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Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 1

Lesson 21 from: Compositing 101

Aaron Nace

Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 1

Lesson 21 from: Compositing 101

Aaron Nace

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Lesson Info

21. Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 1

Lesson Info

Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 1

All right, let's, go toe basically how we just said it before we're going to go file script and I'm gonna go to the load files into stack. I'm going to choose browse here and we're going to choose our our file. We're just going to go up one, two tethering we're gonna choose cereal bowl and selects, and here we are. We're just gonna shift, click all of those images, all right? And we're going to hit open and hit. Okay, so this is a completely different type of compositing than what we did this morning. This morning it was framed compositing, so we had a lot maurin mages. Now, this african positing is technically more difficult, so element compositing is more difficult. We didn't shoot these all in a way to where we can hopefully, you know, have control over all the lighting and the camera angles and everything like that. So we shot all of the elements together, so it shouldn't be as difficult. It's like, you know, if some of these were stock stock images that we were just trying to stic...

k in this stick in the final, but it is a little bit more of a difficult type of composite, then what we did early this morning, but that being said, we don't have as many as many options here you can combine multiple styles of compositing if you do, if that's something you want to do, you could have framed compositing as well as as well as element compositing, which, if we do wind up replacing one overheads, that's, something that we're gonna be doing so that's technically frame compositing and element compositing together. All right, so let's, just click all of those I'm gonna hit command. And I'm just gonna call this sarah, there we go, and I'm gonna shift both those command ji and this is going to be just for and command g on that one as well. And this is khun we called towel. All right, perfect. Now the composite here because we are doing elements, but we really were not doing that many different elements. I mean, we wantto put jasper in syria bull, but when we're done with that it's like, okay, what else do we do this image like, no, we're not doing this over and over and over again. So that's, why we're going to be able to spend more time, like stylized this image and, like, really make it pop it's gonna be fun. Okay, so we were going to try a few different things, right, we were going to try using this face and what do we think about that that's? Terrible. This is going to be for the hand. We can go ahead and re name some of these. If you want, you can rename them or we can use the same color system that was done in light room. You can actually right. Click right here on this eyeball and go down to yellow. And we've no, we used a yellow filter earlier because version for her hand. So we can actually just use the same thing here instead of wanting to rename it that's a really cool way to do it too. How do we feel about this one? Should we replace well, father replacing her hand? Or is it? Is it pretty? Okay? Yeah, I don't think it looks better. Other on dh this one the hand doesn't look bad, but it's definitely like mohr maurine the way. So we were way want to make some room for jasper. So let's, go ahead and test this out. All right, we've got our baseball let's. Just go ahead and bring this down to the very bottom and then we're going to bring in the hand in over top of it. So this is yellow, this is going to be for hand. Now what we're going to do is use our keep your truck it to create a lame ass shift option command m which we created earlier and I'm just going to lay your mask out her hand so we're going to paint here black on our lame ass there we go and right over here we're just basically painting out her hand and everything else should stay pretty much in the exact same place you can see that we did wind up changing the cereal the the glass of milk there is sort of the glass or in shoes but pretty much everything else stays the same okay now take command I and there we've got a new arm on sarah which is really really cool now it doesn't all match up completely perfect but we're getting pretty close all right let's just make sure that's visible there and we're looking for any types of like seams in the composite so I'm gonna hold ultra option and click on my land we didn't see that's what our layer mouse looks like right now not really that great but it doesn't really matter that much you can also hold down the slash keep so areas where we're going to see like a little bit of a little bit of a change our areas like here on the cerebral because that did move now technically we didn't really want that to move we weren't planning on doing from compositing you know, replacing a hand, things like that if it turns out, you know, sometimes that you do wind up doing that sort of thing, it's not usually the end of the world, but if you don't plan on doing that, it's just going to make your job a little bit harder in photo shop, all right? So we're going to bring that in there would go, and this is pretty much so from the cereal box all the way to her arm that's all replaced let's just zoom in and what I want to do is let's, just turn this layer off and on so we can see, you know, thankfully, her arm is in right about the same place, so we're just gonna photos were going toe masset in, and as we said here earlier, hair is usually like a pretty good place to do your blending because it's, just just a massive, you know, like brown curls, and if you have a soft edge right around there, you really won't be able to see it usually just