Lessons

Lesson Info

Full Edit Mode: Layers and Masks

what I wanted to do now is show you a couple of other things that are handy to do in quick, thick smoke Over here on the left hand side, I'll zoom in so you can see we have a few tools. But again, not as many as we had back in full edit mode, because elements is trying to keep you from being overwhelmed by too many choices. Doesn't want you to scare you away. So the next tool that I want to talk about over here is the red eye tool. Okay? And it cleverly looks like a redeye, which is nice. After that, we're gonna talk about this tool right here, which is your make Gulf skies blue Bruce, which is pretty darn handy. But we're gonna start off with the red eye tool, So go ahead and zoom back out. I'm gonna close this image by pressing command W or control W. And again, I'm gonna trigger Don't say by pressing d as in don't. And I'm gonna open up another image. I'm going to use a command open or control open or commands here, or command rather control. Oh, to trigger the open dialogue and I'm...

gonna come down here to read I. Now what I isn't as much of a problem is it used to be because the digital cameras are getting better and better and better at doing that little flashy thing to keep you from having the red eye in your photos. So here we are with a portable baby with red eye. Now, I mentioned earlier that while you're zoomed in like this and viewing a before and after, you can click and hold with your mouths to move around on the image toe, position it where you can see what you're actually gonna edit. The next step is to go activate the red eye tool on the left hand side. So you want a cruise over here and give it a single click and it highlights her darkens rather to let you know that it's activated. Now, this is the part where you do as I say, not as I do. Okay, I cannot tell you how many times I have cussed this program up one side down the other because I'll go grab the red eye tool and I come over here and I can't do anything. Why is that. That's because I'm on B before, okay, You have to scoot over to the after image for the cursor to change to the actual redeye tools to see how it changes to that circle with the slash. You can't click here, but if you cruise onto the after image, then you actually get across here. So there's several different ways you can use this tool. Naturally, you can click single click on the offending red, so I'm just going to you give the inside of the people a single click, and in this case, elements got rid of the red I instantly. Then I could come over here and click the other people and it's gone. That's one way to use the tool. I'm gonna press the undo button, appear at the top to go back to my original image. Now, with some instances of red eye that could be really contrary. I've noticed no rhyme or reason, but they could be really pesky, so sometimes you might get a better result. If you click and hold on your mouse button and then draw a box around the whole iris, sometimes that will do a better job than single clicking within the people. Okay, So that's method to Method Number three is that if either one of those ways does not completely eradicate your red eye, then you need to change the tools options. So here in in quick fix mode, we have a limited set of options available for that tool. This is just like the options bar that we saw back in full edit mode. It allows you to customize the way the tool behaves. So let's say, for example, that nor clicking nor dragging and drawing a box around our peoples got rid of our red eye. Well, you can change the pupil size and the amount that you're darkening. Okay, so if you can't get rid of it, don't give up. Just click. Undo a couple times, Go back to the original state of the image. Come up here to the Options bar while the red Eitel is active and change the people size. Make it larger. Okay, so you can click within this field and either click and drag over the numbers to highlight. Or you could just double click toe. Highlight that 50 and perhaps you want attack in 75. That might be the magic number that gets rid of the red eye. Or you can click the little downward pointing triangle and use the slider bar to increase or decrease people size. So if you had a really stubborn people that would not turn black, then you could just pump this baby all the way up to 100. And you might even change the dark and amount to 100 too. So don't forget to experiment with those settings if you don't get rid of the red eye on the first try. Okay, so that's really all there is to read. I mean, it's that's probably the simplest thing you'll ever do in elements. So I'll go ahead and close this image, and we're gonna look at the take, make dull skies blue brush s. I'm gonna open up an image that I shot in Egypt, actually, and there was this really pretty mosque. And the only problem is that the sky is really, really flat. Its really, really boring, and it just looks awful. Well, elements knows that that's a problem that's prevalent in digital photography. And it gave us a new tool. I believe in elements. Time is when it came along, and it's called Make dull skies blue and it allows you to paint extra blue onto the sky. It's really handy a couple of different ways to use it, though. We're gonna look at it here in quick fix mode. And then after we talk about it, we're going to go into full edit mode and we're gonna talk about how you can further tweak your make No skies blue, you can make them even bluer. So over here on the left hand side, we want to go grab our brush and it actually looks like a paint brush painting onto a cloud with Blue case, we're going to give that a single click. Teoh, activate it. And on this one, I think I'm gonna change my view to be before and after Vertical. And then I'm gonna grab my little hand, Michael hands hole here and I'm gonna scoot the image down so we can see the sky area. We're going to concentrate on that. So again, all I did was change my before and after Poppet menu at the bottom left vertical. And then I grabbed my little hand tool over here on the left, and then I can move around. Within that image. You can also press and hold the space bar. That's a keyboard shortcut for activating the hand tool. Okay, so I've got my blue sky brush. And again, you don't want a mouse over to the before image because you will not be able to do a single thing. Mouse down to the after image. And as you can see here, your brush looks like a circle with a cross here inside of it. The circle is, of course, your brush cursor, and that's letting you know what size brush you've got. Okay, and a quick keyboard shortcut for use. You can't increase brush size by pressing the right bracket. Key Muse email. Pressing the right bracket key to go up on breast size That's really honking big. Or you compress the left bracket key to go down and brush size. That's a real good keyboard shortcut to memorize, But if you don't want to memorize them, you can always change brush size up here in the options bar. Okay, so you could just click that little down reporting triangle and drive the diameter slider to the right to make the brush bigger to left to make it smaller. Okay, The plus sign inside of the brush cursor means that when you click and drag with this tool, you are going to be adding that