to use in my opinion. Okay, watch this. If I crank the vibrance up, things just get more amazing. Okay, or the big difference is that you can see some of these images or some of these colors here, the front here, especially these pinks and these yellows, they're actually quite strong already. And what vibrance does is when it lifts them up, it starts lifting up other colors, supporting colors in the background, whilst leaving these. They go up a little bit, but not as much as some of these background colors. So let's look at this green here. Okay, if I lower that back down to about 0, it's kind of washed out. And instead of increasing them all equally, it leaves some of these more saturated ones alone, okay? And brings up some of the other ones to meet it. The difference between that and, say, saturation, watch this, if I crank up saturation to get this kinda green to come out, these guys end up going a little bit overboard. Okay, you might like that effect, okay, there's no kind of right or wrong. It's more, this is probably gonna give you the more natural effect, so increasing the vibrance. How far do you go? You can max that out, okay, that's totally fine. Often, depending on the quality of the initial photograph, it's only kinda slight adjustments. Just to kinda lift the colors. Plus 40 in this image works for me. Down at the bottom here, remember the eyeball, on and off, this vibrance layer, just to see, have I made this better or worse? You can see it's just lifting, say, these blues back here and these greens here, just to make a more colorful image, or more vibrant image. Might go up up even a little higher, you can do both. Okay, bit of saturation and a bit of vibrance, not normally what I do. Cool, so that is vibrance. And that's kind of like, I guess, lifting the colors, leaving some of the saturated ones alone. What I'd like you to do is save this document, close it, okay, it'll save it as a PSD. And I want you to open up the second version, okay. This one is here is Jaztina Poon, okay, open up her image. Okay, and I'd like you to do the same thing. Go to Adjustments panel, go to this little kinda V, and see. And this one here, I wanna do it with you okay? I set it for homework, but I'm doing it with you. Why, because this one's a really clear example of that's already really saturated, but say this, mm, I'd say rooster, chicken, okay, is not. So watch this when it comes up, okay? Vibrance lifts the color of this chicken here, but leaves this fine. Whereas saturation, okay, ends up blowing this out to get this color going. So have a practice with this, even though I just did it with you, and save it. I'd like to see your final result, okay? So check us out on social media. Twitter is TutsPlusDesign. And on Twitter, I am danlovesadobe. Or if your favorite is Instagram, I am bringyourownlaptop. I'd love to see what you did. All right, let's get into the next video, where we start looking at adjusting kinda specific hues. At the moment, we just made everything a bit better. Okay, let's say we have a color shift and there's a little bit too much color. We can start doing some more selective adjustments. All right, I'll see you in the next video.
- Overview
- Transcript
Continuing our work with Photoshop levels, we'll look at how to change color levels in Photoshop. Using Photoshop’s Vibrance and Saturation, we will correct the color in an image. The second step for achieving beautiful images is ensuring your colors are the best they can be!
3.3 Hue Adjustments
Hi there, in this image we are going to look at hues which is basically just colors in Photoshop. And we are going to look at doing kinda selective colors there where we leave the stalk alone but we can adjust colors, okay? Cool stuff like that, and also more kinda like practical stuff. Where say this image here, the colors are grayed but we just wanna make them lift them up a little bit. Can you see before, after, before, after, okay? Just to kind of like subtle adjustments more that day to day use of Photoshop huge adjustments. All right, let's go and learn that now in Photoshop. All right, let's look at the first step, let's go to file, let's go to open In your source files open up 06a, the first one. Okay, thank you. Thank you, DJ. It's going to open, make sure on our Move Tool and we are going to go back to our Adjustments panel. Okay, so we looked at levels earlier and then we looked at vibrance now we're going to look at the kind of next step and we're going to look at this one called Hue and Saturation. Click on him is the first of the second line. And start off with I want you to grab the just this main hue slider here. Grab a little diamond in the middle of the triangle and drag all slowly to lift an insulator right. Go, okay, it's just the way of going through and deciding and changing the hue of an image okay completely. Now this works perfectly for this particular one because there's only one color in the image. Let's close this now, and jump into an image that has multiple colors and we have to use a couple little tricks to adjust that. So let's save and close this one and open up the next file. I'm not gonna save mine because, just because, I've done that before, let's go to File Open and let's open up 06b. Okay, and this one here by Philippe. If I pronounce people's names wrong I'm sorry I try and let's look over this lines selected. Let's go to adjustments and let's open up hue and saturation. Now, if I grabbed this hue slide and now and I want to change this to say pink, I change it to pink, where is pink? Okay, you notice it's changing the the stock as well. So, just by dragging the slider at the top by itself, it just changes everything. It's quite cool kind of acidy dream type but let's say that I wanna kind of isolate this particular color. Okay, so where's his master, drop that down, and let's go down to rids, okay and now it's going to only adjust the red color. Okay, so that's a way of adjusting a specific color. You might have a product that you've got a photograph or some clothing. And the cool thing about it is that it's quite a unique color within the image. If there's multiple things that are in red in this image, this is not gonna work. But yeah, we'll look at something called masking later on to fix that. But for the moment, okay, cuz we've only got one red thing, it's a nice, quick easy way to adjust the hue. Not just adjusting the hue, we can go through and adjust the saturation of that colour as well for that one particular colour. Okay, the other thing is let's say that you want to change the colour of the stock. Now what happens especially in kind of like landscape and kind of nature shots is the like, I can't want to just that colour which is green, clearly because it's the stock of a rose. But if you look real closely, it's actually opposing right and it's actually a bunch of kind of focus and yellows that make up that kind of my brain tells me that it is green because that's what green stock should be. So, what we forgot to say green since I wanna just you not a lot happens you can see, okay, it is because actually this guy is made up of mainly yellows. So it happens quite a bit you are looking maybe this thing is broken. It is not just like the yellows are just not the greens are not very green. They are more of a yellow color. So now I have got yellows and adjusting them. You can see I can adjust it. And often what I will end up doing is adjusting the greens to look more like the kind of green you just drag a little bit to the right and it's kind of made a green. I'm going to drag up the saturation. Okay, just as an exaggeration to show you that, yeah, let's actually the yellows. Now the Lightness slide here, I never use. It does a pretty weird thing, it's just kinda like covers the, we're looking at this down here, covers it all in white or removes it all black. Okay, so I never use that slide. If you wanna play with the lights and darknesses, okay, go back to the labels like we did earlier on in the tutorial. Remember that's under adjustments, in here under labels, okay. So you might not be doing this particular exercise very much where you kinda wanna replace the color. Let's look at kinda more thing that I end up running into a lot more. So let's save and close this one. I'm not saving it. And let's go to File Open, and in here we're gonna open john-marks-arnold, john-mark-arnold, okay, is, 06c let's open up that one. Okay, so this is kinda typically what I end up doing, I don't end up changing like the whole rows, like changing completely different color, I don't get to do that very often. Most of my work is, I got an image from a photographer using it for a project. And I just want to make the greens a little green in the sky little blue. So to do that it's the exact same technique as we did for the previous one, but we're gonna be a little bit more subtle with it. So adjustments panel, let's go to hue and saturation. And what I wanna do is adjust this grass here. Now, like in the last one, grass in this case is actually more yellow then it is green. If I grab the greens and try to adjust the colors, nothing much is changing. So if I go to yellows though and adjust them. Okay, you can see there's a lot more yellows going on in that grass. What I wanna do is, instead of making them purple, which you could do, okay? I'm just gonna make them a bit more green, so I'm dragging a little bit to the right. Now, on, off, on, off. You can see, yeah, a bit more green. And what I also might do is grab the saturation, just drag it up a tiny bit. Now, it says kind of like tiny adjustments. These are the hard ones because it's like, sometimes you wanna just make it scream like you fix it in Photoshop, but often it's just more kind of like subtle changes than it is. That's the kind of, I guess the nice adjustments are just tiny little corrections. Same with the sky. The sky is actually made up of a mixture of blues and cyans often. So you have to kind of have to peg the blues. Check that they're in there by dragging the saturation up. You can see that they are definitely there. So what I want to do is probably just bump them up a little bit. Okay, on, off, just a little bit more maybe. And in here you might go to the cyans. And I click at the saturation. Definitely in there as well. There's a mixture of both of those colors. And you can decide whether if you want to kind of adjust them. And make them maybe a little bit more blue or yeah, a little thick. There's a little bit of touch that way. And I'm going to crank out the saturation a little bit. Okay, so on, off, on, off. Might be a little bit hard to see in the video, but hopefully if you're playing along your monitor, you'll be able to see it quite clearly. Yeah, it's kind of like tiny adjustments are the things that I spend most of my time doing, just little fixes. One thing before we go is, this one here is is colorized. If I click on colorize, it kind of removes all the colors and gives you an option for the slider here to do like a sepia or just kind of a single tone color. Okay, so this can be kind of cool for that CPF effect, okay? Find a kind of a really yellow or kind of dust color and yeah easy just turn it on and off. Okay, has a color is good for that. Okay, so I'm going to actually save this one here now and what I want to do is I've got an exercise for you if you go to File Open. The last one and that is 06d by Elas Kadik. I am just gonna, anyway, just click open. Okay, and this one here beautiful photograph and it is cool the way it is but let us say that we want to make this guy's little bluer and the guy the trees in the water a little bit more saturated. So I would like to use us to do this for an example. Okay, so go through, go to adjustments panel. And use your hue and saturation and I want you to see if you can practice your techniques, raising the blues, see if there's any signs in the greens and just kind of, I guess, make it a little richer. Right my friends, that is gonna be the end of hue adjustments. Okay, we did some big sliding adjustments for that first image, but then we got a little bit more and more specific, as we got along just kind of tweaking the colors towards the end of this exercise. So, I'll do homework and I will see you in the next video where we start working with text.
- Overview
- Transcript
Moving on, in this lesson we’ll work with the Type Tool to create a simple postcard flyer. You will learn how to create the correct page size and dimensions for a printable postcard. You will also master using expanding and fixed-width type boxes for typing text.
4.1 How to Work With Type
Hi there, and this tutorial we are going to look at type in Photoshop. Now we are gonna create a little mini design project. It is gonna be a postcard Mother's Day Sale type of thing. And yeah, we are gonna explore type throughout. All right, let us get started. All right, so the first thing we're gonna do is, and let's say we've got an image we wanna use, right? Which is it's got a File Open. In your source files, it's called O7a, we're back, we've used this image before by Errol. Okay, let's click Open. And instead of trying to resize this into a postcard size, that's what people tend to do. Let's say you want to do something for like a US letter or A4, as they try and grab this and try and reshape it into the right dimensions. It's way easier in Photoshop to go to File, New, create the right size. Then drag that in, and use our cool little scale option to kind of resize it so it fits, it's definitely easier doing it that way. But you'll also find in Photoshop is that got some, you can just type in your inches along the top here. Or switching to centimeters or millimeters depending on which part of the world you're in. What we're gonna do is, we're gonna go to print, and there's some default templates in here. Okay, you can see this US, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, A4, click on this little View All Presets. And what I'm looking for is one in here called, it's not in here at all. Okay, it's in the Art & Illustration and it's this one here called Postcard. So now that's selected, it's done a few things, it's given it the right height and width. Know in different parts of the world there's actually different sizes, we're gonna use the US. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make it landscape, okay? Just for this one, we're not gonna change anything else. Just make sure yours looks like mine in terms of resolution and color mode, but we'll discuss that later on. Let's click Create. Now let's go and save this thing. And what you'll notice is that Save is grayed out, it's weird. Photoshop, it's one of the kind of quick. So Photoshop is, well you haven't done anything to this, so I'm not gonna save it. So if I grab the text tool and started adding text, it would start. Allow me to save or just go to File, Save As, okay? And I'm gonna give it a name. I'm gonna put it into my Source Files. And I'm gonna call this one, Dan's Postcard, postcard even. Let's click Save. Now we're gonna use our fancy trick we learned earlier in this course. We're gonna go to our image of flowers. We're gonna grab our move tool. We're gonna click hold drag, drag, drag, drag into the tab. Keep holding the mouse down, and then let go down here. All right, so it's the wrong size. Okay, I kind of did that on purpose so we can practice our resizing. And what we're gonna have to do is gonna look at rotating it as well. So make sure our layer here is selected. It's got the little icon, or the little thumbnail of our flowers. Let's zoom out, who remembers what the shortcut is? That's right command minus on a Mac control minus on a PC. We're gonna zoom out so we can see the ages like we did earlier. Let's go to Edit, let's get on to Transform, and let's look at Scale. Okay, and he's actually, reasonably the right size but I wanna rotate it around. So let's go to Edit, Transform, and it's gonna rotate, okay? And the same kind of thing, grabbing the corners, okay, and drag it around. Now remember when we did the scale will be held shift, and it would kind of resize it proportionately. holding shift in this case when we're using the rotate tool, okay? Just kind of locks it into 45 degree angles. Okay, so it's just nice little steps. So I'm gonna rotate mine around, so it looks like that. Now you go back to Scale, hit that Transform, Scale, grab the corner. Remember holding Shift, drag down, and let's get it to a sort of size like this. You can drag this into it afterwards by letting go, you can let go of Shift and just drag the center. Don't drag the little dot in the center, okay? It's just the center of rotation just won't do what you want, just drag anywhere else in here, and we can move it around. Okay, I'm not too worried too much about the ages of the moment. Okay, I just want to get it kinda lined up ish like that. Now remember, nothing works. Why is it not working? We've got a press Enter on your keyboard origin, okay, this key, I'm done. That's what I wanted to do. All right, so let's now add some text, okay? So down here is your text tool. Now actually the zoom in a little bit. Remember the shortcut is command plus on a Mac, control plus on a PC. Grab the Type tool, says capital T here, okay? And what you can do is, we're gonna learn there are kind of two ways of adding text. And the first way is clicking once, okay? And you can type in, and it just kind of goes for you. I'm just mashing away the keyboard to give you an instance. Now if your font is a whole lot bigger, or a different color doesn't really matter. What you might do is select it all, and change the font either over here. You can do it both places, the top or over here on the right down to something like ten point for this example. So that's one way of adding type. When you're finished, okay, you can go back to the move tool, and that kind of commits that change. And I wanna show you the other way of adding type. That's good for headings. So but if you've got some like say body copy that wants to go in, grab the Type Tool. And before you start typing, actually no, that's fine, okay? And is just a click hold and drag a box, okay? Whereas before we just clicked once, we started typing. This one we clicked held the mouse down, and drag that a box. What this is cool for is, I'm messing with the keyboard again. You can see it kind of breaks on two different lines. Okay, it's a good way of putting body copy. If yours is like mine, there's these massive big gaps in between the lines here. Okay, I'm going to select it all by using my title, and just kind of like drag up across all of us. And then over here on the line spacing, it is way too big. I'm gonna sit back to order, go. So let's look at styling some of these now. So those are the two ways of doing it. Clicking once and the other one is clicking and dragging the box, depending on what you need. But to finish this, go back to the move tool, great. So what I'm gonna do is, I've got these two layers, crazy leaders in them. And so this first layer here, actually, doesn't really matter what layer on. If you grab the type tool, click anywhere in this top part. I'm gonna select all the text, hit delete, and I'm gonna type in some proper text now. So yeah, we're gonna cover a few more text features, but now it's a little bit. We're doing a little bit of design work. Okay, so Mother's Day Sale, I'm going to select all the text. I'm going to make it white. Now you can see there's, I can use the color here or color there. I've got the text selected, I'm gonna put color. And in terms of choosing a color, you use this little slider to pick the hue. Okay, let's say you wanted pink, and then you click the upper pink. You can see here's my text and that color. You might have to move this out of the way to see what you're doing. What I want is white, and to get white is to grab this little dot that you've put anywhere. And just click hold, and drag it, drag it, drag it. And drag it kind of like wing to this corner, I drag it a little bit past means it gets all jammed up in the corner, and this perfectly white, click OK. I'm using Gehrman for my main one just because it's a font that you're likely to have as well. And so in terms of font size that makes me. What am I do is after day put a return in, okay? And if the spacing between the lines is not great, okay, we're gonna have to adjust it. The other thing we might have to do is this text here is kind of overlapping the one at the back. So let's grab this lamp, okay? Which is the top one there. We go by move tool, and I'm gonna say, come down a little bit, but he say, way down here. Back to Mother's Day, and I'm gonna drag you down a little bit. Awesome, don't worry if you you finding a little bit hard to read against the background with your phone. We're gonna add drop shadows, and a future video to this particular text. Let's look at a couple of advanced features. Let's grab the title. It's click once, okay, because I just want to text box that runs on forever. I'm just going to put in, let's say save the day, save the date, fonts little bit big, so you have to grab it all. Let's just make it a bit smaller, okay? And we live different or in the world, right? And so I'm in Europe at the moment, and it's different from where I'm from in New Zealand,okay? I get the second Monday, second Sunday in May in New Zealand, but it's not the same in Ireland here, which can be tricky. Sorry mom, the reason I'm doing this is I want to select all the text, okay? And I wanna make it capitals. I wanna change the font first. I'm gonna pick probably one you don't have. You can pick any font you like. I like Museo at the moment, okay, it's when you can download and buy from type kit. We're not gonna cover how to install fonts specifically just yet, but I'm gonna pick, yeah. Okay, so pick any font, and it's I wanna make it all capitals. So over here, you've only got some basic kind of features. You've got the fonts, the kind of font white. Basically, whether it's light or bold, and some other basic stuff. You got this Advanced button, it's not that advanced. Click on it, and it gives you kind of, I know some of the stuff that I'm used to seeing in a type panel. And the one that I want is this third one, and it says just make all caps. That's what I wanna do. I wanna drag the font down. Now another little tip for fonts, you can see it goes from 18 to 24. Like what if you want 20 you can just type it in there, and hit Return and that'll force it to be. Or the trick that I use quite a lot is doesn't matter if you using this one, or this one down here, close them back in. See this little icon here, you click and hold and drag on that icon. I'm just clicking, holding, and dragging left to right. If you got really so computer doesn't work that flash. But I'm dragging mine I find this this a little easier to work out well find one. Great, I've got mine down to 12 points, Okay? My move tool, and I click it, try and get there, grab my Mother's Day layer, and drag here, back there. And this last layer down here, okay, this crazy layer gonna move him right about there. Now I don't have specific text to go in here, so I'm gonna show you a little trick before we leave. I'm gonna grab the type tool, I'm gonna click in here. I'm gonna slick all these texts, I'm gonna hit Delete, okay? What we're gonna do is put in something called placeholder text or lorem ipsum. Now it's just a really common way of putting in placeholder text. I know that, let's say that I'm the designer in this job, and not the copywriter. And it's coming from the client, and I know it's not coming today. So I just wanna put some text in. So .type, come down to Paste, lorem ipsum. Now it's just Latin words that just mixed up, so that make any sense. And it allows you to design without there being in that kind of distraction of fake words. And then what I'm going to do is just delete, put it puts in a lots, [LAUGH] okay? So I'm deleting lots of mine. And just I've got a little bit of learn some in there. I'm gonna put in a couple of routines. Now I put it, florist, my florist. This is totally made up brand, okay, myflorist.com. It's probably a website, not mine. So I'm gonna sync all the text, and now you might wanna skip ahead cuz I'm just styling. Now looking white. Okay, what font am I gonna use and use that Museo again, I like that one. Museo, like Musiah rounded, it's really cool. Makes my move tool, and that's going to be, yeah, gonna be it for this particular course. The big thing to know is that you click once, you get a tight box that goes on forever. And if you click and drag, you get a box that has an outside, or a kind of a break at the end. A good tip is to select on the layer, and you might need to go into Avanced. now I don't think advanced is super nerdy stuff. Actually, this good usable stuff in there. And you also know if you toggle this so click keep clicking it. It switches between your advanced character and bounds paragraph. So if you're looking for indents, and other stuff, yeah, just keep clicking on this mesh away until you find the one you need. All right, my friends, let's finish this one, and get into the next video where we look at doing type on a path.
