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The Geeky Stuff: Apply Image and Calculations

Lesson 20 from: Photoshop Mastery: Ultimate Mastery

Ben Willmore

The Geeky Stuff: Apply Image and Calculations

Lesson 20 from: Photoshop Mastery: Ultimate Mastery

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

20. The Geeky Stuff: Apply Image and Calculations

Lesson Info

The Geeky Stuff: Apply Image and Calculations

Do you remember when I talked about lab mode yesterday in and lab mode it can be useful for making selections well let's say I had an image like this one yeah, I wanted to make parts of it black and white but I want to make a selection using lab mode so I might come over here and duplicate this image this's a duplicate that I called lab justice the file name I'm going to convert it to a lab then I'm going to look at my channels panel and I'm going to switch between the channels and see where this carrot stick out the most from the background there's a there's be whichever one I think has the most contrast that will get her to stick out the most let's say it's this one I'm going to duplicate that particular channel by dragging it down the new channel icon and then I'm gonna try to make part of it black and part of it white to create a mask so I'll come in here and use levels I'll use the black eye dropper and levels and I'll click on karen skin then I'll use the white eyedropper and lev...

els and I'll click on the flowers then I confined to knit by moving in these little sliders if I want to but I'm really trying to get karen to separate from whatever's immediately surrounding her click okay so now I'd like to use that mask but I don't feel like copying and pasting and dealing with that I'm just going to have a stay here in this document, but I'm going to switch over to our original document to actually apply, so what I'd like to do here is I'm going to add a black and white adjustment layer what I would like is to have the flowers that are hearing color and have standing in the middle of it in black and white, so I have my black and one adjustment layer here, and I could click on my image with that little hand tool active and maybe make those flowers brighter, but I only want the area where karen is to be black and white. I want the rest of the image to stay in color, so I have my black and one adjustment layer, and when you have a black and white adjustment layer, it automatically includes a mask. All I want to do is grab the information with that other file and put it in the mask somehow here's how I'm going to do it with the mask active so photoshopped knows where I wantto put the information, I'm going to go to the image menu and I'm going to choose apply image all that means is I'm going to grab the black and white image from somewhere in photo shop and I'm going to put it in whatever is active so the layer mask is active right now when I go to the image menu and choose apply image that's where it's going to put things and now I simply needed tell it what exactly should be put in there so at the top it's his source that means what document should get it out of and I called the other document lab so that's what I'm going to say is grab it from that document then if that document contained layers I could tell what layer it's on but what we don't have any layers and there's just the background there's really nothing to choose there and then they can say what channel should it grab it out of because it needs to be a black and white image and what will be the black and white image will be the individual channels that make up the image or any extra channels which are known as alfa channels and we ended up duplicating one of those channels so we had an extra it's down here it's called b copy so now what it's doing is grabbing that grayscale image out of the other document and it's putting it right there in the map ask for this adjustment layer because that's what was active the only thing is I'm getting the exact opposite of what I want I wanted karen in black and white and the flowers and color so there's a checkbox in here called invert and that simply inverts the end result so that now we have the background color karen in black and white and below that we have some choices for how it's going to apply it if there was something already in the mask you know, some paint in there or something I could say how should this combined with the contents that is already in the mask? There was nothing in the massey began with so this isn't really going to do much I could just set it to normal because it's just going to blatantly replace the contents of the mask then I haven't opacity so I could say how strong when I like it to go in there so if I already had some contents in that mask and I didn't want to completely replace it I could lower the capacity to less in it and then I can click okay so if we look at the contents of this mask to look at the contents you can option click on the mask that right there is just a copy of what we made in the other document and that's been inverted because I had the enberg checkbox turned on if you want to see that I'll just go back to the other document this is the the channel you're working on right here it's still active in all of this is this that's been inverted? If I take command I you'll see it's the same go back to our rgb image so I was just viewing the mask to stop feeling the mask I option click, and so you can see how it could be useful if you want to do something in another document. Now, there's a limitation here whenever you choose either apply inventor calculations. Usually the