30 Days of Photoshop

Lesson Info

Preview of Content Part 1: Layer Comps, Styles, Masks

after standing up on end chatting with about here's the plan for the thirty days I wantto do some examples of the kind of things that were going to be talking about and my intention here is not to necessarily go through every single step to say here is everything you know to to do this particular function but mohr an overview of the kind of woman doing along the way they'll still be some that are frankly short enough that it will be pretty easy to see here's how this works but it's really just picked a bunch of sample images that relate to the various things we talked about I'm not going to show you them in any particular order that relate to thirty days but just mohr big overview of the kind of things we're going to talk about so for example I have start off here I've got a document in photo shop with a bunch of layers already in it and this is an example of something actually did quite a few years ago and I deliberately yesterday just went looking for an older document just for a cou...

ple of more than one toe to prove the point that if you stick with this idea of creating objects or creating graphics whatever want to call them documents that air structured properly in quotations then there shouldn't be a problem with going back and saying well I did that document x years ago but I should still be ableto work with it because it will still preserve all of the information so one of things that we talked about him one of the days we were talking about getting images in and out of photo shop is the importance of saving this file as a psd file so this was safe is a psd probably from I want to say photo shops cs four cs five with several versions ago doesn't have some of the new features that have but it still has if we look through the layers panel you'll still see there's a whole bunch of layers and it's showing me certain information like this one has a stroke in a drop shadow on here's a type player so this was created some time ago but all the elements within it are still very editable so one things we'll talk about in more detail over the next couple of days is this concept of getting setting yourself up for success and one of the ways is with this idea of creating going through almost like a checklist so right now if I was starting to work in something in photo shop and I deliberately at the moment set myself up for failure because the way I I have left things mean if I went to try and do some operation right now any time you see that little symbol that looks like that it means no so now I have to try and figure out why is that not happening now each version of photo shop it gets better at telling you so for example let's see what happens if I try this and it tells me the target layer is hidden so that is fairly clear because it means the layer that I've currently clicked on isn't visible and you can't work on a layer if it's not visible sometimes unfortunately the error message isn't a whole lot more help so as a result normally as I'm working I go through a habit of going okay are my tools settings look good I'm on the right layer oops I wanna layer this hidden either have to show that layer or switch to a different layer sometimes it's a simple as a tool just can't function because it's saying well you can't do that the type player must be rast arised before proceeding so here's a perfect example of that five forbidden fruits thing I mentioned is this scares me frankly the way this is set up because right now it's actually saying the type player must be rast arise its text will no longer be editable rast arise the type and it's actually prompting me to click okay guys think I'm a button is highlighted that means go go ahead click that if you do that means you're throwing away the chance of editing the type so the fact that this line says it's types of no longer be edible that to me should be flashing and read or something to tell you be careful and unfortunately that's one of those work habits things where if you just like okay because if you assume that because adobe is giving you this dialog box and saying do you want to rest arise it that almost implies it's ok to do that and the problem would be this if I do click okay then I could do something else but just by looking at the visual you can see this is just a regular old layer now there is not a type player so if I looked at and said oh I just need to you know change the font well I can't it's not a type player anymore so instead I need to come up with some alternate arrangement and usually in the last few versions of photo shop that is converted to a smart object when you do that that means enclosed inside this container is it's preserved thie editable type but now I could do other operations like paint on it are apply a filter or things I couldn't do before but embedded inside that I still have the opportunity edit the type so that's the kind of one of things we talk about throughout this whole session all these sessions is use caution don't jump in too quickly a lot of people I find this kind of click on a tool and use it then kind of go whoa why that happened or why is it not letting me do it that's why we'll go into more detail over the next couple of days about what I mean by a checklist and preparing yourself but it also means think about the end result if the end result is I want this type toe look like it's warped then my first inclination as well I'd have to use a tool that does warping but can I warp it and still preserve the ed ability type and the answer is usually yes but at least that some kind of a thought process you have to go through is to say before you just jump in and go well it's saying I should rest arrives so I guess I will is there a better alternative and and more often than not these days yes there is and usually it starts with the word smart hands with object so anytime you khun in case something in a smart object it means right away you've got more chance for success now one of things that I talk about in the one of the later sessions I think it's the tips and tricks one if I remember correctly this is an example and I show this touch on it now because I think this for me highlights the challenge that most of us face who for