- Overview
- Transcript
Now we’re going to take type to the next level, learning how to type on a path in Photoshop. Creating curved text is easier than you may think—just watch this video to learn how to warp type in Photoshop into interesting shapes and how to get text to follow a curved line. In the final project for this course, we will create a text badge.
4.2 Warped Type and Type on a Path
Hi there. In this video we are going to do things like this where we get the, say, photographer's name to flow along the edge of the leaf here, okay, along a path. And down the bottom here we are gonna make this particularly ugly badge where we get the text to flow along a circle. And then we are gonna make some bulgy text in the middle, okay, all learning cool skills using text in Photoshop. All right, so to get started, let's open the file to get started with. Let's go to File, Open, and in your source files, okay, you can open up 08-warped-text. Now, if you are following along this tutorial series in order, okay, you can just use the file that you created in the last video rather than opening up this one. Okay, but if not, open up this file. And what I'm going to have to do, what you might have noticed is that I picked some new fonts. I just couldn't handle Garamond anymore. So I picked some fonts. The trouble is, is you're not going to have these fonts. So what I'm going to have to do is I don't want there to be any kind of trouble when you're trying to open the document and it's saying you've got no fonts. So what I'm going to have to do is click the top one, hold Shift, grab the last one and [SOUND] we're going to get a layer and we're going to do the Merge Layers. Now your file is going to open, it's not going to have any trouble, but the text is not editable. Sorry about that, cool. So let's start with the kinda curve that goes around here that identifies the photographer. Okay, and we'll get, it's called typing on a path. Okay, that's the kinda term for it. Now, what we need to do is create a path to follow. And we're going to do two versions, we'll do that plus the little badge down the bottom you saw. And we're going to start with, if you find the pen tool over here, and hold it down. So click hold, hold on the pen tool. Okay, and these extra options pop out. We're gonna use the free form pen tool. If you're already master of the pen tool, use that one. Okay, the freeform pen tool's for people that don't even know what these are, okay? So nice quick, easy version. So let's grab freeform pen tool. There's kind of two things before we get started. Along the top here, you can pick shape or path. Let's be on path, okay. And on the top here, there's a cog, click on the little gear wheel thing and curve fit, bump it up a little bit, okay? It goes, I think maximum is ten, but go up to five. All it does is when you draw, it's gonna help you kind of smooth out the line. So if you're drawing with a mouse and you're finding that the line's not very nice, just go into the cog and adjust this curve fit. Cool, so what I'm going to do is I wanted to kind of curve around here. It's best to start where you want the text to start. If I start up here and start drawing down but I want my text to come up this way, it can cause problems. So I'm gonna undo, step backwards. So I'm gonna down here. And I'm gonna try and up and over. It's a really hard movement to do if you're finding it hard. I've practiced a couple of times off screen. Okay, so that was okay. And you'll notice that it's curved that out nicely. That's to do with the settings in the cog. So that's an okay start for me. Okay if you get it wrong, hit it, step backwards, give it another go. Once you've got your path, though, the interesting things about paths is you don't see them as, they're one of the few things that don't appear in the layers panel. They end up in this paths panel. Don't go in there, it's messy and scary. But for this technique, we're gonna stay out here on the layers. So all we need to do now to get the text to follow along is grab the type tool and there's no extra settings. You just gotta watch this icon change. You can see by default it's this kind of like, I don't even know how to describe that drawing, that thing there, but you can see it in front of you, right? And when it changes, look, ooh, see the little line going through it? Bad, good, bad, good, that's the icon you're looking for. And wherever you start clicking is where the text is gonna start. So I'm gonna start somewhere down here, doesn't have to be perfect. You'll notice my cursor is flashing. Now if the last thing you did in Photoshop was a really big font, okay? It was up to like 200. It's going to be this giant flashing cursor. So before you start typing, just pick an appropriate size. I'm gonna go real small on mine. It's gonna be about 6 pt. Pick any font you like. I'm using Museo Sans Rounded. Okay, but you can use anything you like, and we're gonna type in the artist's name. Erol Ahmed, okay? And yeah, that's type on a path. If you can draw it and you can use the type tool, just click on it, will follow along. There's a couple of things you probably want to do, is you can select all the text like normal and make some adjustments. Okay font and size and color, mine's white. And the other thing you might want to do is this starting position for it. So I'm going to zoom in, remember Cmd++ on a Mac, Ctrl++ on a PC. Okay, and I'm gonna use my little sliders here. Can't use my space bar shortcut that we learned earlier on because I just learned if you hold down space bar it just puts in lots of space bars. Cool, so we've got this, now we want a begin and ending point, you can kinda see them there. There is this little cross icon, that's the beginning, and that's the ending. To adjust where it starts on this line and where it ends, you have to use this tool here. It's just underneath, okay? It's the path selection tool. Now, again, you can hold down this tool. If yours is stuck on the white area, that's fine, just click and hold it down and just grab the path selection tool. Cool, and if you click hold you can drag the beginning point. Drag it back. It's a little bit tough, if you're finding like, man, this is a little confusing, it is. It's a little bit tough to do. And the ending point, I don't really change that I want to be as long but you can see If it's too small, it doesn't have enough room to fit that word and just kind of drops them off. So if you are finding everything's disappearing, you might have to find that little circle, okay, and drag it out to the end of the line. Another thing you can do is click hold and drag anywhere in the middle of the line. You can see that little icon, it's all about icons here, see the little arrow there? If you click hold and drag it, okay, you can drag it and flip it underneath, and it's kinda flipped underneath. I'm gonna go to Edit > Undo, it's not what I want, step backwards. Okay, I'm going to though go get mine to kinda move to about there. And the other thing is, do you want to edit the path? Okay, now I can kind of grab any of these points and just kind of drag them along, sometimes though if you are not used to using vector paths it's easier just to go to things like edit, transform path and go to Rotate just say you just need to kind of like of like adjust it a little bit. Hit Return, okay, and you can kinda just make some adjustments. Don't just click anywhere on the line [LAUGH] step backwards. If you want to physically move this now, okay, go back to your Move tool, okay, that's probably the easiest to do. What I might do, it's quite bright. I'm going to lower the, not lower the opacity, I'm gonna change the color. So I'm clicking on the color of my type, okay? And I'm just going to lower it down to something just a little bit more off white. We're gonna look at drop shadows a little bit, if you're like, man, I wish I could add drop shadows. Why aren't we doing drop shadows? It's in a later tutorial. We'll do that real soon. Trying to segment everything out here, it's a little tough. All right, the next thing we'll do is we are going to create the badge, okay, that we saw at the beginning. So I'm gonna use a little shortcut to zoom right out completely. We can just hold Cmd+-, and it works. But if you hold Cmdon a Mac, or Ctrl on a PC, and just hit the o. It's the one along the top, okay, above all the letters. So not o, not o then, zero, okay, next to nine. Click on that, and it just kind of puts it in full screen, it's a handy little trick, little shortcut. All right, so to do the badge is quite similar. Instead of using the freeform pen tool to draw the shape, we're gonna use the Ellipse tool. So if you click and hold down, you probably got the rectangle tool selected by default. Click, hold the mouse down for a while, and then go to the Ellipse tool, okay? And the same thing with this, you can draw with a shape, okay, but it's better to draw with a path, okay? Remember the path is this kind of like hidden invisible line that the ticks can follow. So, ellipse, path, now we're gonna draw out a circle. I want mine in the bottom right here, okay, somewhere in here. Now if I draw out a circle, okay, I can draw any sort of ellipse that I want. If I want it to be a perfect circle though, the height and width, who can guess what we need to hold down on our keyboard? Have a guess, you might be wrong, you might be right. It's the Shift key, okay. That Shift key constraints the height and width. We did it when we transformed early, remember, when we scaled it up and down, we hold down the Shift key. Okay, get it to a right sorta size and then remember, what do I let go first? Let go of my mouse first and I've got a kind of circle, we can adjust this later on. Just like before, okay, we've got our path, now grab the type tool and we're looking for the right icon. This is a little bit more important because so a bad icon, good icon, but then sneakily, there's another one. Okay, this is a third group. So you might wanna do this on purpose, okay? But if I use this icon where the dotted circle around the outside, if I click once, it's going to turn it into a shape that I can type into. So I'm typing and putting in a few spaces to break the lines up. That is a technique. We're not doing it in this course. So we're gonna go Edit > Undo typing. Okay, actually, I'm gonna go what I want to get it because you're halfway through typing, okay, I'm gonna hit the Escape key on my keyboard top left. Just kind of like Escape key is like, I didn't mean it, let's get out of there button. Okay, and let's go to Edit > Step backwards and we're back. Cool, so we've got our path, and we're gonna look for the right icon bad, bad, good, okay. And try and get it where you want it to start. I want mine to start in the middle there. Kind of, all right, and we're gonna start typing so I'm typing in all caps so FRESHNESS, can never spell this word. I'm totally gonna pause this and come back and spell it right. [LAUGH] Okay, what you'll notice is freshness guaranteed. Okay, and, man, it's probably wrong, it's okay. And what I'm gonna do is I could rotate this around or what I'm gonna do is my cursor's still flashing and he can see a little flashing there. It can be anywhere. I'm just gonna go and be centered text, okay? So that's gonna kinda try and center it. The problem is it kind of centered upside down. That's okay. So instead of trying to play around with these markers, okay, there's that little cross and then this little circle, they're actually mixed up together here. They're really a bit of a pain. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through and do this. Edit > Transform path and I'm gonna go to Rotate, and this is just easier. Okay, so I'm going to rotate it around so it's at the top. I hit Return, and that's just a nicer way of doing it. These little targets are painful. All right, again, the font size is going to be up to what you're doing. I'm going to go down to five points probably pretty low. We'd have print this out and double check whether it's legible on our postcard. It's always a interesting thing when you're working on a screen and need to print, always print it off. So, budget one in your office just to see can you read the text at five point? Probably not, but heigh-ho, this is an example. So I want to leave it there and go on to doing the squeegee text in the middle but people will inevitably go, hey, how do I put text along the bottom there? And the thing about it is that you can't do it on the same path, okay? So what you do is, you duplicate this path, and you have two of them, and flip it over. Doesn't make sense? Probably not. Let's learn by doing. So what I'm going to do is right click freshness guaranteed. And I'm gonna say duplicate layer, give it a name. What was it called, next day. It doesn't really matter what you call it. I never name my layers, okay. You should though. Okay, I'll just call it next day. But you see it hasn't changed the text. What's happened is, if I grab my move tool, there's just two of them sitting on top of each other. Now, this is a bit of a hack because say Adobe Illustrator, which would be perfect for doing this exact same badge thing and you know, there's tutorials on how to do that. But Photoshop does it okay, so let's just look at it. So, I've got two of them now. I want to flip it upside down, so let's grab the type tool, okay. And, like before, okay, if I click in here, remember what I can kind of drag this so it kind of flips upside down. Where are you? I'm not using the text took, that doesn't work, okay? I'll leave that in there because you'll probably do the same thing. Grab the Direct Selection Tool over here, okay? The black arrow and then click hold and drag, and flip it over to the other side. Cool, and it's on the wrong way. So I'm gonna use my Edit > Transform Path > Rotate, I'm gonna flip it around. Now, I'm flipping this around. You might have seen before that mine just happen to magically snap like this into these nice little degrees. You can manually do it at the top here. You can see those are degrees, okay? But if you hold Shift while you're dragging the corners, it just kind of locks it into 45 degree angles. And that's going to work for me. Hit return, [LAUGH] I'll do it one more time. Return, eventually you'll get it. Okay, so what I want to do is I want it to be kind of what you'll notice if I grab my move tool and I drag him up, he's kind of in a different sort of, he's on the inside of the line now. So this is where Illustrator has an option to go through and kind of flip it to the outside of the path. What I mean by that is, you can see he's sitting on the inside, okay, where I want him to kinda be spread around the outside. And I can't figure out a way to do this in Photoshop. I don't think you can. So if you can, leave me a comment, I'd love to know how. Okay, I don't think you can. So what we can do is just make the circle a little bigger. So the same part, Edit > Transform path. Let's go to scale. Okay, I want to make it bigger, but I wanna hold down Shift to get it to kind of be proportionately bigger. Okay, and then it's just kind of working out what seems to work for your design. Try not to click on the line. Okay. Move tool. Little bit of transforming, a little bit of wriggling around. And this one down here is not gonna be freshness guaranteed any more. This one's going to be next day delivery. Now look. Cool, I'm gonna rotate it a little bit longer. You notice I'm not going out to the Edit menu much anymore. Okay, if I want to rotate, Edit > Transform. Okay, there are some shortcuts. Free Transform is the cool shortcut that does a bit of scaling and a bit of rotation all at once. So if you are like I'm getting really sick of going up to all these menus, you'll notice that the really common things have like undo is Cmd+Z on a Mac or Ctrl+Z on a PC. So if you are doing something over and over, just check, is there a little shortcut and you might want to save some time. All right, so we've got the top one and the bottom one, they're just things on their own layers doing their own thing. Okay, but it's the way to get them top and bottom. Next thing I wanna do is grab my Type tool, I'm gonna click in the middle here. I'm gonna be centered. I'm gonna type 100%. I'm gonna pick a font and a size. Bit big, pick a bold one. So you go off, pick a font and a size. I'm gonna stick mine in the middle here. And we're gonna use one of the easiest features. So with it selected here, go to your type tool. Okay, well it's selected, sorry, just had to make sure is the layer is selected, it's kinda this light gray. Make sure you're in your type tool and there's this little icon here. Okay, this little icon here is the warp text tool option. Okay and watch this. Let's get down here. So Style none, let's go to arc and it's gonna arc it. Lower arc, arch. I'm just reading stuff out now, flag is cool. And the best one of all, there's never not a good time to use fish. [LAUGH] Okay, so have a play around with them. They've all got options you can make, just drag these left and right, decide which say the fish head goes. There's lots of kind of adjustments on them all. And if you do find you've kind of destroyed it and they're not really working anymore cuz you've changed too many settings. A little trick is hold down the Alt key on a PC, or Option key on a Mac. You see the cancel, so I'm just tapping that key. So I'm on my Mac, so I'm holding down Option, and just click Reset, and everything goes back to normal. And what I want is Bulge, there you are. Cool, now I'm just gonna find a thing that works for [LAUGH] my thing. That looks good. [LAUGH] it doesn't, but that's okay, we've learned the tool. Let's click OK. All right, so that is the end of the tutorial, but now it is time for your homework. Okay, I would like you to take your new found skills, doing type on a path, okay, and make a badge for another company, okay? It's a real association. It's this one here. If you go to your exercise files or your source files, it's OAB called badge exercise. There's the text, okay? So it's the Association for Obesity Prevention. Check out their website, okay, and I'd like you to create a badge kind of similar to what we did here in our exercise. Okay, doesn't have to be exactly like this. Use a bit of creativeness in there, okay? And yeah, I'd love to see what you come up with, okay? So pick fonts, colors, ways of using the type in here, and I'd love to see either a JPEG or a screenshot of it, okay? And either post it in the forum as outlined at the beginning there or send it to us on social media. So for Envato Tuts Plus, they are Tuts Plus design on Twitter, on DanLovesAdobe on Twitter. But for Instagram, find me at bring your own laptop and just tag me in it. I'd love to see what you do or give me some feedback if you ask for it, or let's just share what everyone's doing, we'd love to see what you're up to. >> All right, friends, that is it for this video. Let's get into the next one where we start looking at drop shadows. Finally, you're like, man, let's add some drop shadows to this text so it's more believable or readable? It's time to do that next in the next group of videos. See you there.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson you will learn how to add a drop shadow in Photoshop. You'll create a text shadow and then use Photoshop layer styles to add a bevel, emboss, gradient overlay, and strokes to text and images. Making your own text effects will soon be within your grasp!