two documents need to be an identical sizes the width and pixels in the hide and pixels needs to be the same. Otherwise you wouldn't know where to put a larger, a smaller document within this s o that's. Why it works best when you're working a duplicate image that you've done something to doesn't have to be a duplicate image, though it could be chosen from anywhere in your file. If you've added some alfa channels to this particular image, you know it's in the same document, you could do it from there all sorts of things, so let's, try it again just to do a simple adjustment. I'll do black and white again just because easy to tell when something's been black and white and when something's not but there's all sorts of other things we can do, so we'll try a few of them, I'm gonna duplicate this image again, go to the image menu too stupid, kate, I'll make one this in lab mode. And I'm gonna try to isolate the blue sky from most of the rest of the image. S o I'm going to change the mode of this duplicate the lab in that I'll look in the channels for where does the sky separate the most from the rest of the image? Eyes it in the a channelled or is it in the b channel? And I think the b channel there seems to be a little bit more separation there, so duplicate the bally channel by dragging it down to the new layer icon. So we gotta dupe and all adjusted, so I do the same process we did in the previous image. I'll just come in here and use levels the eyedropper so I could start with just use the black eye trumper on whichever the two areas it's darker used the white eyedropper on whichever the twos lighter being fine tuned the results by moving these little sliders. All those I droppers were doing was moving these sliders for me, so I confined to this because not all of that one area became white, that I really like that it's doing a pretty good job. Now when you do this in lab mode, oftentimes you're gonna end up with a little bit of postal ization or slightly other issues in here because you're doing such extreme changes, too. To that so like here where the sky is in this area it might not be a smooth, radiant, that type of thing so oftentimes elena blurring this just a little bit and then also you can come in here and readjust it at any time maybe you go backto levels and say wanted maura the sky there's bring the blacks in further but just so you know, oftentimes I will come over here and blur this with gazi blur and just hit it with two or three to soften it up a little bit all right, so there's one mask now let's see what else I might be able to do. I'm going to go back to the original picture again this time maybe I duplicated again and this one I'm gonna call seem like so now all take that duplicate and change the mode to seem like a I can switch through the various channels just see what he's made out of now and now we have these grayscale images we could use a swell I might end up using this black one for something I don't know what yet so now let's go and apply those to your image let's go back over here to the original in my layers panel in the original picture I'm going to do a black on one adjustment layer just like we did before you make my sky little darker whatever doesn't really matter uh then I want to apply that to the mask so you see the mask is active if it wasn't already had click on it quick to make it active and I'm into choose image apply image now I need to tell it hey the source what document should come out of it can come out of this exact image I just choose the name of this image from the menu but I want to grab something out of the one that I converted the lab mode so that's what I'll tell it to get it out of if there were layers in that document at half until what layer but I haven't worked with layers so that can just stay and then I'm going to say b copy just like before because we had duplicated that and now it's in that mask you see only the sky is uh uh colored the rest is black and white I might want the opposite of that if so hit invert so now you see only the sky and generals and uh is in um color let's try something else maybe I come in here into any other kind of adjustment let's just do a simple one brightness and contrast and I crank up the brightness to brighten this image up. Maybe I messed with the contrast a little but I think there's it's applying to too much of the image the sky doesn't look good. This area up here doesn't look good, so I'm going to put something in the mask to limit where this affects the image. So I'm gonna again go over here and shoes apply image, and this time I'm in a take from the image that was in seeing white came out because in the c m y k mode image, one of the channels that we have is the black channel and the black channel on lee really applies in the really dark parts of the image, and so if we end up applying it here, if you look at my layers panel, if you could see this or not here's our result, the little invert check boxes still turned on it just remembered it from last time, so it's actually inverted version, but any area in this mass that's black is where it doesn't apply, so it says, hey, don't apply at all to the sky and you see it's applying mohr and maura's against these brighter areas so it's mainly applying to the doors to the trees that are in here and other things so we can, uh, do that nicely. Click okay, so here's before between those two layers on theirs after the main thing is apply, image simply means grab a grayscale image from somewhere usually it's from the channels panel and you simply tell it from which document you want to grab that channel from, and