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Using Overlay View to make detailed edits in Photoshop

Lesson 5 from: Complex Selections: Furry, Fuzzy, and Hairy

Ben Willmore

Using Overlay View to make detailed edits in Photoshop

Lesson 5 from: Complex Selections: Furry, Fuzzy, and Hairy

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

5. Using Overlay View to make detailed edits in Photoshop

Lesson Info

Using Overlay View to make detailed edits in Photoshop

Okay, this point I've painted where I saw the old background showing through and now what I want to see is there any place where the hair well where is getting a haircut and it shouldn't in order to do that we're going to change the preview we're going to change the preview at the top of the style of box from on white to a choice called overlay and with overlay we're just going to see a red overlay covering up the areas that wouldn't be selected and now I can zoom in you have a zoom tool up here in a hand tool or you can use standard keyboard shortcuts that work in any tool and photoshopped to zoom in like command plus to zoom in and zoom up and what I'm looking for now is the red area indicates what we discarded when we're done and so I'm looking for hair that's blatantly going into the red area because that's where we get any haircut and wherever I see that I'm gonna paint over it give photoshopped control over what's happening so I could see little hairs coming in into the red overl...

ay here in salt paint over that giving photoshopped control of what happens in that area when I let go it will re calculated and hopefully the red therefore wilmore closely match because it's going to do its work I see some red overlapping the hair here sell paint there as well get all the hair all the way out to the edges and you see how the red has been re calculated it much more closely matches now because the original position of the red is based on the selection I had and here only where I paint do I get photoshopped control and sell paint here and I could just do that around this whole thing if I need teo and I don't have to let go until got everything I think it might need help with about there it's just when I let go is one of three calculates so I think that's looking a lot better as far as how the red is matching I'll go over to the tail and where the tale is I see red covering out parts of the tail here so a click hey and I'll paint over those parts you go all the way up this edge because that just looks a little weird missing the tail there that comes up I'm not worried about the rest of the image right now if you notice areas like right here I can see the red overlapping it if it's not furry fuzzy or harry then this isn't what I should use to fix it I should have used the quick selection tool or just quick mask mode with painting or something else to do it the thing I'm using right now is for furry, fuzzy and herring and if it's not free fuzzy and harry I probably will be more effective using something else to refine something so on lee looking for those furry fuzzy harry stuff uh now if you want just to see the difference, I can change the preview backto on white to see if it looks any better I think it does because before it wasn't looking so hot right there was one area that I really just like that where we have the hair and that is the tail it looks like there's some extra stuff if I go over to where the tail is and zoom up on it, you see some stuff that doesn't look like tail? Um well let's see if we can deal with it. Wow, while we're in this little tool here there's actually more to it and the upper left there are two choices that in that this means give photoshopped control this means take away control and I think I can hold on the option key to temporarily get to this if I want to or I can click on it manually and then I don't have to hold down in the keys and now I'm going to take away control of photo shop and so if I click and drag here, I'm going to say no, you screwed up there, you don't get to control that can all paint it also up here and when I released the mouse it should re calculate and what it's really doing is bringing me back to what we had previously and right there my selection was probably sticking out too far and so what we had previously wasn't very good so I might have to redo that um manually, but what I'll do here is just make sure taken all the control away I'll bring it all the way into here and then I'll come back with the other brush, the one that gives control and I on ly give it out as far as it needs to see if can't do any better there's still a little bitty chunk there, but I might have to fix that afterwards right here also there's a little bit of weird stuff I can either click on the one that looks like the eraser or just hold on the option key you can tell inside your brush you'll have a plus sign, which means your giving photoshopped control or a minus sign, which means you're taking it away and so I could come in here and say take away some of the control in there there we go clean that up and I could do the same thing over here if I have too much then when I'm done, I'm gonna assume I'm done right now down here at the bottom of the choice called output in this says what kind of end result we want we started off when we went into this command with a selection so in this case it's offering us to one end up with just a selection or would you like to end up with a layer mask attached to the layer? Do you want a brand new layer with the latter master, you have a copy of the original or do you want this in a new document but you just need to choose what you want in my case I'm going to say I wanted just a layer mask attached to this layer so that we end up hiding things like we have here click okay and now you notice that we have my layer with a mask attached. We can further refine this then by going here to the mask, hold down the option key and clicking on it option clicking on a mask you remember at the very beginning of this session I think