change. Okay, so the plus sign is for add the change. So you're telling elements. Hey, any pixels that I brush across with that brush, I want you to add this change, so I'm just gonna click and drag across the sky and because I have such a high amount of contrast between the sky and the building or the mosque, rather, I don't have to do very much painting at all. If you had a less contrast in that in your image, you might find that you make some areas blue that you didn't want to make blue. Okay, so let's talk about how to fix that. I'm gonna zoom into the image a little bit, and here again, you can use your resume controls at the bottom, right, or you can use the keyboard shortcut commands plus on a Mac or control plus on a PC. So what's happened here is that we have painted over an area that we didn't want to be blue. Well, if the plus sign in the middle of the brush stands for add this change to the photo, what would happen if we put a minus sign in the brush? Then the area you painted over elements would take away your subtract that edit and that change whatever it is that you're applying. So let's take a look how to do that a couple of different ways. Of course. If you'll notice up here in the options bar, let me zoom in. You'll see that right now. This brush icon is darkened, meaning it's active, and it's got a little green plus sign above it that brushes currently in ad mode. Well, if I click the little brush to the right of it's got a red minus sign and also these tool tips that are popping up our handy. In some instances, this'll is one of them. If you just hover over a tool for a second, take your hand off the mouse and let it be still in. This little tool tip will come up. It tells you what that item does, so if we click the minus sign brush soon back out. When I come over here. Back to the image. Now I have a minus sign inside my brush cursor. So if I start painting over that blue area, I am subtracting that change from the area in which I paint across. Now you'll notice this little black and white line that looks like marching ants. And that's exactly what the heck I call it. Or marching is that denotes a selection in a selection in elements is your way of telling it Hey, do this thing, but only in this one spot, not to the whole picture, just to the area I've selected. So as we're painting across the image elements is creating a selection as we're painting and it's applying ah, layer of blue Onley to that selection. It's hiding it from the rest of the image. Okay, so that's what the little marching ants are. And we're gonna talk more about selections both today and tomorrow. So if I really wanted to fix up this image, I would need to keep painting across this area that I did not mean to make blue in the first place. Well, you can see how big my brushes if I start painting across that area with the brush that big. I'm gonna unb lose some of the stuff that I really wanted to be booed in the first place. Okay, so what you want to do is make your brush smaller in that instance. So I'm gonna go ahead and switch back to the add mode of my brush, make my brush a little bit smaller by pressing the left bracket key Or again, you could use the brush diameter slider appear in the options bar. I'm just gonna brush across it and again, your success with this tool will vary according to the contrast, it's in your image. Okay, so now I need to move over to another area of my image. But I don't want to switch tools. I don't want to switch to the hand tool. I want to keep the middle skies blue brush active, but I want to move over in my image. That's where the space bar keyboard shortcut comes in really handy. So as I pushed the space bar, see how my cursor becomes a hand Now I can move over in reposition bad image within my view screen without having to change zoom level or that switching tools. So that's when that space bar keyboard shortcut comes in handy. Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, let's say I'm a little too lazy amounts all the way up to the top of the screen to go grab that minus brush when I need it. You can change to that brush with a keyboard shortcut, and that is option on a Mac or alter on a PC. Okay, so see how we've got the plus sign in the middle of the brush right now. But if we hold down that modifier key option on America are all on a PC, we can switch into subtract mood very quickly and easily. Okay, so that's what I'm gonna do. Now I'm gonna keep holding that key down as I'm painting with that brush and I can unglued areas I didn't need to make do to begin with. Now, of course, if you're doing this, you know, for riel, you probably want to zoom way into the image and make sure that you keep changing your brush size so that you don't no pain over any areas. You didn't mean Teoh. So you'd be real careful. In other words, a little bit more careful and I'm being with this one, but you'll get the the point of this so you can see how using those keyboard shortcuts increases your speed with this kind of technique. Museum bag out a little bit by pressing command minus or control minus on a PC. So here we can see what a difference this one tool made in our image. And it was a real quick fix again because I've got a lot of contrast. But the question becomes, What if it's not blue enough? How can you make it more blue? How can you change? It's this coloring that elements is doing well. The answer is you cannot do anything to while you're in quick fix mode. And again, quick fix mode is a way of elements making everything very friendly for you. You know, very easy, very friendly, very calm, very soothing. But there's not a lot of ways to tweak what you can make happen in quick fix smoke. To do that, you need to pop back into full edit mode, and that's where you're going to see what elements actually created to make our dull skies bluer. You're going to see that it created a whole nother layer that it filled with blue. And then it's hiding that blew from the areas that you did not paint across, which is the mosque. It's on Lee revealing the blue in the sky area. So before we pop over into full edit mode, do we have any questions on using the middle skies, blue brush or the red eye tool? Yes, always questions. Leaves always questions, and I don't know if you're going to go over this later. But question from Hadiya was, if you wanted the mosque picture to be black and white, but only the flower to be in that natural pink color. Is there a way to do that? Heck, yes. It's one of my favorite things to do in elements. And we're gonna cover that and just I hope we'll get to today. We probably will. Fantastic. It's gonna be a little bit later on. Great. Thank you. There was a question from Vaz. Ooh, who asked Wanna chromatic aberration of here? By making the sky darker on top of the mosque. Why did the chromatic aberration appear? Won't a chromatic aberration appear by making the sky darker? On top of the moss. Well, there's quite a bit of blending the elements is first of all this. It's filling the selected area. The marching ants rather is filling it with a blue Grady int, which means it's fading from blue to transparency. So in this case, because it's ingredient, you're not going to get that kind of hard color transition from one color to the other. There's a little bit more blending that's going on. Actually, this the edges of the selection being softened does to touch to make it blend a little bit better. So I don't think you're gonna You're gonna run into that kind of problem with it. There is a question, and you might have actually gone over this, but from J. C. I. NPV Is there a way to change the intensity of the blue in the Blue Cloud brush? There is, but not in quick fix my right, just to clarify, that's what we're gonna do next. There were some other questions that came up, but I think we can wait a little bit later. All right, so now let's pop into full edit mode, so I'm gonna go ahead and leave everything just like it is. And you don't really have to worry about selections in that. I know a lot of people who once they end up with marching ants on their screen, they want to get rid of them. They don't print nothing's gonna happen. So we're just gonna let our marching ants continue marching around the sky for just a minute here and we're gonna pop over into full edit mode, which is your ah, pro level mode, wherein elements assumes you know where the tools are, You know about the menu system and you're okay with rooting through the menu system to try to find things. Okay, it doesn't really help you do a whole lot in full edit mode like we've been seeing in quick edit mode and guided mood. So we're gonna trot up to the top right ever screen here and under the edit tab, we're going to click the full button. Now, if you're using any other version than this one, this is elements. Nine. You may have a an orange edit tab with a little triangle pop up menu that you'll have to click, and then you could choose full from that papa menu. But If you're inversion nine, you can see all three of your modes right here. So go ahead and give full a single click. And now we're back into the editing mode we saw when we first talked about the whole elements. Workspace. Okay, so we've got our tools panel over here on the left hand side, all your different tools. And then for each of those tools, there are options. So the options bar changes according to what tools currently active over here On the right hand side, you're now seeing what's called the layers panel. And layers are your key to nondestructive editing in elements and by nondestructive editing. I mean, where you're not actually harming your original image. You're doing all of your changes on on their own layer you can think of in in its own little space. Okay, I'm doing everything in its own little self contained space. That way I came back out of each individual change. If I want, I can change the strength of any of the edits that I've created. Using what's called layer opacity. You can reposition layers independently of other layers that will become really important when we start getting into collages because it will be moving around things in our collage. You know, independently of the other items that might be in there, but let's just spend a couple of minutes on layers. I'm gonna open up another image that I will use to explain to you what layers really are. And it's cleverly the Texas flag. I even have props. Okay, so you can think of layers in many different ways. Okay, You can think of them as a stack of transparencies. I don't know about y'all, but when I was in elementary school, the mass teacher had an overhead projector. Okay, like one of those draft things, you know, she had overhead projector and she would put down the problem. Let's say is two plus two will be on one transparency and the kids would all see that. Okay to fusty. Let's figure that out. And then after we figured it out, she would put another piece of transparency down that had equals four. Okay, so if you were just looking at the screen, it appears to be a single image. But if you sat through the math class, it was the teacher building up that single image through transparencies, which were revealing different parts of the formula. So you can think of layers like that. You can also think of layers as a stack of image slides. Okay, that you're looking down through from a bird's eye point of view. And my most recent layer analogy is construction paper. Hence the props. So let's take a look at this. So I will deconstruct my Texas flag here, and we're going to take a look at it exactly. We're gonna build exactly as it was built on the screen here. So let's say we start out with a red piece of construction paper and everybody's played with construction paper. So if we take this red piece of construction paper and we put actually I'll do it like this we put a another piece of blue construction paper on top of it. Okay, Is the red construction paper still back there? Of course it is. It's just the blue is covering it up has exactly how layers work. Exactly. So if I keep building my flag, here is I stack up more pieces of construction paper on top of the original, read more and more of the red disappears so that you're seeing what appears to be a single image. But it's really made from several pieces of construction paper. As you can see, as I'm stacking the pieces of construction paper, they have the power to cover up or hide the piece of paper that's on the bottom. Okay, so right now you're only seeing a tiny trying or a tiny rectangle of red, but you know that that whole piece of red paper is back there. Okay, so that's how layers work. Now, when you're looking at the main viewing area, if you're looking at your document here, you're seeing down through your stack of layers like this. Okay, so that matches up with what we're seeing on screen. Exactly. The layers panel to the right of that. Over here. You're seeing it more like this. OK, so you're actually seeing each individual piece as it stat. Okay, so that's what you're seeing in the layers panel over in the document. You're peering down through that stack, which looks like this. OK, so layers panel document. Okay. It's like you're a bird and you're looking down through all those stacks of transparencies or construction paper. You know, insert leases. Newest analogy here. So you'll notice over here in our elements layers panel that the star is on top. Okay, so if layers have the power to cover up or hide whatever is underneath them, then if we want to start to be visible, it has to be at the top of our layer stack. Because if we change its stacking order now, you can't see it. But you know the stars back there, right? Okay, cause in your layers panel, you're seeing it like this. So layers have the ability to cover up or hide whatever is underneath them. OK, you can have as many layers as you want in an elements document, okay? And this is what they look like right over here. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on the layers panel here, and we're gonna talk about a few things that we're seeing. First of all, this is a layer, and each layer has a little eyeball to its lift that lets you show it or hide it. Okay, So if we zoom back out here and I click the little eyeball next to the star if I give it a click Now I have hidden that layer. I've turned it off. For all intents and purposes, layers that are turned off will not print, so that comes in handy if you're doing a bunch of color correction using layers, which were about to dive headfirst into. If you have made a color change on a layer when you decide you don't like it, you don't have to throw it away for it not to print. You can simply hide it by clicking the little visibility eyeball to its left. And if you decide you want to turn it back on, just click in that little empty square area where the eyeball used to be. Give that a click and you'll turn it right back on. You'll also notice that appear at the top of the layers panel, a little field called opacity. This one is how you make some layers more see through than others have that'll come in handy in color correction. So let's say you corrected your color and lighting with an adjustment layer, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But maybe the changes a little too strong. You could back off of its opacity, a little bit to make it look more real when we get into retouching under eye circles column bags for lack of a better way to put it. When we start zapping bags, everybody has lines or a little bit of a dark area beneath their I. So if you take that out completely, then you make your subject look plastic like cover of Cosmopolitan. I'm not. I don't like that at all because I think it perpetuates some pretty serious body issue, especially for women. So when I'm doing Miley touching, I did my retouching on separate layers so that initially it may look like I've completely removed the bags. But then I'm gonna lower layer opacity of that one thing that I did to make the retouch look riel. So I'm telling you all this to get you excited about layers and that it's It's a very safe way to edit because you can build up either the color corrections or the collage or the piece of art. Whatever the heck it is that you're making, you can build up different pieces of it in their own little self contained layer, so that lets you to, you know, affect it without affecting everything else. And if you do one thing, let's say that we don't like the star. You know, I could throw that layer away. OK, so it's a very, very flexible way to edit your documents Now. You can also move layers independently of each other. So let's create a whole another country, shall we by moving this star. So the way it works is that you have to tell elements which layer you want to mess with. So that's called the currently active layer. And it will be the most important layer in your life at that moment because whatever you do next will only happen to that layer. Okay, so the currently active layer is the one that's highlighted. Now I believe on a map highlighting looks light blue. I think on a PC It looks like gray, I believe so that it will be obvious to you that one of the layers is activated. OK, so this one right here is activated. So as I click each layer, then you can tell which ones are active. So if I want to move the star, I could click the layer that the star lives on In this case, it was made with a shape tool which will talk about also later on. So now I'm gonna go grab my move tool from the tools panel on the left side of your screen. And it's this little guy, right? Here's the top left, most tool, and it's the move tool, and you see, as I have her over that tool, we get a little, ah, letter next to it and parentheses. That's the tool's keyboard shortcut so you can switch to the move total just by pressing the wiki, which I like to do that. So I'll do that now. Preston Wiki. And just like we learned earlier, any time you change a tool, you get a whole slew of new settings in the options bar. So for the move tool, you can have this automatic bounding box turned on, and this is on by default. It drives me a little crazy. Well, crazier, so I usually keep it off, but I do believe it's on by default in that bounding box, if you'll remember, looks just like our crop box. He's got those little handles that you can drag to resize different parts of your image. You can summon that bounding box at any time through another menu command. But just know that by default it's always on when you've got the move tool, activate. And if it drives you crazy, which it may, then you could just turn it off by clicking that little check box next to show bounding box and you can always turn it back on. Okay, so since I don't want to resize my star, I'm gonna go ahead and leave. Show bounding box off and I've got the move Tool active. I'm on the right layer and I just simply click and drag to move that star around wherever I want. It's the other layers didn't move at all. So when it comes to collages and other art, even creating designs like flyers and stuff and elements, the ability to move independent items is a really, really good. So let's take a look at opacity real quick. Here. Let's say I want to make that star a little bit more see through. I could come up here and double click within the opacity box and type in a new number if you happen to know what you want or you could click the downward pointing triangle to summon the little slider, and you could drag the slider back and forth, or a real pro level tip for you. And this tip will work for any field that has a text label next to it. See how, when I have er over the word opacity, see how my cursor changes to a hand with two arrows. You can. As soon as you see that cursor, you can click and hold down your mouse button, and you can just move your mouse left or right as far as you want. And that will only change that field. So that works for any fields infield, meaning a box that you can type in that has a text label next to just hover over the text label, and you'll get that little scrubby cursor that allows you to quickly change that setting. So as we go down and opacity for our star, see how it gets lighter and lighter and lighter. Now what you're seeing here is a bit of an outline around. The star that comes from the way I created The Star created it with one of elements shaped tools. There are star shapes built into the program, and so it's just giving me the outline of that shape, that extra gray line. We'll zoom in so you can see it. That does not print, but you will see it. If you have a layer activated that was created with a shape tool, you'll see just a little faint grey outline of the shape. Don't worry about it. You can't get rid of it. But if I click any other layer, see how it goes away. So it's only something that shows up if you've got that layer activated. Okay, so if I wanted to go back to full capacity for our star, I could drag that up 200 for changing layer stacking order. It's a simple as clicking and dragging, but you do want to get into the habit of clicking and dragging the layer thumbnail. Okay, so this right here in every single layer is called the layer thumbnail, and it gives you a preview of what is going on on that layer. So these layers right here are called Phil layers. They are filled with color, and that's what the soul icon means. If I wanted to change the color of those layers. All I have to do is a double click, that layer thumbnail, and that will open up a color picker that lets me change that color. So for image layers like this one right here, shape, layer. Rather, you get a preview of this shape. Okay, so there isn't a shape on these cause it's just layers filled with color. Okay, so that's why you're seeing only the color. So this is a layer thumbnail. This is what you want to get into the habit of clicking and dragging when you're moving layers