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Bokeh Overlays

Lesson 14 from: Hidden Photoshop Tips & Tricks

Jesús Ramirez

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Lesson Info

14. Bokeh Overlays

Lesson Info

Bokeh Overlays

the you guys buy boki overlays from websites. You know, like it's really popular. And some portrait photography Where they I don't know. You spend that on how much money but a certain amount of dollars and then you get a pack of overlays that you can overlay on top of your image, and it's got has got the boki effect. I don't recommend buying them. I recommend making them, and I think they're really, really easy to make. And I'm gonna show you how I make mine. And much like the earlier class, I'm gonna show you some bad photos just to show you that with bad photos, you could make some really cool booking overlays. So I have this image here of a burger that I shot with my cell phone, and it's a terrible photo he has. I know. And we're gonna make a really cool boki overlay with it. And you can use any image that you have in your cell phone or in your hard drive. It really doesn't matter. The only thing that you need is images that are not too bright. Um, if you go into filter and by the w...

ay, actually, the smart way of doing this is by using a smart object because you always want to be ableto edit any adjustments that you make. So if you go into filter blur, I'm sorry it feels for a blur Gallery Filbert. You're gonna get all these options here on the right hand side. If you adjust the blur, it will obviously become more blurry. But under the effects tab, we have the bow. Okay, um, sliders that we can use to create our bookie over late so I can increase the light. Okay. And you can see how I'm starting to get some booking effect. If I blur it more, I get more and I can adjust the book it color to add color. I can also adjust the light range, and I'm probably gonna overdo it. Just so it's really visible in the next step. And all you're really doing is fine tuning the blur. Fine tuning The light broke a Boca color and light rangers to get Ah, you know, something that looks like a bouquet overlay that you were purchased One of these websites that sells a 10 of these. Maybe you can start your little side business making vocal overlays. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Um so when you're done, just press OK? And if you like it, then you can keep working with it. If not, you can always come back and edited because we're using a smart object. The smart filter, really. And I can double click on Blur Gallery and continue making adjustments if you want, So I'm not gonna do any of that. I'm happy with it, But I'm just letting you know that it can be adjusted if you need to. What you want to do now is use one of the blending modes to blend it with the layer below it. The one that I would recommend for something like this is used one of the lightened blending modes. If you remember from earlier in this class, we talked about how the lighten blending modes keep bright pixels and hide start pixels. The book is bright in, the background is dark, so that will be the one to use. We're gonna use cream and there it is's doesn't look perfect, but we can continue working with it. Blending modes were not all blending most, but at least the blending most in this category reacted the luminosity of the layer. So we want If we want to control how the blending of this layer, um, is displayed, you can control the luminosity and we can do so by going into the levels adjustment layer. And we can make the image starker in some areas which will hide the effect. We can make it have more contrast. We can adjust it in different ways. If the book is not looking the way like we want it to look, it's not looking very good in my eye. We can rotate, it may be and just keep playing around until we get something that we get that we like. Excuse me. We can always come back into the Blur Gallery and maybe continue. Tobler, it may be out of more boki effect and get something that works for you. So maybe something like that, And since this is a regular layer, we can always come back and add a layer mask. So I'm gonna click on this icon here, which adds a layer mask, and I can paint with black to hide maybe some of the bookie on her face and just reduced the density. You can think of the densities, liar, lighter and slider. Excuse me. The properties panel, um, as the opacity for the layer. So if you have a layer mask selected in the properties panel, you'll get this thing called density. So at 100% and I'll, um, well hit option and click on the lira mask at 100%. The density shows just as you painted it. But if you reduce the density, it'll start hiding that layer mask. So it's white, meaning that effect will show. So it's a way of controlling how strong that layer mask that you created is. So I'm gonna hold option again, click on the layer mask and control the density. So now maybe I can break bring back some of her face just a little bit so that the book is not completely hiding her face now a photo shop tip that are like using for one year done with a composite. This is a very simple composite is that you want to make things seem as if they were part of the same image in one way that I like doing that is by adding just a tiny little bit of noise. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit command option shift E. You're essentially smashing your forehead on the left hand side of the keyboard and getting all this keys, and that creates a layer that has essentially, you're copying and merging all those layers together onto one new layer. So is one layer that contains all of that, and you can convert it into a smart object if you want. I'm not going to, but you can go into either ah, at noise or something like that. I like using is lens blur, and I'm not gonna add a blur. I'm gonna add just a little bit of noise to the image, and I can zoom in just a day. We could see so maybe one or two when you can use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard, just white noise. So just a tiny little bit and you can decide if it's monochromatic or not. In this case, maybe, maybe not. And, um, the reason I brought up the lens blur, as opposed to the um, noise filter, is that whenever I used blur on an image I always started, keep the original grain and noise that the image has so that I don't lose it. So I usually come in here and adjust my blurs from here and at the same time add noise. But I've gotten so used to that have it that when I when I had noise, I usually just come in here anyway and just not add any blur. So I'm gonna press OK, and it's not a huge difference. It's a very, very subtle difference. But it makes everything more realistic because if this were a real photo, there might be some film green on there. And if you when you're walking next to a little movie theater and you're walking into the movie, you'll see the posters for the all the upcoming movies. You'll notice that all of the posters have noise. You probably have seen that already, and this is one of the reasons why they do that. They're all composites, and they all add noise just to make the composite on a little more cohesive.

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Ratings and Reviews

Amy Vaughn
 

Yeah yeah, Jesus Ramirez is a great instructor and this class is packed with useful tips and even some fun ones that might not be so useful. But it was that one about using two windows from the same document that changed my Photoshop life.

Lael
 

Overall Photoshop Week 2017 has some amazing instructors for workflow & compositing. Jesus Ramirez has the unique ability to combine simplicity with really useful depth: blend modes, different approaches to selection or combining different tools. This course covers a lot of tools and there are a number of ‘wow! didn't know that!’ moments a more advanced user will love.

Elad
 

Jesus is excellent! full of knowledge and provides a lot of helpful tips in a clear and easy to understand way. Only thing missing are captions for this class, for some reason. Otherwise, I wish there were more classes like this one.

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