Related Links
5.1 Layer Styles and Effects
All right, in this video we're going to take the design we've been working on where the text is a little hard to read and we're going to add, ready, drop shadows. And we're gonna look at bevel and emboss and, get ready for it. [LAUGH] We're going to hammer it with a gradient overlay. We're going to look at some of the other layer effects also in Photoshop. Plus, kind of lifting text with just a nice black box and playing with opacity. All right, lots of effects to learn in this tutorial, let's get started. Okay, so first up, if you are continuing along in the series, okay, you can just work on your file. If you are not, go and open up 09 effects from your source files. And we're going to add, first up, a drop shadow to this big Mother's Day Sale text. So just make sure in your Layers panel here, you have the layer that you want to change selected, it's kind of this light gray. And down the bottom here there's this little FX button, click on it. Okay, and here are all the things we're going to look at in this tutorial. Okay, so we'll start with drop shadow, it;'s an easy one. Now mine, you can see it's edit a drop shadow, got this big thing in the way. To move it, see this kind of light gray area here, just click hold and drag it to get it to a point where you can see what you're doing. And the background here and yeah, work with this panel. Now it'll remember the last thing you did, so yours is going to look a little different from mine. So let's look at the basics. Okay, so let's look at the distance first. Crank it right up, right up, get it up to like 25. You can see the distance away from the type there. Then this angle here becomes a little bit more obvious. You can see I'm just dragging this little dial here and it's just kind of the way that the light effects it. Okay, so it's up to you what you want your drop shadow to do. Let's look at these other two before I give you my, kind of like, the way I do drop shadows anyway. Spread, spread you're not going to use too much. It depends on whether that kind of feathering is pushed right to the outside, kind of does a weird choke around the outside. Don't use spread. The main one is size, size is how fuzzy it is. Okay, so you can see I'm dragging it smaller, smaller. And you can see it's got, when it's down at 6 points, okay, you can still kinda see the text. But if I get quite high, it becomes this kind of vague blur. Now if you're like, is it working? Is it better? Turn this preview on and off, just get a sense of what it's doing. Okay, so it's really up to you what you wanna do. What I like to do is I like a straight up and down, okay, angle. So I'm putting 90 degrees, and I like the distance quite low, and I like the size quite low. So it will depend on your image and text. Okay, so I do like about maybe 5 by 0 by 5 is kind of where we are end up being. You can see this, it's just a subtle turning on and off. I like that kind of drop shadow. You don't have to like it. Okay, but yeah, have a play around with that to get the settings you like. Let's look at doing one more and we'll bring up some options. So if we click OK, we're done. Let's say I want to edit it again because like man, I wish I would change it again. You double click on this word, Drop Shadow, okay, and it opens up. So you can go and make amends. I'm gonna click OK. So let's do it to the SAVE THE DATE along the top here, actually, let's do it to the photo, this one here, the name of the photographer. So let's select the layer. Let's go down to the FX, let's add a drop shadow. And let's say we want to do something different here, okay. Because it's smaller text and I'm gonna kinda zoom in, I can still use my shortcut to zoom in, which is kinda cool. He's my Space bar key to drag it around. So`, what I wanna do is I wanna do something different here because the size and distance don't work for this thing, and the same with the angle. And the angle is the big, I guess important one. It's this thing called Global Light. So, what ends up happening, if you use the word Global Light, it just means that if I change this one for this text, it's gonna affect everything else. Okay, so it's gonna say it's gonna just this one. So if I want to adjust this one separately, I have to untick it. Let's look at what I mean. If I rotate it around here because I feel that's better, because it's on an angle, can you see the adjusted this one here? I'm gonna switch around you'll start to see. Okay, so the trouble with is, I'm gonna put it back to 90. So they're all at 90, then I'm gonna untick this and now watch this guy here. I'm going to crank out the opacity. That's one thing I didn't mention the last one, the opacity. Okay, how much you can see of it, crank it up at 100% so you can see. This one here 5 by 5 doesn't really work, so I'm going down 3 by, okay, to kind of get it to come out. Put the opacity down a little bit, but because Global Light is off, it's not affecting the angle here. Cool, let's click OK. Let's look at another way of kind of lifting ticks off the page. We'll use bevel and emboss. Now bevel and emboss works really well with thick text. It's not gonna work with any of this kind of lightweight text. So I'm gonna click on this one, 800%, make sure it's selected in my layers panel. Down here let's go to bevel and emboss, okay, and I'm gonna move it out of the way, it's always in the way. Okay, there we go, that'll work, cool. So these are the defaults. Okay, and it's a bit of experimenting here. And you can kind of look at this as a kind of a really clear indication of what's happening and down here, how it's affecting the type. First of all, the style, emboss does both the outside of the text and the inner part, okay. Pillow emboss kind of looks like it's sitting in something. Outer bevel, just the outsides, kind of lifting off the background. There's different techniques for kind of deciding, it's a personal choice here. Okay, I don't like bevels much at all. [LAUGH] But people do, so we'll show them. Okay, so what am I gonna use, I'm going to use inner bevel. And let's have a quick little look, Smooth, Chisel Hard, just look at the edge here, gets a little bit more you can see there. I kind of like, I kind of do, almost there. Depth is how like basically it's how much the shadows you get, okay, how extreme it looks. And I feel like it should be a bank letters on the front of a bank or a lawyer's building, needs this kind of chiseled, you need to use Trojan, the font, and you need to use Chisel Hard bevel. And again Size and Soften, they're gonna kind of make sense as you experiment with them. You can kind of see it says here how much, depends on how thick your type of is. If it's really thin, you're not going to see anything. In this case can't see much of a change either because the font's quite small. Okay, so and you guys have got kind of a flat spot on top, which I don't like. Okay, soften, I'm not sure why you do Chisel Hard and soften it, but anyway, there's more and more complexity you can get into here. In this essentials course, we're not going to get into the super hard core stuff. Just play around with it, experiment with it, until you get it how you like. When you're finish click OK. And one of the things I wanna show you in one of the other, I'm gonna combine two things we're learning. One is one of the other effects, so I want two effects applied to this thing. I want to change the color of it as well. So the effect is called Color Overlay, but how do you add more than one? Okay, you can do it by double clicking where it says Bevel and Emboss, to open it back up again. And you can see on the top here, here are all the other options I had down the bottom in this FX panel. Okay, so Bevel and Emboss, we're going to look at Color Overlay. And watch this, if I turn the tick on, it's working. Its kind of made it a different color. But there's a bit of a gotcha. What ends up happening is I've turned the tick on and off, but you can see over here it's still shows Bevel and Emboss. Look, cuz I can turn lots of these on. Okay, I need to actually click on the word Color Overlay to bring up the options for it. So you might be ticking this on and then thinking you're at there, okay, or at least say. Let's do it again, tick that on, and thinking you're there, making adjustments but nothing's changing. Okay, it's because you need to actually click on it. So I'm going to turn all these off except for Color Overlay. Color Overlay, I'm gonna click on it and click on this little square here. Yours is probably set to red, by default, it remembers the last thing you did. Like when we're picking font colors, you can just drag this Hue slider to get it to somewhere you want. Okay, and pick a color. [LAUGH] Doesn't have to be that bad, come on Dan. I'm not sure what color I'm going for but you get the idea, right? So drag the Hue slider up. Now click in here for the circle you want, and then just keep an eye out here how it affects my chisel. All right, if you're looking for branded colors you might type in the RGB colors here or the CMYK colors, if you have it. Well maybe the hexadecimal numbers to be really precise. Let's click OK. So we've got two things applying now. Let's click OK. So those are a couple of FX, and we've used those mainly to kind of make the text pop off the page. What I'm going to show you is a technique that I use, it's not an effect, but it's just, it does the same type of thing. It's just using a big old rectangle. So you saw it at the beginning okay, in the intro. So if you grab the Rectangle tool, the only trouble with what we've got here is last time we were using it, remember we were using the Ellipse tool to do the badge, okay. And as soon as we went to the Ellipse tool, we changed it from shape to path which is gonna cause problems now. Cuz we don't want a path, we want an actual big, big shape. Okay, so the path is just kind of like an invisible outline whereas the shapes and actual thing on the page. So Rectangle tool, shape, how about the top here, fill color, click on it, pick a colour from the swatches. I'm just picking black. If you want to get a bit more detailed, you can click on this option get you back into our lovely Color picker, Cancel. I'm just gonna use black, and click off in the top here. And for the stroke, I'm going to have no stroke which is this little red line here that says, I don't want any color, please. Click off. What am I going to do? I'm going to draw a rectangle that can kind of starts off the page and kind of goes in here. Cool, I'm going to move it. Back to my Move tool, I'm gonna move it down a little bit. And the trouble is, is that it's on top of my text. Yours might be different, depending on kind of what you last we're doing. And so like before, remember in our layers exercise, we're gonna click hold and drag, drag, drag rectangle down, waay down the bottom here. I'm just dragging it just in front of my flower. All right, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the lorem ipsum text, now, Move tool, I'm gonna try and drag it down now. What you might find is, you might find moving this stuff is quite tough. Okay, and we're at a point now where, I don't know, this might be an option for you. I prefer to have the Move tool, and have Auto-Select off. Okay, Auto-Select on just means whatever you click on, watch the last panel over here, click on the background, it jumps to it. Jumps to that, which is kinda cool, right. I find especially with a really thin type like this, I just turn it off, okay, and I just make sure I'm very consistent over here in my Layers panel. So that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of the course. I'm gonna say beyond this layer, Move tool. And it doesn't really matter where you click now, it's gonna move that particular layer. It's not gonna automatically do it, cool. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to grab my Rectangle tool, and I'm gonna drag it across a little bit. Cool, and I want to lower the opacity quite a bit. So with the rectangle layer selected, let's lower the opacity of this just makes it a bit more see through. [SOUND] Yep, so that's just another technique, instead of using Drop Shadows. You see it quite a bit, yeah, but you might hate it. That's okay, you might love the Chisel, Bevel, Emboss, and that's okay too. All right, next thing we'll look at, we'll just look at one or two more. You can experiment with them all. We'll look at putting a stroke around the outside. Let's do it to the Mother text. So Mother's Day Sale. Okay, double click, cuz we're gonna add two to it, remember, drop shadow and double click. And we're gonna add a stroke around the outside. Remember turn the tick back on, make sure you're actually there, goes gray. Okay, and you'll see I've got a little strroke around the outside. Let's zoom in a little bit using my shortcut keys. There's kind of two things to work with. One is I'll change the color first of all, so color down here, pick a hue. I'm gonna go to that kind of like orangy red thing I was doing before. And let's crank the size up, okay, size is too much at the moment. Okay, all we wanna do is, the position is inside, which is doing weird stuff to my type. You might like it. I'm gonna go to the outside, so it's like a stroke around the outside of the type, okay then you can do this kind of thing. Now we're doing it with type it can be done with any sort of shape. Okay, that rectangle can have a stroke on the outside, an image that you've masked out can have a stroke on the outside. Yeah, it's up to you. All right, let's do one more before we go, cuz it's kind of cool and kind of gets us into some slightly more, not advanced but just growing our learning in Photoshop. So I'm going to zoom all the way out, command zero or control zero, actually I might go one more. And we're gonna work on this lay here Layer 1. Let's be a bit more proper about it double click Layer 1 and call it Flowers. Return, actually have to double click on the actual letter there too to be able to type over the top. And we're gonna do a gradient overlay. Why, because it's super in fashion now. If you're watching this, and it's like a 10 year old course, it's not gonna be super fashionable. But at the moment we love a bit of gradient overlays on images. So let's have a look. Okay with this layer selected, it's gray, let's go to FX, let's go to Gradient Overlay. Okay, and depending on if you're brand new to it, yous is going to look pretty close to mine, you might have adjusted yours in the past. So what we're going to do is we're going to do two things. We're going to pick a nice gradient, okay, and then we're gonna go and look at how to blend it with the background. Now, deciding on nice colors for gradients, Envato has got, let's have a little look. I just Googled the Envato Elements, okay. And there's just lots of good ideas for gradients in here. Just type in gradients in the search and just have a look and find stuff. This particular gradient background pack has some really cool colors that you can get ideas from. So once you've got an idea for a gradient, jump back into Photoshop. And you drop down this little Gradient arrow here, this little chevron. Click on that, and you've got some built in ones. My goodness, there are some bad ones. [LAUGH] Okay, these have been in here forever, yeah, they're bad, anyway. Let's click on just this kind of standard black to white one, it's a good easy one to start with. Now click it back in. Now to adjust the actual color, click anywhere in this kind of color box here. And this big ugly thing opens up and we can go in and adjust the colors, NOw you're just using these bottom little cubes here, like little houses. Don't use the top ones. So the bottom ones here, if you double click on it, you can use your Hue slider to get the hue you want, okay. And then pick a color. I'm gonna pick a color that I saw, kinda like an orangy peach color. I figured that out earlier on when I was playing around. Okay, click OK. So that's the beginning of it. Double click this last one and do the end. And I figured out the color that I wanted, okay. I just copied and pasted it from when I was playing around before, okay. Let's click OK, and let's click OK again. Now gradient overlay is kind of cool. Okay, the thing is it's ruined my image but you saw at the beginning that I had a kind of a mixture with the background. And this has something to do with something called the blending mode. Now, blending modes are super awesome and handy. Normal does exactly what it kind of meant to. Okay, but if you ever play around with any of these other ones it's gonna affect the background a lot better. Okay, so it's a good dissolve, it's never a great one. Darken, so that's getting a bit more exciting and it's kinda cool what it's doing, right. Always in the way, let's move you over there. Okay, that'll do. And you've just gotta keep going through this list, multiply, it's kinda cool. Color Burn, Linear Burn, I already had a play, and I liked Overlay, kind of a cool one. And so is Soft Light, but I really liked Hard Light where are you Hard Light. Why can't I find you? You can see it, there it is, it's the next one down. [LAUGH] Okay, it's It's a bit strong. Okay, I know we're kind of, I guess, like we're destroying the images quite a bit. I'm liking this kind of thing. What you might do though, is lower the opacity a little bit just to kind of bring, Hard Light is a bit strong. So maybe something like that. Then play around with the angle of this a bit, get it how you want. How do I want it? [LAUGH] I'm just gonna drag it around forever while you watch. You get the idea, right. So that's my Gradient Overlay, okay. We've used a linear one, you can use a radial one, which is just like a circle in the middle coming out, okay. But I'm gonna use linear. And yeah, that's gonna be it for this video. Okay, there's a few other layer styles that you can go through and practice with. And it is time for your homework. Okay, so what I'd like you to do is, you've used the image here from a Raul Amid. What I'd like you to do is either using your Envato Elements account, go find a new image. Or if you don't have access to that, go to Unsplash and find your own image. Find your own gradient, and I'd love to see what you what kind of combination you come up with. You can use the text that we've used here or go and adjust it maybe for your own personal brand or the company that you work for. And I'd like to see what you've kind of come up with. You're allowed to just show and tell, you can ask for criticism if you like, as well, and I will be kind and give you any pointers. You're allowed to use chisel embosses as well. I promise not to comment on them. Yeah, so do that and share it with us on social media. Remember, Twitter, look for @tutsplus design. And on my Twitter as @danlovesadobe, on Instagram I am @bringyourownlaptop. Tag us in it, and yeah, we'll comment and we'd like to see what you do. All right, let's get into the next videos, where we start looking at cropping and resizing images. Not as exciting as gradients but very important. All right, let's go do that.
- Overview
- Transcript
Learn how to crop an image in Photoshop. First, we'll perform simple crops on images, and then we'll then explore how to crop images to specific dimensions for printing. Lastly, we will explore the magical “content aware crop” whereby Photoshop will magically create additional background imagery to fill in any empty space.
