(techno music)
- [Chris] Welcome back to this two-part tutorial.
So far, we have combined these two images together.
Second part is going to be to do some fine tuning,
and here I hope you pick up some valuable tips
as we look at how we can do that.
All right, well for starters,
if we zoom in on the image a little bit here,
one of the things that you may notice with your edges
is that they're a little bit harsh,
but up here, they're nice and soft.
So really, I only wanna work on this edge right here.
How do we do that?
Well, what you can do is you can click into the mask.
Let me zoom out so I can see all of that.
Use a tool like the Lasso tool,
and then just make a rough selection around this.
And essentially, what I'm doing
is I'm selecting this area on the mask.
Then I'll go to Filter, Blur, and apply a Gaussian Blur.
And what this will do is if we zoom in really close here,
so you can see that, let me zoom in too close.
If I exaggerate this, can you see how that edge
became really nice and soft?
If I bring this down, it's still a little bit,
it's a little bit too hard.
It looks almost like it was cut out,
and that happens sometimes with selections.
So I wanna soften this,
and I'm just gonna bring this up,
eyeballing it until I feel like that edge
has a nice sort of transition versus one which was so hard.
It looks like right around a radius of four, click okay.
Next, let's do this on the other side as well.
Again, Lasso tool.
We'll go ahead and just make a rough selection.
And you have to keep in mind
that you have to be on the mask for this.
What I mean by that is, you can see that I'm on the mask,
not the image.
The white brackets show you where you are.
This says I'm on the image.
Click here, now I'm on the mask.
If you option click on a Mac, alt click on Windows,
on the mask, it will show that to you
in this black and white view.
This is sometimes helpful just educationally,
so you can see what is it actually doing to that mask?
You can see how it's creating a transition
from white to black, that gray area.
That's what's actually creating the softness.
So that's how this technique works.
And what we did before was,
we brought this up to say, around four pixels.
And it's not super noticeable, but just enough.
And this helps with compositing, with backgrounds,
all kinds of things.
When you wanna work on one area,
but you don't wanna do that to this area up here
because it would ruin it, right?
We can't blur the whole thing.
We're only affecting this area that we have selected.
All right, option or alt click, that brings the mask back.
Command D on a Mac, CTRL D on Windows is deselect.
Okay, we improved our mask.
Next step, we need to apply a blur to the background,
because, how we shoot in F28,
the background should be out of focus,
and it just looks strange that it's so sharp
because you see a little bit of the focus
kind of fall off, or the shallow depth of field,
and so we need to fix that.
The way we'll do that is go to Filter,
and Convert for Smart Filters.
What that does is it converts a layer
to a Smart Object Layer,
which means that we can apply filters non-destructively.
In other words, you can always change your mind,
you can always undo what you've done.
And so, here we have that applied.
It's now a Smart Object Layer.
So if we go to Filter, and Blur Gallery,
and choose something like Field Blur.
Also I should point out, the reason I'm going to Field Blur
or any of these blurs is because of the controls down here.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
And if I just have one Field Blur,
it's gonna apply the blur everywhere in a uniform way.
Now if we get too high, it will look sort of fake.
So we're trying to find just the right value.
And we also wanna add a little bit of noise or grain,
otherwise it looks too smooth, and it looks kind of digital.
So in this case, we'll go ahead and apply that here.
And let me just exaggerate for a moment.
If I make a mistake and I click okay and I say,
oh my gosh, the background is,
it's just too soft.
How do we fix that?
How is this non-destructive?
We'll go to the layer, and then click on the word
Blur Gallery, or whatever filter you have.
I should say double click on it.
That brings you back up, and then you can say,
well hey yeah, right around there.
Then click okay to apply that.
Now at this point, once we see what the blur likes,
we probably will need to fix up our mask a little bit.
So I'll go to my mask, grab a brush.
I'm gonna paint with black with a nice, small brush.
And I'll use opacity somewhere up above 50, I'm at 70.
And I'm just gonna look to kind of fix up any little issues.
Like the hair looked kind of strange right here,
so I'm gonna paint that away.
There's a little bump on the sweatshirt right there,
I'm just gonna take that off.
And if you paint on a mask with white,
you'll bring stuff back.
If you paint with black, you can take it away.
So here, I'm gonna look to do that a little bit up here.
Lowering my opacity, just gonna try to create a little more
kind of transparency on this edge.
So sometimes it's helpful when you have hair masking,
to fix it up.
Sometimes you don't need to do this, right?
Sometimes Photoshop just works its magic and it's perfect
and the world is great.
But you know those times
when that doesn't always work, right?
Okay, well, small little things to fix up.
We did that, great.
What do we do next?
Well next, we're gonna work on the overall color and tone.
To do that, I wanna work with my adjustments here.
And the type of adjustments I want to apply,
first I'm gonna use Color Balance.
And I'm gonna exaggerate something here with Color Balance.
