Skip to main content

Compositing Brightness and Light

Lesson 30 from: Adobe Photoshop Compositing: Essential Techniques

Aaron Nace

Compositing Brightness and Light

Lesson 30 from: Adobe Photoshop Compositing: Essential Techniques

Aaron Nace

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

30. Compositing Brightness and Light

Next Lesson: Working with Color

Lesson Info

Compositing Brightness and Light

let's go ahead and work on integrating our subject in a little bit better adding some some bright areas and cem cem dark areas so let's go into our subject we're gonna grab a levels adjustment layer option command ji and I'm gonna be brightening this up and let's just make our whites a little bit brighter as well and again this is gonna be mostly for style what I'm doing right now all right and I'm going to focus in these bright areas especially like right when they're around you know things like our lights those birds going to need to blur in the background aren't they I'm gonna go ahead and do that while all right well I think about right click on here I'm gonna convert these two smart object as well all right which is I think we smart object to the birds last time get away all right give these a little bit of a blur here all right here we go let's go ahead and go back to this later and use our brush jewel to kind of paint this in especially like these these highlight areas I want th...

em to be a little bit brighter all right and some of the time I find like we're probably going to do this in just a little bit some of the time you want this that dirt needs a blur see that's the problem is you zoom in and you're like I need to match the blur to everything some of the time you want these like blur layers for instance I want this to exist on my shoe but I also want this to kind of like I give a little blur outside of the shoe is well on let me just kind of talk about what I mean by that I'm gonna go to buy channels and then we're going to go to our between a red channel blue channel and our green channel well they all look the same right now don't they because our her later is black and white images black and white channel doesn't matter I'm just going to hit controller command l and darken this up there we go so we get something like that and now I'm gonna hold control and click on this area which is going to turn all of those white highlights into a selection okay then on a layer above this and this time I'm not going to clip I'm gonna hold controller command and hit delete which is gonna fill with our background color which in this case is white all right I mean he command I on that later mask and then basically just paint white right over here where I want these areas too and this is where I'm going to give this a little bit of a blur so on my layer itself I'm going to give a galaxy and blur and what this is going to do is it's going to make like the lights kind of like glowing off of the subject because that's that's how light works like life does not get just restricted to your subject right it actually does kind of flow we talked about that earlier looking at the lights in the studio you can actually physically see it with your eyes in the studio so anywhere around you know anywhere around the image now because I copied the entire image anywhere around the image where I want that glow to happen around my subject I just add that and the glow is gonna it's gonna glow from him all right which showing up in you know the areas like the rim lights and stuff like that like right here that say that little bit of glow that kind of just peeks over his shoe it helps to integrate him into the background just like that so these like little quick little tips on dh this I'll probably do on a layer above everything in the end if we needed to but all these quick little tips really help sell these facts yeah that reminded me of the opposite how you have the ones where on the shoe that needed to be fixed because there's that little tiny like white at the bottom of the shoe from the original oh this layer that came back yes I do need to fix that don't I all right cool that's not a problem at all let's do it motion blur on that dirt there make sure it's going in about the same direction as the ball all right and make sure it's got about the same distance on it too cool and if you really wanted to this is kind of cool so this is our dirt right there I could hit a command j and then hit command e so basically just duplicating the entire group and then merging it together and I'm gonna bring it down below move it a little bit to the right now it's gonna blow your minds now take command or control l on this and I'm gonna change my output levels and now my dirt is real it by the light that's right over there because I just duplicated the dirt I put it underneath it and then I used a uh basically the levels adjustment layer to make sure that it was only visible right there so this is the rim like to my dirt and uh I'm going to just use my brush will now and painted black underneath the ball because it doesn't need to be visible there but yeah all that dirt now has a rim light yeah what's that there is anything to do with third dirty tricks all right let's go ahead and use our trailer brush now yep I'm going to paint a little bit more going on with the ball because I want some of this light here to kind of look like it's actually curving around our boat so I'm just gonna grab a levels adjustment layer option command g to clip that we're just going to make this area quite a bit brighter here all right I'm gonna hit command I on this use my brush pool and I'm gonna paint white now right over here and that's gonna help give it a little bit more of a rim light we're gonna do the same thing well you know what I'm gonna do this separate sorry photo shop is slowing down just a little bit understandable you do a great photo shop you're doing great all right let's paint that black on there I'm going to give this a little bit of a blur this is gonna be the highlight on that side of the bowl there we go and then I only want this to be visible where this ball is actually lighter so we can use a blend if on our ball so hold all or option and command and uh bring it and just say we're the underlying layer is darker don't be visible just worse later all right there we go and