around, changing stacking order or even dragging them to the trash can. The tiny microscopic trash that's at the bottom right of the layers panel. So, for example, if I wanted Teoh, let's say I wanted to move my blue layer up. Then I could click and hold on its layer thumbnail and then drag. It's wherever I wanted to land in my document and you'll see as I'm moving in around. Did you see the line between the layers highlight when the right spot highlights. That's when you can let go of your mouse button. Okay, so you can rearrange layers all day long. And now let's see what we've created over here. All kinds of crazy stuff s. So if we put our star down at the bottom, of course we wouldn't see it anymore because it's underneath Everything okay? Still there. Not visible cause it's not on the top. I cannot tell you how much that trips people up when they start combining images to make collages, and they get completely freaked out because the star, whatever it is, has disappeared. But you just got to stay cognisant of your layer stacking order. Remember, it's just like stacking transparent Caesar construction paper. Any questions on on that part? Being questions on layers girls Absolutely question from Egan. How do I get the thumbnails to show in my layers palette? How do you get the thumbnails to show in your layers? Palette Will. You could change your panel options. Okay, so there is a another microscopic menu. I want to ask Adobe. He's don't make a lot cause this little bit smaller because they're almost visible like No, we can't making me smaller. This little menu right here, it looks like a downward pointing triangle with a bunch of lines. That's a panel fly out menu. Give it a click and you will open a menu of items specific to that particular panel and t the thumbnails, especially to make the thumbnails bigger. You want to go down to the option called panel Options. Okay, so you want to give that a click, I'll zoom out That's gonna open the cleverly named Layer Panel Options Dialog box, and they're your copy of elements is probably set to none, which would mean you're not seeing the sun males at all. I set mind to the really big ones, OK, because I like to see them and be because, you know, I'm teaching a lot and it's helpful if the students can actually see them to you. So that's how you would change that. And then when you're finished, you could just click. OK, see how my mind got a little bit bigger when I did that sets helpful. Another quick clarification question from Rick was, But how did I create one of the How did you create one of the new layers? Oh, great question. How did you How did I create those layers? We're gonna talk about that as we come across the techniques that we that we're going to use them for. But you can go up to the layer menu, and that kind of makes sense. If you want to do something specific to layers, a layer menu is a bit logical, so you can trot up there and you can choose new. And then you comptel elements what kind of layer you want to create, so you could create a new empty layer. You could duplicate a layer. You can also delete layers from here, but you can also create new Phil Layer. So this is how I created those layers filled with color. I chose Layer New Phil layer solid color, and then elements asked you What would you like to name it? He says. Fab feel layer press okay, and then you'll get a color picker. The asked you what color you'd like to fill that layer with. We'll just say yellow and click OK, and over here in the layers panel C. I got another layer that's filled with solid color, and now I don't even know what country this is anymore. Donor that Texas used to be its own country. Yes, he did. Okay, So back into the layers panel, you can also create other kinds of layers. And that's the next thing we're gonna talk about is all the different kinds of layers that you're gonna encounter can ask another question question from Hadia, who's joining us from Pakistan? He asked, How is a layer moved from the bottom to the top, such as the star by mistake was placed at the bottom and isn't showing. Great question. How do you move layers around you? Click and grab the layer thumbnail itself. Okay, so just click and hold down your mouse button and then drag it in any direction. So if I drag it back to the top up here, it will appear again. So it's just a click and drag affair. And then, if you want to move the element around, then you have to go grab the move tool, and then you can move that item around. And E Powers asked, Can you just explain again what order the layers need to be in? Well, the layer stacking order depends on what you're trying to create. So if we're creating the Texas flag just like you can see appear on my layers panel and elements. Then for the start to be visible, it has to be on the top of the layers stack, because whatever is at the top of the layers stack has the power to cover up or hide whatever's underneath it. So it just depends on whatever you want to see on top, because you really are looking down through it like you were bird, right? Thank you. I think we can move on. All right. Okay. So I'm gonna go ahead and close this document, and I'm gonna open up another one, and we will get back to our make our dull skies even less dull, more blue in just a minute. But I want to pop open another document. We're actually gonna create this collage, probably tomorrow. And it's a collage, and I made with with several layers, and it's got stock art in it, as well as, um, vector embellishments like the starburst raise all kinds of things, but it's a good example of some of the different types of layers that you can create elements. So the ones that we've seen so far were the fill color solid color fill layers Okay. Over here, you're going to see the top two layers. Have a big T in the layer thin now and again. The layer thumbnail is just a little preview of what is going on on that layer. So when you see a layer with a T in it, that means that that's a type player or a text layer. Okay, so any time you grab the text tool and elements, which also cleverly, is a big old fat T anytime you click to activate that tool and then click on your document elements creates a type layer for you. And unless you tell it otherwise, thes type players remain edible. Okay, So if I wanted to change the word you know, ski, tow snow, I can absolutely do that cause text layers are edible, so go ahead and change that that. Okay, so the next kind of layer we've got here has an image preview here. Well, those air image layers. So those air probably the layers you'll be dealing with the most, because as you open up images from the vigil care where they're gonna open up, you know, as an image layer. Okay, so that's all those are this. Will guy down here has a gear sprocket next to it. This is called an adjustment layer. And an adjustment layer simply is your where Tell elements. Hey, elements This next change or adjustment that I'm gonna make to my image, please put it on its own layer. So when we get into color correction and things like that in full edit mode, we're going to be doing those things with adjustment layers. So that keeps the change from affecting your original image, which gives, you know, flexibility and change in the strength of it, hiding it from part of the image that