6.1 How to Crop
Hi there. In this video, we're gonna learn some basic cropping. But we're also gonna do some magic cropping where we take this image here. We want it to be landscape. And you can see here, when I do the cropping, there's some edges here that just don't exist. They've never existed in the world. But ready, steady we magic them up using the Crop tool. All right, so let's go and learn how to do that now in Photoshop. All right, to get started we're going to open up all three of our images. Okay, a nice little trick just to add to our super fantastic Photoshop skills is I'm just using my source window on minimax arts Finder. So I'm nothing to do with Photoshop. I can see Photoshop though. The look was if I click hold and drag all three of these guys just anywhere in the middle here, hey, they all open, click on Photoshop and here's my tabs. That's a nice easy way to get started. Let's start with this first one tin A, and it's be on our Crop Tool. Now the Crop Tool is about the fifth tool down, exactly the fifth tool down, grab it. Okay, and the basic use of the Crop Tool, just make sure the top here you're on this one here says WH and resolution like otherwise, if you've played with it before it can cause problems. So just make sure you're on that option, and you can grab any of the corners and resize it. When you're ready, hit Return. And that is copying. Okay, I'm go to either undo and give us a few extra skills. So back to the Crop Tool. Here it's kinds of dots on the outside and watch this, if I hover here, I can resize it. But if I hover just outside, can you see it goes from this like little straight arrow to being the arrow. I can click hold and drag. It's really strange if you're like, man, this is feels really weird. It is really, really weird. [LAUGH] Photoshop have decided this is the best way to do it. And it's just a nice way can you see my horizon line? It's actually perfect in this photograph. Okay, thank you, Annie. But you might want to adjust this one, okay? So I'm rotating around, hit return, and half of this weed crop. You're less likely to be making it a weed crop and kind of fixing it up, so it's straight, but know that you can rotate it that way. Now the next thing to do is let's say we want it to be a specific size. I always find we got to file new, make the document size you want and then drag it into it. We did that in an earlier video when we started looking at text in this course go jump and do that one. If you are interested in doing that method, okay? But a different way is to deal with in the image. Okay, so up the top here some basic kind of presets. Let's say I want kind of really traditional photograph size K. So five inches by eight. I click on it. And it gives me a little preview saying yeah, we're gonna have to trim off these areas to make that happen. The cool thing about that though is when I hit Return, I know it's perfectly gonna fit in say it's an art print and it's going into a frame, okay, it's gonna fit in the five by seven. If you need a different ratio, you can just type in at the top here. Okay, and if you need to flip it around, seen it the other way around, click on this little option here it goes from kind of portrait to landscape. If you needed to be a physical size, okay, you want it to be 200 millimeters or by 300 millimeters, you can go to this top option here height and width. Okay, and you can say I'd like you to be say, 300 and centimeters, okay. You should probably use millimeters but it's giving me that particular ratio topping the top and bottom off a little. Okay, to get out of this because I kind of wrecked it you gotta hit Escape twice on your keyboard okay escapes in the top left. Can we get back out of there? We can also hit clear because if you don't the next time so you don't crop anything for like two months you come back in, it's gonna remember those and it's gonna confuse you, okay? It's gonna be trying to do stuff, you're like why are you doing this weird shape? The next thing we'll do will be our super mega amazing thing in Photoshop. Okay, I love this feature. So what we're gonna do is we're going to, I want it to be my five by seven. Okay, I'd like it to be like to flip it around so it is landscape and the trouble with it like this is that obviously the crop is a little wrong. So I'm going to click hold and drag my image to kind of get it somewhere in the like. It's not. Its not quite working. And so I'll let go. Now, I can drag these edges and because it's locked into this ratio here, it's not gonna kind of bend any way it's gonna kind of resize nicely. Okay, so I'm going to get it to a point where like this and now I'm gonna drag, try not to drag this little dot here, drag anywhere else. Okay I'm gonna get to like here, want it to be like this. The only trouble with this kind of crop is that it was originally shot the other way around, so I need to landscape this extra gap here just gonna be blank. Unless super magic content aware. Okay, turn that on, it's a little underwhelming tick, but I'm ready for the magic, I'm gonna click the plus button or return on your keyboard. Give it a sec, get ready, whoa, magic double background. Cool okay, it's kind of done a little bit of weird stuff over here. Okay, but it's made it up new table, new table that side. It's pretty impressive. It doesn't work on all images all the time. We'll look at a couple of other examples but it is pretty amazing especially for this kind of like, I don't know it's got a gradient in the backgrounds and woodgrain has done a great job this side not so good the side but still pretty amazing. Let's look at another example. So this is 10b. Now the only trouble with our Crop Tool at the moment is that it's trying to do this thing, it remembers remember? Let's go back to with heightened rotation, make sure it's cleared, I say with heightened rotation. With height and resolution I'm gonna zoom out a little bit and I don't want this kind of like traditional kind of photography size. What I want is let's say I'm doing something for social media and it's like I'm doing a banner for Facebook. Okay, that kind of big banner right at the top there or say you're doing. I do a lot of HTML banner ads and they just got really weird sizes or maybe a double page spread easily to make it wider. Something like this. I chose this example bcuz it's gonna probably do well make sure Content Aware is tacked on, click the plus button or hit return the keyboard It just says really nice way of duplicating the background. Cool. This one did a perfect job cuz the backgrounds quite simple and what you'll find is nature's pretty good. Cuz I can kind of mix it around and do it stuff, do it in a nice kind of organic way, where it becomes quite troublesome as if there is like really linear lines. Let's have a look at this last example by Brooke. Okay and let's do the same thing. I'm going to grab my Crop Tool make sure content is on I'm gonna drag it out, okay? So, I've got just want a bigger option. Okay, nice little square. Hit Enter on my keyboard and give it a sec. And it's gotta do okay job. Already, I've already practiced. But it's gonna be a few things obvious, okay? So, hey we've got two lemons. That's a bit weird. I've got two of these. Okay, and the lines don't quite line up. This one's done. Okay, that bit looks good. Okay, so there are just times where this thing just doesn't work at all. It's done an okay job but it's a little bit obvious a few of these. Later on the course will do a bit more retouching where we'lll show you how to fix it up. Once you've got to this stage just to kind of get rid of double lemons, but yeah, it's I guess I want to show you with a really cool examples like this guy, and this one here that are pretty amazing job and then just show you an example that doesn't always work. All right, so that is cropping we did some rotating and then we turned on Content Aware Fill you might want to turn this off before you finish this class just so that we're not trying to do it all the time and turn it on purposely. All right, my friends, we will see you in the next video. What are we doing in the next video? We're talking about resizing and resolution.
- Overview
- Transcript
Let’s now learn how to resize an image in Photoshop without losing quality. You'll discover how resolution works and how it affects image quality and file size. We’ll also cover best practices for various image outputs such as for print and web.
6.2 Resizing and Resolution
Hi there, it's real me, I'm back again for this video because we're gonna talk about resolution. And resolution can be a little bit difficult. I find it a little easier when I wave my arms around for this one. So, what we'll do is we'll go through some practical examples and cut back and forth to the computer to explain it. All right, so let's get started. So, let's get started, first by opening up two images, is a live in A resolution from your exercise files, okay. And these ones from Jonathan Francisca, both of them, okay. And what we're gonna look at is kinda of, resolution gets kinda of, we talk about high and low resolution, good quality, bad quality. So this first one A, is good quality, high resolution and this one here is low quality, bad resolution. It'll open up in your Photoshop quite small and just hit Command + on a Mac or Control + on a PC to zoom in. You can see, we've all seen examples of this where it gets kinda of all a bit pixelated and the zoom out about there. Yeah. Okay, there's just not enough resolution or density of pixels in it to make it look convincing. This bigger version here though, has the exact same problem, okay but the cool thing about it is the human eye and the human brain can tell the difference between lots of little cubes and a real life real image. So what I mean, if I zoom in okay, Command + or Control +, it's actually just made up of, I get close enough of tiny little cubes. But far enough away, my human brain can't tell a difference. So they referred to often in, there is two kind of main sizes. There is 72 dots per inch versus 300 dots per inch, okay. And that's Just kinda of like quality levels and let's say that most images that are born, okay? Through a digital camera and or through stock library sites, they're gonna come at this 72 dots per inch. So let's check that. Let's go to image and let's go to image size and we can check that, this one is indeed 72 dots per inch. Okay, we also use pixels per inch, depends on which kinda of realm you come from. PPI or DPI, people refer to them as just a shortened version. It doesn't matter they're interchangeable in this case. So this thing is 72 dots per inch, and it is really big. You can see it is 72 inches across. So, let's say I've been asked we're gonna get this image ready now for print and the specifications have said we would like this document at 300 DPI or PPI, K and we want it as the biggest size we can get. So what we do here is, let's say we've got an image we need to send it off to the printer or send it to newspaper, we're gonna go to image, image size. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure re-sample is off, okay? When we're resizing original artwork re-sample off is best to get started with and let's turn the resolution to what they asked for, which is 300. And what you would have noticed is that, you've noticed the size change, that went from like a really big 72 inches down to something quite small, 17. Okay, and we'll cut to some real life footage now of when I'm waving my arms around. All right, so here I'm waving time. And so, what ends up happening, right? Is you've got this document, it's 72 dots per inch and it's really big 72 inches, right, it's really really big. Okay, so but the requirement is 300, okay? So what that means is, my 72 dots in an inch, see my inches of this big. Can the 72 little squeeze in there? Okay, but the requirements I need 300 in there not 72 anymore. So what you do is you end up telling Photoshop like cram 300 in that same square instead of 72. And what it does is it says, well, there's a little stuff out here I'm just gonna keep grabbing it and cramming more into that one inch. So instead of 72, I'm gonna grab some more, now is 100 and grab some more of them, come in here guys and they pull them once and squeeze them all in. Gets up to 200 and keep squeezing them in and they pull them all in until is 300 of them in that same inch instead of 72. And the cool thing about it is that, now that one same inch has a lot more detail in it and it looks really good for print. And that's what print needs, our human brains can be convinced by a print, that it's 300 dots in an inch. Anything less and it starts, you starts going like you start to see the little dots, okay. So and anything more we don't need, our little brains don't need anymore than 300 dots in that little inch, you can get more. So, that's why we need it. And what the trade off is of though, is because of gradual those dots that were hanging out here and pull them in and pull them in. The physical size of the whole document got smaller about a third smaller, okay. So we had to kinda of cram more in but the drawback is their physical size get smaller. And that's I guess is just one of the trade offs when you're working especially with print and you're being asked for 300 DPI. Just know that whatever image you've got, it's gonna be about a third, I know it's not perfectly a third, but yeah, it's about that. Okay, so, and the next thing to think about is, let's say I need it to be 300 DPI. Okay, so that job is finished, we're done with that one. We got it, it's a bit smaller. It's, I think it's 17 inches across now, at 300 DPI, job done, send it to them that's as big as it can be at that resolution. But let's say there's a chance where or there's a tummy like actually, it needs to be 300 and it has to be 18 inches across. You've just done a little calculation and Photoshop said, it can't be, can only be 17 and you're like. What you can do is, remember that little checkbox, we're gonna check it again in a second that little checkbox that says re-sample. That's the thing where you tick that and you type in 300 and you force it to be 18. Okay, and Photoshop will do its best, it'll just invent new pixels. Okay, so it pulled in old ones that are needed and then it goes, well, I still need some more. So, I'm just going like, start messing about with the file and start duplicating and then making more. And, it's totally fine when you get to a certain kind of like, a little extra half an inch, no problem, no one's gonna notice, okay. But if you say I need it to be, I need to be 50 inches across at 300, Photoshop is gonna try it's best, is probably gonna melt down trying to do this job. Okay, but it's gonna look bad. It's gonna have a lot yucky goop everywhere and it's gonna try it's best, but Photoshop is good but not that good, small changes, yeah great, turn re-sample on, increase it a little bit, you're fine. But, if you're trying and do too much, you're gonna see all the junk. All right, let's jump back in and do it properly on the computer together. Okay, so let's say needs to be 18 inches, man, it's just not big enough. You can turn this on and let Photoshop re-sample it. So, I'm gonna force it to be 18, okay. And, what's gonna happen is Photoshop is gonna try it in its best to like magic up new pixels. They didn't exist before, it's gonna do its best to magic them up. And, with a small change like this, okay. We went from 17 to 18, you're not gonna notice, okay. It's when you're trying to do massive changes if they're like, it needs to be 22. Okay, you're gonna actually start to see, you can even see it in here, this is kinda of like goop that appears, okay. So, is a re-sampling goop and yeah, it just Photoshop is trying its best to make up more pixels but it can't go back in time and make a photograph. So, that's kinda of like small changes, nobody is gonna notice, big changes, people, are. That's probably one of the main used cases, okay, is when you take an image, you work on a Photoshop and it needs to go into a printed document. You might be sending yourself into Illustrator or into InDesign. Okay, and it needs to be 300 pixels per inch. So, change in here, see what size it is and then go and you might turn re-sample on just to get a little bit more out of it. All right, let's look at one other use case to help you kinda of understand resolution. Jump back to Dan's hide. >> All right, one other common use for using Photoshop to resize images is going out to kinda of Wobble social media. And what that means is, often they'll say something like, your image can be a maximum of 1600 pixels, okay. And it might be going to say Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and you just need to resize your image because at the moment, it's quite big, okay. You shot it on your disc allow, you downloaded it from the Internet, that's really, really big. You can get to a more appropriate size for yeah, going up to social media. So, let's go and do that now and resize it to about 1600 pixels. Okay, so we need to get that right size. So let's go into image and resize. And, what we're gonna do is it needs to be 72 dots per inch, okay? They might not mention that, they just assume that if it's going up onto a website, okay, cuz that's the kinda of standard website size, and this is where re-sample needs to be turned on. We made it bigger and the last thing, okay, you can also make it smaller. Okay, so with re-sample on, I'm gonna say it needs to be pixels, okay, and it needs to be 1600. Okay, I can't remember what I said. [LAUGH]. The talking head version. Let's say it was 1600. Okay, and I've kept the link locked there so that it changes the height and width. And now I know it's the perfect size. It's the 1600 across the biggest that it allow and at the right resolution, I'm gonna click OK. Okay, it's gonna be a lot smaller, but that's right, that's what the website wanted. So that's what I've given them. Now, I'm gonna go into a File, Save, I'm gonna save it as a JPEG and upload it to the website. Okay, so those are two hopefully examples of resolution. It can be a little bit of a rabbit hole of knowledge. And, but I hope it gives you a kind of brief understanding of some of the typical uses, getting images ready for print, and getting them ready for a website all about the resolution. All right, that is the end of that brain bending exercise. Let's get into something a little more exciting back into Photoshop, learning things like masks and selections. All right, let's go do it now.
- Overview
- Transcript
You'll start by learning how to make simple selections using the Photoshop Marquee Tools; this technique is great for selecting and picking up specific parts of an image. You'll get some practice using both the Rectangular Marquee Tool and the Elliptical Marquee Tool. You'll then learn how to copy and paste selections into another image so that we can start making a collage and blend images together.
7.1 Rectangle and Elliptical Marquee Tool
Hi there, in this video, we are going to look at some basic selection techniques. We're gonna create an Instagram post in the square format. We're gonna use the rectangle marquee tool to bring in our cool coffee cup. And then the ellipse marquee tool, like a big circle, put space inside the coffee cup. All right, let's go and learn how to do that now in Photoshop. All right, to get started, let's go to File > New, and over here I'm gonna kinda start with Photo. And then go and change it loads, okay? So in here I'm gonna switch it to pixels, because Instagram, they've got a square format, right, and it's 600 by 600 at 72 DPI, that's the resolution. Now that's when this kind of video was made. I always make it double the size just in case, cuz Instagram seem to suck in bigger size images but only display the smallest 600. But I guess when they decide we're gonna display bigger images, we want them to have the high quality ones, okay? So we're gonna go 1200 pixels by 1200 and make sure RGB 72, click Create. Now we're gonna open up two images, File > Open, and in your source files they are called, where are they, 12A and B, okay? So these marquee ones, thank you, Alexandra and the Norwood things. So we're gonna start with this image here, 12A, grab the rectangle marquee tool, okay? Click and hold down and make sure you've got the rectangle marquee tool. This is a nice simple one, and you can draw at any sort of size you want, okay? And then we're gonna move it over to our image. Now to get it to be a perfect square, what I'd like to do is go to Select and go to Deselect. It kind of gets rid of that selection. And who can guess what key I'll hold down on my keyboard? That's right, it's Shift. So hold Shift down and kinda start anywhere up here. It gives me like a perfect square. It's gonna work for my Instagram. Okay, got it kind of cropped how I want. If it's not quite right, you can just hover in the middle of selection and move it around, okay, get it to where I want. And then all I'm gonna do is go back to my move tool. And we're gonna use the shortcut that we learned earlier. Remember the fun Tab game, you can copy and paste it, I won't. I won't come find you, but we'll do it the proper way. Click and drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag back to this original image here and then, the mouse down the whole time and let it drop into here. So what we're gonna do now is practice our scaling, so we're gonna go to Edit > Transform > Scale, gonna zoom out a little bit, okay? And I'm gonna grab the edge and I want it to come down proportionately, okay? It'll scale down, we're gonna hold Shift, okay, get it to kind of where I want, roughly there, where I want, roughly there. And then I can kinda drag the middle, don't drag this little thing, this little target, it's the kind of center of rotation. We don't need to mess with that, just drag anywhere about but there and kinda get it in the middle, okay? When you're ready, hit Return or Enter on your keyboard, otherwise things don't work. So that's the rectangle marquee tool. Drag things in a big rectangle or square by holding Shift, and you can copy and paste things. Let's go to 12B and just look at the very similar, okay, ellipse, okay? Elliptical marquee tool, it's gonna do exactly what you think it's gonna do, okay? I can draw out an ellipse, and I'm gonna go to Select > Deselect. And if I hold down Shift, it's gonna be a perfect circle. I'm just gonna kinda crop it there, okay? And we're gonna put our space inside of a coffee cup. So again, move tool, drag, drag, drag to this first tab. Holding down the mouse key the whole time and let go in the middle, too big, Edit >Transform > Scale. Grab the corners, hold Shift, drag anywhere but the target, I'm just gonna keep dragging it down until it's kind of in a, don't worry too much at the moment. The edges are a bit crisp, and we're gonna learn more and more features as we go along. This is, I guess, just a quick and easy thing to do. Now if you're finding it hard to move around cuz it's jumping around, I quite often just use my keys on my keyboard, okay? The arrows, so I'm just tapping the arrow key to the left and up a little bit, I zoom in, okay, you can see the edges aren't perfect here. We'll look at doing a bit more of that later in the course, okay? But stepping around when I'm ready, hit Return, zoom out, awesome. Looking cool, straight to Instagram. Okay, so that's losing the marquee tools, okay? The circle one, the ellipse one, sorry, and the rectangle one, nice and quick and easy. What I'd like you to do, though, is I'd love you to do your own version, okay? Find your own coffee cup or plate or bowl, something kinda looking from the top, and find your own image in the inside, okay? One thing you might find is I just happened to find an image that's a perfect circle, you might be on a more of an angle, okay? So you might do, with this layer here selected, go to Edit > Transform and scale it, and you might have to kind of distort it a little bit to fit in with maybe, the perspective of the image, okay? I'm not going to do this, so I'm gonna hit Esc, it's my undo key. And because you've got probably got access to Envato Elements, what I'd like you to do is, you don't have to pick, find a coffee cup in here as well, and I come into elements here and I typed in photos and used aerial, okay? I spelt it like Arial the font to start with but [LAUGH] okay? But some of these images, if you type in aerial, you can find some stuff that you can work with for your example that's kinda looking straight down from the top and yeah, find something interesting. Once you've got it, okay, find your own coffee cup, find your own aerial image, and see if you can combine them as practice. And then with your social media, Instagram posts just tag me in Instagram, okay? So I am @bringyourownlaptop, I'd love to see what you did. You can also edit to that forum we mentioned at the beginning there in Envato. You can look in the forums and if you search for Adobe Photoshop for beginners, you'll find our little shared group where you can share the things that you've been making. If for some reason you don't have access to Elements, try using unsplash.com, okay, and find some images in there. All right, friends let's get into the next video where we kinda do a bit of masking but it's a cheap trick, not a cheap trick, it is a good trick, quick and easy. Let's look at how to do that next in Photoshop.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson you will learn how to create a clipping mask in Photoshop quickly and easily. This technique will enable us to mask images inside shapes and text.