now it looks like that that light is actually curving around the bowl so that's you know that's the kind of stuff that is really cool when you're doing compositing is you know it's thinking about how actually how light actually does work with you know shapes and things like that sometimes it curves around things okay what was the next thing we were gonna fix so many amazing things all right whatever is going on here on his shoe we can fix that as well we're going to is going to turn the czech group off we're going to go down to our subject and create a new layer option comanche to clip that clone stamp tool s for the consensual sample right there and then paint right over top of our shoe and speaking of our shoe this is a really big shoe um speaking of the shoot for all our bar football fans out there we kind of discussed this yesterday but for safety reasons we did not use the nails or the spikes in the bottom of the shoe but of course if this was if you were being hired aaron by a shoe company to do this we would have the proper the proper spiked shoes for this first sure for this particular image oh yeah for sure we just we had our in studio audience weii we wanted to protect their faces safety precaution all right cool all right it's a good sign when you turn it into black and white or turn it back into color and doesn't look horrible all right let's turn our czech crew back on so you can see all this stuff were still working in in black and white and I'm really excited it's really coming together I'm gonna go ahead and add some flair to our lights back here which is going to exist both back here above our lights and that will probably also exist in front of our lights as well so let's go ahead and just turn all these all these layers off there we go isn't it so cool how I mean literally it's just like every single thing like there's nothing on this image that we didn't place exactly where it is which is just it's amazing especially because at any point in time we can just totally change it we can add it and move things around okay so on a new layer I am going to hit shift option command e which is gonna make a stamp visible layer that we're going to go to filter I'm gonna go down here to render and we're going to go to a lens flare all right so now render lens flare coming from these guys and you can really choose whatever type of lens flare you want we're goingto choose one hundred millimeter prime what's up that that's really cool that you can choose what kind of lens it's coming out of even really specific it's so cool and there are actually a lot of really great plug ins for photo shop is well that will allow you to do even even mohr lens flares I think noll lighting effects is one of those it's like gives you one hundred mohr different types of lens slayer ifyou're a lens flare junkie alright I kind of like that I don't see don't see how that looks all right that looks pretty cool because it's got a little bit of a glow to it now lens flare that's going to be applied to the layers so if I move the layer around you can see lens flare is going to be applied to that layer but a really cool trick if you want to basically just make it on its own layer minute shift elite and I'm going to fill this layer with black okay I'm gonna hit command f which re applies the same lens flare and you're going to see the lens flare actually has some color to it if I change this back from normal to screen now we've got lens player that's actually got got its own layer so weaken basically just put this on whatever layer we want all right so now it's up to us to just duplicate this as we want teo so whether we're let's see if we can make this a little bit smaller huh so whether we're going to be creating this lens flares and then what color do we want these we don't have to decide right now but all right I'm going to make this a little bit less here we go see I'm going to keep it from doing every single one of these I'm just sitting command j a bunch of times by the way I don't know do we like this or do we want to do something else we'll see in just seconds all right cool so I made a tana layers right there I'm gonna shift quick all those in his command e it's going to change it back to normal I'm going to change us again actress screen we can put a layer mask on that and no problem we can just paint this away that part which we don't really need we could just take care of that all of one let lens flare above everything all right and now let's go ahead and turn on our check group again let's go ahead and turn on our stadium in our grass in our background players in our subject in our sweat in our ball and our foreground player in our dirt and we don't need to do our sketch right now all right and then we can hit command j on this and then we can have that be visible there as well all right so basically just using one light and then duplicating that for multiple lights they're all right there we go all right and that sets us up in an awesome place per section four

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Fantasy Composite
Soccer Composite
Adobe® Photoshop® Keyboard Shortcuts
Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Kim
 

This was the Best Creative Live course I have had the pleasure to watch. Aaron was so informative and explained each technique very well. He was so pleasant to watch because he was so humble and was so happy and excited about what he was creating. What an excellent teacher. I hope he does more seminars.

Curtis Roberts
 

Fantastic Course! I've watched (and purchased) many courses from Creative Live, and there are many good instructors; excellent instructors, in fact. Aaron's course on compositing essentials is one of the best. In addition to being a technical expert, he is a great teacher; a real talent. Great information and good illustrations/explanations. He does go a little fast when using Photoshop, and while I was trying to find the short-cuts keys, I would find he was three more points down the trail ahead of me. (That's part of why I bought the course ;-) )

Juli Miranda
 

I love the class he is generous, clear an super fun!! i highly recomend it. A lot of trics and cool information. He is Great teacher and super high level photoshoper... So greatfull. thanks!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES