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Compositing Soccer Image Background Part 2

Lesson 24 from: Adobe Photoshop Compositing: Essential Techniques

Aaron Nace

Compositing Soccer Image Background Part 2

Lesson 24 from: Adobe Photoshop Compositing: Essential Techniques

Aaron Nace

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Lesson Info

24. Compositing Soccer Image Background Part 2

Lesson Info

Compositing Soccer Image Background Part 2

we've got our stadium in in place now and I want to go ahead and add lights and at this point I'm just trying to fill in what's going on in my comp like I look at that and like I know that doesn't look good like I've been doing photos for a while I know this does not look good but it's okay right now I'm just getting all the pieces in to play I want to make sure the pieces they're going to get basically placed in my image where I want them to be and then I want to make sure like the perspective is right and everything's working again we're going to say in black and white for a long time because it just makes things much much easier for instance if I turn this back on excuse me in color you're going to start to think this isn't working now because of the color right but the color is really easy to change so we should be thinking like okay I want to be thinking like does this need to be to lighter too dark for instance the dark sear on my stadium are darker than the dark so my grass so i...

f I was using these images as my let's go ahead and bring up my full screen there if I was planning on using these images as my finals I would need to darken down this grass in the foreground to make it actually looks like it's going on with my stadium so I would just do that there we go and then all of a sudden wow that looks way better right it's like okay that actually looks like it fits with the stadium that was super super quick so at this point I'm mostly just trying to think about like our perspective and making sure everything's actually going toe fit together because once it does then I can actually start to adjust my colors my lights in my darks and things like that all right so the next we're going to do let's go ahead and get some lights in here I'm gonna command o open we're gonna go back to our stock images here and I'm just gonna flip through them and find her life so you can see we have a ton of different stock images here alright we'll find our lights even get like the windows except the wallpaper I was thinking about what I was thinking about using this is the grass for the soccer field and just like even ng out the curves and then I found better grass so I was like man I would've been cool to show you guys that but all right so here's the bleacher we're going to use my head open on this and then we're going to hit the for the move to and click and drag from one image over to the other room alright commanded me to close that out all right so working in black and white so let's go ahead and start grouping are layers yeah trooping are lazy and naming those groups because this is going to help us stay organized because we're gonna wind up with thanh a ton of different layers and a ton of different groups by the end of the day so with this layer here I'm gonna command g we're just going to call this stadium all right there we are and I'm gonna hit command g on this and we're gonna call this lights all right so we're going to keep all these together keeping everything really nice and organized it helps to keep things organized in photo shop just it's going to save you a lot of work in the long run not only that but I do and we've said this multiple times I'm always working from back to front so our sky is going to be very background and then we'll have our lights and then we'll have our stadium and then we'll have whatever we have and then our player will be out in front of that then maybe our goals out in front of that and maybe other players soccer feed or get me in front of that so I'm working in my layers along with the depth of what's actually happening in my image and makes it much much easier all right let's just click there alright background cool all right so these lights were going to go ahead and cut these out of the background again really quick and easy to do you could do this in multiple ways let's just go ahead and grab our magic wand tool and I'm just going to click right here on the outside you might be surprised how much I used the magic one tool I thought you're supposed to use a fan selection tools I like the magic wand tool it's really really easy so we're going to click on our later mass button when he command I and then we have this and then a lot of people I think would try to make their layer mask a little bit better than this right they would try to say like okay I need to go and select everything like that I'm not gonna do that I don't got time for that I can use a layer mask that's going to completely make all of this stuff invisible right because I've got a black post with a light background so if I just changed my layer blend mode from normal down to multiply there we go all that stuff starts to disappear okay now if I need this to go away even more all I have to do is put an adjustment later on that go up two levels clip that with option klan ji and make my white point a little bit what whiter there we go and I've got a perfect massing without actually messing with the label all right very cool so this is exactly what I want this is gonna look great now all this stuff in the background remember we used a multiply adjustment layer right and that's going to make things darker so in this case my lights are not actually going to be visible but instead of worrying about that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna group these two together all right I'm going to duplicate my life background okay and I'm going to change this from normal down to screen which is the opposite so now the blacks are not showing up with this one all right this may kind of making sense what I'm doing here all right so here on my leather mask I'm just going to fill this entire lame ass with black and there are a million ways to do this by the way like there's there's not oh you're inside to do it like this so I have to be like this every single time it's not like that you can you can do this any way that you want to if you had the time you could totally just turnout control off if you have the time you could totally just there we go let's just bring in our I would turn my transfer off really quick here all right so there we go I just want something that's just gonna like looking like a stamp every time I click it all right there we go and this is all my lame ass and that I need to do so I'm just filling in these lights with white and this is gonna wind up getting a little bit of a blur on it anyway and all kinds of cool lighting effects so I'm ok if it's like a little bit a little bit off from what it would normally be all right there we go on each of those lights and we're good to go so obviously these lights they're going to get smaller but that was pretty quick like and it looks good because what's dark is actually dark we've got our lights or light and we're good to go so I'm going to give this letter mask a little bit of a blur just to make it look like they're a little bit fuzzy there all right and then I have the option to actually add some of this sort of thing onto my lights up there so if I wanted to I just hit command jay on the layer mask and I could just bring these right up there and there we go this should work for most of what I needed to alrite make a selection writer on their hit command tea and I was going to stretch that out a little bit all right you know what that's actually even more complex than we need to go I'm just going to delete that layer gonna make a new layer and I'm just gonna choose white and we're just gonna paint on here all right here we go let's choose the color that's actually been there okay cool and this will get a little bit of a blur so this is going to basically be the starting of our lights of tana what we're going to do in this image is going to be related to these lights and adding lighting effects and blurs and flares and things like that to these lights so I'm not incredibly concerned just put a little bit blur on there I'm not incredibly concerned this this isn't perfect as of right now because from right there which is about what they're gonna be just a command j on that I'm going to give those a little bit more of a blur because at this point I'm actually this is not masking I'm actually creating lights that weren't there to begin with all right so with this group I've got basically an entire light bank created all right now with the beauty of photo shop if I want more than one light bank all I have to do is duplicate that by hitting command j again and I've got more like banks so command jay over here I'm just gonna go ahead and separate these out by these were gonna group those and we're going to call these the right lights all right and I'm gonna hit command j to duplicate that and these they're going to be let's just grupos double click on there and we're gonna call these left lights all right now I'm gonna hit command tea on this group right click and say flip horizontal all right and now these lights are going to be right over there so just kind of keeping things relatively organized now if you had other images of your life's or whatever things like that that's totally cool you can bring those in and use those it's just turn this back black and white okay very cool so all of our lights were trying to say super organized because there's a ton we're going to do the lights are a little bit too large right there if they look kind of ridiculous someone hit command tea and we're just going to make them all a little bit smaller there we go something little bit better and in our initial cop if you remember the top two lights I actually didn't wind up filling those in in the official couple I left those black so if we want to do that we can do something similar here okay so let's go into our left group we're just going to bring this over here all right and now I want to actually like war please a little bit to make them look like they're in perspective because right now they look like they're just kind of stuck there they're not in the right perspective okay so let's talk a little bit about that basically let's create a new layer whenever we're working with perspective okay so we talked about how our our perspective when we're looking straight out at their horizon line it's going to be something like this right it's basically just gonna be straight across now as we look up the perspective lines all go towards the horizon right like everything is going to end up towards the horizon so it's it's natural that these would kind of go down because if if you were looking these forever this line would forever continue and it would converge on the horizon that's just it is perfected pretty clear to everyone here yeah okay everyone's good with that so we have these lines that kind of converge down that way so if I want these if I want these actual lights look like they're in on the same plane basically I just have to make sure like vertical lines khun stay horse vertical those we don't really mess with but these lines we want to make sure that they kind of follow the same rules a cz well so they can't be like going straight across like this they actually need to kind of come down and matching perspective over what's going on all right is that clear cool alright so much photoshopped okay one more one more noise in here all right so to get that going on whoa I'm gonna show you perspective war who write like this do it yeah all right so basically I wantto mash those line so I didn't just click on any one of these little guys here there we go hit command tea and then I'm gonna hold old or option all right sorry control there we go and alter option and that's gonna warp along this access here so I can actually match the perspective of these lights by giving it basically what's like a vertical skew so bring that something right about there and hit command tea on this one bring that to something right about they're all right there we go let's bring these other lights here that's it command tea on this one all right there we go command tea and we'll just bring that down as well all right and keep in mind if I don't get this perfect on the first go around I'm not really that worried about it because all these lights there's probably gonna wind up moving ten different times but I just want to make sure they're close enough right all right so our left lights let's go ahead and just bring those down a little bit and uh we're looking a little bit better all right cool so now we've got our stadium lights and again anything can change at this point if I wanted if I wanted to completely change out a stadium and put in a completely different city I could do that if I want to raise this up lower it down I can do that as well all right let's go ahead and make this look like it's blending in a little bit better hear the stadium with the background I'm I'm gonna go ahead and let's turn these right world turner lights off and we'll turn our background off and I want to make sure I can see through all of these different greats here so we're gonna go to our stadium I'm gonna click on my sitting layer and I'm going to go to select and then down to color range just like we were doing with the greens earlier and this time I'm just going to click in these in this lighter area writer on here there we go so we're selecting the color range of those lights that we want to be able to see through let's go ahead and add there we go all right and with that selection now we can create a lay a mask so we're going to click on her lady mask and I'm going to just paint black on my leather mask right here let's just turn our original background on hey command h that's in a high destruction there we go and now we can see through these areas so we're just selecting areas and then painted black with a mask no big deal now another good way if we do have any like you can see some of these areas are a little bit lighter than they should be and I want this to be almost black right I want this to be pretty dark against the dark sky if we have any especially like that that looks horrible it's really not that difficult to take care of that you can do that with a levels adjustment layer so if you guys remember from day one I showed you a level adjustment layer this guy here on the left is going to make your darks a little bit darker this here on the right is going to make your lights lighter okay this point is going to make your darks lighter in this point is going to make your lights darker now making your life starker basically takes anything that would be light and makes a dark right so if I just clipped this adjustment layer to my city um option command g to do that take my whites and I'm making a darker like I'm doing right here hey command I and then I just basically paint this in with the lame ass right over here just this plane layer blending mode then I don't have to worry about that at all I'm just darkening these areas down and I'm taking care of all of the whites there and I could still like if I wanted them to be a little bit later I could do just like that and we're good to go so it's just going to get rid of those rights and this is just one of probably fifty different ways you could do this it's just a really quick way to make sure we're nice and cleaned up and that we're looking like you know I don't want it to look like we have white fringes everywhere on the background it should look like we can see through this and because we did use the layer mask we should be able to see through this as well so when we turn on our not our sketch I was like man those lights look horrible when we turn on our lights in the background we were able to see through he can see here we're able to actually see through to our lights in the background all right that's a start work on putting some grass on the field here and then we'll take a couple questions will be good to go all right and with grass I'm just doing you know searches on stock website for italy is the sock website that I used primarily for for grass or soccer field things like that all right here we go this is a soccer field that I'm gonna use this one actually comes with the stadium which I probably just could have used this image as a background but I thought that would be kind of a cop out and I wanted to show us how you make your today would be like three hours long just find the background that works for you well there's really nothing wrong to do that I just want to show you guys that there are other options you can totally create this stuff on your own all right the grasses would be in front of the stadium so many hit command g on this and we're just going to call this grass here we go let's go ahead and put a layer mask on this after full screen there we are all right let's put the lamb asked here on that layer all right and then now we wanna hit just command t bring this down and stretch it out all right very cool and the thing that I like about this is if I decide to change perspective at any point in time I can do that like I could raise this grass you know you're not going to go crazy with it but I could I could move it if I needed to plus I've got other pictures of grass that I found a swell like there's this image of grass which is it's beautiful and if I wanted a different perspective where I was looking more like down on a stadium then I would use this picture of grass so we'll hit command tea and we'll just try putting this one in in place as well cnc there there's always going going to be options when you're doing compositing and that's one of the reasons why I love it so much because you're really never going to be restricted so this grass is a little bit lighter that's the reason why it doesn't look is good but if you wanted to make it darker super simple grab a level adjustment layer clip that and make a little bit darker and you're good to go so I don't think we're going to wind up using that grass layer but you always have options when you're doing composites like this all right so we've got our grass in there and yeah I think we're good to go let's start off with a couple of questions and then we'll recap and then talk about what we're going