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11:45 am - Blending Sliders Q&A

Lesson 14 from: Adobe Photoshop: Retouching and Collage

Ben Willmore

11:45 am - Blending Sliders Q&A

Lesson 14 from: Adobe Photoshop: Retouching and Collage

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

14. 11:45 am - Blending Sliders Q&A

Lesson Info

11:45 am - Blending Sliders Q&A

So don says, can you first mask out an area that you do not want to be affected by the blending cider, then use of lennon's letter? I know you can't do it afterwards, but can you do it before? Well, the only thing of mask unduly is hide things, so as long as all you wanted to do is find something, yeah, you can have it before or after, but the thing I was saying you can't do is have a mask, bring something back that the blending sliders were causing to be hidden, so it doesn't matter if you apply before after, like on that, when I had that picture of the tree and I knew the grass is probably still going to show up, I could have massed out the grass first and then applied. The blinding cyrus wouldn't matter, so it depends if what they're thinking about as far as what the mask is capable of doesn't matter if you do it before after the end result will look the same all right, duke in park city, utah, asking for the bus on brick can you use displacement in combination with the blend? If ce...

rtainly you can and we will be doing displacement maps later today, and so I could make it so the graphic of the bus looks like it was put onto the wall using equivalent to wallpaper and if you think about the wall not being perfectly flat the bus would conform to the shape of the bricks so where the grout lines are it would bend into the grand line and you see how to do that later photo maker says will it help to go into the mask tab on the layer and reduce its opacity or feather it when doing this blend? If work if you go on the mask tab for a layer, let me see here if I could go toe when first off when you have just the blending sliders in no mask then it's not going to be doing much if on the other hand you have a mask on you double click on the mask you'll get this to show up you have the choice called density and you have the choice called feather feathered just softens your mask it acts as if when you painted you painted with a softer brush then you actually did uh it's just says everything and this is tire mask I'm going to act like he used a soft edge brush if you bring it way up, it can change it quite a bit if you look at the mask itself in my layers panel, you'll see the result bring this down a little bit but it is softening the contents of the mask uh that kind of stuff but this all by itself if you haven't used to mask instead all you've used is the blending sliders themselves. I don't believe it's going to have any effect because there's no mask it's only if you had to mask and if you find you painted with a brush that wasn't soft enough you could do that kind of stuff or if you wanted to see through parts of it, you could play with it but it's not directly applicable to the sliders shade kay and spain is asking in the blend if options right above the sliders what does the drop down menu that says gray do um anything you picture it's made out of three pieces it's actually made out of three grayscale pictures and if I can find a picture that contains multiple colors, where was that image of the uh this one when we work on this one and see if I can show you what that does all right, if you have any time you open a picture, you could go to the channel's pale and when you change that little pop up menu that they're talking about, which I'll show you in a moment it was right above the sliders where we're using when it's set to gray it thinks of your images if it's a grey scale picture when it comes to the sliders and that's a default but if you change that menu, you're gonna have the choice of red, green and blue. And what that means is instead of thinking about a grey scale version of your picture it's going to think about these three specific grayscale versions of your picture, it shows up in the channels panel. So if I click on these channels let's, see if they make this look different. Do you see how in different channels different parts of this text are more pronounced than in others and I can simply have it instead of looking at the general brightness of my picture, he could instead look at these channels when it's figuring out what should show up or disappear. Uh, if I look at an image that has very distinct, uh, colors in, it might be more noticeable, so it could think about this, which is kind of a generic version of the image this you see where the pumps got really dark, so they used the blend of sliders and is thinking about this it's going to be much easier to keep the pumps and hide all the bright stuff or this would cause if I did the same thing, I would look at more of the trees showing up, I think is the trees are darker compared to here compared if I work down here, it doesn't differentiate things very much so if you find that you just have trouble with using the sliders but what the contents of your picture is has dramatic differences in color you have a blue sky, a red boat, a green grass you might find that before you go into the blending sliders you might want open your channels panel and just clicked between these and see which one of them separates the thing that you're trying to keep from the rest of the picture in brightness which one gives you the best separation? So if it was the green one in this case when I go to those sliders instead of having it think about a great scale version of the picture I can say look at the green channel and the pumps