7.2 Clipping Masks
Hi there, in this video, we are going to use Photoshop to take this image and clip it inside a letter like this. Boom, quick, super easy, all still editable, you can move things around. It's really cool, let's go learn how to do it now. All right, to get started, open up the source files, and open up the one called 13a-clipping-mask from Biel Morro. Get started, grab the type tool, click once, and type a letter. Okay, now, mine's already a ginormous, big serif letter because I practiced before the video. And [LAUGH] in my font size, you can see it's something ginormous, it's 900. Weirdly, the font sizes only go to 72, so yours might be as big as it can be at 72. You can either type in that 900, pick a font, or do what I do and just kind of click and drag to the right on this icon. So clicking and holding my mouse and just dragging to the right, you can see it goes up way past 72, until you get to kind of a size that you like. And I've decided about 900 something. I go to my move tool, get it into position, it doesn't matter what color it is at the moment, okay, because you saw at the beginning, the image is gonna go inside. Now the way this works is mainly to do with the layer order. The image has to be on top of the D, feels a bit weird, but that's the way it works. Now if I drag the background above the D, often it just says no. Okay, so what you can do is just give it a name. Okay, we've run into this problem before, it's locked. So just double-click it, call it Roses, okay, and drag it just above, and we are ready to go. To make the magic happen, make sure roses is selected, it's this light gray, then go up to Layer, and go to this one here that says Create Clipping Mask. Ready, steady, cool, super easy, super quick, nice, clean kind of mask. That's why it's in this section, and it works really good with these kind of simple shapes like type. So some of the things, so it's easy to get started. Now let's look at a couple of the interesting parts to this technique. I've got roses selected, so if I go to my move tool and move it around, you can see it moves independently of the D. Which is really cool cuz it means I can kind of get it perfect how I want. And I can also use the Edit > Transform > Scale, and then I can kind of resize this to how I want it to be, get in the right position, click Return. So same for the D layer, okay, if I click on this and move it around, okay, it's independent. There's gonna be lots of times where you wanna move them together. So what you can do is click on the first layer, hold Shift down on your keyboard, and then click the second layer. They're both light gray now, okay, and I can move them both around, and I can both transform them at the same time. Okay, just have them both selected. Now I'm gonna go and add the white background and the drop shadow. You don't have to, you can skip on to the next video. But if you wanna hang around, let's put a white background in. Why don't we have a white background now, it's because there's nothing there. It's kind of invisible, and Photoshop uses this checkerboard kind of effect to kind of try to represent invisibility. There's nothing there, but I want a solid white background and a drop shadow. So what I'm gonna do is, down here on my layers panel, I'm gonna click on this little icon here. If you hover above it long enough, it'll tell you it's the New Layer button. Click on him, and instead of Layer 1, I'm gonna be real good and call it white background. And the easiest way to fill it with white is, when it's selected, go up to here to Edit, there's a Fill option. And from this drop down, yours is probably set to something else, okay, I've set mine to white. Click OK, and we have a white background, well, we have white everywhere. But over here, remember, we're the bird looking up at the top, the white background's too high. Click, hold, and drag it, okay, so it's underneath everything. Next thing I want to do is add a drop shadow to my D. So I'm gonna click on the D layer, and I'm gonna go down to here to effects. I'm gonna go to Drop Shadow, and I'm gonna mess about with this, probably for ten minutes, trying to figure out what kind of drop shadow I want. One thing you might have to do is, the distance is gonna be really small and the size, because it remembers the last thing you did. We were doing drop shadows on really small text. Okay, so first thing to do is just crank up the distance and the size. Or not the size, sorry, the distance, and make sure the opacity's high, so at least you can see your drop shadow. Cuz if the distance is really small, you can mess around with these all you like, but you can't really tell what's going on. So crank it up, and go on to the next video while I mess around with us. All right, in the next video, though, we are going to learn how to use the quick selection tool. It's pretty amazing to do selections with, so yeah, I'll see you over there.
- Overview
- Transcript
The Photoshop Quick Selection Tool is probably the most robust way of selecting things. In this lesson, you'll learn the intricacies of this tool and discover how to use the Quick Selection Tool to ensure good, quick selections.
7.3 Quick Selection Tool
Hello there, in this video, we are going to do some selections using the quick selection tool. It's quick, it's really good, and it's gonna allow us to cut out this image here and put it into our mixed background, kind of interacting with some type. It's quick, it's easy, let's learn how to do it now in Photoshop. All right, to get started, let's open up two of the files from our downloaded source files. There's 14a and 14b, thank you Quino, let's click Open. All right, so we're going to, we've got two tabs open, we're gonna copy this and put it into this file here that I've made, so let's be on 14a. In an earlier tutorial, we used the really basic marquee selection tools. Now we're gonna use kind of probably the most universally useful one, is the quick selection tool. So if you click and hold down, you might be using the magic wand tool, which is fine, but it's not as good as the quick selection tool. Let's grab him, now just double-check what your settings are at the top here. I'm gonna be on the adding to the selection option, which is a little plus. Or you can be on this first option, it doesn't matter, either of those two. In terms of the brush size, okay, you can drag this up and down and decide on where you need to be. We're gonna start with 50, and just show you how it works. Okay, roughly 50, doesn't really matter, let's just copy my settings there. Cool, and all we need to do is click, hold, and start dragging across. Now, what you'll notice is, I'm gonna step back, gonna go to Select > Deselect. I don't kinda start selecting the edge, you don't need to, it's a pretty clever tool. I'm gonna just start dragging kinda around the edge, and can you see the little dotted line? They're the marching ants, and they just help identify what we've got selected. So I'm just gonna kind of drag around, drag, you can see I just did a big launch across there. And it kind of just, it's so clever, it just starts thinking, well you've selected this, so you probably want a bit more of this, and it does, it jumps across. So I'm going to now click over here and start dragging, okay, and you can see I can let go of my mouse, and I've got part of it selected. Sometimes, it's a little bit hard and you're like, what have I got selected, what do I not, okay? And the easiest way to do it is just kinda turn this option on and off. Okay, it's called quick mask mode, just turn it on, and it just shows you, kind of masks everything out in red. Okay, so turn it on and off just to see, don't double-click it. Okay, so just turn it on and slowly turn it off. What I'm gonna do is, gonna keep just dragging around, and you can see I'm not going anywhere near the edges. It's pretty clever, the only thing it hasn't done is these little guys in the bottom here. Now, I've picked a pretty good example for this. So when you're maybe using your own stuff, we're gonna learn in some future videos a little bit of extra tricks to get some more tougher selections. But if it's a product shot or something like this, that's a really nice studio shot, it's gonna be easy to select. So these bits here are not quite right, so I'm gonna zoom in, so Cmd+Plus on my Mac, Ctrl+Plus on a PC, holding down my Spacebar and dragging with my mouse. Okay, you can see it's miss these bits, and there's a little bit of stuff in there. And yeah, quick selection is quick, okay? It's not gonna be absolutely perfect, but it's pretty close. So what I wanna do is minus for my selection, okay, but my brush is quite big, so it doesn't fit in there. So I'm gonna lower the brush size, something quite small, teeny tiny, and I'm gonna click in here, say get rid of that. You'll notice that when I start dragging, it goes and it looks horrible, and when I let go of my mouse, look, [SOUND] magic. What you can do, there's this auto-enhance option on. The only trouble with it, it does a better selection, which is cool, but it does stress your machine out. So get in there, and I've got a really pretty high-powered laptop, and it does stress it out. Don't worry about getting too far into these edges in this example. Okay, we're gonna do some more sophisticated selections later on. So I've kind of tidied that up using the minus. If I, say I go too far, go a bit of that, and it's like no, it's gone too far, go back to plus and just drag across there. But auto-enhance, you can see, kind of stresses it out a little bit. Cool, so let's zoom out, and let's see what we've got, have I missed anything, click on that quick selection tool, it's pretty good, go off. So now we're gonna move it into this file here, we're gonna use our technique where we just drag it. Okay, and one thing we might notice, let's do it first. Let's click, hold, and drag it, okay, and drag it, drag it into this tab, wait, come down. You'll notice that my one has not the most beautiful edge, okay? So I'm gonna Edit > Step Backward, Edit > Step Backward, until it's gone. Come back here, and I'm just gonna kind of shrink the selection a little bit. We're gonna look at more sophisticated ways of doing this later on, so don't worry. I guess we're just kinda getting used to the tools, quick selection is an awesome one. The edges aren't perfect, so we're gonna go Select > Modify, and we're gonna go to Contract. And how many pixels, you'll have to experiment depending on your image. Okay, but I'm gonna go back maybe 3 pixels, not 30, click OK. Now with my move tool, click, hold, and drag it, and it's gonna be better, not perfect. Okay, but it's a quick solution for the quick mask. Okay, and now I'm just gonna go and kind of rejig this just to show you what it looked like in the beginning. But If you're happy with that, you can move on to the next tutorial, that's the quick selection tool. But a quick caveat with that tool there. I've picked an image that works well with it, it's got nice, clear, defined edges. When we get into things like hair and out-of-focus objects, quick selection tool is not going to work. Okay, so it's one of your tools in your Photoshop toolkit, and we'll look at more advanced ones later on. But for studio shots and anything that has a clear, sharp edge, it's super quick and easy. So what I wanna do is, I wanna resize it, so I'm gonna name my layer Flower. [LAUGH] My spelling is terrible, I just spelt that flouwers, when I first start, with a U, I had to go back and [LAUGH] reshoot this. So I'm going to use my selection tool, okay, or my move tool, move it around. I'm gonna use my Edit > Transform > Scale, and I'm gonna shrink it down, holding Shift. This is stuff we already know, so if you wanna skip along, it's okay. And I'm gonna rotate it, I'm gonna get it down to a size that I like. Hit Return on my keyboard, Edit > Transform > Rotate, okay, click anywhere on the outside here, and get this kind of, what I'm looking to do in this case is, I want to rotate it around. I want this kind of Dublin to be behind, and the florists to be above. So I've got it into where I want, hit Return, and we're gonna play with the layer order. I love this kind of real subtle interaction with the background layer. Watch this, I'm gonna bring the flower in between these two guys here. That way, that kind of D's partially obscured, you can still understand it's the word Dublin, and florists is above. And for no reason other than to balance up the composition, I'm going to right-click this, duplicate the Flowers layer, and Flower 2, how about that? With my move tool, move over, now instead of going to Edit > Transform > Scale, Rotate, we're gonna use this one here, the free transform tool, which does both. Okay, so from now on, I'm just gonna use the free transform tool, the Cmd+T on a Mac, or Ctrl+T on a PC is a really common shortcut to know. Okay, so if you're gonna be learning any shortcuts, that's a good one. Cuz what it does is, allows me to hold down Shift and resize it, but at the exact same time is, if I go move away from here, I go to rotate, I can rotate it around as once. If you're finding that tough, don't sweat it, you can go back in and it just do it the long way, but I wanna do it the quick way. How balanced is it, it's not super balanced. I need to find another image and crop it out, but no, I'm not going to. Hit Return, and that is going to be me for this tutorial. All right, so that's the quick selection tool. It is really amazing, but there's a few other things that we need to learn in terms of selections and masks before you're a pro. So join me in the next tutorial where we learn what a layer mask is.
- Overview
- Transcript
It’s time to learn what a professional layer mask looks like and how to create a layer mask in Photoshop. This “non-destructive” mask is the key to properly masking out images in Photoshop.
7.4 Layer Masks
Hi there, in this video, we're gonna learn what a layer mask is. Basically, we're gonna take the same tutorial we did in the last video, but do it properly with something called a layer mask. The cool thing about them is you can turn them off later on, disable them, bringing back the background, fixing your masks, and then we'll really double back and look at this option. And you can see, we can fade the edges, we can break the link, we can move them around so that we've got more control, more professionalism, more awesome. Let's do that now in Photoshop. So what is this layer mask that I speak of? Okay, it's probably better just to go through and show you an example. You'll see all the perks and pros for using a layer mask. So I'm gonna double back and use the exact same files as the last tutorial, so 14A and B. And we're gonna get up to the point where we were at, so I'm using the Quick Selection Tool. Okay, and I'm just drawing around super quick, and I've got my selection right. And what we did before is then use the Move Tool to just drag it in, okay? The problem with that is it's something called destructive editing. And what I'm deciding is that, watch, as I move this out, I've cut that background out forever. And my selection is kind of fused forever and there's no going back from that. And that's not what I wanna do in Photoshop. I wanna make a selection, maybe a quick selection like this, and then maybe go and fix it up later on, or make adjustments or just have a bit of flexibility. To do that, you make your selection, like we did here, and instead of dragging it, you just click this button down here. Okay, it says, Add a Mask. Okay, and it's got a layer mask. And what happens is, we're gonna give it a click, and the background disappears. Okay, I need to go through and fix my edges, that's fine. There's a few little places that need touching up, but we'll do that in the next video. But what's happened is, can you see this layer structure over here? My image is protected, it's perfectly fine, there's nothing destroyed about it. This mask just sits over the top hiding things. And where that becomes really nice is that later on, I can go and fix, my mask will do a better edge on this, or reuse this image for something else where I don't need it to be masked. Let's go and use it, so I'm gonna grab my Move Tool, click hold and drag. Up at the top here, using my technique, you can see we end up in the same place, we've got the same kind of edge here. But you can see over here, the mask came along, which is lovely. And now I can do some modifications to the edge here, okay, whereas before I couldn't. So what I can do is, see this down here in my layers, I'll toggle between the two. Can you see those lines that appear on the outside? Cuz you can work on the image or the mask separately. You can see your Properties panel changes, depending on what part you got selected. I've got my layer mask selected, and it gives me options to play around with this mask. And real basic one is the feather, so watch this, I can crank up the feather and it just kind of feathers the edges a little bit. Okay, so it wasn't so bitzy and yucky, okay? Cuz it's on a black background, it's gonna kinda let the background of the actual image through. And often, this is all you need to do to get a selection looking nice, just give it a little bit of a feather. So let's look at what else you can do with it. So I can right-click on my mask and say just, Disable. I'm not turning it off forever. I can just see what was in the background there. It's not much, cuz it was a black image in the background. But if there were other elements that maybe are cropped off that shouldn't have cropped off, I can just double check. Okay, so this very similar thing than what we did in the last video, where we kind of cropped it out. But now we can go back. Yay for layer masks. So whenever I'm looking at people's work and I'm seeing if they're kind of self-taught or using it like a professional, I'd be always looking for layer masks to give future self or other people in the business that open your PSD files the ability to go back and adjust your mask. Either fix it or maybe just turn it off, so they can use the image. I can turn it back on by right-clicking it and going, Enable Layer Mask, or I can delete it forever and get rid of it, and maybe start again. So hopefully you can see the perks for a layer mask. What we'll do is we'll look at maybe another example that better shows its amazingness. Okay, so we're gonna go back to files we had open before. Remember we did this one here, we did 12A and B. Remember we used the circle, it was these two, remember? We copied and pasted this in. So we're gonna do the exact same thing again, but just use our layer mask to give ourselves like some professional awesome skills. So I'm gonna drag out my circle holding Shift. Get it there. And instead of just going to my Move Tool and dragging it out, cutting the background out and never to be used again, I'm gonna Undo. And I'm just gonna click this button. So it's not much in terms of what you do, except you can see here it's probably a better example. Where I've got this mask, this is black versus white, on top of my image, and the image is perfectly fine. Here is what's called nondestructive. Now we use my technique, grab the Move Tool, drag it into this one down here. Okay, now I can go through and start scaling it. So remember, I'm gonna use my shortcuts from now on, Cmd+T okay? I'm gonna scroll it down. Get it down. And let's look at some of the other perks. I'm gonna hit return. So that's done. Remember the edge we had before, which was real kind of, it was just really hard-edged, okay, so it didn't look really believable, as much as a galaxy in a cup does. Remember the feather? I can just kind of feather the edge here. I'll go with maximum feather so you can kind of see the edges there. But you can see I can kind of, I'll move it out so you can see it. It's got a blurry, feathery edge. Okay, and it just helps that to look slightly more believable. It gets better. Layer mask time, you can see at the moment it moves together, the mask and the image. But you can break that link. Se this little linking icon here? Click on it. Okay, and now, remember I click on my mask or my image. In this case, I wanna leave my mask where it is, because it's kinda in the right position for the coffee cup. But if I grab my image now, Move Tool, look at that, how pro are we? Okay, we can get our composition right, we'll make adjustments that the client asked us, or you get the idea, right? So, in this class so far, we've been doing destructive editing, okay? By just copying and pasting it or dragging it. From now on, though, you and me are gonna use layer masks. Turn the link back on, cuz otherwise it's a bit funny having them separate. [LAUGH] And now let's get into the next video, where we start tightening up some of the less easy selections to make. We've been doing it easy so far. Let's make it hard. Or at least harder. All right, see you in that video where we look at something called select and mask.