you simply make sure that wherever you want to apply it, that that is active first before you go in and start choosing apply image otherwise there's nowhere to put it, so make sure you've targeted the layer mask or whatever it is you need to use, you can go over and applied a second time if there's already something in that mask you come over here and say, apply image, and you can tell it to choose anything let's say I did that lab mod thing again with b copy and that's when the blending mode would come in, it would say, okay, now, you already have some stuff in there, so you d only want to put a part of this in by lowering the opacity, or do you want to combine it with what's already in there using a blending mode? So a lot of people will end up using that when working with channels where I should say saved selections, and so we could look at a few instances of that, I'll simplify this by closing up those other files I made get rid of the lab one get rid of the scene, why k one? Because we're done using him, and I'll hide these adjustment layers just to go back to our simple original picture some flint lor uses of this would be if I were to do something like make a selection let's say that I selected the top portion of the sky here I'm using the quick selection tool to do so. Then I went to the select menu and I said save selection and I called it sky next I selected the doors and the archway actually, I don't want to add to this, so let me go to the selectmen u two's d select first okay, so then I tried to select some of these surrounding areas. I'm not going to be absolutely precise because you get the general gist of it. I'm not going to be creating a masterpiece here get the little bushes trees and this gateway to go to the select menu choose save selection again now anytime you make a selection and then you go to the selectmen, you'd choose save selection the place where it actually saves it is in the channels panel, so I'm going to go to the channels panel and look and so here if I click on the word sky is the first one, any area that is white is considered the area that was a selection come down here so that's the sky whereas this is the arch and the trees now if I wanted to combine those two together, some people would end up using apply image to do it what they would do is they would create a brand new channel by just clicking on the new channel icon down here to say this is what I want to put things and instead of starting with a black one only choose undo let's just duplicate one that already exists I'll just take this arch in trees drag it down to that new channel icon so we actually start off with something in there go to the image menu she's apply image and I say well let's apply the other one the one called sky so I come in here just say well what do I want to apply I mean say the channel called sky it put it in a one hundred percent just like I told it to but then I can tell it how should it apply it ah screen mode is only able to brighten things they can't darken things so the areas where the black is and there wouldn't be able to cover up what's underneath so if I use screen mode that's kind of the two put together we had on the edge of those selections from auntie alia scene which adds this tiny little line that's in here and if you can see that the kind of paint out to fix it but some people will use apply image to combine together multiple channels there's a different command though instead of apply image called calculations in calculations is really the same thing as apply image, but instead of telling it where you want to put the end result by making that area active like layer mask active for a channel active, you khun specify where it should end up right in the dialogue box itself. You don't have to target something first, and so we could look at a few examples of that look at this guy, uh, I'm gonna work on two images, I'll work on this image, we'll get to that, but also working a simple document to start with, I'm just going to create a brand new document, come to the file menu, choose new, and I'll make this just sufficiently large two thousand by two thousand pixels should be good, and we're just going to create something simple here, and so we can progress using various features and photo shop. I'm going to first create a grid in here, so I'm going to select an area like this with the marquis tool, and I can either fill that with black or if I want to get black and they're another method is just type command I command, I is control, I am windows and it means invert or giving the opposite of what I currently have soul type command I then I'm going to make a horizontal bar and if I type command I gives me the opposite of what we currently have, which means I'll get black over here but where this selection overlaps this other black bar it's going to give me the opposite of black so when I type command I you see how it made that little, uh, inverted area now that's all I need in order critic grid in this document what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select the upper left corner I'm in the marquee tool I'll just click just beyond the outside here and drag in until I get just those first two bars that are crossing like that then I could go to the edit menu and there's a choice called defined pattern in defined pattern I can just say what if I want a name? So now if I define that as a pattern, I can apply that pattern and if I do it's simply going take what's inside that selection of repeated over and over again just like your tile in the bathroom wall with the exact same content over and over. So