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Textures and Layer Mask Adjustments

Lesson 5 from: Advanced Photoshop Compositing

Jason Hoppe

Textures and Layer Mask Adjustments

Lesson 5 from: Advanced Photoshop Compositing

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

5. Textures and Layer Mask Adjustments

Lesson Info

Textures and Layer Mask Adjustments

the next thing I'd like to dio is go in and create that really awesome kind of paper texture effect coming from the bottom here. So I'm going to scroll into document and I got my awesome little paint peel right there, and that would look really good. I could put that down behind here at the bottom there, So it kind of looks all painting P. Lee and I could send that to the back. So I get that behind my object metal paint peel right there. But this looks really blatant and really crazy, and I would just love to be able to get just the texture of that. So with that, I could turn everything off again. So I get just that texture. Go to my channel here, and I'm gonna go to the one that's going to give me the best contrast and what I want to end up with as I just want to end up with the shadows that given very little cracks in my little curls. That's it all I want because really, none of this other stuff really matters. So the Blue Channel is going to give me the best. I'm gonna lose the back...

ground cause the background doesn't make any difference. But I just want my little texture in there. So of course I'm going to duplicate this channel. And with this channel, I can go in and take this channel and use my levels to make the whites completely white so that literally no information shows up there make my darks darker, which is going to control the shadows, which is going to control my selection right there. And then I could saturate or de saturate that, However, I'd like, of course, command. Click on that. There's my selection. Make sure I go back to my Composite Channel here. This layer I no longer needs. I've got my selection. Go back in and turn on these other layers. I can see what I'm doing with all this and with my selection inverted. Now go in and I'd like to go in and now put some content on this layer because remember, this election is just active. There's nothing there. I mean, I could go in if I took this paint peel and I made a mask in this layer. That's what it's gonna look like. It just simply masks out all those areas right there. That's fine. I could also go in, and I could take that exact same selection and just go on a new layer here and simply fill it with a color because there's my selection and there's my black. So there's my layer, and I could feel that with a color if I wanted to and just allows me to get that color, put it in there and get that whole kind of cracked effect on there as well. So kind of cool. If I want a mask that out, I can take a mask. And they could just hide those areas that I don't want to see. You know, maybe not going up into the clouds as much kind of mask at out. Well, Meritus, kind of weird, crazy cracked effect. Now, my clouds. I'd love to be able to go into those clouds there and actually put a nice little starry night coming in from behind there. And what did I do with my cap? There is my camp. There we go. So that starry night boy, that would be so nice to be able to put up in those clouds there and make that look realistic? Sure, you know, Put it up there. How do you go in and make that come through your clouds? Well, it's pretty easy because if we go back to our clouds here and we select our clouds and they go into our channel here and if I want just the clouds to show up, I could go in very easily and just select this portion of the clouds. Don't really need my channels for that. I could just use my basic layer and use my quick selection tool on my clouds channel to go in and just select that area. That's my window that everything is going to come into. So with my selection active, I go to my starry night and there's my selection. What's inside this election is what I'm gonna see when I apply the mask. I could then mask that out. Come on, apply the mask. There we go. On There's my starry night as I see it Turn on my mask back on my clouds. So I have that as well. But now I have this problem with E bottle being hidden right here, so I'd have to go in and do a little bit of shuffling. I could move this entire thing down the list here on, I could put that behind my clouds. When I do that, I put this behind my water bottle I can see has become through. We actually have that showing through the back of the bottle because the bottle is transparent. So this actually sits behind the bottle. And what's weird is that when you look at the layers panel, this looks white, doesn't it? But that blend if shows you this little double box right here that tells you. But you're not really seeing what you think you see. So because this is behind, I'm actually seeing through the water bottle right there. The clouds air on top of it. But the clouds are also being kind of mashed themselves with the actual cloud mask. And I've got my cap separately, and I've got my set up right there. Now the fun part is bringing the clouds in front of the water bottle. So if I take my water bottle, I could go in and on my mask right here. I'm actually going to delete my layer mask so we can get this back I put a mask on my water bottle. I could go in here with my brush on my mask and take that and I could paint a little bit on my water bottle to get my clouds to make it look like they're coming in front of my water bottle. They kind of come doing a soft mask here. Gonna have it look like their kind of passing through in front behind. Now that's all in the mask for the water bottle. I can turn that on. Turn that off. When you have a mask, think of a mask is something. It's a simply black and white. Okay, it's a black and white image that's allowing light to show through. If you double click on your mask, this is gonna call up your properties panel, which