kind of all blend together. All right, there we go, so we're just gonna wind up bringing in all the way round here are other hand, and they were using this kind of like block of magenta in her shirt that's going to be our transition point so the block magenta is you know this goes from one image over together but because it's just one big solid color you're really not going to see it all right here we go we've got her hands and coming up all the way up and we've basically got an area where we need to figure out one shirt is going to have to try to like take over the next let's see if we're going to paint this right over here and use kind of the shadow in her hair there we go well that's interesting because now we have three of the same hairs you definitely don't want to start trying to composite like this's don't try to do this look bad it's a lot easier to blend one shirt with another than one face with another one all right so let's just paint that in a little bit dark find that transition area right there with that and we'll go ahead and zoom in there we go so we're using the hair here as a transition area and you can see it it really does work quite well just like a big blank campus kind of all right and here we can choose to make this either visible or invisible let's just make that hair go away just a little more okay perfect and they're you know all this detail and things like that look great it kind of gets lost in the shadows there so we've gone from, you know, the same face that we like, but we've replaced just about everything else and what do you guys think about the image in the composition now, is it something you want to go with? Okay, cool. So we waken basically compared this, which is a compass it's a composite of two separate images to the other one, which is just going to be a one hundred percent one image I'm gonna hold all tor option, and here we can see some of these areas that we what might want to make sure that we do fill in so I'm just going to grab my brush tool, we're gonna paint white just right over here to make sure that these areas are in fact covered there we go, some of these transition areas like, you know that and somewhere is where we went a little bit softer, I'm gonna leave those alone, but, you know, here in the middle of it like that could have been part of our froot loops box that was just like, semi transparent way don't want to do that, all right? And we're gonna hold alter our option let's. Just click on here, make sure that that's visible, they're perfect. All right and there we go we've got basically a whole new frame and it looks good so we can see things like hair exit a shirt he's a really good areas to make that transition from one friend to okay so I'm gonna go ahead and group those together and now let's just compare we like this version or that version well the serial ball's pretty much in the same place and we can still waken still do the composite and will probably wind up having to move just for a little bit but we can still see it with both of the versions because the cereal bowl does stay in the same place so let's go ahead and start off with with this version of the composite and then we can bring jesper into it all right and we're going to focus on we're going to do we're going to the composite with both versions a gesture as well all right so we've got him it's just all so I'm gonna use my move to so you can hit v for you moved so there's a really cool keyboard trick instead of I don't never like gore down here and lower the capacity instead if I want to lower the opacity get thee for your move toe then you can hit the number five on your keyboard and that's fifty percent capacity zero is one hundred percent capacity zero zero is zero percent capacity so just a really quick way to, like be able to bring that up if you're on your brush tool and you hit the numbers one through zero that's going to be your opacity from one ten percent all the way to one hundred percent or you can hit shift one through zero and that's going to change your flow from ten percent all the way to one hundred percent so depending on what tool you currently have selected, the one through ten are going to actually do different things all right, perfect. So we're on the for the move to hit the number five change your passage of fifty were hit command tea and we're just going to shrink him right on down now this is one of those interesting circumstances I don't use smart objects often in photo shop, but when I do wind up like changing the scale of someone if I wanted changing them and I may need to change him over and over and over again that's a great time to use a smart object because it won't wind up giving him that bit of a blur. You know, if you change something really small and then you decide you need to make it bigger, it will look a little bit unclear that would be a good time to use a smart object in this case in particular because what we talked about earlier was the fact and sometimes if you photograph something large and then try to make it smaller, it looks like it has too much detail remember that from day one. So this is one of those cases where I actually don't mind if we lose the tiny little bit of detail on jasper, I'm totally okay with that, because if he was that small, the camera wouldn't be able to pick up that much detail anyway, so I'm totally okay with that, but what do you feel about the size? We want to get a pretty right before I hit enter? Because once I do it's going to apply that transformation and then you don't want to transform something over and over and over again if you can't avoid it. All right, how we feel about the size I know it's kind of hard to tell, but too big or too small, still too big, ok, cool, and this is really great whenever you guys are scaling something in photo shop, I do this stuff all the time and I'm still bad at it because it's hard to tell how big or small something should be like get someone who's not really involved like your mom or your friend, like someone who does not have to be qualified at all. They can walk by an image and we like that looks too big like anyone can probably be able to tell that so especially when you're scaling something if you've been staring in an image you might think something looks great and then you come back a day later and we like well what was I doing that looks horrible it's just because like you get you get blinded by it you get too into it so thank you for suggesting it's too big how about that little bit smaller cool all right we'll make him about that big let's go ahead and get the other version of me and there is also the number five I could tell from you guys laughing everyone probably likes that one the best I'm gonna hit command tea and we're just going to make that of its smaller as well all right there we go and what were they perfect that's pretty cool you know, in the interaction what we're going to try to do is make it look like she's actually trying to scoop him up which I think works is really cool we didn't plan this but her short color you know one's up matching matching the color of that inner tube why well as well all right the floating so what we're going to do is I'm gonna hit v again and then hit the number zero and that's just going to turn us back to one hundred percent so our goal here whenever we're you know, doing this type of compositing I'm not really I don't really want to cut him out perfectly like I would prefer to not have to use a pencil and cut him out perfectly what you really want to do is you want to surround your subject with something where you can do it bad job masking them out and they're still going to look great that's why we actually put him in a pool of milk if we put him in a pool of water or just had him stand there with a floaty can you see like it would it would lose a lot of legitimacy I mean, it wouldn't be wet around the edges and things like that, but now I don't have to get like a pen tool and cut this out perfectly because you know, it should just kind of flow into the other things. So with this african positing put them, try to get them as close to the actual environment that wind up being in when you photograph them. All right? So I'm just going to pull a mask on here again and you're going to see like this is it's not very hard this is, you know, probably why this course is called compositing wanna one because all the work in photoshopped that we're going to be doing is really it's not that hard to do now, some lightness and, you know, some disparities between luminosity or you and things like that I'm going to show you guys some ways to take care of those as well. There we go and we're gonna make a hard edge brush and kind of bring this in there. So if it's too light or too dark, we can take care of that as well. All right, here we go and keep in mind hey does have a shadow behind him, which is it would make it does make sense that he needs the shutter behind him like the spoon has a shadow behind the spoon, the milk doesn't everything like that. So that's, why we do need it, make sure that we include those objects as well, okay, now here, when his face the reason why we put that white card in there is to cut him out from the background instead of, you know, like run school instead of cutting out, cutting him out of the background, using a pen tool or something like that, all we're going to do is you're going, we're going to use a magic one tool I'm gonna hit w for the magic one tool it's on the quick selection, which I don't use very often we're going to go over the magic one tool, and I'm just going to click shift, click right there in the selection in these areas, if you select somewhere that's too similar to something else is going to keep on going, you can lower your tolerance as a great way to select less and less and less. Okay, so basically, we just selected out that white card. We're going click on our lame ass and I'm gonna hit shift, delete. We're going to fill this with black because we don't want that area to beauty school and all of a sudden he's cut out of his background. So just a simple put a white card in there saved us five minutes and makes a really nice selection really, really cool way to do it. So it's thes stores like tips and tricks like these are not things that you would know to do on your first time compositing, right? But if you start compositing over and over and over again, you're like, oh, let's put a white car behind him. It will be easier to cut him out. Not only that, but now you guys have taken compositing wanna one? So you know, let's put a white car behind him and he'll be easier to cut out from the background there we go, and we're just going toe their mass this out. So I realized that it's not the milk does not match perfectly on the to the milk that's in this terrible but we're going to show you some really great ways take care of that as well all right, but first what I want to do before I spend a whole ton of time getting him cut out and mass out perfectly and everything like that we still need to decide which just for we're going to use right because I'm not going to spend twenty minutes making the wrong guy look great I want to make sure that we picked the right guy and that we wanted you know, spending the necessary time on that all right? So let's see about placement maybe you know something right about there um see make that a little bit less visible as well, all right? And I'm just getting my brush tool to paint that back, okay? So now what we're looking for is something relatively rough and we can see that that's that's what he looks like in its position it looks a little bit less real than it should because there is no shadow and everything like that but once once the shadow gets in there in the reflection everything like that it's gonna look a lot more real all right? So seeing that what do you think? Is it the right size this first thing we would need to see maybe looks a little bit too big, I think. All right. Cool. Let's, let's. Drink him down. Command tea and he's kind of come down inside is just a little bit more. All right, let's, compare that one and let's. Go ahead and bring this other version of jasper in to the image. All right, there we are. And what we can do if we really wanted teo if we can get everything in the right place let's just bring the opacity down just a little bit there if we got pretty much everything in the right place. Ideally, we would be able to replace the entire surface of what's happening inside of the cereal bowl with this milk. So ideally, we won't have any of the milk visible from the inside of terrible. It'll just be what's going on here. So let's, just make a very quick selection here. I'm gonna grab a marquee tool and just make a selection right around there. It's not perfect, but we can always change it a little bit later. And we'll add that to it as well. And I'm gonna click on my layer mass button that's just goingto layer mask just him out. There we go and we're going to bring him right about there we can see we do have some awesome hugh shifts and they're obviously we've got some blues and things like that coming in that maybe we shouldn't have, but we can change those things as well, all right, unless you seize airbrush tool now and go ahead and make room for this spoon wait, go so he's kind of like right near the border there, and then we can use the same trick we did earlier with the white card basically using that, too. There we go using this white card to be able to cut out our shadows, which, if you guys remember from day one, we're going to do our best to make it look like the shadows are actually on the bowl of cereal, which will be very, very cool somebody hit w for the magic one tool again and let's, just select out these areas that are a little bit lighter. Here we go, all right? And I'm gonna click on my leather mask and hit shift elite in fill those black as well perfect. So going from here to actually like making this look one hundred percent real, we still have quite a few steps debate quite a few steps to go it doesn't look a hundred per cent real yet but we can see we can at least get an idea of like which jesper we like so what do we think? Do we like this guy or do we like that guy the other guy I think that's pretty much unanimous right? This jasper is us awesome. What do we think? Does anyone have any chimes on the internet? What do you guys think? Would you like to see the jasper in the floating facing us or the sitting up jesper looks like laying down so far is the winner laying down is the winner awesome? Okay, well let's look att laying down before we continue to do our composite all the way through to the end we've got one more thing to keep in mind and that's which version of sarah we want and how is that going to look? Because there are a lot of things that I want to do two to the image of jasper that are really going to help make the image come together but I can't do those things until I decide which version of sarah I actually want to do. Okay, so we're gonna make this visible and then we can see maybe we can ask the folks on the internet and you guys well, do you like the one where she's looking at the camera or looking down? What do you guys think really looking at the camera what do we think? Alex says no, you can't sell, all right, let me just put them back for back again looking at the camera and looking down, you like looking down, we got a brother happening, houses looking down, internet says, looking down right where a lot of people on the internet, guys and quite a few people on the internet just because so many people who are bringing this up, I really want to see just for a little bit smaller for a little bit taller because they're they're saying it doesn't match this still of the ladder, and so I just wanted it doesn't match the scale of the latter there we g o and that's a really great point, it doesn't match the scale, the letter so we got two options here. We have the option to completely get rid of the letter because that was just another fun element. I like the latter in there, but if I want to see just for that big, we do have the option to make the letter gone. I can clone stamp that out relatively easily. So if that's something that we decide, we can totally do that the other option is to in fact make jasper smaller, I'm okay with really both of those, what do you think that on the first day we discussed that and the considerations that I think we made were how small can he get before he's no longer a focal point of the picture exactly and that's another interesting thing so let's go ahead and try making them smaller if if we don't like it we can always make him a little bit bigger but these are decisions that I'd liketo have like you know we want to decide all these things before we start getting into work because unlike you know the first frame compositing where it's just really easy to turn something on and off this element compositing is just a little bit more difficult because we're going to have to do things to match like color and hugh and saturation and those going to depend very much on what those people are interact with all right so we voted on looking down and let's go ahead and see if jasper we can make you a little bit smaller there we go something like that the other thing that we're going to be quote unquote missing out on is the fact that his ripples are going to be affecting the entire cereal bowl so there are things we can do there just wanted to keep in mind that he's no longer making up the majority that's your cereal bowl all right and we could make him just a little bit smaller I think if we do want to match the scale for the ladder all right? So let's, just see I'm gonna zoom out and I can hit the commands iki, which is the undo key in photoshopped there's undo and then there stepped backwards option command z will step backwards over and over and over again command z will just undo and redo one hit command z over and over again, we could just see larger or smaller. What do we think, guys? It's not bad, right? Okay, perfect. All right, well, we can do smaller. I'm totally cool that that gives us a little bit more room for us tow for, you know, just bird interact with the spoon there we go and ideally want things like ripples to kind of, like extend into into the spoon as much as we can, we want all these things to kind of come in be really so we want to set out a plan on how we're actually going to wind up getting jesper into this place and making them look one hundred percent real. We're going to talk about what some of the important things are and what things are, they're a little bit less important, so I do this often when I'm creating my images usually I'll just grab a brush tool and we'll just create, you know, just a very small brush and I'll just kind of circles of things so in this plan, what do you guys think? I loved him input here from you guys and a cz wells on the internet of some of the considerations. Some of the things we've got to make sure we fix some of the things that you know, we we want to make sure to include in the final and then how to get go about those. What do we think? Are we still going to be? Ah, placing cereal inside syria ble that's a good question. We can totally play cereal inside this. Terrible. We have a lot of photos of cereal and cereal. What do you think would be more interesting if we had some couple pebbles in there? Froot loop, ease. Okay, totally cool. We'll do that. And we'll probably wait till the very end to do that. So definitely could you take some of the ripples, maybe from some of the other shots. Kind of like how you were using the details from other images. So that way it does extend throughout the whole bowler. Is that even an issue? Yeah. That's. A really good question. So he is in the cereal bowl. He's. Definitely causing some ripples here. And those ripples I do like I do, like the fact that he's got ripples in there. We got a couple of options here we've skilled him down but I can still I could clone sam some of the rebels out over weaken scale the ripples to make the ripples a little bit larger we have a lot of options there so that's a really good point all right so let's go ahead and write that out ripples we've got some of the other considerations that we want to take out our we've got this area this just like a bit of blue right? This doesn't really fit it's just like a solid line the next thing they don't want to do I want to make sure that we've got a relatively smooth transition from this area to this area so we can use like a larger soft brush to be able to get that we need to take it this area's well now the other couple things we've got and we've got a different color here as well as it's just a little bit maybe it's like darker has more contrast and things like that so I'm going to show you guys some great ways probably in section two if we don't have time now I'm gonna show you guys from great ways to take care of that and just check for like color and light and dark things like that the other area are the shadow areas here for his feet I want to make it look like those air actually on the on the outside of this bowl on def, we do need to carry a little bit of shadow area here from what would be his head or probably what is going to wind up being this area here this should be shadow area as well all right, andi suggestions coming in from the internet, the flipflops in towel flipflops in tower yes totally will want to make sure that we take care of those so hopefully we're going to put those right about there and, uh, that ladder is really cool I think we should leave it in who any other suggestions mostly it was things that have been mentioned adding cereal um actually the milk seems like most everything has been covered. Okay, perfect, perfect. So we've made a lot of decisions, so it kind of seems like we haven't done a whole lot in your process. This would probably take maybe ten minutes or so, but we've made a lot of decisions. We decided which version we liked of sarah we decided which version we liked jasper we've got the rough in the composite and we're ready to go ahead and start going on it, so we're going to keep going and so first thing I want to do with jasper is I want to bring him up in height just a little bit because I do want these areas kind of like to flow a little bit better so the shadow looks like it is going to wind up hitting that bull and I'm also going to take a look at you know what this cereal looks like before and after so basically this might require, you know, masking and I'm going to use a very soft edge brush to mass this because I do want to make sure that this that this spoon you know, really does look like it's entering the water, but I don't want to destroy areas of jasper in the india ripples of what he's got going on there perfect now one of the things that we're goingto have a little bit of trouble with early on from basically right now is the fact that, you know, we did we did what we could to make sure this milk that was on him isn't, you know, isn't sorry isn't that different from the milk that's in this terrible, but they still are a little bit different they're not exactly right and that's something that we do need effects, so there are a couple of things that we can actually do to make sure those look a little bit better and a lot of people when they start off with something like this, you're going to try to take care of everything with a layer mask their kind of try to layer mass came out perfectly and you know like tryto like blended together or whatever but that's really not what I was just doing I don't think that layer masks later mask are great but usually they're not they don't provide you with the entire answer usually want to do quite a bit of blending within the layers themselves and then use later masks when you have to so let's take a look at this now there this is going to get just a little bit more on the conceptual side of things but it could be really hard to see what is too light or too dark sometimes it's hard to tell what's too saturated or not saturated enough or maybe it's the wrong color so what we can do is we can create a couple of things to kind of help us out in that matter and the first thing I like to do is create a black and white layer and that's going to make it really easy to see if something is either too light or too dark so we're going to do that I'm going to create an adjustment later we're going to go up to channel mixer and I'm gonna click here on monochrome there we go so now we can see a couple of really interesting things that are going on in our image we can see over here is this like you know does it too light or too dark and we're looking at not only the fact that there should be a shadow there but I want like a smooth amore smooth transition we can see here this is quite a bit too much contrast, right there's almost no contrast here this is we've got light areas and we've got dark areas so what we're going to use to get jasper look like he's actually in place are something called clipping masks has anyone who used clipping mass before okay, we got a couple of guesses and a couple knows I'm guessing we got the same on the internet so I'm gonna explain what clipping masks are real quick and once you guys get these things going make element compositing a lot a lot easier so basically what a clipping mask is I'm going to create a new layer here and on this layer I'm just going to paint with we got this nice pink color, so why not? We're just gonna paint with pink something like that nothing that fancy this just a example here, so we've got this on one layer I'm going to create a new layer right above that and we're going to change our color and this time we're going to go with something like a greenish blue there we go now if I want this to be a clipping mess, basically I went away for this greenish blue to be visible on lee where this layer that was under it, which is pink. I want this to be only visible there. So what do I do? Do I create a regular layer mask and try to, like, mask it away? Do I make it a selection? Well, a clipping mass kind of takes away all of that and it just doesn't automatically for you. So if you make this a clipping massively layer three clipping master layer to all you have to do is write, click on this and go to create clipping mask and it's going to create a little arrow down and clip it directly down to this layer. Now these late this is a really, really helpful technique because this is it something that you, khun still move each layer, these air still regular layers, I can move this layer around and it's only going to be visible where layer two is, I could move layer to around and later one is goingto layer three is going to stay in place and only visible it's really, really cool. Not only that, but I'm sure you guys have used adjustment layers things like curves and levels and things like that. Let's, check that out too. I'm gonna grab an adjustment layer, we're going to go to curves, click this and crank it up a little bit okay, here we go. Let's, close up. Close that out. Now. I can clip this down. Tto layer tuas. Well, I can do this as many times as I want, and they're all going to go down to the layer that they're clipped you. So option command. Jeez, keyboard shortcut or again, you khun right, click and go to create clipping mask. So now we have a curves adjustment layer and you can see it's affecting all these letters. But it's stopping and this guy I can turn this one off and on in the curves adjustment layer is on ly affecting that, which is very, very cool. I can still open this up. I can change my properties. I could make it darker. I can do whatever I want. But now, it's only going to fact layer too, so I can do this over and over and over again. All these layers, they're just gonna point directly down to the layer there clipped to so lister this black and white layer on and we can look att an area like this. Where, it's, just a little bit darker. Now, I do realize there was a shadow, but before I worry about shadows, highlights and things like that, I need these to blend quite a bit better so what we're gonna do is we're gonna click on this layer where we have jasper and I'm gonna make an adjustment layer we're just going to go up to our curves adjustments I'm gonna go ahead and clip this so option command g and now I may be sure this is on ly visible on jester now keep in mind we're just looking this image of black and white but what I could pretty easily tell is my light levels what's light in what's dark and why don't they fit so if I click here in the middle and start dragging this up we can see pretty soon what's going on over here is I'm able to get this toe where like you know at least that area right there that looks like it's funding a lot better right? We could do with some other things if I continue to bring this up we can get like the mid tones up we can actually take our darks and weaken bring these up as well and what we're going to get is a little bit more of ah of a nice blend there it's going to take the it's going to take the darks and just make those a little bit brighter which is going to affect everything so there are a lot of things we could do with curves we could take on the top right and make this a little bit darker if we wanted to do that, we can't even combine these together, so from the top right if we drive this down, it's going to make our lights a little bit darker if we joined this, the left it's going to take everything and make it a little bit brighter. It's going to take your white point and bring it in from the bottom left if we bring this up, it's going to take our black point and make it less black there we go. So, like, the darkest thing on this pixel is, you know, that, you know, like, great if I bring it into from left to right it's going to bring our black point in and make things, you know, everything to the left of that is going to go one hundred percent, what we're gonna do is basically play around with this to try to get things to match. I'm gonna bring our point up here just a little bit, which makes us look pretty good here wait really are blending in quite well, but it's a little bit too bright. So now I'm going to take the bright party's point here, and we're just going to bring that down just a little bit. There we go and I'm still in black and white but this should really help out quite a bit of the other areas in the photo as well so let's just turn this black and white off and now we can see this before and the after now what we're doing this the other thing to keep in mind is because we're on a composite image guys, this isn't gonna work everywhere I don't have like a one stop shop solution there's no like magic button so what I'm doing here I was looking at this area here making sure that that area looks good and then I can use a layer mask on this curve adjustment layer to make sure that's good I can use a completely different layer to make sure this area's good or to make sure his face is good so I'm not too worried about you know is it good everywhere that's not really that important to me as long as it's good in one place that's what we really want to look at so let's just put a layer mask on there and current adjustment layers already come with later masks so that's nice this area we don't need to be brighter we actually need this to be a little bit darker we need the contrast to be a little bit less right so I'm actually going to paint it away from that area now this area on the right it is making that blend in quite a bit better right? We can see that oh yeah cool it actually does blend in quite well and I like his face being a little bit lighter as well maybe all painted away just a little bit but I think having his face a little bit lighter is a positive thing so pretty quickly we've been able to figure out okay it doesn't need to be lighter or darker and we figured out a wayto actually do this is well okay we're going to change the minute shift click the two of those in any time I'm using a coping mask I like to group those layers together I'm going to bring this down just a little bit because we've got a little bit like the edge of our cereal bowl there we've gotto bring that down just a little bit so they can go ahead and blend we're gonna have a little bit of ah fun time playing with these shadows here but nothing that nothing we can't do okay now we're gonna click on her later mask and I'm gonna paint this dark so notice the layer with jasper the lame ass ke stones you know his milk is extending all the way to about right over there and we could extend it out even further especially now that we've gone ahead and brighten some of that area up so I'm not trying to do like a perfect job masking him out, but we're trying to do instead is to make sure that the milk that he's in blends with the milk that's in the actual serial let's go ahead and bring some of that back in I'm going to paint with white on my later mask here we're going to paint some of that back in so now some of his ripples are going into the cereal bowl into the into the actual spoon, which is very cool all right? And we'll paint that black there now ideally, if we if we could have, we would have a bowl this sorry kiddy pool that was quite a bit even larger than the one we had so we wouldn't really be restricted by those edges we would have like, you know, infinity amount of milk that we could just kind of like play play with him, but in this case we don't have that so that's looking pretty good now I do like you can see how a little bit of a darker ripple here and the ripple gets a little bit lighter as it collects into the spoon that's collecting more lights we need to account for that too again we're going to use a clipping about school money grabber curve adjustment layer option command g's going to clip that I will make that just a little bit brighter and then now I'm gonna hit command I on my leather mask and I only want this to be visible right here here we go so that's visible now so this is still jasper's milk but now we're matching the luminosity of jasper's mochas the curves up into the spoon with luminosity of the other milk that would be coming up with a spoon game is looking at me like that's pretty cool, right? Very, very cool so this is where clipping masks are so great now our goal here is if you can make a composite look great in black and white you're pretty close, so when I'm doing compositing a lot of the time for this epic compositing all edit maybe half of the thing in black white because I don't really you know if I could make it look black and white good luck, I know I can make it look good in color, but if it doesn't look good in black and white it's never going to look good in color that's one thing to keep in mind all right? So like a right side here that's already looking pretty good I would say, you know, in this area that's a pretty convincing applause it already let's turn this off and see what we've got now we've got a couple other areas that you know or maybe not looking as good and the reason is you know, we've got a little bit of some interesting things going on with our color like this doesn't exactly look like the right color of milk that's not really that hard to take care of either what we're gonna do is I'm gonna create a new layer I'm gonna hit option command g what we're going to do is I want to create a new adjustment layer we can do two things we can actually grab the color of the milk and we can actually painted over words or we can use a hue