I mentioned it that lets you view it. So now we could see what we have in here and in some places we might need to paint touch it up that type of thing option click again to turn off. Let me show you how I might fix some parts of the body, not the harry parts of the body because sometimes you end up with layer mask and it's not easy to tell that if you need to come in here and fix something like the belly down here, where there's a notch cut out sure, you could grab the paintbrush tool in since you're working on the layer mask, you could paint with black or white to modify what's there. If you were to paint with white, you would make areas show up that's how it works in a layer mask and you could paint like this to make that area show up. But how far out should I paint? I can't see where the hold the edge waas so here's a trick that I find to be useful whenever you have a layer mass that's hiding things first you khun disable the layer mask. You do that by holding down the shift key in clicking within the lair mask. When you disable the layer mask, everything comes back into view makes sense, but the problem is now I can't see where where the larry mask would have hid things so here's, what I find to be useful after I disabled layer masked by shift clicking on it, I'm going to then view the layer mask as an overlay on top of my picture and overlay that looks a lot like quick mask mode it's just not quick mass mode, it looks the same now. In the way you do that is when it's a layer mask that you want to overlay instead of typing a letter q to go too quick mask mode which is what yet would do if he had a selection on your screen when it's um ask what you need to do instead is pressed the backslash key it's right above the returner antakya my keyboard it's the slash key that leans towards the left for you guys that would be this way I think for me I'm looking at the other side of it but if I press that let's see what happens I get red overlay so we've disabled the mask so we can actually see the whole picture I did that by shift clicking on the mask then I pressed the backslash key all by itself it's not command backslash or anything else is just backslash a lot of people get the slashes mixed up it's not the one used for web sites you know when you type in http colon slash slash not that one the one that leads the other way. Now I can come in here and I can refine this so if I paint with white I could come in here and very easily see exactly where that needs to be touched up and then if I need to paint with black to hide things there's a trick there as well usually you can click this little icon with the arrows to switch your foreground and background colors like this that has a keyboard shortcut and its letter x for exchanging them. So therefore I'll come in here and when I need to paint with white I just hit the letter except my paint with one color I had x again and I'm painting what the opposite so I could come in here try to get that tell it really looks like it might match the edge question. So even though your mask is disabled, you're still painting on the mask. Yes. What happens is if you look in the layers panel you khun, tell what's active by looking at the corners. If you notice the corners of the mask, have little brackets around them. That means that if I paint where I run a filter or I perform an adjustment it's gonna happen to that even if it's disabled that's what's active if I clicked over here now the images actives so the paint would actually show up on the picture when I painted. But as long as those little brackets air over here then even if this is disabled, their hidden or anything else that's where the editing is happening but I had done two things I held down the shift key and clicked on that which disabled it and then I pressed the backslash key to see it as an overlay and that made it so I could more easily come in here in find ten things in the final part of it was when I'm painting if I need to switch from painting from with black to paint with white or the other way around by press letter x in that exchange is my foreground and background colors so that I get them swamped um and so I find that to be overly useful usually after I've created a selection using another tool and it's a za mask I might need to come in and do a little fine tuning question yes it's that when you're when you made the selection and then you hit the selection right um in this mode right now we're at does it take the actual selection and make it into a channel in the background? You could say so just so you know, a a, um a layer mask is a channel attached to a layer, so if you it's a concept that a lot of people really don't have I mean people have used butter shop for twenty years don't have a good grasp on and that is any time you see anything that looks like this it is a channel it's just a matter of in this case it's a channel attached to a picture but if I go to the channels panel you'll see it sitting right there. So is that what the mask is that what allows the mast appear even if you turn it off? Is that kind of reflecting on the the channel to make that masks were back in? The picture is somewhat yeah, I mean, it's just a channel attached to a layer and the fact that I disabled it doesn't mean I can't work on it. It just means that it's not affecting the layer at the moment. Uh, so it's, just something we just gotta get used to the idea that you can edit something that's not currently, uh, hiding parts of this layer is just it will hide parts of this later when you turn it back on. Okay, so I guess that my question is is if you go back over, you've got turned off and then you're back over in the main picture and you hit q and bring the mask up again and you begin to add additional spaces where you're cleaning it up. Does that make changes to the channel in the background of the channel in the master one of the same? Ok, so you say that separately? Yeah, this thing here is a channel attached to a layer and you, khun, look at that channel either