allows you to do a couple things. One, it allows you to control the density of your mask. So if you do a mask where you hide everything, it's going to be black. So it's gonna hide. You can control the density, which then allows you to control how much hiding you're doing. So right now you see, my mask is very light grey because I'm turning the density down. But I can go ahead and set the density up, which allows me to hide more. So the blacker it is, the more I'm gonna hide. So if I want to be able to do this, I can turn that up. I can turn that down and make that happen, just like so pretty awesome. And it's all because of a mask. If I don't like it, I can simply shift click on the mask. Not a problem. Everything comes right back with it. So we're getting there. Get in there. You have any questions there? OK, Yeah. So Kyle wants to know you only made the bottle hole into a smart object before transforming. How do you know whether how do you know whether or not you need to make anything into a smart object? So the reason why you use a smart object is when I'm putting on in compositing something like this. I just don't know at what size and location I'm going to use this and I may go in and resize this thing 10 15 times. Well, if I'm using a normal object to keep re sizing it several different times. I can't be sure that I'm going to get the best quality because every time I move, it rotated scale it. I'm always gonna have those issues of, you know, redrawing. So if I know I'm gonna be doing compositing, I would probably go in here and I would probably open up a lot of my objects of smart objects and be able to scale and do all these things. And when I'm done, then I could go in at the very end if I wanted Teoh and Rast arise them. But I really don't need to. You can keep things a smart object because the whole point of doing something like this is doing everything non destructively. Yeah, because they don't want to go in and have destroyed anything whatsoever. At any point, I could get back everything that I've done pretty much where I could go in, they could turn off all of these items right there. I could get right back to my glass. I could go in and I could set this all back to what I've done. And I've got my bottle right where it needs to be without ever having to worry about this, so this happens quite often because the client will come in and they'll say, Okay, try this, try that and then you realize that it's like, Oh, I shouldn't have done that. Well, none of this stuff has really been erased, so I have that content all the time. So that's why I use those specific objects and smart objects here. So I had a question about the clouds behind and in front, and I had this kind of mantra in my head that Oh, if it's below, then it's in front of and if it's above its behind, But that doesn't work anymore because of the way you've reordered them. And so I'm wondering how you could mask that out and have it be behind. If the cloud layer isn't blow anymore. Well, that's the great part with masking, and one of the very fundamental basics of masking is you have to get away from the you know, if the layers on top it's in front of everything in the layers below. Well, it's still true. These clouds are still in front or on top of the bottle. Okay, they definitely are. There's no question about it But what's happening is when we go in and we have this, this is set to multiply. So that is going Teoh, knock out the white areas and go through. And so if I had this and I had this set to normal with no mask, that's exactly how it would look OK, and yes, it is in front of it. However, the blending that I have set up here allows it so that it looks like it now is intermingling with the background. This being set to multiply and multiply specifically takes whatever is white and makes it transparent. And anything that is off white is going to make translucent. So you see here when I go into normal mode, the clouds are sitting on top, and even though it's white, I can't see through it. You said it to multiply and everything that's white becomes translucent. By the way, the opposite is true with screen. Everything with black is going to become transparent just in case you ever wanted to do that and those air to blending boats that I use all the time because they're so great. I didn't have to go in and do any selection anything else. I just simply told it to multiply. And now I can see right through. And because I've gone in and I further put a mask, it's kind of cutback. Certain portions of the cloud on a mask it out. So guess is this in front. It most definitely is. But I also went through on the bottle, and I made it hide part of the bottle. So the bottles there I hid the bottle, which then allowed me to see through to my white layer there, which happened to be the same color as I perceived the clouds to be. So it's one of those things where very basic compositing what's on top is on top. But now, all of a sudden, I'm not going to try to go in and do my cloud sandwich. I'm gonna put the clouds behind and copy the cloud and put it in front as if we actually think that way, because that's the way a lot of people think. But now that I can start opening up holes through or masking holes through now will be able to see through all those other layers because I'm basically opening up the windows this makes for really confusing photo shopping. So one of the things that we do when you do do a lot of layers like this and you're trying to figure out where you're actually going and you're trying to find what it is, several people go in and they just simply poke that layer in the I turn it on, Turn it off. Well, that's great. But it also, if you right click anywhere within your document wherever you click. It's going to show you all the layers right at that point where you click. So if I right click up here and basically I call this the drill down. If I were to drill straight down through my file, the cap would be on top, followed by the clouds the water bottle would