a living don't teach photo shop because as a photo shop instructor I pretty much have to dig in and find every possible thing I can just in case but there's a lot of people that whole self taught thing that this function that has actually been around for quite a while but it's very underutilized because it's the kind of thing where either most people don't discover it or when they do say hey what's this panel do the initial look of the panel doesn't tell you anything so let me actually do this I'm gonna just open uh some other document just for now so the panel talking about is this one right here called layer camps and right now when you look at it it just says last document state and the rest of his empty so if you were had discovered this panel go hey what is this do I don't know that just by looking at this you go oh I get it because it's very nondescript right doesn't really tell you anything it just says last documents state what does that mean well what this layer calms panel lets you do is create different combinations of layers so in this case only have one layer but I go back to the document you'll see I deliberately have variations where I wanna either want this look or this look so I crave them is to separate layers and now I can use this thing called layer comes to say which ones do I want to look at so for example I'll just do a riel quick example right in here to show you I added some type in here and now I decide okay I want to be able they were going to show this to someone obviously I'm oversimplifying but I'll show an example of second I want to be able to show them examples where either have the type player on or not and maybe semisi through or not and possibly over here or not so I want to be able to show several different variations and rather me have someone over my shoulder going hold on one second while I move this over and lower the opacity instead what you do is you do these things called layer camps and layer comes basically are like a snapshot of the current state of your layers panel so right now I just click on this button on as I always say if you're unfamiliar in adobe language any time you see this little page icon that's adobe for new so anytime you want to create a new something generally you click on that little icon so I create a new layer comp and I would call it with text and I wanted to remember where the layer is in terms of visibility what it looks like sorry which layers are visible where its position and also do I do any appearance like blend modes or opacity or layer styles so I just okay so then I'll just very quickly say now I want a second one that's called no text or new text in my bad typing and then one other one where I showed the type but I want it over here and again this is sort of oversimplifying but I'll show you uh moved text and you also have the option of writing little notes to yourself if you want to remind yourself this is the one where I did this so all this really means is when I save this document very important as a psd so it preserved this it means the next time I open it if I don't remind myself what options do I have I just simply click through go here's the one with text here's no text here's the move text so instead of me having a remember and move it over here it remembers that it's still the same one type player I'm just telling it for this layer comp have it over here one hundred percent see through one hundred percent opaque if I want another one I can move it down here and change it accordingly in terms of but we're changing visibility position things like that not content and that's key in other words I can't say well on one layer comp I wanted to be black text they don't want to be white those are two different things so in that case I'd have to have to type players one black type one white type and change choose between them with layer comes the same thing as if I had a logo on I wanted one big local one small logo I'd have to make two separate type or two separate logo layers and hide and show them as part of layer comes for this to work question is there a limit to how many layer cops you can have with well document good question I'm not sure I mean a lot of things and it will be technically there probably is some answer like yes but it's nineteen hundred I mean I don't know but I've never run into it I've had once right had like fifteen or twenty layer conscious I have all these different variations I would suggest that the most important thing is naming them because when I first discovered this I was like oh layer comp one layer comp to layer come three and then later on I was like okay that didn't really help me because I don't know what therefore so if we look back at this document I already have some created so imagine I've got this client coming in I want to show her I've got a bunch of variations for you to choose from instead of me going hold on one second hyde hyde hyde show move and do it all I do is say so I've got this is a basic one and I could even just click on the little arrows and go then I've got two ones or with a stroke or with your name down here or I can also make this text semisi through or have a film strip across the bottom and all this is doing is saying show this layer high this one move this one but it means that I have all these options available just there one click away and the alternative is goto my layers fallon go wait hide this show this show there's hide that move that layer comes just record all that and records when you click that new button at this moment in time this is the way your layers looked so it preserves all of that now remember when I mentioned before about to me as much as this is not automation it kind of is because compared to the alternative that would take me so much longer for me to go on a go okay wait I'll hide these now imagine okay so tell me say it this way imagine I didn't have layer camps and I said tow this client looking over my shoulder so here's option one she was okay so all right so let me just do this and we'll hide that and then scroll down here and get this one and no it's not that one it's this no wait okay hold on must be this one but I have in the wrong place and then she says ok now show me the first one again and be like okay wait a second why you