Hi, folks.
Glyn here with a new episode for you, episode 91.
Real quick one.
I want to show you how you can make a window frame type of shadow in your pictures.
Here's the before, after, before, after.
Okay, so before we get started then, on screen, you can see the final retouched picture.
I'm going to be doing a tutorial taking you through all the retouching steps to get
to this final image here, but just so you know the actual starting point, this is kind
of the raw file, where nothing has been done to it in Camera Raw or Lightroom.
This is the out of camera shot.
I'm going to show you how you can take this picture all the way through to this picture
here.
For today, I thought I'd do is just show you one small part of that retouching, and that's
the actual window frame type of shadow that you can see just a little bit on the background
behind our subject here.
Just on the point about this background here, you'll notice, before we dive over to do the
technique, the background here, I'm using a grey.
Now it's great for doing the compositing.
We can use blend modes to add textures and backgrounds, but what you'll notice is that
the background in the actual out of camera shot isn't evenly lit.
That's intentional because what we don't want to do is have a background that is just pure
grey going across there, no shadows, nothing because that will be really, really boring.
When I'm doing this kind of stuff, and I am actually using a grey background behind a
model, I will purposefully have a little bit of shadow detail actually hitting onto that
background because it just makes it a little bit more interesting.
Let's just dive on and quickly show you this, how to create this window frame type of effect
here.
You can see the effect behind our model here.
Come up to the layers panel over on the right hand side.
It's the uppermost layer.
I'll just turn that on and off.
You can see that it's very subtle, but it does have a bit more interest to it.
Here's how we're going to do it.
Let's just delete that layer there.
I'm just going to press D on my keyboard to get my foreground and background colors to
their default of black and white, and you can see that now over in the toolbar, then
I'm going to add a new blank layer to the top of the layer stack.
Just so we know what's what, we'll just rename that one to "Window".
Then I want to come to the toolbar, and I'm going to select the custom shape tool.
That's down about 3/4 of the way down the toolbar there.
You can see we got a rectangle tool, ellipse tool, polygon, but right at the bottom, custom
shape tool.
When I click on that, in the options bar at the top of the screen, we've now got this little area
called "Shape" with a dropdown menu, and these are loads
and loads of different shapes that are in Photoshop by default that you can make use
of for all manner of things, but the one we're going to be using is the 3 by 3 grid, which
you're going to see just around about here.
Let's just click on that to activate it, I'll click on the top bar to remove that list of
shapes there, and I want to click in the top left of the picture and drag outwards.
You can see as I do that, we do get this 3 by 3 grid.
As I move around, the height and the width of it vary.
I want this to be kind of even on the height and the width, so to do that, just hold down
my shift key as I drag outwards.
We'll get it to around about, let's move the space bar to move it, somewhere about there
will be fine.
You can see now we've kind of got our 3 by 3 window frame, but it's actually quite thin.
There's nowhere at the top that we can increase the actual width of all these different sections
here.
All I'm going to do is press Command or Control J on my keyboard to create a copy of it.
You'll see now over in the layers panel, we've now got "Window Copy" there.
Then I'm going to go to my move tool, and I'm just going to use my right arrow key, and I'm
going to click across a few times, 3, 4, to increase the width, and then we'll increase
up a few clicks, maybe 3 or 4 clicks, to increase that just a little bit more, so you can see
now by just by moving that 3 by 3 grid, we've made it look a little bit wider, but I want
it even wider still so I think I'll create another copy, so Command or Control J. Again,
press down my move tool, and then use the right and left arrow keys to go either left
or right a few clicks, and then the up arrow keys just to make it a little bit thicker
there.
Now we've got quite a nice big thick grid.
I don't need all those three layers, so with the top one selected, I hold down the shift
key, click on the first window frame there so they're all highlighted and then go to
the fly out menu at the top right of the layers panel and just click on merge layers, so that now
becomes one layer.
Now we're actually going to blur this.
So that I don't have to do a blur, get it wrong, redo it, obviously we're going to be
using smart filters, so with this window layer here, I'll then go to the filter menu at the
top of the screen, choose "Convert for Smart Filters".
We get that smart object, smart filter icon in the bottom right hand corner of the thumbnail
over in the layers panel.
Now all I'm simply going to do is go to the filter menu, choose blur, and we'll
just use Gaussian Blur.
We can kind of dial in now how much blur we want for that window frame to have.
I want this one to be really quite subtle, so I'm going to take it up quite a significant
amount, around about 150ish, something like that.
That should do.
Obviously then we'll just click "Okay".
Obviously, being a smart filter, if I wanted to change that, I'd just double click on the
actual filter name there to bring up the Gaussian Blur dialogue box, but I'm quite happy with
around about 150, 153.
If you turn it on and off, we can see that obviously because this is at the top of the
layer stack, this is going to be on top of our model and our subject.
Quite simply all we do come to the bottom of the last panel, outer layer mask.
It's a white layer mask meaning we can see everything, so to hide parts of it, i.e. the
parts going over our subject, I'm just going to get a straight forward brush, nice simple
round brush.
Let's just make sure there's no silly settings in there that will make it behave a bit funny,
and making sure I've got a black foreground color.
Now all I need to do is just paint it off the actual subject here.
Let's just paint it off his leg, a bit off the chair, came down quite low on that one,
something like that.
So now we can turn it on and off, and then all we'll do is just lower the opacity
maybe just a little bit, and actually the bottom, if you look as I turn it on and off,
look at the frame here, the window frame, it's quite an obvious line is going across
the bottom there, so all I would simply do is get the brush, making sure that it's 0%
hardness, and I'll just make it nice and big and just add a couple of strokes just to soften
it and blend it in just a bit on the bottom there.
We can turn it on, off, on, off.
A real simple effect but it does add a little more interest onto that background to give
it a little bit more kind of atmosphere.
That's all for now.
Before I go, just one quick thing.
If you haven't already, make sure you sign up for this YouTube channel.
It's great to know that you folks are out there and supporting it just by clicking on
the subscribe button, which is free, but one other little thing that's free for you, if
you go to my website, glyndewis.com, over on the right hand side here where you've got
your email address, if you put your email address on there and just click on Send, you'll
then get a link to download something that we're producing every single month, which
are these free tip sheets, like a pdf download that you can get hold of.
We're also going to be producing a pdf on the "Power of P", which is
a few steps which can guarantee to show you how you can get a successful photo shoot every
single time.
We're going to have like a downloadable pdf there for you.
That's enough of my voice.
Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time.