to be doing in our next session perfect I'll start up here and then we'll let these folks ask ask away so photo maker would like to know does aaron suggest marking vanishing points on our horizon line if we don't have c c in the new perspective tool um yeah still super super helpful so I'm gonna hit command h again toe unhygienic selection we can see I've varied from my original horizon a little bit but I can change that again three other reason this is going to be really helpful is just kind of keep in mind let's just create a new layer here and everything that you do in photo shop just perspective in life I'm sure you guys remember like learning about perspective you see like how to draw a box like okay here's a here's a square you want to make it look like it's in perspective you know put some lines on it didn't do like that you gotta you gotta cube um these lines this line this line in this line in real life they're parallel in real life they're perfectly straight right but if you want to make the box looks like it's far away what you would do is you would set of vanishing point let's say we set up a vanishing point right over here and you want this line basically these lines would go back in space towards each of these lines would wind up going towards that point there right and then this looks like it's a box it's hard to draw a little bit with the walking tablet but this looks like it's being pulled back in space right and let's say are vanishing point was here on on the ground well if we wanted this point to look like it's coming from there and that point from there as well in that point from there as well there we go and then you have a box that looks like it's being pulled out towards the ground towards the horizon or let's say we had a few buildings right we had and we go let's just create a new layer we had a couple of buildings in our in our image and we wanted to look like you know they were correct in in perspective but whatever it was like that well you could build these and then they these lines here this line eventually these all go down to the horizon right so you have ah building right here this is going to go about down to the same horizon point and then buildings on this side they don't look like this right see how awkward that looks because my vanishing point is here these need to come down in this direction and go towards our same vanishing point and are same horizon right there so obviously I'm doing a really crude job with this but it's it's simple perspective either one point two points or three point perspective so having your horizon line really really helps out because every every her every line that should be parallel to the horizon will wind up going towards your horizon so all these this line here in this line here they're both technically parallel to the horizon and if you were do not look at the world in perspective they would look completely flat right without perspective you just get a bunch of flat boxes right but because of perspective distortion these lines you know things like that because I would see you know if the building went down below the earth thes lines would they would all wind up going towards the horizon that's just that's how perspective works so having that horizon line it really helps you out with composite because you'll know you know if you put a building here you know and it's jay I'd say we're going to be putting a building into our right into our image and the building is doing you know like looks like thiss well all of a sudden like that's not going to look right and there's no amount of photo shop that you can do to make you no this building look right like you can't put it unless you put it right down there then it actually will look right right but like you can't put it over here you can't put it over there you can't make it larger or smaller you can't put it on its side anything like that because these lines on ly to go towards the horizon so if it's blow ground shirt but like this that's just never going to look right unless these lines due north arriving so it's a really great little guide to help you make sure that everything actually is going to the same place and follows the rules of perspective which is just how it's how we see the world so as long as you are following those rules of perspective you can get away with a lot just like we did we warped the perspective of these of these lights in the background you saw what a huge difference that made just kind of changing them matching the perspective a little bit made them look like they were actually in place rather than like you know they were just stuck their beginning cool on dh jimmy schaefer would like to know did you ever create skies using the cloud filter in photo shop oh good question I don't I've used the cloud filter and photo shop it's a really cool filter let me just show you guys how I might actually use it that's a fil a new layer with black I'm gonna goto filter and then I believe it's under render and then down to clouds all right so filter rendering filed I don't create skies like this but you can create fog with this filter really really cool so I'm gonna use my levels to make my darks darker keep my lights where there are and then changes later blend mode from normal done to screen which is going to completely make my blacks disappear so you can see through it now change my opacity downs like twenty percent maybe let's see down to thirty percent taken area this and like stretch it out or something like that all right and then we've got like a really nice atmospheric fog in the background that we can just kind of put where we want to so this is you can see like I would use a softer brush to mask it in and it would look a little more natural but now we've got a nice atmosphere fog and if you wanted to color match it you could just add some color to it too so this is I find a great use for that cloud filter but I'm usually like skies are pretty easy to find and they're pretty easy to photograph yourself so I would just you generally use this document

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

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