if I get rid of my selection by going to the select menu and choosing d select one way I could apply, that pattern is to go up to the uh, edit menu and choose fill one of the choices when you're filling is to fill with a pattern and if you choose pattern to fill with you'll have little choice down here of which pattern you'd like to use if you click there. The pattern you last made will be the very last one on the list click okay, you see how it repeated that multiple times to fill up this document, I just needed something to work with. Now, let's, go and see how we can modify this and just create all sorts of weird variations of it and use a feature called calculations to do that I'm going to go to my chance menu. This is where I'm going to be plain, and I'm going to take any one of these channels since they're all identical in duplicated just by dragging it down to the new channel icon. So that's our original and I'm going to duplicate it again, and in the second duplicate, all I'm gonna do is blur it, get it so it's noticeably blurry, and then just so we have something else to mix with this let's, create another channel, this could be empty channel or a duplicate doesn't matter, because we're going to replace what's in it. I'm just going to create a new channel, and then I'll use the grady in't tool in photo shop and with grady into one photo shop ochlik near the top of my document dragged down. Do we have a great ian so now let's look at what we have we're just going to work with the bottom three channels click on their names to show you what they have we have a grid a blurry grid integrated so let's see what a command does that's called calculations we've already used to ply image where we had to tell it where to put something first and we can say just apply a different grayscale picture to this but calculations takes it a step further if I choose calculations we get this this thing looks really complicated but all it is in the end is it asking you for the source of two gray scale pictures that it's going to combine together? There just happens to be three menus you need to use to tell it where is that grace kelly image the top menu is just what document is it in and the only document that is the same size as this one is this one meaning there's no other documents of the same size so nothing else shows up they're taking ignore that below that it's his layer well this document doesn't contain any layers so we can ignore that too trying to keep it simple below that though it says hey where do you want to grab a grayscale image we can either grab the red, green and blue that makes up this image or the extra ones that we've made I'm going to be working on those extra wants let's. Just use the top one then below that it's a source to that's, the second grayscale image and it's the same men uses just what document, what layer? And then what channel? I'm gonna choose the second channel so what's happening here is photo shop is trying to combine two gray scale pictures the grayscale pictures happened be whatever is in this channel, which is my grid like thing and whatever is in this channel, which is the blurry version. Those are the two images it's thinking about that's what I've set up in these two areas, then below that it wants to know how to combine them should it use multiply mode. We're just act like you're pretty with ink prints, one on top of the other should have tried to use screen mode, where it can only lighten and it comes in there enlightens around the edges shouldn't use one of the, uh contrast, blending modes like soft light or hard line or some of the more odd ones, like add, subtract or difference. I'm gonna use difference because I kind of like the look of what we're getting then at the very bottom of the dialogue box, what it wants to know is where to put the end result should it create a brand new dog that contains that end result should create a brand new channel to put it as the end result was, should it create a selection? If you choose selection, the areas that are white would be selected there is that our black would not be, I'm going to say, make a new channel and I'll click okay, so that new channel was created by combining two of the other channels and using a blending moe to do so let's see if we can create some more. I'll go back up to image and she's calculations. All we're going to do is tried different combinations of these particular channels. Why don't we take the one that looks like a grady int can see what it's called in my channels panel it's called alpha one I'll choose that is one source that I'm getting already look pretty wild and let's choose one of the others. I can either choose the one we currently have highlighted with, which is alfa two or I can try one of the others. Maybe I tried the blurry version if I look at the blurry version what's, it called in my channels, it's called blue copy to look at that looking thing, so all we're doing is we're combining two gray scale pictures using a blending mode. And it just happens to be that you get some really interesting looking and results especially if you use the bottom few bloody modes that aaron here we have divide and here which can create interesting things exclusion in difference difference and exclusion will be very similar it's what happens right around fifty percent gray that'll be different we switch between the two and then at the bottom it says where do you want to put the end result in a new channel new document or would you like to get a selection out of it? So here I'm just kind of heading in a random direction to show you what's going on