might not need that adjustment and so on. Speaking of that, it is now time to talk about what the hit. These two things are right here with every adjustment layer. You're going to see this white thumbnail next to it. As you can see from my tool tip elements is telling me that's a layer mask thumbnail. Now, a layer mask is probably something you have all heard of and thought, What the heck is that? Well, you can think of it exactly like digital masking tape, just like you would mask off the baseboards in your living room before you paint them right because you don't want the paint to get on the baseboards. But you don't take the baseboards off because that would be too much work in the paint were driving. They had to put it back on. You just want to hide them right, and you hide them by putting the masking tape on top of them. That's all. A layer mask is your equivalent of digital masking tape. It allows you to hide parts of that layer when we get into the color correction with adjustment layers. Let's say you know your sky looks great, but your foreground needs some color correction. Well using adjustment layers and the layer massive tags along with them is the way you can apply a color adjustment part of the image, but hide it from the part of the image that doesn't need that adjustment. That is really, really, really powerful stuff when we get into using adjustment layers. So anyway, that's what this is. This is a layer mask. This is a layer mass to, but it's one that I've manually added to this image layer. Now, the reason I've done that is because I only wanted the Starburst, the rays and the stars to show on the top part of the image. I didn't want it to cover our whole ski bunny girl. I only wanted to reveal it in certain areas. So if these two icons are layer masks, what the heck is going on? What's all this black stuff? Well, there is a rhyme that creative pros have come up with to help us remember what color to paint with in a layer mask, depending upon what we're trying to do. And the rhyme is black, conceals quite reveals, black conceals, why reveals And I'm gonna say that 100 times for the rest of the day and tomorrow because as long as I've been doing this and teaching this, which is about 11 years now, I still have to run that rhyme through my head. Every day, game time I go to paint in a layer mask because if you don't do that, if you don't do it every day, all day, you lose that in everybody out there. Please don't feel like you should memorize every thing that I'm saying that you should be able to sit down and do all this stuff just like that, because there's no way it's a complicated program. And if you don't do this stuff on a daily basis that you will, you'll forget. You know, that's a great reason to purchase the video so you can go back and go over those techniques. So if black conceals and white reveals, I can look at this layer mask without even looking at the document itself, and I can tell exactly what's going on. The only place in the image you can see this starburst is on the top part is on the white parts everywhere that's black. This image is being hidden, black conceals of white reveals. So now let's look in our actual document and in this one right here, this is an empty mass because all masks start out white. It's empty, black conceals, white reveals, and everything's being revealed, so a mask isn't doing anything. Okay, so if we come over here and look at our image and we can see the Starburst raise here, I believe I lowered the opacity that layer a little bit, so I'll pump it back up, and I think I'll turn off this layer so we can actually see a little bit better. See how you can only see the rays up here in the in the sky part. So if you look at this mask thumbnail, it is a miniature representation of the full size document. Okay, It's just miniature. So glancing that that mask you can tell very quickly. Oh, okay. Well, the only place that that Starbucks is being revealed is at the top portion around her head because you can tell by the brush strokes in the mask. Okay? And I painted those by hand. Okay, This mass right here, I said, is empty because they start out that way. And so this levels adjustment and we're going talk about levels here in a little bit, is not being hidden anywhere from the image. Okay, so if I turn its visibility eyeball off, you can see the whole image dark and a little bit. Now it's gonna lighten a little bit. That's all I did with that Levels adjustment was I changed the lighting in her image just a little bit. So those were a few the different kinds of layers that you can create in elements and again How do you create them? Several different ways. We looked at the layer. Many already layer new layer that would create a new empty image layer that maybe you could paint on with brush strokes. Layer newfield layers. Gonna let you create a layer that's filled completely the whole You know, whatever your canvas size is gonna fill it with a solid color ingredient, which is a fade from one color to another or a pattern. Elements has a bunch of built in patterns in which you're good for, um, applying texture to images. And then when we get down to new adjustment, layers work, which is where the rial powerful. This is where the real meat of what everything we're gonna be doing with elements, threats and today and tomorrow really comes from adjustment layers. This 1st 1 right here is called levels that lets you change the levels of brightness in your photo, and that's what we're going to be using for color correction. It's very, very powerful, and it's identical to what you get in photo shop. See us whatever. Okay, so that explanation is going to carry over. If there's any photo shop users watching brightness and contrast changes, brightness and contrast hue saturation. We saw this one already. Let she change the color and color intensity in your image. Grady. It map lets you take the eso. All images were made from shadows highlights and Minton's right. So with a great map adjustment layer, you can tell elements. Hey, make all the shadows in my image, this one color of the Grady in and make my highlights in the image another color of the Grady in. That's how we're going to create one of the most beautiful black and white images you've ever seen in your life is with that photo filter lets you give your image a little bit of a color cast. Very, very subtle. Invert. Reverse the colors. So let's say, for example, I wanted this image right here to be its opposite. So instead of blue and white, maybe I wanted orange. Then I could invert the layer, and you'll actually reverse the colors, just like on a color wheel. It will make the color their opposite on the color wheel, so that's a handy one for designers, and the other ones we've got up here are threshold. Threshold is a great way to create an extremely high contrast image. It will throw all the color out of your image in the shadows will be pure black and the highlights will be pure white. Looks like a kind of an Andy Warhol Sarah graph. Kind of look with that and pasta rise makes your art makes your photo looks like a cartoon are okay, so it takes the the color gradations out of it and replaces it with solid blocks of color. Okay, so there's several different adjustment layers that we're gonna be using. But for