know it would just be painful for both you and her to sit there and remember everything here is just a matter of layer compton you say did you mean this one or this one now it's built into this document because I have all the layers set up and I say the layer comes this would mean nothing if I say that is j p because j peg would say compress everything flattened no more layers no more layer comes nothing so I want to be able to say it any time that's why again I opened his older document that I knew I had done four or five years ago but I also save layer comes because I have no why I didn't have to look at myself and go what I do oh yeah that's cool because I forgot it was so long ago so this is an example of two important things one is it's not so obvious form of automation because it's getting us to an end result quicker but it's also a good example of why I think we need to consider classes like this because my job is to go in and find these things that aren't obvious because just the name layer comp what does that mean and and again this I've shown layer comes for a number of years and almost without fail someone says so this new in this version of potion like new and like really like yeah and that's because at first it's just a thing under the window maia says layer camps and when you most people if you heard the term layer comp this it's not like it says I don't know lay out options or I don't know what they could even call it but the name isn't very obvious as to what it does so this is the kind of thing where once we've covered how you create layers and how you can combine them and try different things like layer effects and layer styles and opacity and all that kind of self how you can take it a step further and say okay now that I've done that I want to build into this one document all these choices before layer camps what I would have done probably is either tried to name my layers very carefully which I usually try to do but you'll notice in this case not so much I have layers called layer to layer to copy but doesn't matter because I've got the layer comes to remind me when I show this it does all these things for me and again it's just one of those things that once you know it's there may not be something use everyday because not every day do you create multiple versions of something but as I sure I say in the class where I talk about this this could easily be one photograph with three adjustment layers there's one experiment different combinations instead of you having to go hide this show this turn this off and the other thing to remember is that for example this one laywer comp the texas semisi through that's one of the options I can save is keep it in the same position but lower the opacity on one and keep it one hundred percent of the other so even a simple matter of doing that instead of me having to go and change the old passing on the fly this is doing it automatically now I don't want to steal my own thunder so I don't want to get too much into the checklist part but as I'm everything I'm doing for this whole segment now I'm always in my head going through a checklist because when I want to show you something I'm not saying it out loud but I'm always going is that the right tool are those the right settings I'm on the right layer because I'd hate to try do something go why is that not working and it would fail miserably so when we talk about checklist over the next couple of days to me it's a key element to success because otherwise you jump in and go why is this not working so having a structure that helps you is one thing but also const simply checking everything is another big part of it okay so let's uh look at this as another example so all I've done in this document just to save a little bit of time is I made a new document filled with black and I've got to type players one that's the word acne and one is productions both of them whenever you see the letter t that means they remain editable so my goal is to keep preserve that edit ability which by the way takes about two years able to say that quickly edit ability keep things editable as much as possible now and at some point in the past I would have run into a roadblock where I would have said well my only option now is to rest arise but now I don't have to for the sake of convenience I have put these two layers into a group and in unfortunately fairly typical adobe fashion they call it a group even though it's really a folder I don't know why they call it group because in other programs when your group things together they're not separate anymore here there's still separate but they're just in a folder so I know why they do it that way but that's the way to do it so the advantage of this is for example I can hide and show the group very quickly and also if the group is identified then when I go to move them it moves everything in the group automatically so instead of having to link them together or do something else putting them in a group is just better organizationally up until very recently that's really what it was meant for I was mostly meant as an organizational cut down on the clutter in your layers panel by putting things into groups but one of things that's happened recently which is fantastic and by recently I mean photoshopped cs six was the first one to do this is in the past if I wanted to apply some effect I'd have to do it first to this type player and then copied onto this type player using something like layer styles so for example I would say I want to make it look gold and have a bevel dash will I do that toe one type player on that copied onto the other when you do that the two type players look the same but the settings are independent of each other so if I decided I want to change it I have to change both of them I couldn't just change one now I have the option of saying like it also applied that same look to the group and that way anything inside the group will automatically have that effect applied to it so from a workflow standpoint it's easier because now I'm cutting out a step I'm not having to say well if I make a change I gotta change five different things now I change one thing now this is an example apart the reason I mentioned this is when questions like jim you asked before about what people have photoshopped elements or what version of photo shop and photoshopped elements it would be very different than this even to have an older version of photo shop like before c s six you can't do this so that's one of the things that adobe updates and says well gosh enough people have asked I wish you could apply layer styles to a group now you can so in this case I go to my layer styles and I have to do a couple of things first of all my type is white and I did that on purpose to show you this because one of the options is that can do this all in layer style so the first thing I want to do is give it some phil which is kind of gold ish looking and then I say I wanted to look like it's chisel type so I go to bevel boss is all the same dialogue box just picking on different options here and I changed it to chisel hard and then change the size to the point where I'm starting to see kind of ah peek here that's kind of hard to see and that's because the settings that this thing have thie default I guess I should say are not ideal and that's another important lesson is mentioned this a number of times these air default settings that until we put in there because they have something in there but that doesn't make them good but unfortunately a lot of people when they go to layer styles they tend to spend all their time up here at the top and ignore this part where this is just a cz editable for example I find like I can't really see the bevel as much as I want so I might change some of the settings in here and it's still ok but I wanted to do I still want to do something mohr well here's a perfect example of and I'll touch on this when we talk about the whole permission to experiment thing this little thing that says gwon gloss contour here's how I feel most people use this when they're first starting out they go in this layer style boxing ago los contour I have no idea what that does so they just move away and say because I don't know what it does I don't want to touch it because it could be bad instead my feeling as well what's to stop you from clicking on things and see what they do but if you don't like it you can always put it back again but a lot of people seem reluctant if it's something they don't really understand what it's for but because I haven't done anything yet I can always cancel this and forget the whole thing I have no problems with going down some path about saying what all these do now some people would explain to you exactly what gloss contours how they function personally I don't care I just know when I click on these little things it looks like that and I like it a lot and that's all I need to know because I don't need to understand personally how gloss contours are making this look but if my goal I'm thinking I want to make this look like shiny chiseled gold type that I start clicking on things go wow that's pretty cool I like that a lot click okay as quickly as humanly possible and now I've applied that to this group so that means the two type players inside automatically have that effect what's cool about this is now if I decide what would it look like if I had a new layer in here and I just added a little bar across the bottom as soon as I fill it with some color it instantly has the same effect because I'm plying the effect to the contents of the folder so assumes I had mohr type orographic eleanor everett is and that's a huge bennett but to be able do that because now if there's something I don't like it's telling you right here you did bevel in boston colored overlay and if I think well I like the bevel I'm not sure about the color I could go back in and try some different color and right away I'm seeing live the difference of what it looks like so this way you have the option of going I can experiment if I okay I don't like that all cancel put it right back the way it wass the other thing that's really important that we talk about in some detail is this whole idea of presets let's assume for the moment that I'm creating this for some project where this is going to be a recurring theme I'm going to use this same look on a siri's of type elements instead of me going okay I did what were those settings again I don't try to remember them I just click this button that says new style and when I do it's going to allow me to okay do a different way because it's not in that way so that's fine over here oh I can't make it out of a group good point okay so in this case I'd have to do a little trick just to show you what I'm doing here but the ideas if you have created some look you want when you click new style you could actually save this look for future use that reminds me note to self tell adobe you should be able to save a style from a group okay I'm not sure why that is currently available but that's what these are for so if you look through and see all these styles these air predefined looks that you can apply to objects that are on layers this also is a great example I've actually deleted some of the even weirder ones but almost everything you see here are built in styles that adobe gives you and honestly most demure like seriously like glowing green text with a red board around the outside that's what you're giving me and I hate to say it because I love everything adobe does I really do accept this these are just some of them are just weird but the good news is if you click on one and go oh yeah that's awesome at least you can see how they did it and you can tweak it so one of the important lessons we talked about with presets is preset just means start out this way but when you click on a preset it applies something that you've saved but still gives you the breakdown of how you did it so even though you might look at some of these ago I would never apply that at least you might say but if I go off on some variation of that it might actually look the way that I want so presets mean and honestly some of them are just really anyway I get caught up some of my soapbox sometimes about some of the weird things that they provide but anyway even the ones that are weird you can still save but how did they do that and then you look at and go oh so they added that beautiful grady int with a stroke and I'm okay but at least you can kind of see how they did it and then make your own but this is just one example of the pre sets that are available so that I can ultimately say I want to save it myself for future use and or I could take one that's already been made and tweak it toe look the way that I want so if you were to save your own style would it just automatically be under the styles tab right it would be this so this is the styles panel and in here it's any styles that you've either loaded or created so when I click if I did actually make one see if I have a new style here and actually called it something we'll just leave it at that for now then the very hopes the very last style there is the one I just created so you would have a serious and if you hover over it eventually should okay it's not going on this case but usually pops up a little hovering thing with the name of its reminds you this is yours now we I do a class on presets where part of it is to say how do I manage the contents of what shows up so if I don't want some of those let's just call them less than practical styles I can remove them or I can put mine at the top so I know these first five are mine and then also how to save these for future use so that if you decide in a future version of photo shop or in case photoshopped crashes I want to have a backup plan that's what this is for is too that's one of the many benefits of creating stiles is there one click option but also it's built into photoshopped presets by nature are not document specific their photo shop general in other words if I were to now close this document and make a brand new document and I have type on it I could click on this button and it would be gold because it's built into photoshopped overall all right so I'm going to save this because later on I want to see if I can't use this for some other purpose but that's just a quick little example of if you are trying experimenting with layer styles mean that started out as flat white type and in just a couple of klicks I made it look like this and I've saved that little look so now anytime I want gold devil type I know it's right there the great part is if you say you have a project where the type is much smaller when you apply this looks like the beveled edge looks wrong that you still can access the settings to go let's let me tweak them so it's important to know what I feel very strong that's a lot of people think of pre sets as when I apply them oh well that's the way they look no in most cases that's just the starting place to say here's the way you recorded it as our say that as a style but it's still telling me I did bevel nimbus and color overlay I will go in and adjust does in some other way now one of things we talk about in the discussion of layers is masks it's such a hugely important part of photo shop so here's a couple of examples of how I might use this trying to take a group portrait and one person's not looking at the camera so I said let's take another one although in this case we look the cameras like nice is dave and this is funny because when I was setting this up this happened coincidentally I did not say to two of the ladies here and can you close your eyes that just happened by coincidence so right now I have two photographs where I want to kind of combine them together and say let me take the best is kind of that whole like some people just swapping heads so when you're taking group portrait ce take several and hopefully in between him like well his face looks better there and that's how we can do it now I deliberately did not use a tripod for this to show one of the benefits of what photoshopped can do so I need to combine these together got two separate documents I'm going to combine them by doing it's technically called dragon drop but I call it drag weight drop because most people get it wrong the first time this is a fairly new to photo shop is thies tab documents in older versions photoshopped everyone it would be floating so I want to take this document and put it onto that other one and what most people tried the first time is they just go drag and drop and I go why didn't work because you have to do drag wait then it switches documents now you drag down a release so now I have two documents and as you can see clearly they are not lining up so now I will take twenty minutes to manually line up these two photos I could now fire's getting paid by the hour I might do that now I still wouldn't um so because I didn't take these on a tripod I know they're not quite lined up so this is another example of this not so obvious automation that gets me closer to the end result I want to align these two photographs instead of me doing it myself there is a built in function to do it it's just a little odd so I've selected both layers I just did that by cooking on the first one shift clicking on the second one and there's a function called auto allying layers and it automatically compares the two layers and attempts to line them up which is great the only thing that confuses many people is even though it's called auto align layers it's under the edit menu I personally would have expected to be under the layer menu but it's not so I choose auto online layers and fernandez click auto okay and it says let me just line those up for you and now they're lined up this is like one of the cheap thrills of photo shop is just doing like that just because you can so now I just have to look and say all right so I want everything everyone else looking this way but dave's looking the wrong way so on this layer I need to basically hide his head so the other head underneath shows through now I could use the eraser just erase it but then I'm throwing away information and that's one of our five forbidden fruits is don't erase anything just in case now honestly I say that in this case I think it's unlikely I would want to revert to this photograph but just in case instead I would add this thing called a layer mask and the way a layer mass works we're going to this and way more detail is I just look at my tool settings and make sure my foreign color is black wherever you paint with black you'll be hiding this layer two lips I got a really funky brush going on hold on a second that was my bad I'm not checking okay that's more like it okay so then I just say let's just show this part of this layer instead not that that