but in essence you're grabbing two gray scale pictures and you're combining that gather using a blending mode telling it where to put the end result so let's see if we can figure out an actual useful use for this where we're not just playing around making weird looking stuff I mean I think what we have here is pretty interesting looking but let's see if we can do it on different image where we end up with a straightforward semi useful uh end result so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to open this image and if you have an image that was shot on green screen background this is the a little less ideal version of it usually you don't want a bunch of wrinkles in your green screen and any shadows that are falling on your green screen should be shadows you want to keep in this case I wouldn't want to keep the ones that are in the folds of that especially down here at the bottom because usually green screen is used to remove the background same thing that they do with the weather man who's just standing behind a green background and there's substituting the weather map well if you have somebody standing on green screen you can keep the shadow that's down by their feet and all that kind of stuff so in this case is going to try to remove the background where the green screen is but it will keep the shadows so we're going to end up with a little bit of those folds and things didn't have a great example image because it's not that often I'm shooting on green screen I happen to do it a couple of years ago when I was creating something odd and have this and a cz an example but with this I'm going to use the channels that make up the picture here we have the red channel, good green channel and the blue channel and if you look at these in the green channel the background is pretty darn bright since it's a green screen there's a lot of green in that area and the red channel there's not all that much used in that area but if you look at me do you notice that I'm bright? Where is in the green channel? I'm dark well we're going to combine the red and the green together to see if we can create something useful when I'm done looking at these channels I just click on the top most one to get back to a uh full color version and I'm going to go to the image menu and choose calculations in calculations I'm going to tell it to use for one of my channels the red channel and for the other channel the green that looks pretty bad pretty weird looking there but that's what it looks like when it combines the two together using a mod called difference well, what I want to do is I want to get the background to be white it was white as close to what I could get and get me to be black sir to do that if I look over at my channels panel let's see we'd have to do if we're combining the red and the green channels well the green channel the backgrounds already pretty close toe white so we want something similar to that which is great so we want the green channel kind of as is but when we apply the red channel do you see the backgrounds dark? I really want the opposite of that so I'm going to tell it to invert my red channel there's just a checkbox for invert. So next to the one set to red clique on invert. So now if it's thinking about an inverted version of this, instead of having this darkish background, it'll be a light ish one. And if you think about me, instead of being bright, I'd be dark. If it was the opposite of this, then I'm going to experiment with different blending modes until I can find one that's going to combine this together in a way that looks rather useful and I think it's going to be in this general grouping where I might find one wait hard mix it's doing a pretty good job, I could lower the capacity of this, so it is not full strength or anything like that. But the main thing is I'm getting the read and I'm inverting it and also applying green, and I'm not inviting green, then I'm experimenting with various bloody modes, and you go through all of them if you want. Uh especially if I go up here, uh, to some of these that can only brighton let's say I use color. Dodge, you got quite a bit different results. Use the ones that can darken your image. Just experiment until you find the one that's really going to give you what you want you don't need to get the background to be completely different what you really need is to get your subject to turn black so even this result right here could be very usable because if I click okay and I have it go into a new channel here so let's see what we got we got red inverted green normal color burn mode put it in a new channel so here's my end result we'll only need to do is adjust that just like we would adjust what we had a lab mode to create masks like overhearing use levels I could just say hey force big areas toe white forcing the white now this is a little bit less than ideal in this image in that if you ever get shot on a green screen you should never wear green clothing and I don't know if you noticed or not the shirt that I was wearing his green in it that's why people can shoot things on a blue screen usually have the choice of blue or green and you look at what clothing are people wearing or what color of their eyes to say what what I have that would really make them separate from that background and so ideally I would have been shot here on a blue screen instead because my shirt has green in it anyway, I'll click okay here all I did was add contrast to this levels bringing this over and I need to do the little of bit of touch up by grabbing my paintbrush and touching up the little bitty parts that are