the moment, let's get back to our make dull skies blue brush that we started out with over in quick fix mode. Now remember, there was no way for us to adjust the intensity of the blue that was added with this tool. Okay, so over here in full edit mode, you can actually see what elements did to add the blue. So it created this layer automatically by using that brush. So that's a really neat thing, because even if you didn't know that, it's protecting your original image just by the way it works. So that brush that we used over in quick fix mode is actually called a smart brush, and smart brushes are available in full edit mode there a little bit tougher to get at. But once you know where they are, you will most likely use them in full edit mode as opposed to quick fix mode. Okay, because, as you can see here, you can make changes. So by default photos for shop elements made this blue sky layer 75% opacity Well, if I want it more blue, can't I just bump up the opacity? Of course you can. So now my skies, even more blue than it was before. So you have to pop into full edit mode to get at that. Now, let's say that when we were in quick fix mode that we really couldn't we really couldn't make that brush the way it automatically created the selections. We couldn't get our skyline just perfect. Okay, As I zoom in here, you can see that I've got some trouble spots. I've got some areas that ended up being blue that I didn't want to be blue, okay, but when you're over in quick fix mode, you're painting with that brush, and it's creating a selection. Then, depending upon the contrasts in your image, it can be difficult to get all the right places colored. Okay, but you can adjust it manually over here in full edit mode. If you look at this mask, see elements created all this behind the scenes for you. If this is a miniature of our full document, then could we just go into this mask itself with a black paint brush and maybe hide the blue from that area right there just by hand, Painting it? Absolutely. So you confined tune Not on Lee. The the strength of the blue skies. But you confined tune the area in which that blues being revealed in a much simpler way than you can with the brush that creates a selection as your drawing it because you could drive yourself crazy going in, Add subtract brush mode trying to get it just right. So let's take a look at how to fine tune it over here. And remember, our lime black conceals Why reveal so this black that we're seeing in the layer mask is actually the shape of our mosque. Okay, so that's how you know that the blue is only being revealed in the UAE area. That's why the mosque isn't blue. So let's go ahead and zoom in and let's see if we can fix our mask here. So the other thing I want to show you is how to know if the mask is active. See this little extra corner bracket around the layer mask thumbnail. That means that you have activated the mask. If I click the background layer, you'll see that that extra little corner bracket is now around the background layer that lets you know what part of the layer is active. Okay, so I want the mask active, so I need to make sure that that bracket is around the mask. And if it's not, just give it a single click. Now I'm gonna go grab the regular old paintbrush from the Tools panel so it lives over here on the left hand side and you'll notice that there's a slew of brushes when I click the brush icon in the tools panel, this guy opens up and I've got a whole slew of brushes in there. The one I want is the one on top, just a regular old plain old, ordinary brush tool. You can press the letter B as in brush to activate that tool and to cycle between all the different tools in that tools list, you can press shift b, see how the icons changing as I'm pressing shift. Be on screen here so you can go through all the different tools and that tool. Sit if you wanted. Okay, so now I've got my paintbrush activated. I'm in the layer mask here. Now I need to tell elements what color I want to paint with. Well, if black conceals and what it reveals, See, I still have to do that. What I want to do here, that thing right there is not supposed to be blue. Okay, so I want to hide the blue from that. I want to conceal it. So I need to paint with black. How do you tell the brush paint with black? You do that by looking at your foreground and background color chips at the bottom of your tools panel. These guys right here, the one on top is your foreground ship. And that's the color that whatever currently active tool, if it paints with that's the color is gonna pick up. Okay, So you want black on top? Well, your color chips may look like this. You may have quite on top. Well, to get glad to be on top, all you have to do is click that little curved arrow, and that will flip flop your color chips. Okay, so I compress a little curved arrow. Or even better, I compress the X key that will flip flop your color ships back and forth, and that's a really good keyboard. Shortcuts. Remember when you're painting with masks because master silvery forgiving, as you can imagine, because all you're doing is hiding or showing what's on that layer. Well, if you hide or show a little bit too much and then you need to go back and fix it, all you do is press X to flip, flop your color chips and then fix that area. You know you do the opposite of what you just did. OK, if you're color chips are not black and white and there's something else altogether, you can set them to the default of black and white by clicking that unbelievably tiny little color chips underneath the big ones. This guy right there, you can click that to go back to the default of black and white. Or you can remember the letter d from the word default and dis press de okay, and that will take your color chips to the default to black and white. But whichever way you want to do it, we want black on top because we're going to be concealing black conceals white reveals. So now I can come over here to my image, and my brush is a little bit too big. So remember the keyboard shortcuts earlier, the left bracket key goes down and brush size the right bracket key goes up and brush size so I can make my brush little bitty I can zoom in again my pressing command plus or control plus on a PC. And then I can come in here and everywhere I paint that blue is gonna be hidden. Okay, so I could very painstakingly go through here and make sure that all of my edges of that blue are absolutely perfect. That's why we were talking about when the gentleman had the question earlier about isn't it going to cause some kind of weird, you know, funky color difference not really, because once you pop into full edit mode, you can go in and at a very high zoom level, fine team exactly where that blue is showing. And if you're using a soft edged brush, elements comes with two types of brushes. Those that have really hard edges and those have soft edges. If you use a soft edged brush, you're going to get the tiniest amount of blending between what you're hiding in what you're revealing. OK, so you're not going to end up with a hard edge. And how on earth do you know if you've got a soft brush will be a great question. Well, while you've got the brush tool active, trot up to the options bar and you can click this little downward pointing, trying a little