here or in the channel found that right there is exactly the same as that right there, there they are the same thing. If I click away from this layer so it's not active and I go two channels, it doesn't show up. I needs to have that layer acted to get it to show up, but uh, but this in what was attached to the layer are one in the same. You're just too different places you can access it also that's somewhat what could be confusing for summers that's also the same as what quick mask it if I have a selection of type q, you see the channels panel quick mask is a temporary channel s oh it's a thing that takes a while to get your brain around because, um, of things, but for now, all you need to know is that if you have a masking hold shift and click on it, it will no longer hide parts of that layer, but that doesn't prevent you from showing it is an overlay, but the thing that you'll forget is you're used to getting that overlay by typing q. He was for quick mask. This isn't quick mask uh, quick mask is only used when you've a selection. If it looks like little marching ants, you get queue to get over, let if instead it looks like a mask attached to something you hit backslash instead so it's kind of confusing cause they look all the same and all that is all it is is one thing over laid on top of your picture it's just the first time people were introduced to the concept it was when they were learning quick mask mode and therefore every time you ever see a red overlay you think quick mask no it's just a thing overlap on your picture you just happen to be introduced to when you learn the concept of quick mask so you think that every time red is over laid on your picture it's quick mascone now it's just something over late and it just happens to be that if you had a selection you type cue it looks the same but since it's not attached to a layer it's not exactly the same weaken do similar changes and such so and I'm gonna take a little while to get your brain around all those things but let's let's move on when it comes to furry fuzzy and harry uh let's come in and I just got a bunch of pictures of people usually are furry, fuzzy and harry things and there's all sorts of things we can do with them uh I'm just going to choose one of these, open it up and let's see if we're going to run into some issues when it comes to color changes and similar stuff because having edges actually we have a color hair and stuff and we might end up with some problems and I want to run into problems so we can learn how to solve so let's try some things out so we need to start off as usual with the selections photoshopped has some idea what we want to keep because as far as it's concerned maybe we want the background we still need that exact selection around the hair s so we use the quick selection tool doesn't have to be quick selection it could be any tool issues quick selection tool is quick and easy so you often will start with that and before I usually get into doing the refine edge I usually make sure this election is a pretty good one because it's what I'm going to be stuck we were stuck with for the rest of the image and so I will usually when I'm done with it all type of letter q to get that overlay that you could get and if it doesn't look right I'll fix it before I deal with hair but let's just say I'm trying to get rid of the top portion and the bottom will keep so at this point if this is what I got out of the quick selection tool I'll just have the letter q and I'll zoom up on it and I'll say where did it mess up where does it not quite define this correctly and if there's a spot where it doesn't look good, like here in the armpit, I'm gonna fix it now, so I'm in quick mask monks I typed letter q I can come in here with my paintbrush then, and I might come in here and paint like this and I'm okay getting a little over spray onto the body because then I hit the letter x to get the opposite color and then I can take it right off the bike. It's a lot easier to get into that little corner by putting in too much and taking some away trying to get a brush so small you, khun, get way up in there! Here it looks messed up, so hit the letter x had a paint with black black is what adds the red stuff in come in their pain. A lot of people ask, what kind of brush should I have? How soft should the edge big? Well, the answer is right in front of you when that means is, the softness of your brush should match the softness of that object. So the things out of focus in a soft brush if things really crisp focused, you need a crisp, you know, brush, it doesn't fade out is the matter of your brush should match the edge quality of the thing that this red stuff is supposed to touch, so here this is semi soft, so I'm going to use this semi soft brush. Um, so here I might also come over here and get a little too much, not to their hit. The letter x. This has a crisper edge than the arms, so I might end up with us later, crisper brush. Then I can take it away there, fix those kinds of things. I'm not going to spend too much time doing that, though, because that's, not the hard part, the hard part is getting the hair for a fuzzy harry stuff looking right. I only stressed that fixing the other part, because if I don't, then everybody assumes you're going to use the thing that's designed for hair for doing it. I'll type cute, too.

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Ben Willmore - Complex Selections - Reference Guide.pdf

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Selections have always been my nightmare, Ben Willmore is a Godsend. His easy to comprehend teaching method and techniques make learning fun and the lessons taught stick. I now own others in his lineup of classes with more on my wishlist. Thank you Ben for making Photoshop Selections less daunting and complicated than it can sometimes be and thank you Creative Live for having one of the best teachers out there. I highly recommend this course to any and all.

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