then behind in the starry night. And then my white layer is right there. Now it's going to change based on where I click, because I'm gonna have separate items. These items are always in the layer. That it was built were always in the order that the layers were built so I could see that the clouds air on top and the bottle is behind And then my white layer is behind there as well. And it's just simply a matter of going in and right clicking anywhere. And you can click slightly off and it's going to give you a different composition. So there we have it. Super helpful. Thank you. Yeah, Probably a long description, but whatever. So weaken dio a lot of great fun, funky stuff. I had turned off my ripped paper right here. We really didn't do much with this because this is sitting there on the bottom right there. But we could do a lot of fun with us. You know, we could bring this up to a different layer if we wanted to. And we could also go in and use different blending. Bodes with this to get different effects so that they apply differently. I'd love to be able to go in and have it only appear on my clouds. Here. Let's see what this does to move this up. Hadn't tried this one. Let's see. Oh, yeah, Well, crispy, crunchy clouds who Nice little cracked clouds here. So what I've done is I've just moved up my well, You have a little crispy, crunchy layer here and I've put it on top of my clouds here. And I've also clipped it together. And by clipping it, it makes it appear on Lee where the clouds are my option. Click in between these two layers. It will allow me to isolate it on Lee where these appear and I don't know all of my blending modes by heart. So that's why I use my shift Plus to run through all my blending boats. And this allows me to go and see really cool things that could be kind of cool clouds kind of cracking coming apart. I'm using a divide filter Had no idea the divide filter would work. But I could take this layer if I wanted to. And I could make it much more impactful. Toe make it look like the clouds or cracking apart here. That could work as well if I turn off my layer right there. Yeah, that's what it looks like now it looks like the clouds are breaking apart. Yeah, and that's all Just the blending mode right there. Judy wants to know how is masked density different from layer A passivity, mass density and layer opacity. Two completely different things. If I click on a layer and I control the opacity, it's controlling absolutely everything on that layer. Okay, no matter what it is that just controls how much we're able to see through the whole thing. When I choose the mask density here, the layer is staying at exactly the same opacity. So there is my 100% opacity of my sky. If I go in and I control my mask density, you'll see that it will go from black to grey, which is allowing me to have items show through. Okay, the layer still is at 100%. What I'm doing is I'm basically controlling. Just think of this is window tinting okay? How much light is actually coming through the window? So that's the difference between the opacity and then the actual mask right there. Now, one last thing to you know, this looks kind of good, but we definitely water at the bottom of this as well. So if I take my starry night, I know I've got water at the bottom here, some to duplicate that layer option, click and drag. So I get that and I'm going to delete my mask here because I don't need that. I'm gonna move my starry night down to the bottom so I get my water right down there. So I have just my water would put a mask on this. Take my brush, large brush, and I'm just going to go in. I'm gonna brush over the whole thing in black with a nice, soft brush to kind of get that so that it kind of gives me that nice, soft, ethereal looking water right there. There's my water on. I'm going cut back capacity there. So it's like that. I'd have to do a little bit that air masking right there as well. So maybe that wasn't such a good idea. How would you get Thea water to show through the bottle? So if you want the water to show through the bottle, that's where you're going to go, and you're going to change your layer order. And you're actually gonna put this on top of your bottle? Okay. And then you could go through with your different blending modes, and that's gonna allow the water to show through, like so? So that could be sitting in the water like that. We got a question here. Do you ever run into problems when the smart object is a photo shop? Smart object, and it needs to be bigger than its original size. Well, anything that you take and you expand in size, you're always going to give some degradation and quality. The biggest thing with a smart object is allows you to manipulate that up and down, rotate and scale. And basically, until you said it in the final position, it only counts as one rear ender. Okay, so, yes, it still works. If you take something small and you render it very large, you're still gonna degrade it. The thing is that you haven't gone in, you know, it didn't remember all of the other times that you manipulated it. It's just that one final size and then when you rest, arise it. So those still hold true? Yeah. You still have that same issue.

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Ratings and Reviews

Tomas Verver
 

:) Some nice ideas about how to make advanced compositions. I don't use the channels for things Jason does. I don't use often the channels for selecting though. I liked the ideas the instructior has for nice compositions. Is it a complete course? No, is it still fun and nice to view when you have an account for full acces? Yes it is!

Oscar Javier Gallardo
 

Awesome! i learn a few cool tricks that definitively i'm going to use on my next projects. Thank you a lot.

Kimberly DeVos
 

Jason Hoppe is so easy to understand and explains things so well and in an interesting way. I have several of his Photoshop and Illustrator classes. He's an awesome instructor.

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