I'm gonna bring in a lot of cyan and blue.
Way overdone, way overkill.
It's affecting the image and the background.
Actually, I only want it on the background.
So I drag it underneath and change the layer order stack.
Now if I add a Layer Blending Mode like Soft Light,
that blue, which is over the top, take a look.
That's actually not that bad, right?
I mean, that isn't horrible.
So if we compare that with Normal,
it looks kind of just chalky and strange.
Soft Light looks a lot better.
And the reason why I wanted to point that out
wasn't to maybe modify it that intensely,
but to illustrate this idea that when you start to blend
color in with a Blending Mode,
it can lead to some cooler results.
With Color Balance, you can try mid tones.
You can go to the Shadows,
those are gonna be the deeper tones.
So all those deeper kind of little black spots on the wall.
And I think that's kinda cool too, right?
So we can start to see how we're changing the color there.
Next, I'll go to Curves.
And with Curves, I wanna darken up the wall.
So I'm just gonna go ahead
and bring that down a little bit here too.
And great, let me zoom out so you can kinda see
how we're doing here.
Gotta see the whole image, right?
So you can see that.
You can see these are just adjusting that area.
All right, next I wanna apply another adjustment
that affects everything.
So I click on Curves again, and it just a darkening effect.
It may not be this intense,
but we can always change the value.
We can also change the Layer Opacity.
And we have a mask.
So with the mask, I'll grab my brush
and I'm gonna paint with black.
And with a 0% hardness brush, a really big brush,
huge brush here, maybe bigger than that.
I'm gonna go ahead and just say, hey you know what?
Don't darken this area,
I wanna protect this part of the image.
And I know that my value is too high right now,
but I'm leaving some of these values high sometimes,
because I think it's easier when you're watching a tutorial
versus if I have this really low, kind of like this,
and I start painting.
You're like, what is he doing?
Is he really - is anything really changing?
But basically, what I'm looking to do is to just say,
hey, I don't want to darken this part of the image.
I want to darken the other part.
So I'm creating kind of a custom vignette.
Can you see how that is working there?
And of course, as I mentioned before,
we can control that value.
But what I don't wanna do is - I wanna create something
where I have a little bit of this darkening effect
around the outer edges,
so that we're drawn into the subject and her face.
Now that I've done that, I'm also noticing that,
I think the lower portion of the image is too bright.
So I'm gonna go back down beneath my image here,
or beneath the photograph of the person.
I'm gonna create a darkening effect,
and then grab the grad - the gradient tool.
I couldn't say it there for a second.
With this one, if we click and drag,
can you see how I'm clicking and dragging?
And if I click and drag a short distance,
there's a big transition line.
Click and drag a long distance,
it's a very soft and subtle.
And can you see how this one is just seeking
to darken up the lower portion of the background?
And what I wanna do is I want that to be a little darker.
Again, I'm trying to sort of increase the viewer's view
towards the face.
So I wanna kind of lift the view up to this area up here.
You know, another way to add a vignette
is to work with Curves.
Darken down.
Then go to the Mask tab, and hit Invert.
Just conceal the entire adjustment.
Then grab your Brush tool, here I'll paint with white.
Again, no hardness.
Again, really big brush.
And this time though, drop the opacity down.
Each brushstroke I make allows me to progressively
darken the area more and more.
And this way, I can kind of customize it.
And as you make brushstrokes like this,
what can happen is,
those brushstrokes can become a little bit noticeable.
If that's ever the case, just increase the feather value,
and that will soften all your brushstrokes.
It will kind of blend them together.
All right, well I think this is looking great.
Now that we're at this point, for me,
to finish it off, I wanna crop the image.
So I'll grab the crop tool
and I'm just gonna crop up a little bit.
I feel like I want to do that.
So double click in order to apply that.
And maybe bring in the top a little bit down as well.
So kind of making these final adjustments here
near the end.
And after having done that,
one of the things that I like to do,
is to review the image in full screen.
So once this is done rendering,
I will press F to go to full screen.
And when you're in full screen, let me zoom in even more
so you can see that a little better.
You can pull up the Layers panel by pressing the F7 key.
And I wanna do that so that we can walk through,
and I can kind of reiterate some of the steps
that we've taken in order to work on this project.
Well, the first thing that we did obviously was,
we took a look at how we could work to combine
these two images together by preparing them in Lightroom.
Then we sent them over to Photoshop.
In Photoshop, we removed the subject from her background
using Quick Select and Select and Mask.
Then, we had the background underneath there,
which we customized using some different layer adjustments
or adjustment layers.
We used Color Balance, Curves.
Also, we used another Curves
with a little bit of a gradient on it,
just to darken up that lower area.
Then we applied some adjustments,
which affected all of these images,
which were these layers above.
And with that, we have finished up our project.
I hope you picked up some valuable tips
in this two-part tutorial.
And I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.
Bye for now.