sorry this dave my friend dave but now that that photos that much better believes he's sort of looking at the camera even though that's his standard face of smiling for the cameras like really that's it is it anyway you can see over here that the structure of this document I still have all the information because this little black blob on the layer mask is saying hide that area but if I ever wanted to I could show it again now that's a very simple example of a layer mask here's one of the examples and you I saw this a little earlier in this case I want to you make it look like I have text on the wall behind them and I showed you in the opening slide show what it looks like so I take my type tool and we'll just type something in here and I don't really have a plan for look of it but I'll just kind of for now roughly say something like that and I only think I would do is pick the color and I'll do several things at once here talked about one of the days we choose about talk about picking color here is an example where I've got the color picker open and I can pick a color the way I want or I could just move my mouse over and say I want that color right there and it's sample it from her outfit if I had another window open that I could see I could drag the eye drops even further and say or that color from that website because whatever you conceive visually you can make part of your selection of color so now I have exactly what I want type covering up his face that's not exactly what I wanted all I want to look like it's behind him well here's another example where on the one level I could rast arise this type so it becomes pixels and our race the parts I don't want and it would look like it was behind his head and it would work but then everything else is out of bounds so someone says just moved the type down nope changed the color maybe edit the type definitely not because I've deleted information so instead if I add a layer mask this allows me to say I would like choose to hide certain areas and at first I'll just do it quickly using the brush tool but we can see is able to with other options with basically this is the really quick version by wouldn't do it more carefully than this in a second but you see by nature now I'm down the right path where now at least it looks like I'm behind him but this is still tight so I can edit it so one of the things is that rast arise type if you're applying a filter or attempting to apply a filter that little dialogue comes up and says do you want to rasa rise the type in many other cases though if I go too just right click and she was rast arised type it doesn't warn me and say type will no longer be edible okay and that would be a very bad thing to do because now I would throw away some of my opportunity to change my mind and I'm trying to preserve as much edit ability as I can now if I was going to do this better because that was just a real quick one the way I would really do it because it would be better and I'm just using I just used some shortcuts to zoom in to get to actual size I would use a tool like my quick selection tool does a really nice job of editing or I should say selecting what it's doing is looking for definite edges so because there's enough contrast between him and the wall behind him it already had a pretty good job of picking it up so now I just come over here click on the layer mask and say okay so I want to fill these areas in with black I could paint the whole thing but there's always multiple choice is one of them is phil tell it use black like that so now there's a little bit are still doing a bit of tweaking but the difference here is now I've got a bit more and see see when you look at the mask it actually looks like that it's a little more of that I need that means if I want to consider moving the type around a bit here is one of the tricks of photo shop by nature when you add a layer mask see that little chain symbol it means it's linked with the type and usually in among many cases I should say usually often that's a good idea because you want the mask and the object move together but you think about it in this case that wouldn't make sense because if I move both of them it doesn't work so instead if I unlinked the two that means the mask will stay put and now I have mohr option to move the type to a position that I want so once the layer mask has created if you make it big enough if I go too far you see now I'm revealing parts of the mass that I didn't make so in an ideal world I would make a mask the full outline of both of them because that would give me unlimited ability to move it around now on top of this I would probably also do something like lower the opacity and change the blend mode so it looked more like it was actually painted on the background but that's one of the things we go into some detail with the whole world of masking is to be able to do this kind of thing and it's I always feel like it's since sounds odd when I say this but I really believe that eventually have to start thinking like photoshopped so many people as I mentioned this earlier they think I need to put the tight behind him you're not really putting it behind him you're making it look like it's behind him by creating a mask so any time I'm faced with some task where someone says can you just make it look like there's paint on the wall right away I'm thinking while I have to make a mask because I know I can't paint behind them it's one layer of of information um so I think I told this story last time I was on quite alive but it's still my all time favorite story of people who don't quite understand how digital images work there's this was years ago mind you so I give him a little bit of leeway but this fellow showed up at my office and had a photo he taken with his brand new digital camera of a cottage he was selling and he had this nice photo of the front of his cottage you could see the driveway and he said I'm hoping you can help me because I can hear it in your shop I want to flip the photograph around and put it on the bottom part of like why would you want to see the cottage upside I was no to show the back of it and I was like wow if you have a camera does that I want one of those and somehow in his head he thought if he had a digital photo he could