saturation adjustment layer that's going to allow us to cull arise the milk let's try to colorizing it someone who gold to my hugh slash saturation option command g is going to clip that and I'm gonna click on this colorized button now it's going to colorize all of jasper, so obviously we're going to have to use a lame ass to make this just visible where the milk is, but I can just choose a different hue that's going to be closer to our milk, maybe around the yellowish orange it's definitely need you to be a lot less saturated, right? Something right about there starting to look a lot a little bit like milk there we go so it's going to take that like blew casts over there and we'll come off to the left a little bit so we can see making this visible and invisible all the sudden all this area that had that blue cast on it from the actual pool that's going completely away so what we're gonna do is I'm going to command I on that layer mass again and I'm just going to make sure to make this visible just where this is and all of a sudden the ripple that was in the original pool that had that blue color cast check that out that's the original ripple we're just using it right here in the cereal bowl isn't that awesome? It's only affecting the layer that just goes on as well, so I'm just able to paint this in and all of our color issues with, you know, the milk like, hey, that moat doesn't look exactly the right color well, we just solved it all with one layer, which is amazing I'm just gonna use my sorry I'm just going to use my brush tool kind of paint this in and make sure that this is visible where all of our milk is all right, this is just gonna take a second. I can take a question from you guys or anyone on the internet if anyone has a question yeah, h e doc and also dale our photo have a similar question about if you can create a cliff clipping mask inside another clipping mask it's like inception math in section master we're going into the matrix going into the matrix that's a really good question on clipping mask inside of clipping that's what I would do is something similar okay, I'll show you how to do that you can't technically you can't do exactly that but you can do something that's going to basically get something very similar achieved so let's say I think what they mean is we want like we want something to be visible on lee where this layer is visible right because this is also win a clipping masks so what I would do let's say we wanted to create a new layer I'm gonna hit option command g and we're going to just paint some blue on that layer okay so we're painting blue on this layer it's only visible where jasper's physical but let's say I want to use this clipping this layer that's clipped to also define this one well, technically you can't do that but here's what you can do I can hold cold controller command and click on the layer mask for this layer which is going to turn in it's a selection and then I can use that to define a layer mouth for this layer so that'll work even if you don't have an adjustment there if I created a new layer let's just shift click on that one a new layer and then I created another layer over here I've never had to do this by the way, so if they're just curious that's awesome, but I've never had to do this you can you don't have to just be able to control click on a layer mass to turn that into selection you can also control click directly on a layer which will turn that into a selection and then you could clip that and also use that layer to define a layer mask is well and then I could turn that layer back off too that's um master photography instruction right? They're testing my brain and I like it we're trying to stump you, you know, give me the hard questions, I love him, I love him. Well, it's really fun for me too, because you know it's gonna happen sometimes I'm like, I don't know the answer to that, but if I can figure something out a person's asked me a question, maybe, you know, six months down the line, I'll come up with the time when I need to use that and today we will all figured out, okay that's, that's how you actually do it? Good question. So one more question from cg photography and michael porterfield about thie clipping mask is whether you would use ever use a blend if instead, what do you use blend if options just in general todd's looking at me, he's like, yes, erin does. I have a master of blended and I love blend. If it's had a lot of really great applications, blend if is a really great option when you are trying to blend one layer into another. In this case, it's, a slightly different type of blending that we're actually doing. We're doing more like composite planning if I was, for instance, trying to brighten everything up in the cereal bowl, but only affect my shadows. That's when blend if is really, really great, but for this type of compositing blend, if is really well, we can always give it a shot. I wanted to say that I probably wouldn't use it, but it could have been just because I had a father.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming-HD.mov
cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming-low.mov
LaundromatWorkingFiles.zip
FrootLoopysWorkingFiles.zip
Love at the Wash.pdf
Swimming in Cereal.pdf

bonus material with enrollment

cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming_Short-HD.mov
cL-1305-NACE-Bonus_Brainstorming_Short-low.mov
PhlearnDiscount.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Great moment i Won't miss. 2 of my favourites learning web sites in one !!! Thanks Aaron for all you bring to me including lessons of English...(don't understand every joke but...when you smile , i do too... ) Best regards from Brittany (France)

Mohamed Rasoon
 

i'm amateur photographer.i had a hope move on as professional, this is great lesson and CreativeLive motivate my self step by step to fulfills my hopes.

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