open up the brush preset picker. Say that 10 times fast, really easy to tell the hard brushes from the soft ones. The soft ones look fuzzy, so as long as you've got one of these soft brush is chosen, it doesn't matter. The numbers underneath the brush icons is simply that brushes size and pixels, which, as you know with the keyboard shortcut, doesn't matter. cause you can make it any size you want. So just make sure that you've got a soft brush activated in lieu of a hard edge brush. And then you can come in here and our space bar keyboard shortcut to bring up the hand tool that lets you move around the image wires aimed in works in full edit mode. So if I want to make my brush smaller, I could personal left bracket key, and I could come in here and very painstakingly fixed this area that I could not get perfect back in quick edit mode. Now let's say that I screw up and I do something like that. Do I have to start over? Heck, no. If black conceals and white reveals press X to flip flop your color chips. So now that light is on top and then you can come back in and reveal that area. So it's a process of showing and hiding what is in that mask, and you could go in and get it just perfect. And if you paint with the wrong color like I did, then you can quickly go in and fix it. I won't spend a lot of time on this one because I think you guys get the idea of it. But that's the way that you can start out with a middle skies blue brushing quick fix mode. You know, if you want Teoh and then come over in full edit mode and tweak the opacity of it to make it stronger. Fine tune the mask if you need Teoh and when you get the mask fine tuned. Let's say, Well, I really like it. If it was a bit more blue, what would be the easiest way to make it twice is blue. Anybody got a Guess what if you duplicated the layer? Absolutely double it at. So with that layer activated, you know it's active cause it's highlighted. You can trot, appear to the layer menu and say duplicate layer. Hello, Mrs. Gonna kindly ask you what you would like to call it and you can just press return to activate, okay? Or you can give it another name. So now I've got to blue layers. Well, if one wasn't enough, but two is too much. How can we fix that? We can adjust our layer opacity for the second layer. Okay, so What if 1.5 of these blue layers would be perfect? You know, the 1st 1 in 100% we might activate the 2nd 1 here and lower Ah, rapacity so that it looks riel. And maybe something, you know, like 2015 2025% looks right to you again. There's no right or wrong answer on This is what looks good to use subjectively your photo. So that's the way that you can keep adding more blue without having to go through all that mess again. Any questions on that? Parks that was a little bit more complicated than what we've done this thus far. We do have some questions from the Internet. Um, vast, you had asked, What's the difference between creating a mask toe? Add the blue sky and selecting the sky lasso tool and increasing the saturation? Oh, that's a good question. If you were to use one of elements selection tools to put marching ants around the sky, if you increase the saturation, it would just be making what's there more vibrant. Okay, what we're actually doing is we're adding another layer of blue on top of it, so instead of just adjusting the color that lives in the image. Already, we're adding a whole another layer of blue on top of it. So we're adding more blue instead of adjusting the intensity of the blue that's already in it, Filipino lizard had asked, Is there a way to inverse what I conceal reveal in a mask? If I did it in reverse without having to redo it? Yeah, you could, uh, gosh, remember, how do that if you start out with a selection, you can choose select inverse, and that will flip flop your selection. If you did it with a mask, that would be a little bit a little bit more complicated with the mass. Here really does painting with with wider black. But if you're creating a selection first before you Adam asking this isn't something that we've really covered it, but you could flip flop your selection so that the opposite of what you selected is now selected. OK, so you could do that using the select menu and choosing inverse after you've already got marching ants on your screen. So, for example, if I went over here, Els, grab the quick selection brush and I'll get on another layer here. And if I just painted okay, Elements is gonna create a selection based on my paint strokes. Well, if what I really wanted to select was everything outside of the squiggle that I just made, I could try it up to the select menu and choose inverse. So now the opposite of what I originally selected is selected. And when you're creating selections and again, the only reason you'd want to create a selection is to do something to one part of the picture that you didn't want to do to all of it, or to do some quality head swapping. But put somebody's head on someone else's body, which I think is a fabulous thing to do for family reunions, divorces, breakup. I always tell people who needs therapy when you've got Photoshopped, you know? So in that case, you could select the head, you know, and then move it. But oftentimes it is easier to select what you don't want in order to flip flop it to select what you do you want. Like how you get creative, Lisa, Anything else? We shall we continue on one more question just to clarify again from Butterfly. Um, the question was So when you started with the Black shadow, as the person is saying of the mosque, why did you get that originally? Oh, elements created it by itself. It created that layer and filled in the mass by what we did over in quick fix mode. Okay, so if we just wanted Teoh, let me show you that again. I wanted to delete these layers and start over. I could click and drag them from their layer thumbnail down to that tiny little trash con trash icon at the bottom of the layers panel that will delete my layers. You can also click the layer and choose layer delete layer. Okay, so now I popped back into quick fix mood. And if you remember, what we did was we just grab that make dull skies blue brush. We came over to the after version of our image. I brush a little bit bigger and we just painted across it. And because I've got such high contrast, I can really just kind of click. I don't have to paint again. Your mileage on that's going to vary. So now if I pop into full edit mood. Yalda, Salamis lead all those layers. Well, elements created that layer and filled in the mask automatically according to the area we had painted over. Because if we go back in quick fix mood, I'll do it one more time. You can see See how elements has created this selection? Well, it took that selection and it filled the rest of it with black. That's why this the, uh, you're only seeing the blue revealed across the area. We painted over elements. Put down those marching ants to make the selection to select that area, and then elements filled in the mask. The rest of it the area outside of that with black. That's where we got this shape. So if black conceals and white reveals that tells you that the blue is only showing up on the sky area, that's why it's being hidden. That's why the whole moss doesn't look blue, but elements made that layer all by itself.