just turn it around and see the back of the house and I was like we have to actually walk around the back of the house and take a photo he was so disappointed and I was like I got a photo shop is good but if it could do that that would be pretty so we have to think like photo shop and say I can't move these people I need to make it look like I've moved them I can't paint on the wall behind them have to make it look like I have or my favorite phrases end up with it looking like I have painted behind them and that all a lot of things in photoshopped certainly almost everything revolves around layers and a lot of things were all revolve around layers and masks and that's how we can create the illusion that I've got something behind them another example we go through in the classes if you have a otherwise beautiful photograph and the sky is kind of boring how could I put in a new sky and people to say just put in a new sky well involves masking the sky to make it look like it belongs there but it's still ultimately in photoshopped language comes down to original photograph new sky mask that's what's going to make it look like hopefully believable situation now here very quick I did this really quickly so I'm not one hundred percent sold on it yet but it's very close to what I want and show in the actual lesson on masking how I can now go on tweak the edges of the mask because right now it still looks a little suspect to me I can see a little bit of fringing around there was not one hundred percent the way I want but it's pretty darn close considering it was a few seconds I took me a longer because I was you know narrating so if you don't narrate your own work it'll take even less time but that's that's the power of layer mask is that ability to create things that didn't exist in real life by doing that kind of thing dave you and maybe pop in a couple of questions to give you a little breather all right so when you're making layer masts and when you're making layer cops do those things by a lot increased the file size well you know this is going to sound like I'm avoiding the question but honestly I don't know and I don't care okay I'm being facetious a little bit layer comes no because they're just little text instructions that say do this layer mask yes they will definitely increase the file size but when people say how much my reaction is I don't really know because I've never run into a problem where it's too big and the reason I say that as I'd much rather have a big file that gave me all this flexibility then go gosh that's files getting big I better make it smaller somehow and throw away things like masks and I say that because I've heard people say gosh this file is must be getting awful big maybe I should merge a few layers on like whoa hold on there cowboy what are you getting on error message saying your file is too big if you are then maybe but if you're just thinking gosh it's pretty big well you know what go buy more storage I recently create a whole series of little postcards with photos I call them photoshopped words of wisdom and one of them is storage is cheap your time isn't go buy more storage and save everything in layers because that's going to give you all these options so that was a long answer to say technically yes the falls is getting bigger but I wouldn't worry about that unless you ran into actual error messages saying that file is too big to save or I can't continue or something like that so maybe a sight quest drive or something like that psycho strike hey hey so davita would like to know do you duplicate your base layer as a general practice I used to I used to in fact I had one of the options you good I should have brought a pad to write down potential for bonus videos because that just reminded me of on automated feature I didn't talk about I used to actually have theirs away in photo shop you can say for example every time I open a new dock a document what I usedto have was an automated cancer every time I open a document duplicate the background layer because I was so adamant about not working on the background now most of the time I at least consider converting that back in later to a smart object because the reason people used to duplicate the background and people still do was to protect the background on work on the copy which has a lot of merit to it the problem was if you for example apply to filter to the background copy at best that just meant well if I don't like it I can delete it but it still didn't tell you you use thes settings nor could you tweak them so on by making a smart object when I apply filter it tells me these air the settings you used and you can adjust them so my answer is more often not I don't work I don't duplicate the back on there because I'm either building on top of with adjustment layers that have mass or other layers with mass or and they should moby and or smart objects because each one of those let means I'm not technically working right on the background layer fantastic thank you and one of our regulars marty helen asks if you will be covering during the thirty days how to make a custom swatch panel yes um during the class on choosing color I just kind of talk a little bit about it on dh and in fact having an option to say for client x y z they always used these colors are going to make that a custom set of swatches are only load those and no other colors so we talk about that a little bit during color and on the class on presets everyone talks in general about a kind of a preset management system about on ly only loading what you need as opposed to having this giant eye and the reason I say that I used to have a brushes panel I had so many brushes I go looking for a bus I swear it would take twelve minutes I'd be like schooling I know it's in here somewhere because I had so many brushes now I have sets of brushes here's my smoke brushes here's my water brushes here and I load them as I need him as well as having this giant thing that scrolls forever so that's one of the things talk about is that option of how to manage your presets to make life a little easier maybe a question of the studio so how would you automatically set photoshopped tio turn your background image into a smart object well jim if you could do me a favor since I'm sure