- Overview
- Transcript
The relatively new Photoshop select and mask feature is by far the best way to fix poor selections and will enable you to make clear masks. You will learn how to tidy up selections made with the Quick Selection Tool, starting with simple masks and then working through to harder masks, such as those used for out-of-focus hair. By the end, you'll understand exactly how to select hair in Photoshop.
7.5 Select and Mask
Hello, in this tutorial we are going to take some more complicated selections and masks. The most complicated of them all is here, that's a little out of focus in the background here, okay. And using the power of Photoshop and its amazing Select and Mask feature, hey, we're gonna mask it out against our sunset background, just because using the underwhelmingly named Select and Mask feature. It's amazing. It's gonna do it now. So we've got two files open. We've got 14A, which we've used before, and we're gonna open up this new one called 15. So grab both of those open and let's start with 14A. And we're gonna built on some of the techniques we've already learned. So we are going to use our quick selection tool. We're going to use a brush size of, it doesn't really matter, again, in this case, cuz it is such a clear division of color in the background. So I'm gonna click, hold, and start dragging around, and we did this in the previous tutorial. So I've got most of it there, it's an okay job. Anything I need to fix up is just these bits in the middle here. Zoom right in, then I pick a smaller brush size. Now it's shortcut time, okay. We're not going through too many in this course, because we are at the beginning kind of level, but there's some really useful shortcuts like, look at your keyboard and you're looking at the P key. And we are using the square brackets that's next to it, okay. So the open and close square brackets, give them a try. It makes your brush bigger and smaller, instead of going up the top here and going, okay, now I need a small brush size and dragging it up and down. It's a nice way to get started. So I'm gonna do something quite small, and I wanna minus from the selection. So I can go to minus here, and just kind of remove that bit there, go to second, minus that bit there. Gonna get it even smaller, and get this bit in there, this bit in there. I'm not gonna spend too long now cuz that was for a different tutorial, I'm gonna tidy that up. I say no, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Zoom out and I've got my selection. And like we did in the previous tutorial, we're gonna add a layer mask cuz that's nondestructive and awesome. And we're gonna have something that has an okay edge. And we looked at doing feather, and feather's eh, doesn't kind of work, what we want to do is maybe tuck it in a little bit. So what we're gonna use is this magic thing here called Select and Mask. If you can't see it, you might be on this thumbnail here, doesn't appear. So I can click on my mask, and then Select and Mask appears in my Properties panel. So click on Select and Mask. They should have called it like super amazing mega masking fixer thing. Because it's got an insignificant name, Select and Mask, but it does some really amazing tricks. So yours might look like, more like this. So we need to do a couple of things. The first thing is along the top here, we need to decide on, and I think it defaults to onion skinning, we can check in against different backgrounds. Now, this will depend on your actual image. Ours is white against black. So if I start masking it against black, okay, so just put a solid black background in there to kind of show me the edge. It doesn't show me it very well. Whereas white, I zoom in a little bit. You can see it's a really easy contrast against the edges here. So decide what works for you on black on white. It might be on the layers, that might be one that works for you as well, if you've got a layer underneath. So where does the magic happen? Magic happens is, there's kinda two ways. If you go to Edge Detection, okay, and after you can just lift this up, and it fixes a lot of things. I'm gonna crank it up a little bit, and I'll show you the preview on and off. It can stress your computer out a little bit. Now also note that we're not looking at high quality preview, you can turn this on, it just stresses your machine out even more, trying to produce these previews. So if the machine is struggling, you can turn that off. I turn mine on, and what we're gonna do is we're look at the original. This one here that says Show Original, click that. So this is what it used to look like, okay, and that's what it looks now. So it's kinda softened that edge nicely. The shortcut for it is P, and I use that quite a bit. So just tap P on your keyboard to turn it on and off, on and off. It's smoothed it out, but it hasn't perfected it. I find the magic potion often is down in here and under output, and this Decontaminate colors. This works really well when there's a huge contrast between the background and the foreground that you're trying to mask out from. And the color kind of leaks around the outside, so if this was against blue, you'd have like a blue kind of halo around the outside and that's often where the problems with selections are. So you can click on Decontaminate colors and magic, okay. Select P on, P off. Now that fixed this particular one really well. What we'll do is we'll open a more complicated example. We'll finish this one off first, but we'll get into a more complicated example. So there are other options, we'll go into global refinements now. This is work for this particular exercise, you might find you've got very similar flowering against the background, but those two tricks didn't work. Don't think radius and decontaminate colors are the only things to do, start playing around with smooth. So let's turn Decontaminate colors off, and then you can see the smoothness kind of tries to kind of smooth out any kind of jagged lines, that you might have got in your selection. Feather does what we did in the earlier example, okay? I don't find that super helpful. Contrast, Shift Edge. Shift Edge is a handy one, okay, just gonna watch this. If I go a little bit this way, you can see it's just tucking it in, so instead of decontaminating the colors, it's just kind of shifting the edge of this radius, minusing it a little bit, okay, so kind of trimming off the edges. Find that is a reasonably useful one too. So if there is a lot of experimentation with this tool, I guess is what I'm trying to get across. When you're finished, and what we gonna do, I'm gonna output to our layer mask. And you can create a new layer from our selection. I'm just gonna adjust the one I've already got and click OK. But what I should have done before I clicked OK, go back to Select the Mask and Decontaminate colors is what did the magic for us. And I'm gonna say, let's make a new layer with this new layer mask so I can see my one versus my new one. So there's the new one, and I turn it off, turn the old one back one, clear the edge, turn that one off, that one on, message. But let's go and look at a more complicated example, some hair, or this will work the same for, say, some grass, or something that's really hard to select. So let's jump over here to the 15. So this one's a lot trickier. Where it's really had to do selections is here, and out of focus here could be the hardest. So I'm gonna show you a reasonably hard thing to do. Is it gonna be absolutely perfect using Select the Mask, no, but it's gonna get you most of the way there, it's pretty, pretty amazing. So what I've done for you, for this particular file is I've got two layers, I got the model on top of a background, we're gonna try and match these two up. What they have to do with our florist, I'm not sure, but I wanted to do here because everyone's gonna ask about it, I know, it always happens in my classes. So with the layer selected, okay, I'm gonna go back to my quick selection tool, pick a size. I'm gonna start with 50 just because, and I'm just gonna click and drag around to try and get most of it. Cool, so if you're playing along, yours is not gonna be, depending on where you selected, it's gonna be slightly different results from where I'm at, but I've got a reasonably, it's pretty cool selection. And what I wanna do is add a layer mask. You're like, mm, not very convincing, Dan. So what we need to do now is click on my mask, go Select and Mask. And at the top here, we've got to decide against what background where you wanna see it. Now, you can see against white, against black is probably better in this case. Remember, before, it was white, so against black is a nicer here. On layers could be quite useful as well, because sometimes you can get a bit carried away with getting the most perfect mask when really, just needs to look good against here. So let's start with on black to make it clear for you. Now, the radius is just not gonna work in this case, I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so you can see kind of, because there's two contrasting areas. This is kind of out of focus here, but the nice strong crisp edge of the skin here. If I left that the radius, it's gonna try and, it's fixing the skin a bit, but it's kind of not doing a great job over here. So radius is not particularly gonna work for me on this case. Now, I can play along with global refinements. The problem is it's doing it globally, and I have these two really different kind of things going on. So I want to use some of these brush tools alongside here, and it's this one here that's gonna do most of our work. It's called the refine edge brush tool. And basically, it's a brush tool to say, Photoshop, have another go. Have another look at this particular area that I'm painting, and see if you can fix it for me, like magic. I'm gonna use a bigger brush size. Now, I'm cheating in using square brackets, okay? And you can use the slider up here to pick a different brush size, but to make it bigger and smaller. Have a look down your keyboard, it's a shortcut. It's one of the really helpful ones when you're doing lots of masking, next to your P key, just to the right of it, are square brackets, the opening and the closing. Just tap them, and see that it'll make your brush bigger and smaller. I find this is a real easy way to work. So what I'm gonna do is make a nice big brush and say Photoshop, please have a look at paint, I'm gonna paint across this, and have another look at this stuff. Give it a second to catch up. And it's gone through and tried to re mask this part, not touching this. I might do this one, I'm gonna grab a smaller brush and say, actually, have a look at this as well. I'm just painting along down here. Wow, it's hard to do. Very steady hand. [LAUGH] You might zoom in and just do a nicer job. So it's kind of fixed, so you can kinda see I can work on different areas, and kind of start using some of these edge detection features but not globally, just particular parts. So I'm just gonna work around and save. That was a bad go have another go. This wasn't great. This wasn't great. This wasn't great. And moving around, give that another go. That's been another go. Now remember, we're doing against black, and it's very unforgiving, so it's a good way to get started but don't get disheartened if you're like, man, this is never gonna look good. It's not perfect around the outsides yet. I'm gonna keep working around. Have another go at that please, that guy, that guy, that guy. I'm going super fast. I should be changing my brush size a little bit more. But let's just have a little look against our background. So let's look at against the layers. So this is kind of a more important kind of think to look across. You can see some of the haze coming through, which is cool, it's not as blobby, but there's a little bit of blue. Now, do you remember from the last thing we did where, if there's color kinda leaking around the sides, I love this one here, under Output, called Decontaminate colors. And it kinda just tries to get rid of that stuff around the outside, and we're looking pretty magic now, right? I'm impressing myself, which I shouldn't cuz I've done this before. But I'm impressed with Photoshop. It's really cool, especially this Select and Mask. And you can see now I can just zoom in, and just work on the parts that I find aren't quite working. So you have to change your brush size. It's gonna go through and have another little look. Let's zoom out. Okay, see how convincing it is? I'm gonna probably have to go through, and have a little look at doing a little bit more with the brush for these kinda bits that are still a little bit blue. But you can see if you tried to do this in Photoshop before, and it used to be impossible, okay, so Select and Mask has really kind of lifted that game for us. For things like here that are out of focus or trees and leaves that are kinda moving. So there is just times where it's just really hard. If you've got somebody with sandy blond hair, moving out of focus against the hay bale. Select and Mask is not gonna be your super awesome selection trick, you need some sort of contrast. So if you're in charge of the photo shoot, make sure that there's some sort of contrast against your model or the product that you're shooting, so that you can use tools like this later on in post. I hope you have fun with it. I love it when it came out, Select and Mask, you are awesome. Thank you, Photoshop. Let's get into the next tutorial, where we start looking at Smart Objects.
- Overview
- Transcript
Now that we have some solid Photoshop skills under our belts, we need to ensure we do not destroy our original artwork. Smart Objects are an amazing feature that every new user should understand. Learn how to use smart objects in Photoshop in this lesson.
8.1 Understanding Photoshop Smart Objects
Hi there, in this video we're going to look at what a smart object is. A lot of people ask me, why should I be using them? There are lots of forums people say always use smart objects. Okay, we're gonna dive in, figure out the pros and cons for them right now in Photoshop. All right, so we're gonna look at the two parts. We're gonna look at smart objects images, and then we'll look at it for things like logos and icons, they traditionally call vector objects. So, to get started, make sure you've got 16a open, okay? 16a-smart-objects from the source files. Now let's bring in and image, now we're going to do it our way. File > Open, and let's open up the one called 16b, okay? Another image from Norwood themes, great, so we're gonna use our track move tool, click All drag, drag, drag. We've done this before, we're getting pretty good at it, right? Okay, and we've got our image here. It's really big, okay, lots of quality in there, awesome and I wanna scale it down. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you the wrong way, while the way we've been doing it and then the new fancy way. So I'm gonna grab my Edit > Transform and Scale, I'm gonna use my shortcut. Cmd + T, zoom out a little bit, okay, I'm gonna scale it down to something more appropriate. Let's say I get it down to this size, for what reason? Mainly just to show you an example, let's say I wanna use it quite small, I'm gonna remove the background. It's gonna be this little petite thing in here, okay? I click Return, done, then later on I'm, actually, what I might do is make it bigger. So I'm gonna use my shortcut again, Cmd + T on a Mac, Ctrl + T on a PC. And I'm gonna make it nice and big, what you'll notice is, can you see the quality of this guy here? I want it nice and big in here, okay? Hit Return, the quality just disappeared, okay? And that's where the value of a smart object comes in, okay? If you make it really small, Photoshop goes, okay, I'm gonna get ri of all of the pixels I don't need. And when you make it bigger, they're just not there anymore, unless we use a smart object. So with this layer selected, I'm gonna delete them, okay? And we are gonna bring in the proper way. So same technique, try to get across to this tab here. And before you do anything, right-click the layer where it says Layer 1, okay? And we are gonna hit Convert to Smart Object and nothing looks like it changes. Okay, the only thing that changes really is the icon here on the thumbnail that wasn't there before. We turn it off, turn it back on, cool, so that is yeah, basically all you need to do. You don't need to remember to do much, okay? But what happens now if I go to my Transform, I scale it down smaller, okay? Petit, I'm not sure why I use that word [LAUGH], okay. Bad transform, hold down Shift in, okay, hit Return. It's really teeny tiny, zoom in, okay, but when I make it bigger. Let's go, you can see all the quality is still here, okay? So that's the perfect, though, that's the kind of thing for smart objects. What it is, is, think of a wrapper that goes around the outside, it's like a little cocoon. Hit Return now, it's a little cocoon that I put the image inside, okay? That protects it, so even though I make it smaller it's in this kind of protective shell, inside that shell is still a full quality image. Now your file size will be bigger, okay? Cuz we've got the big version in there but it means that it gives me lots of flexibility later on to do resizing. And it protects it from what's called destructive editing, things that will wreck the image, okay? You can kind of do stuff to it but inside is still the good version. What I'm gonna do now is, do this I'm gonna play with my layer order. Now, just so you know the structure of this, I made a rectangle using the Rectangle tool, where is it, yeah, okay. And then I added our color over Gradient Overlay. We did this earlier in the course, right? I've got some ticks there as well. All right, the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna look at, so images are used that way. That's the best way to use them, let's look at, say, our icons and logos. So let's bring it in and you can bring in logos two different ways. I'll show you two different ways cuz if you've already got Illustrator skills, what you're probably gonna be doing is working in Illustrator. So I'm in Adobe Illustrator, you don't have to do this. You can just watch, if you don't have Illustrator installed. I'm gonna File > Open to my exercise files, I'm gonna open up this one here, 16c, it's my vector logo. And the cool thing about this, so Illustrator is really handy for drawing things like logos and icons, okay? Better than Photoshop but let's say it's being drawn in this program, what I can do is grab my black arrow, select it all, go to Copy. Okay, hit it Copy, jump back into Photoshop. Okay and then go hit it Paste and here you'll be, default pixels and pixels is not the good way, we love smart objects, okay? Let's do the before and after, so I'm gonna bring in Pixels. I hit Return, okay, to get it the right size, I'm gonna do the same thing, I'm gonna paste it again. So I got two options, one is smart objects, let's turn off Add to my current library for the moment, doesn't really matter. Let's click OK, I'm gonna hit return, get it the right size. So now I have two using both methods, okay? And the difference is going to be that same scaling thing there. So I'm going to zoom a little bit, so you can see it and they're both the same kinda quality at the moment. So this is my second one, that's the first one. Let's name them, let's go, no smart, Not Smart, this one here. And Very Smart, I'm gonna Stick both of them at the same time. Click the first one, hold Shift, click the second one. I'm gonna use my shortcut for scaling, remember, Cmd + T on a Mac, Ctrl + T on a PC. And get ready for it, let's zoom out, okay? And let's make this thing very big, and I'm gonna hit Return, you'll notice that the one on the left here, okay? Is, let's have a little look, one on the left here is horrible. You've all seen that, okay? It's all pixelated and there's interpolation everywhere. See this guy, smart object man is, look how crispy he is, or she, it's probably a she, okay? So that is the big difference, okay? When you bringing in logos or icons, you've got from, say your Envato Elements account. And it does give you the option, it says, would you like it to be a smart object? Yes, object, smart object is the way to go. Why would you not use a smart object? There is a handful of saved filters up here that just won't work. If there is lens blue, it won't work, if it's a smart object. Every new version of Photoshop, they seem to be able to include more and more of these features. So smart blue doesn't work on that but let's look at the Not Smart Object, okay? And let's go to Filter >Blur and Lens Blur is available, so that's one of the drawbacks, okay? The other drawback it makes the file size big, let's say you did wanna use Lens Blur, okay? So I'm going to get rid of my Not Very Smart layer, goodbye. Let's say I'd like this though, and I'd like to kinda make it nice and big. But I wanna add a Lens Blur to it, so it's not gonna work until convert it back into a not smart object, okay? And what that's really called is if you right-click the word Very Smart. There's one that says Rasterize Layer, nothing's gonna change, except now when I scale it up, it's not gonna have made crisp quality. It'll scale down just fine, but any bigger it's not gonna be having to redraw. So I don't want to do Filter, just kind of an example I guess, I'm gonna go to Edit > Step Backward until my little icon appears. And I'm gonna show you one of the other perks for using a smart object, especially with things like logos and icons. So I'm going to do a couple things, I'm gonna shrink it down, cuz it's meant to be kind of over here. My arrow key is just to tap it around my keyboard. Let's make it white, with this layer selected, we're gonna use the Effects and we'll use Color Overlay. And mine's already defaulted to white, which is cool, click OK, and so I've got that version, right? Now I wanna use it in a kind of a hero graphic way, so that big kinda thing you saw at the beginning, kind of covering the background. So I'm gonna right-click him, I'm gonna duplicate him. I'm gonna give him a name, let's call him Hero Graphic. So I've got two of them now, kind of on top of each other. I'm gonna scale this one up, and because it's a smart object, it's got all the lovely vector, hit Return when you're finished. I'm gonna lower the capacity, to kind of make it a more of a watermark thing in there, here it looks okayish. And so where the perk is, I've got two versions of this now, and let's say that I'm still developing this logo or icon and I wanna change it. There's a really cool, neat little trick you can do with smart objects. I can double-click, let's say, the Very Smart option. Double-click the thumbnail with this little icon, double-click it. Now it's gonna open up in the program that created it, okay? So in this case, it's gonna be Illustrator, okay? So I'm gonna click OK, and what it does is, you see that original copied across okay? It's a second version layer, they're not connected. That original one I made and copied in, doesn't have any sort of connection so, I'm just gonna close them down. But this guy here, this is a vector smart object, there's a total connection back to my Photoshop. What I can do is let's zoom in, okay? I'm just gonna do a real basic, use my white arrow, gonna click on this thing here. And I'm just gonna drag the point, over the handles, I'm just, I don't know what I'm doing right now. Okay, so I'm just adjusting this, okay? Plants ask for changes or I just don't like it, when I hit Save, so I'm go over File > Save. Jump back into Photoshop, you ready? You see, it got the little tab there, okay? That's a little thing we made, okay? There he is there, there's the big tab there, so they're connected together, okay? So it makes for lots of changes, especially if say you use the logo a few different times, okay? It's all connected, even if you're just using it once. It's nice to be able to go inside, make a change and see it update across different artwork. I am totally wrecking this thing now, just cuz. That is right, save it, jump back in here, you can see I've wrecked my logo. Jump back in here, and do it, save it, back into here and it updates. So to recap, basically bring in an image, whatever size it is, you can put it into a smart object, do your work. If you have to convert it to a non-smart object, okay? It's right-clicking it and rasterizing it, there are some extra perk for vector and objects, okay? Copying and pasting from, it works the same for InDesign or Illustrator, copying and pasting logos in. And the other thing I'll quickly show you is, instead of copying and pasting from Illustrator, you can use this file. And this one it says Place Embedded, click on this. I can do the same thing without having to open up Illustrator. You might not be that keen on it, you might not have any skills in Illustrator so you can go straight to here. Bringing in your vector file, Place, everything's perfect, click OK. And entering your keyboard to get at the right size. And cool thing about that is that Photoshop is clever enough to say I'm just gonna make him a Smart Object. So you don't really need to, I guess, make that decision at the beginning. But you still have all the same perks of being able to double-click it. Go into it and make adjustments, and go back in again and have it update in Photoshop again. All right, smart objects, kind of confusing, easy with images. You're gonna be doing lots of images, so 100% smart objects all the time. All right, I think I just need to finish this video now, and we'll get on to the next one. Where we look at some of the Transform and Warp tools, pretty exciting, cool, fun Photoshop stuff. Let's jump into there now and get started.
