Hi, Glyn here, back with another video for you.
This is episode ninety-two and this time we're going to be talking about textures and how
we can use them very quickly and easily to create bespoke backgrounds.
I'm sure there are some of you out there watching this video that already know that kind of
stuff that I'm going to go through.
If you do, just treat it as a bit of a reminder.
For those of you who don't, if you just watch for the next few minutes you're going to see
how very easily you can use textures to create completely bespoke backgrounds when you've
originally photographed your subjects on a grey paper background, like you can see the
guys are here.
Before we do that I just want to show you one thing first before we actually talk about
textures, and that's this picture over here.
Again, you can see this model here, she's been photographed on grey paper.
Just so you know about the lighting, we had two lights, we had a strip light on either
side of the model and to the front I think it was about a one meter square soft-box with
the grid in front of it but with the outer diffusion taken off.
As the light comes through it it hits the grid and that's when you get all these nice
shapes and patters on the floor with all the shadows.
What I wanted to talk about now is just literally how to use the grey paper, because that's
really important when it comes to textures later on.
Here's our model Jessie.
Here is a picture of a door which I photographed over at Heidelberg Castle in Germany.
When we do compositing ordinarily we think we have to do lots of intricate cutting out
using things like refine edge, and it can get quite tricky when we're picking up hair.
However, when we photograph somebody on a grey background ... Let's just take this background
now, drag it over into our picture containing Jessie.
When we photograph people on the grey background we can do things a heck of a lot quicker,
but the background does have to be solid like it is here with this door.
Over in the layers panel you can see the first layer is Jessie, uppermost layer is the actual
door here.
Now, if I wanted to make it look as if Jessie had that door behind her, rather than doing
cutting out, because I've used grey when I photographed her I can just use a blend mode.
On the layer here containing the door I'm going to change the blend mode from normal
to something like overlay, and you can see straight away we're not actually that far
from having her already composited into the scene.
All I need to do here is just add something like a layer mask.
Get a brush with a black foreground colour and just quickly very very paint away areas
where we can see that the actual texture of the door is showing through on Jessie's skin
in particular and on her hair and a little bit on the wings.
You can see how quickly I'm doing this here, not paying much attention while I'm chatting
away to you folks, but you can see it's pretty much she's in there.
Zoom back in.
Pretty much she's now composited in the scene, and it's taken literally about a minute.
Now we can spend time doing the interesting stuff, adding the effects, the lighting, the
color and so on, but if I zoom in, take a look at the wings here.
I'll just take the paint off a little bit there.
Can you see how we've not even used refine edge, but all these intricate bits of the
feather all of that has come through fine, all her hair is fine, but the great thing
is if we just zoom down to the bottom here, look at the shadows on the floor that have
hit Jessie, the shadows going across here.
If I turn the background layer off now you can see they're exactly the same.
One of the hardest things we do when we composite is actually paint in the shadows once we've
actually done the cutting out and put the person into the scene.
With this effect when we use grey to photograph them on, put the background above them, then
use an overlay blend mode, or maybe even soft light but the effect isn't quite so contrasty
then, the original shadows stay in there so we don't even have to think about doing them.
That's a little bit of a sidetrack.
Let's go back over now and talk about textures, because it's pretty much a similar kind of
thing that we're going to do.
Here's the picture of our two guys, we've got Mack on the left and Sam on the right.
These guys belong to an organization called The Bearded Villains.
Here's the final picture.
You can see, if I just get rid of all these layers here you can see that originally we've
just got the two guys who've been photographed on the grey background.
I just want to add some texture to it, and texture you can get from all manner of places.
If I just go to File and Open I can show you that I've got loads and loads of textures
saved already onto my computer.
'Photoshop Bits And Bobs' is the folder I keep them in, let's just double click on that
and then we've got textures here.
You can see as I scroll through loads and loads of textures, and these are photographs
of floors, of walls, of doors, of brick, of dust, you name it, all manner of different
textures that we can use in our pictures.
If I just click on this one, just bring it forward, you can see this one here is just
a bit of marble that's been photographed which is great for adding onto a picture later on.
Another place that you can get them from is from the Adobe Add-ons.
If I just go over to the website, just go over to Chrome and Adobe Add-ons.
Now, I've put the actual URL, the web address in the description part of this video, so
make sure you check it out.
In here we've got loads of different things that we can actually either get for free or
add in to our Photoshop to allow us to do many many different things.
One of the things that's available to us is this one where loads of textures.
If I go to the search area, type in 'Texture', this is going to bring up lots of the Add-ons
that have some kind of texture in with them.
The one I'm talking about today is this one just here.
This is one that's available to those of you who subscribe to the Creative Cloud, it's
a free one to download.