you can write this down if you write down for me make a bonus video about um sorry the name just popped out of my head for a second from script events manager it's too complicated show right now but it's a good question that that it's a function which basically could be summarized by you could save yourself every time I do x make why happened so for example every time I open a document do make it a smart object but the sort of disclaimer with it is it means every time so if you didn't want that to happen then all of a sudden I mean there are work arounds but that's something it takes long enough that I can't really show you right now but it would be a good little bonus video in the section on automation and that's exactly what I hope is going to happen you like our live q and a sessions that someone will ask him what oh yeah that's a good idea that could be a good little you know five or six minute bonus video perfect well it's just any time a phrase starts with every single time I mean honestly for me I probably would but like in that example of the dancers I would probably they want that would already come in as a camera raw smart object so making it a smart object would be unnecessary so that's why for me it's not every time it's probably most times so but there are some other functions like and the other thing is you could turn on that automated function for the next twenty minutes because you're working on a project where you say for this next twenty minutes I know every time I open this I want this to happen so it's it's kind of like we talked about preferences don't have to be constant even a function like that the only challenges if you turn on this thing called script events manager you have to remember turn it back off again and it's also not that I would ever recommend this but if you ever have a coworker that's being kind of a bit of a pain on april fool's day you make a script events manager says every time he opened document flip it upside down drives people because they're like what's going wrong with photo shop don't ever do that and if you do I didn't tell you it wasn't me you know awesome thankyou thank you day and hey let's I want to I want to check one off the list before we keep before we keep going can you tell us about your equipment so I'm going that's your own laptops yeah that's the one you're going to be using for the class and tell us about your which version of tablet using in the pen please the on ly thing I mean in all I've done on this this is off the shelf older laptop I don't try to like loaded up with crazy amounts of everything so I'm fooling people into thinking that I'm you know this taking less time all I did was and this was a kind of odd to me is that I wanted to add more ram and I went to apple's web site they said the most ram this model can have his ex I forget what it was now and I went to some other third parties I didn't know you could make it even higher so I have more ramen apple says I can have on this laptop which is really weird um but I'm not it's just standard I'm using photo shop see see I don't have any you know it is just off the shelf no extra processors this is a brand new tablet that walk him just came out with and it's they renamed their lina what this is called the into his pro and I I can't imagine not using a tablet when using photo shop if you don't have some kind of tablet to me you're missing an opportunity unfortunately there isn't entry fee to get into it it's not like tablets are inexpensive but gosh just offers so many possibilities and when I show an example later on about working with brushes I can just vary the pressure on my pen on the tablet and it gives a different result in photoshopped that would've had me go in tow like three different settings and be constantly changing them now it's just by how how hard I pressed for the angle that I told my pen now this is the like I said the newest one before that I had a call in to his five and I've had walking tablet since they came out and just keep getting new ones every time this one this has the added bonus that it matches my laptop but that's the only real big difference with it but I don't personally use he's a whole lot but it has buttons on the side so you can do things like zoom in and out and option and shift and also on that stuff from these buttons generally I work like this with right hand on tablet left hand poised above shift option command type keys so I just use it like this but could I do everything here without having a tablet mostly except when we come to the section on working with brushes because then this is so much easier because on the fly I can have it change factors and when I want to do something creative I can change it by tilt and pressure and everything else

Class Description

Lessons

1Class Introduction
2Overview of Days 1 - 15
3Overview of Days 16 - 30
4Preview of Content Part 1: Layer Comps, Styles, Masks
5Preview of Content Part 2: Smart Objects and Paths
1Day 1 Introduction
2Exploring Photoshop
3Realistic Expectations
1Day 2: Best Practices I Part One
2Best Practices I Part 2
1Day 3: Lay of the Land
1Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively
1Day 5: Layers I
1Day 6: Layers II
1Day 7: Layers III - Masks
2Bonus Video: "Layers"
3Bonus Video: "Vector Masks"
1Day 8: Getting Images In and Out
1Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing
2Bonus Video: "Free Transform - Warping"
1Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)
1Day 11: Adjusting
1Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)
2Bonus Video: "Copying Smart Filters"
1Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)
1Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)
1Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)
1Day 16: Quiz & Review
1Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns
1Day 18: Selecting I
1Day 19: Selecting II (Compositing)
2Bonus Video: "Green Screen"
1Day 20: Type
1Day 21: Color
1Day 22: Painting & Brush Options
1Day 23: Automation I (Built-In, Not So Obvious)
1Day 24: Automation II (Actions)
2Bonus Video: "Actions"
1Day 25: Presets
1Day 26: Video
1Day 27: Finishing Touches
2Bonus Video: "Sharpen"
1Day 28: Tips and Tricks
1Day 29: Quiz, Review, Projects
1Day 30: Project, Strategies to Continue to Get Better