- Overview
- Transcript
This lesson will allow us to bend, warp, and resize our layers. These transformations will give us tools to reshape and reimagine our images. You'll learn how to warp a layer in Photoshop, how to resize a layer in Photoshop, and more. In addition to simple transformations, we will learn how to mock up a logo and make it look as if it's part of a real image.
9.1 Transforming and Warping Layers
Hey there. In this video, we're gonna take this kinda flat graphic at the top right here and wrap it around our coffee cup and stick it under the book. And kinda make it so interacts with the background. You can kind of see it there. All using the magical Transform tools in Photoshop. Let's get into it. All right, so first up, I've got 17a transformed, it's from Rawpixel on Unsplash. And let's bring in our logo that we're gonna try and morph around here. And so let's go to File and let's go to Place Embedded. And we're gonna start with this one here called 17b, we're gonna use transform logo, 17b. Click on Place. Yep, everything's perfect, click OK. And then we are going to get it to the size we want. I'm happy how it comes. I'm just gonna hit Return on my keyboard or Enter. And remember from the last video when we talked about smart objects? And we were like Photoshop is awesome and it converts it to a smart object automatically. In the very next video that's gonna cause us problems. Okay, so what we need to do is we need to learn some of these Edit Transform tools. You can do the basics while it's smart object like Scale and Rotate, which we've covered already, and we'll cover Skew. I'd never use Skew. Okay, you might need Skew. Okay, I'm gonna hit Escape to say no, I didn't mean that. So not a smart object, it's not gonna work for us in this case. So we'll just Right click the name and we go to this one that say Rasterized Layer. Okay, nothing changes except the icons go and we get to do this. We get to go to Edit, Transform and we're gonna use, we're gonna start with Distort. Okay, and it's just gonna allow us to, it looks kind of the similar as Scale, but when you grab one of the corners you'll notice it's a little bit squiggy. Okay, so what I'm gonna try and do is I can click anywhere in the middle to move it. Don't use the little crosses in the middle just anywhere else. And then I'm just gonna kind of try and lay this thing down on the ground. There's just a lot of like trying to, lot of like tongue out going hum, does that look right? Does that look right? There's a lot of that when you're doing this technique. I'm just trying to make it look like it's on the floor. It could be painful to watch. And yeah, I fiddle around the way just to make it feel like it's on the ground. You give that a go. Okay, when you're finished though, remember, it'll be all grayed out until you hit Return on your keyboard or Enter on your keyboard to say, yep, that's what I meant. Cool, so that is the Distort transformation. There's a few other ones we'll just quickly discuss rather than go through. Under Edit, Transform there's the option of Flipping Vertical and Horizontal just kind of flips it over. Okay, let's look at one of the other ones. Let's bring in another graphic. Let's go to File. Let's go to Place Embedded. You could be copying and pasting from Photoshop avoiding the smart object and using pixels in that case. Let's go down to 17c. It's just a square version that I made. Click OK. If you do get stuck in this kind of middle land it just means that again, nothing's gonna work. It's kind of saying I'm boarding it in, but what size would you like it to be? I'm just gonna say Enter on my keyboard, bring it in that size please. Same problem as before. We're gonna have to Right click them and go to Rasterized Layer. With my Move tool I'm just gonna move it into the middle here and now I gonna try, I wanna kinda make it wrap around this coffee cup. Now there is a setting in here that I'll just quickly show you, Perspective. I never use Perspective. Why? Because I just find I use Warp, it does this which is kind of cool, you might like this. This might work for you but you can't kind of rotate it and I find to do that effect that we did earlier Distort is a lot more flexible. Okay, you might like Perspective. Have a play with it. I don't find it very useful at all. I'm gonna hit Escape. The one I do find super useful is under Edit, Transform and there's this one called Warp. So I use that one and that one quite a bit when I'm trying to fake things. So Distort was great for laying this guy down on the ground. And Warp it looks very similar except it's more like fabric now. So I'm gonna zoom in. Move across. And if I grab one of the corners here and just drag it around can you see it's like more fabric? Whereas this was kind of like we're playing with a perspective and it was quite kind of solid. Whereas this everything's kind of bendy. So the cool thing about this, there's pros and cons. And there are some default shapes at the top here. You can pick Arc, and you can pick Lower Arc, and there are some adjustments over here. And you might get lucky and like you might just get the perfect one. So say this one here, the Band, say it'a a wine bottle and there's no like at the moment there's a bit of a perspective here it's not straight on. So you might decide that actually you can go negative. So I say negative 50, maybe negative 20, and you can kind of get it. But there's this other kind of I want it to be flaring out little bit, so these Custom ones are not gonna be that useful except for Fish. Remember Fish? Can we do this with type? You always need Fish. There's never not occasion for Fish. And if you wanna get back to Custom it's this top one here. Okay, actually, I don't wanna start with Fish, so I'm gonna hit Escape on my keyboard to get back to how it was and just start again. Edit, Transform and let's go to Warp. Okay, and what I'm gonna do is again, just kind of a lot of playing around going on, yeah how's this? There's a lot of dragging over. And what happens is there's kinda four main corners. So these kind of four corners, okay? And then they're these things. These handles that affect how it gets into these corners, so you need to play around with a bit of both. Okay, so you can just watch me there's a lot of just trial and error and practice in this case. Okay, out a bit further. And what I'm looking at is I'm just trying to mock-up trying to follow the edges here and follow the cup top and bottom. So I need this to bulge out a little bit. I need this to kind of come out a little bit here. So we're doing quite a rigid object and I use this technique for, say it's a mocking up an image on a billboard. So I've got a photo of a billboard and I've got my kind of like design that have made for the billboard. It's a good way of kind of just trying to stick it on there and fake it. I use this quite a bit when we do branding deals where we're trying to get sponsors logos on the shirts and stuff we wanna mock it up. And another use, you might not be using [LAUGH] this much. But I got a few tattoos and what I do is when I'm designing them, I like to mock them up on my body in Photoshop where they would be, colors like look just to kind of, yeah bend them around. Cuz you can get quite, you can see you can kind of follow the curves of the body with enough kind of prodding. I'm gonna go, I've gone and wrecked mine now [LAUGH] don't prod it too much. Okay, so you can form this around the human body as well which is quite cool. So I'm gonna try and get mine back to roughly where it was. You're getting the idea now that I've wrecked mine. It looked better [LAUGH] before. Okay, so I'm gonna jump out now and pause the video and actually make it look half decent like I had it before and I'll be back. All right, and I'm back. And I spent a bit of time just kind of flaring it out and matching that. How long did it take? I don't know. I was at it for about two or three minutes trying to get the bulges right. There's no miracle potion for that. But the last thing we'll do before we go is the distorting and the warping is awesome. You'll be both of them in your toolkit. But I want to get this to interact with the background a little bit because it's the same color across and it looks a little fake. So we're gonna make it a little less fake by let's find the right layer to slay here. I turn the eye on and off to work out which layer I'm on. And at the top here we're gonna change the Blending mode. We're not gonna cover Blending modes hardcore now we're just gonna look at switching it from Normal to this magical one called Multiply. And you can see it just interacts with the background a whole lot better. It's the way that this layer interacts with the things underneath. It's the same with this lay here. If I click on my Transform Logo and I go into Normal and Multiply you can see it just blends with the background. It changes the color of it but actually makes it feel a lot more realistic. The good thing about it if I click on this I can move it around and because it's interacting with the background you can see it kinda starts looking pretty cool? All right, so that's gonna be it for our transforming. Let's jump into the next video where we start looking at photo retouching. All right, I'll see you in the next video.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson we will learn the core retouching tool: the healing brush. We’ll retouch our model to remove blemishes and stray hair. We’ll also look at how useful this tool is for removing entire objects or people from an image.
10.1 Retouching With the Photoshop Healing Brush
Welcome back everyone. In this video we're going to look at my favorite tool in Photoshop. It's called the Spot Healing Brush and it's used a lot for retouching. We're going to do a couple of cool things like this, we'll remove some graffiti off the wall, magic we're going to remove some blemishes of this man, see his face, before, after, we're even going to go as far as removing people completely. Look what do you mean? There he is, look, there was a person there, and now it's gone. Cool. Let's go learn how to use this fancy tool in Photoshop right now. All right, so let's open up how Exercise Files, file open, and there's going to be three that we're working with, 18 A, B, and C. So we'll start with this one here. Now we're going to retouch out some of this blemishes and things now. I've worked as a retoucher for a long time and I dont really like what we do. I love the technology though. So let's look at the technology. Not so much the faking life stuff. So what we're going to do, we're going to use this thing called the healing brush. Okay, so the Spot Healing Brush is the top option so click and hold down, we want this one here. Okay, and tons of brush size that will depend on your image, and this particular one, I'm using about, I'm guessing about the 50. Okay, so you can drop this down. I use my brackets there, remember, familiar? Okay, so brackets are really good for changing brush sizes, doesn't matter if it's the healing brush or just the regular brush tool. So I'll go my size at 15 and crank your hotness down to 0. So just drag it down to 0, just gives a nice, even hitch. So when you're using it, there's a good way in a bad way, the bad way is just working straight on it. And I want to show you that first because it is pretty magic. Watch this. If I just click hold my mouse kind of painted out. I'm just dragging left and right, let go. Magic I'm gonna go to Edit Undo. Undo, undo, undo, undo, it just magics away things. I can't believe how cool and amazing it is, well done Photoshop. But now you know when people say that person is being photoshopped, man, it's hard to tell, if you're a good retoucher, it's hard to tell. So, one of the problems with that is that's called destructive editing. Like I can't go back now, what ends up happening is what I'm going to paint out another one. And if you just click once on some of these can depending how big you might have to adjust your brush size, but eventually, you'll end up with this person that looks like quite fake, they'll look like a photoshopped, kind of a plastic weed skin. So what you do is, I'm going to go, there's an option under here called File Revert. That just gives it back to when I first opened the document or at least last saved, okay? So go all the way to the beginning. So the more pro way of using that tool is to create a new layer down here. It's a blank layer, nothing on it. I'm gonna call it my retouch layer, and all I need to do is the same tool, but I need to do this one here that says sample all layers. So instead of like, only just gonna look through to this layer underneath, okay? And make sure it feels as not it safe to content the way it should be by default it should be set to normal, just copy what I've got. So now when I do it, same thing happens, watch I can kind of paint over these things, paint over, paint over. And you can work your way around, brush sizes remember is square brackets next to open and close. Okay, you can go through and you can start working it, but after a while It starts looking a bit fake. Okay, I'm just so good, that it's not looking fake. Okay, let's have a look now. Now, that person is, yeah, let's say it's starting to look a little fake or plasticky. Okay, what you can do is this layer, it's on its own layer, which is the perfect, but it's what they call nondestructive. Okay cuz the background is fine. So what I can do is turn on and off, on and off. It's really good for just seeing your work. Okay? Okay, so your handiwork. And the other thing you can do is if it is starting to look a bit fake because you've just been at it for a long time, often with this retouch layer selected, just drag the opacity down a little bit. And what that does is it lets some of the background, it just makes us a little see through, so you can start to see what's happening right down, right up or down. You can just kind of find your balance of real life, kind of like maybe muting the the marks and blemishes rather than turning them off, because the problem with a lot of like. I had a friend in this casting for models and the problem is their headshots and she'll get people in and like, hey, you don't look like that person at all really, you know? Because of all the retouching, so sometimes, it needs to be a kind of a balance, I guess, softening some of the features or the wrinkles or the acne. Whatever it is, that's the technique, make sure it's on its own layer, make sure sample or lasers in there. So let's get away from retouching people and let's look at one of the cool practical uses of say something like this. Now we've got our brick wall here and it's got so many needs more love. Okay, and we want to remove it. Let's say it's just bad graffiti. That's good graffiti. We all need more love. So same technique here. We're going to make a new layer. So we're going to use our spot healing brush and now we're gonna find an appropriate brush size. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit, okay? And my 50 from last time is probably gonna work. Now when you're doing this, you need to need to click hold your mouse key down and paint. I'm holding down the mouse key the whole time and just give it a good work, okay? And now let go, and [LAUGH] Partially worked, okay? So I'm gonna paint him out as well, and we're getting there. Now, this wall's gonna be pretty forgiving because of the brickwork, it's so damaged. If this was a really even brick wall, this technique is going to be average at best. It's really good with nature, okay? So some of the things down here, say you wanna remove this glass bottle, whatever it is, okay, it's really good. It's really hard to tell where it was. Okay? If you do find it not working for you, you can go to Edit undo and just try again. Often just the act of trying again will give you a different result. Okay, so you can keep working your way around, okay? When you're practicing, keep working your way around, you'll get the sense of kind of how it works. You can see I lost that bit, but it depends I guess, it's pretty amazing though, right? If you had to go ahead, if you're old school Photoshopper, and you'll be like clone tool stamp, forget the Clone tool stamp, wow, that was a good move. Okay? So, you can kind of work these out. Let's look at this last option here. And it's really really good for that's kind of like natural textures. Okay, so I'm zooming it a little bit. My brush size, I'm going to make it a bit bigger. You can see I can click on this actually backed in. New layer, make sure a sample of layers. I'm just going to paint some of this stuff out. You can see pretty magic? I can't believe how good this tool is. And it works amazingly, because of this rough texture. If it was perfectly like some sort of checkerboard, it wouldn't work because there's too many repeating patterns. Now, where it doesn't work, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. I grabbed this example, assuming that I couldn't mask out this person like, no way, it'll do badly. Then I went and made a big paintbrush and I painted her out. And then something. Photoshop did some magic. I have to wait a little while because it's doing its best, but then she just disappeared. I was like, not a good example. But there will be times where it just doesn't work. You'll try and do it and it will try its best but it'll look like there's some sort of weird distortion going on in the world. And know that it does work really well, it's a great kind of starting point at least if it doesn't work perfectly you can try and touch it up either ways. But like I teach this all the time and I'm so impressed, like these are new examples and I'm just like man, how good is that tool? All right, so that's going to be it. Remember, it's on it's own layer, so we can, no instruction, we can go back later on. But yeah, that is going to be the end for the spot healing brush in this exercise. We're gonna look at the next tutorial where actually it's even more amazing. It's called content aware. So we'll do that next in the next video.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson you will learn how to use content aware scale to resize images and let Adobe Photoshop fill in any missing background. What is content aware scale? It's a really useful technique if you need to resize an image in order to stretch it to cover a double-page magazine spread, social media posts, banner ads, or website slider panels.