Don't worry if you don't subscribe to the Creative Cloud, if you're something like Photoshop
CS6 or maybe an earlier version, you've got a version over here which you can also download
as well.
You're not being excluded, it's for everybody to make use of.
I've got this one over here, the one that's called the Fly taster for the subscriber.
When you actually get that and install it you'll notice that you can actually get hold
of it when you go to the Window menu, Extensions, and it will show here.
You can see Adobe Paper Texture Pro.
When you first use it you'll notice it comes up over on the right hand side here.
Can you see this little fly icon with the blue background?
This is where all those textures are actually embedded now into Photoshop, you see all them
different ones here.
If I wanted to add these on to the background all I simply need to do is just click on one
of them, and what you'll find is it creates a brand new layer, it adds a layer mask onto
it as well and it also applies the blend mode.
If I just change that back to normal you can see here's the solid texture, but they've
just simply now by changing it to overlay you can see that it starts to attach itself
to the actual grey paper background.
Obviously it's over the subjects as well, but all you can simply do there, like we did
with Jessie the girl there where we put the door behind, is just get a black brush and
paint it off the guys so that you're only going to leave it on the actual background.
On this example here what I actually did do was you can see just here, I actually made
a selection of the guys so it's very quick and easy for me now as I add textures to remove
them off.
You'll notice some of these textures do in fact have some color in them as well.
One word of warning, if you're going to add a texture that has color onto a grey wall
it's going to look a little bit funky, so what I tend to do is just desaturate it.
When you're clicked on the actual layer container texture, just go to Image, Adjustments, and
then desaturate, take the color out of it and then you're going to be left with a nice
simple texture on that back wall.
Already we can start to see that it's building up there, but you don't have to stop with
one texture.
In the final image of these guys here I went back in, chose another texture ... Let's just
go for maybe this one here, and again we can see there's color in there, that's now almost
like a material effect there but it might work.
Let's just click on the thumbnail, Image, Adjustments, Desaturate, obviously there's
a keyboard shortcut there as well, click on that to remove the color out of it and you
can see straight away that makes it better, and then we can actually start playing around
with opacity to bring down the texture effect just there as well.
You can start to build them up, put as many as you want in there to create a completely
bespoke background.
If I want to take it off the guys here, I could build up many many different textures
in here, then I'll just simply highlight so that all those textures are selected and then
go to the fly-out menu on the right hand side and go New Group from Layers and we'll just
call that Texture, and I'll simply add a layer mask to it.
The layer mask is white which means we can still see the effects, we can still see it
on the guys there, but if I then go to where my selection was saved, hold down my command
key and click on that little channel there you can see my selection is now active.
Again, this is just purely a reminder here.
All I need to do now is just go to Edit, Fill, and fill that selected area with black to
remove or to hide that effect off the guys, and then we'll just de-select.
You can see you can start to very very quickly build up those texture layers just there like
so.
Keep going until you get the kind of look you want.
That's one thing you can do with it, and just as a little bonus before we finish off, here's
one little thing that I remember seeing years ago, blimey, it must have been about ten years
ago when I first went to Photoshop World in Las Vegas and I saw photographer Eddie Tapp show
this and he called it Cookie Lighting.
All he does is he goes through add a curves layer, go to the upper right hand corner and
drag it down just a bit so that your picture starts to darken something like this.
Okay, we'll close that down, then we get a brush, we've got a black foreground color.
Let's just make sure there's no settings in there that are going to make the brush behave a
bit odd.
All we simply do is just quickly dab down in various parts of the picture with this
brush.
We can click down that size, let's make it a little bit smaller, little dabs like this
all over the place, and all that's doing is just making it so that the lighting isn't
even.
Obviously later on we can add a vignette, but by adding all these little dabs of black
here to bring back the original picture it just adds a little bit more interest.
If I turn that on and off you can see the light's not even, it's the shadows that make
the picture interesting, and that's just a very quick simple way that you can something
that Eddie called Cookie Lighting.
If we just look at the actual layer mask that's all we're doing, we're just hiding the dark
parts by putting those little black dots all over it.
There you go, real simple quick way of using textures.
It's definitely something that's worth doing, it's actually cheaper than buying textured
backgrounds because then you can just do whatever you want to your background now and make a
brand new different looking one every single time.
You've also got the compositing trick in there, definitely give it a go.
For those of you who want to know what kind of grey you should get, just get a grey, don't
worry too much about how light or how dark it is, because you as the photographer can
control how much light is on it anyway, so you can make it as dark or as light as you
want to.
Don't forget I'll put the actual address where you can get those Adobe Add-ons in the description
part of the video.
If you haven't subscribed already to this channel please make sure you do so, just click
on that subscribe button, it's just a real quick way of giving us a bit of support.
That's it pretty much, I shall finish now and I'll see you next time.