were really dark in the green channel I could come over here and say, well, let everything that wasn't really dark in the green channel disappear and I might be able to keep most of that stuff if that's what I was looking to do so I would mainly use that if I see big differences in color between the thing I want to keep and everything else then looking through the individual channels might give me a better source than just a grey scale version to start with you that's a long answer to a is there a quiet explanation? One other thing about the sliders is there is a way to make them permanent if all you've used is the top set of sliders, not the one called underlying layer so let me just show you how to make them permanent because sometimes you want to like blur the layer to something else where the blending siders would get in your way so here's how to make them permanent if you create a brand new empty layer by clicking on the new layer icon and you place that layer underneath the one that has a slider supplied, then click on the one that has the sliders and if you go to the layer menu there's a choice called merge down and that means take the contents of this layer deposit on that layer that's underneath later that's underneath doesn't have any blending sliders attached to it there at their default position on that later in photo shop is not able to change the settings on that layer below s o all it needs to do is somehow it needs to visually take what's this layer looks like in combining with that layer that's underneath when I choose merge down, the picture should look pretty much identical, but now the background has permanently been deleted. Just look in the layers panel when I choose undo you see the sky still up in here right it's only the blending sliders that are attached to the layer that's making that sky not show up when I choose merge down it goes into here and it actually had delete the sky in order to make it show up so you merge it down into an empty layer that's underneath and you'll get the same general visual look, but it will be a permanent change and sometimes that's useful depending on what you're trying to do it's just nice to know that that's possible let's say that I want to use the effect of the blending slaughters, but in the end I want to be a layer mask instead that way I could paint to the layer mass to bring things back like bring the grass back so the grass wouldn't be partially transparent let's see how I might be able to do that? I mean to duplicate this layer but I'm in command, jay and I'm gonna hide the duplicate or the original you could say I'm going to take this layer and make it permanent to make it permanent I create a new empty layer that's underneath it and emerged this down okay that permanently doing to the background right now let's see if there's a way to convert that into a layer mask so I could paint things back if I needed to here's how it could be done in my layers I got the tree that's got the background deleted below it is theory journal and the only reason the sky doesn't show up in the original is due to the blending sliders so let's get rid of the blinding sliders on the layer that contains the original go the blending ciders and just put him back to normal. So we have a layer is if we've never played with blending sliders above that is the one or e from permanently deleted the background and here's a trick. I'll move my mouse here onto the thumbnail for that layer, and I'll hold on the command key and click command click. What that does is give me a selection of everything that's in that layer. What is doing it's a selecting. If you look just at that layer, whatever is there and it's not selecting the empty parts, so that just gave me a selection. Then I can throw away that layer because the only reason I wanted it is to get that selection. Now I have my original layer and I have a selection. If I had a layer mask, I should end up with a very similar looking and result, but it's completely done with layer mask. For those of you use layer mass a lot, that could be a really useful thing. For those of you that are not used to using blending sliders and layer mass, your brain is turning to mush right now. But what this means is now I can grab my paintbrush, and if I paint with white, I can bring things back. Whereas usually I can't paint to bring things black. When the blending sliders, or what's used tio, hide those areas. But because I khun trick photoshopped into somehow converting what was done with the blooding sliders into a layer mask. Once it's done purely through a layer mask, I can paint things back. And this is techniques only for certain people. For those of you that are brand new, blending sliders or brand new later mass completely ignore it and just know that once you've played with it a lot, you go back and replay the video and say, what was that he was doing once you're more comfortable using blending sliders in later mass?

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Ratings and Reviews

Kim Doucette
 

Always love Ben. So clear and deep at the same time. I like buying his courses and love the added notes file. Shout out to his lovely wife for the awesome job she does!

a Creativelive Student
 

This is the my first purchased Creative Live course. Enjoyed the live broadcast and now practice a bit of the segments at my own pace. Ben Willmore is an outstanding instructor. Went off and purchased his Mastering Curves which is just as useful.

a Creativelive Student
 

Absolutely loved the class! Found out so many things that could either help me out when in PS or just add to my arsenal of editing. :) Thanks so much!!

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