10.2 Content Aware Scale
Hi there, in this video we're going to look at something called content aware fill. It is my second most favorite tool or feature in all of Photoshop. It allows to do fun things where I've got this extra space over here. This is the original image. I just need to magic up some background in. Pray pester. Let's look at another couple examples where this one here, actually the original is the smaller version, but the background got invented using Content Aware scale. A couple more examples that's the original I tighten them all together in about two seconds using the same tool. Let's look at this last one here, I've got a really terrible format, okay, it's a banner ad or a big little box image, can I need all this background in, magic, the table got bigger, background got bigger. Let's learn how to do this now in Adobe Photoshop. All right, to get started let's open up all of the 19 series that are in the source file, so there's 19, A, B, C and D. We're gonna start with this one here called from met Quinn. Okay, this lovely macro photograph of the bee, or wasp. And the original photograph ends here but we need it to be longer for let's say it's, when you end up blowing up photographs on a double page spread so like across the middle of a magazine across two pages. There's always this like gap on the edge here because the formats don't match up in terms of sizes, so we just need to make it a bit bigger. Now we could try using the healing brush and Clone tool stamp and there's lots of options but there's this magical tool. Remember my second favorite tool in this whole program, so the first thing we need to do is just make sure on the right layer it should be already layer zero. Bet naming then, then go to our magic tool under Edit, and go to Content Aware Scale, okay? I'm gonna Escape. If I just use the regular scale transform that we have I'm going to scale it out, and obviously it's not going to be particularly exciting. But if I use this one, it really hit it, content aware scale, and start dragging it slowly this way. Watch what happens. Magic? The background gets bigger. But the bee/wasp and flower stay exactly the same. When you've got it the way you want, hit enter and dance around because that is a super cool useful tool to use. Okay, so let's say we gonna use this one here. Okay, and now it's not gonna work in every instance, if you are like goodness that is it. That's the only tool I need. Okay, it works. I've picked some images that work particularly well. It works really good when there's an object and some generic background. If this was cropped in really kind of like this, really small like this, it's not gonna work very well, okay? So it doesn't work on all. Give it a test. And we'll look at a few examples now and see how to work it. So this one here, what we need to do for it to work is I need to go to Edit. And look, Content Aware Scale doesn't work on this image here. So we're in 19 B. We're looking at Katherine Hanlon's. So for this to work, we've run into this problem a couple of times being in the background, it's got a lock on it. So double click it with background give it a name, Helen's. And what we're gonna do is I'm gonna zoom out a little bit, okay? And I need to distinct, cuz I wanna make it say a Facebook profile. You know the type of Facebook where you've got the big, let's call it like a litter box kind of format, where it's kind of wide. So I'm gonna use my crop tool, originally in this one here I did that for you, okay? Remember we had it this size, okay? So I'm put it together this time. So using the crop tool, you can see here earlier we cropped things down, but you can actually crop things out, okay? So I'm cropping it out so that I've got this extra room here, I'm not going to get to go. Hit return when you got the crop right, with it same last selected, Edit, content aware scale, and then, start dragging. You'll see, our flower somehow stay magically while in a position and the wall gets bigger. Just super cool. Okay, let's hit enter to confirm it. Now you might run into a problem here where Crop tool, I'm going to click once, drag it up. So you want to make it bigger because you want to put some meaning some roof a text at the top here. The trouble with this one is that it's not going to work particularly well so it doesn't work in all cases. So watch especially dragging it up, the wall gets bigger, but eventually can you see the pots getting bigger? Okay, so there are times where it just doesn't quite work but it's still pretty cool. Who knew what that vase look like this time with art. Let's look at some other instances. Let's look at 19c. So we've kind of expanded things out and that's cool, but you can also so back to my move tool. Make sure double click this layer. This one here is Annie's, we've got a couple from here, this one and the next one. Okay? And let's say that this placements here, well, I guess I want to show you an example we can do it, continuous scale instead of going out which is super cool. Watch this, you can go in. Can you see the bottom guys, start moving in? There's magic and the shadows start distorting. And watch this, you can tighten all these guys together to make a nice, kind of a smaller group. Eventually it's going to start doing weird stuff, okay? But for slight adjustments like this, man, instead of trying to mask them all out and move them together, this is such a big time saver. Can I shrink ' down and spread ' out? I can, I can kind of reform this whole kind of composition here really quite easily. Hit return when you are finished and I will grab my move tool. My computer is gonna stress out. Okay, move tool, there we go. We've got this kind of like, little bit of distortion there but you get the idea right? Now let's look at this last one and get a little bit more hardcore because there are got to be times where everything looks perfect except for this one little thing. So I'm gonna do the same thing here, I'm gonna zoom out, here's my crop tool, okay? Because I want to do that little box again, I want to be quite big ish. I use this heaps when I'm doing, I do a lot of HTML banner ads which are just really weird shapes, you know that kind of really long, thin leatherboard or banner ad, or that skyscraper that's just really bad format. Okay, so reshaping images this way is perfect. So I've used the crop tool, make sure my name is not background. And I'm gonna go to edit, transform, I'm gonna go to edit, content aware scale, there's gonna be a bit of a problem look, you can see him the as the paper. So everything else is pretty amazing right? The desk just got bigger, the leaves stay fine, the scissors are great, that it couldn't work out this thing got a little lost in there. So we hit Escape, say I didn't mean it, and what we can do is we can protect bits of areas. So if you scale it out and it's not quite working, what you do is you collect any selection tool you like. Might be the, we can use the rectangle and Elliptical Marquee tool. We're gonna use our favorite, the quick selection tool. And I'm just gonna kinda draw box in there and it's super quick and easy, just kind of runs out and grabs the edges of this which is perfect. And I'm gonna go to Select Save Selection. Okay, so we need to do this step first. So we make any selection we like, we figure out the bad bets, go to Select, Save selection. You give the selection a name, A name, I never do, you should. Okay, I'm gonna go to Select, Deselect. So I'm done with that now. You just make your selections. It could be multiple selections. In my case it's just a little one. Now when I go to Edit, content aware scale, okay? And there's an option up here that says protect, drop that down, and it says, A name, that's the thing I wrote. Okay, and now hopefully its gonna protect that little selection. Hit return. My goodness, that is pretty amazing. I love it so much. Now we're doing pretty big examples here. We're dragging it quite far out to kind of show off a little bit, but you might be doing two smaller adjustments just to kind of make it a bit bigger or to fit your dimensions. Okay, drag it out, see if anything goes wrong. If something does go wrong, see if you can make a selection first. Save that selection then start dragging and use that protect feature. Now, another caveat for this one is that it's gonna work on 40% of your images perfectly. Okay, using the techniques we've learned here, there are some that just don't work, really kind of confusing backgrounds where maybe it's a crop in really tight of an object or a person. It doesn't work very well. So there are times where just doesn't work and it's never gonna work. But there are times where it's just a lifesaver and half a day's worth of Photoshop work can be fixed with Content Aware scale. All right, let's get on to one of the last videos where we look at exporting for all the different kinds of formats, web, social, print, all right, I'll see you over there.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this lesson you will learn how to export in Photoshop. You'll see the best way to get your images ready for use in a print document, a website, or for social media. You will learn the pros and cons for JPEG, PNG, and PSD files. You will learn how to create a Photoshop file ready for use with other Adobe software products such as InDesign, Illustrator, and After Effects.
11.1 Exporting Images
Hey everyone, this video is all about exporting our files out of Photoshop. So we've done our work, we're finished, and now we need to do something with them. We'll cover how to send them to different Adobe applications, as well as sending them out to print and web and social media, so let's get started. So first up, open up our file, it's called 20-Exporting.psd. Now, this is something we've worked on earlier, so you can have your version open if you like. So the first use case is let's say I've designed this and I wanna put it into something like Adobe InDesign, and that's a desktop publishing app. So where I make my magazines and books and flyers and brochures. Now this technique is true for all of the Adobe software, could be After Effects, it could be Premiere, it could be Illustrator. All they really want is, there's actually nothing to do when you export it, you just leave it as this PSD, this working file with all these layers, exactly the same file you use in Photoshop. I'll show you what I mean, so I'm working on this document here in InDesign. I wanna bring in my file, File, they use Place in InDesign. I find my source file, it's number 20, click Open, I drag out my file, want to kind of cover this thing. Great, move down, Cool, so that's my kinda banner that I've created. And you can see, it just comes through, looks great, it'll print fine from InDesign. Okay, so if you need to incorporate a Photoshop document in any other Adobe product, just bring in the PSD. One of the perks for it, though, is if I go back into Photoshop, And in here, and I need to make some amends, so let's say this flower here, I'll just kind of move it around or decide that it needs to be a bit higher, back there. The background, okay, I need to change, gonna go to Adjustments, there's an invert adjustment, okay, and it's just flipped the colors around. All I need to do is File > Save, jump back into InDesign, and in here, nothing really happens, except here my links panel has a little little icon saying modified. Okay, I'm gonna click to update it. And you can see, just went and updated. Okay, so it's a really quick and easy way to work within other Adobe products, is just to use the PSD. And the cool thing is is that when you edit the Photoshop document, it flows into other products. Now let's look at another use case where we wanna go to print, so let's jump back into Photoshop. So here in Photoshop, I need to send this to a printer, okay, either my home printer, or email it to somebody to get commercially printed, it might be a flyer or a business card. And in this case, because there's text and maybe a logo, we're gonna use the PDF format. Okay, so we'll do that one first, and then we'll look at maybe just using a kind of straight-up image. So this one here, if I wanna send this to the printer, File, we use the Save As instead of Export. Okay, click on Save As, there's an option in here, if you click on the word PSD, okay, or Photoshop, find the one that says Photoshop PDF. Okay, I'm gonna put mine on my Desktop, okay, Desktop, even, and give it a name, I'm gonna click Save, click OK. There's a lot of warning dialogs when we're using this particular save method, cuz what we wanna do is, we wanna turn this off. With that on, it's basically just a Photoshop file, and the file size is huge. Okay, we don't need that, we're sending it to the printer, we don't need them to have all the Photoshop kind of adjustment layers. We just want it to retain all the image, the transparencies, and any vector that we're working with, like the type. So we've turned that off, and at the top here, just make sure you're on High Quality Print. Go back to High Quality Print, it turns this back on, so I turn it off, and it's High Quality Print Modified. If you see modified, don't sweat it, all that means is that you turned that off. You click Save, and it freaks out and says, hey, normally, I think I've turned my warning off. It says, hey, you sure you wanna turn those things off, you say, yes I do. Cool, I'm gonna close it down now, and let's have a look, I just wanna close it down now. Let's have a look at my desktop, there he is there, there's my PDF. Okay, the cool thing about him is, he's a real small file size compared to the original. The original that we opened was at 20 megabytes, and it still retains all the niceness, that good quality, any type has really crisp edges. So that's a great way of sending stuff to the printer. Let's explore a different exporting use case that's kind of more simple. We just did the retouching earlier, and let's say, now I need to send it to somebody to get printed. Okay, it's going to a photo lab to get printed on nice stock, they don't need a PDF. The PDF will look fine, what they'll probably be looking for is a JPEG, and let's look at using our print JPEG. You do it under File > Save As, again, and there's lots of options in here for JPEG. What you want is just the standard JPEG, none of these other ones. Click on that, gonna stick it on my desktop, I'm gonna call this, it's on my Desktop, I'm gonna call this Model, okay, click Save. And this is where I guess it's quite important, if you're sending this. We've done some retouching, it's a great photograph, we wanna keep it as large as we can, okay, we don't wanna kind of drop any quality. Okay, you wouldn't, especially if you want, yeah, this is a commercial print, we wanna make it look nice, keep the largest file size, let's click OK. Let's check my Desktop now, and now I've got my JPEG. Okay, how big is he, let's check him, he's 2.7 megabytes. So still really small, but it will print really nicely. The difference between that and, say, the PSD we had before, is there's no layers left in this one. You can see in my Photoshop document, okay there's actually two layers. This JPEG is a flat pancake, but perfect for sending to the printer because they don't need to see your separate layers. They just want kind of a nice, compact, small, good-quality file to print. All right, the next use case is going out to either a website or social media, and the kinda same rules apply to both of them. It's about getting great quality image for the smallest file size. Because they they need to upload, especially for our website, we don't wanna be waiting for you image to load, we want it to go super fast. So let's look at this first option here, and let's say I wanna save this out for a banner for a Facebook title, or say it's an Instagram post. What I wanna do is go to File, and in a slightly different place, it's under Export, and this one here. Export As is the magic one, click on Export As. If you're using Save for Web, it works okay, Export As is better in my opinion. Okay, so in this one here, because there's no transparency, by transparency, remember, there's no checkerboard in the background, there's no kind of hole in the background, in this case, a JPEG is gonna be the best, okay? And the quality slider, when we exported the print version of a JPEG, we had to use a different way because it retains more detail that's used for printing. Because it's going to a website, or to our social media account, Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, we don't need that same level, so we use the Export As feature. And whereas before we had the quality jammed up as high as we can because we weren't worried about file size, in this case, it's basically as low as you can go. Can you go down to 2% quality? The way to know is, if you zoom in, can you start to see, it's starting to look pretty junky at 2%. The cool thing about it, though, is over here, you can see it's actually 37 kilobytes. Okay, so it's teeny tiny. So best to check it at 100%, okay? And you can see, even 100%, you can see some of the interpolation or some of the pixels all glooping together. So how low should you go? My rough rule of thumb is between, so low is 30 and high is 60. Okay, I find somewhere in there is my middle ground normally, there are exceptions. Let's try 30, click out somewhere, are you happy with 30? Zoom in a little bit, this is totally up to you, what is it for? Type is gonna kinda stand it out quite a bit, you're not gonna notice it too much in here. You can see it still looks pretty good, even when I'm zoomed in. Okay, but things that have crisp edges will stand out a little bit more. So I might decide, actually, I'm gonna go up to 60. You can just drag this up and down by clicking here and just going up and down and deciding what you want. You can see the file size, though, is a lot bigger at 135 than it is at 30, so it's a trade-off. If you don't care about file size, go for the higher version. So for websites, file size is really important, for social media, not so much. Leave it at 100%, that's fine if you're gonna just post it to your Twitter account. All right, once you've got it there, I'm gonna click Export All, give it a name on my Desktop, and leave it as is, .jpg, hit Save, and we're done. Now there are occasions where you spend ages getting a mask, okay, I've turned off the background, the eyeball here. Remember we did these masks earlier, okay, and we spent a lot of time doing it, cuz we need transparency. Often, you'll only need transparency if it's going out to a website. Not everyone's gonna need this, okay, but let's say we need to retain the see-throughness of our image. Because on the website, you can actually see through to the background, which is perfect. So all we need to do is just go to the same feature File > Export > Save As, we just save it as a PNG. A JPEG, you will see, will fill in the checkerboard transparency with white, cuz a JPEG just can't handle transparency, but a PNG magically can. Okay, so we'll leave that, even though it's got a checkerboard, it'll just be see-through. This might be cool if you're going out to, say, a video product, and you wanna keep the transparency. Or in my case, I do a lot of web stuff, so it just needs the transparency. Big trade-off is there's no quality slider, and over here, you can see the file size is really big. If it wasn't so big, okay, and didn't have so much stuff going on in it, it would be a lot smaller, but yeah. That's how you get out a file for web that has transparency. Click Save All, Save, And that's it. So hopefully that gives you, quickly go over it once more time. Okay, so normally just leave it as a PSD if you want to put it into another program like InDesign or Illustrator or AfterEffects. But if you need to go to print, okay, typically you'll just be doing a JPEG. But you have to go this File > Save As, JPEG, it's different from the JPEG in here, it has more quality for printing. If, like in this example, there's text involved or logos and vector and all sorts of stuff going on, it's probably better to save it as a PDF, and that's under the Save. I like to mix them around, Exporting sometimes, Save As sometimes. So Save As is the PDF. And the last was social media or websites. And it's just hiding under File > Export > Export As. And a JPEG if you don't have transparency, a PDF, if you do. All right, friends, that is gonna be end of the exporting video, I will see you in the next one.
- Overview
- Transcript
In this concluding video, we will look at what the next steps should be as you continue to learn how to use Photoshop more effectively. We will talk about the relevant next steps if you are a photographer, a marketer, or a web and UI designer.
Thank you for watching!
Related Links
12.1 What Next?
All right, you made it, it's the last video in the series, and we'll just talk about what to do from here. Okay, so first of all, I love to see what you've made. Okay, so if you go to the forums here and search for Adobe Photoshop for beginners, you'll find what other people have done and share what you've done and I'd like to see it. Okay, or you can share it on social media, if you prefer. Okay, for Twitter, we are TutsPlusDesign, or I'm DanLovesAdobe. Instagram, I'm BringYourOwnLaptop, so share it there. And then I guess working at what you do next is easy. The easy one is an advanced Photoshop tutorial, okay, so there's a few of those here on Envato Tuts+, so search for that. But then you might consider yourself, I guess a bit more specialty. Okay, so if you're a photographer, the next steps for you might be more going into something called Camera Raw, or Adobe's Lightroom. That might be your kind of next step for your learning kind of experience. If you are a web designer or UI kind of interface designer, you might look to use, there's some courses here for Photoshop specifically for web and UI design. Okay, there's a few features that are specifically for you, you might check that out. Or you might move into something like Experience Designer, Adobe XD, okay? That's a really cool tool for prototyping, websites, and, yeah, apps. You might be in the marketing field or communications, okay? You might find the next best course is something else, something like InDesign, which is desktop publishing. Or Illustrator, which is more to do with creating graphics and illustrations and icons and logos, that type of thing. Or another nice thing you might go check out if you're in that space is something called Adobe Spark. It's a really cool way for doing social media posts real super quick. Fix photos in Photoshop, and then add some graphics real quickly in Adobe Spark. So that is going to be us, we are done, we had a great time together, I hope you did, I did. And that's gonna be the end of the course. I'm going to finish with an awkward wave. Bye now, I hope to see you in another course.