on my shirt because my shirt had some green in it and so it's picking up a little bit of that so it now let's use that you got it there let's go back to the full color image click on the top most channel covered layers and maybe I want to use a mask to hide part of this image so let's double click on the background layer because I can't add a mask to the background so double click and why don't we add a mask and then when we use calculations it's really grabbing two images and putting them together I only need grabbed one image right now the one we made a few minutes ago and so if I only need one image I go to the image menu and I choose apply image applying this just means take one invention apply it to what I'm working on where's calculations means take two of them and put it somewhere else so apply image and just get it from this document until it to grab that extra channel it's just called alpha one I'm goingto tell to put it in here in normal mode and look at my channels talent you see what's in there, the only problem is black hides things. So right now I'm hidden that's not quite what I wanted so I can turn on invert, so I've kind of removed the background of me because of the green screen. I could put any kind of background I want behind that, so I'll just come over here and do a solid color layer choose some sort of color to put back there, and I put it underneath by dragging it down. Remember I said that the shadows would stay there, because usually in a green screen, you want the shadows because you wanted to look natural like that person standing there. But in this case, the shadows a little less than ideal, so apply image fakes a single black and white picture and applies it to whatever is currently active it's up to you what's active, it could be a channel can be anything, whereas calculations takes to black and white images combines them together, and then you choose where you want the end result to show up either selection, a new channel or a new document, and it's a really geeky thing in that this is not what the average person uses for any of this for anything in general, but apply imaging calculations used to be essential. Back in the old days of photo shop, before he had layers, if you didn't have layers to work with, you really needed to use those things, so those people that have used photo shop back in version two point five or earlier, they get used to those commands, and those that got used to photo shop after layers are like, I don't know if I want to mess with those, but it doesn't have to be as complicated as you sometimes think, because when you come into either apply image or calculations, it looks overly complicated, mainly because you have so many different ways of telling it where to grab your grayscale image from this is what document it's from if you have multiple layers, so I want to isolate one of those layers and then where's, the grayscale picture is in one of the channels or the extra, and you have just have two of those to say where the two great scale pictures and this is, how is it combined? If you're comfortable with bloody mode somewhat, then you, khun, get in there and start practicing with it in plain, and it can be overly useful. Other times you got this experiment and make weird stuff by playing around if you have some bad television going, you know, cem show, that doesn't completely keep your your mind entertained. Why not be playing with these making some interesting ideas and coming up from interesting formulas for combining things together? It's very mid century mid century. So is that geeky enough? That's, pretty geeky ricky level geeky level ten or eleven here and creative live today with ben wilmore. Hey dpt, cam would like to know, would you potentially use this instead of refined edge to select hair? The those operations it's not that I would place replying air refined edge with this it's that I might take the end result of refine edge because I find refinanced works pretty darn great on hair, but it might take the end result of what it produced. And if it's in a mask that means it's a grayscale picture sitting there and I might decide. Well, is it going to help me to maybe mix a little bit extra into that mask by maybe stealing from one of the channels that make up my picture and pushing it into that to further refine it? But I wouldn't usually use it to completely replace refinance because we're financed is pretty darn good with here. You just need to know how to do it, right.

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RDM Photography
 

I have always enjoyed watching any of Mr Willmore's courses, engaging and entertaining with a gentle professionalism, with a good pace of delivery for the target audience. What I so enjoy is that the underlying theory is 'correct' with obvious care and understanding of the terms used and this speaks volumes as to the instructor's commitment. I have always learnt something from these courses and this was no exception.

Jose A De Leon
 

This is by far the best investment I've made. Ben is a qreat teacher. I watch repeatedly the videos over and over until the concepts become second nature. Since I bought the complete bundle, I can go back when ever I want and watch again. My Photoshop skills have improved exponentially. I'm extremely happy I made this purchase.

Lemmi Kann
 

I just started to get familiar with Photoshop and know the basic. After watching just first three lessons I am totaly blown away - I can see how much far I can go with editing my photos, what possibilities I have. I edited some of my photos and they look way better now! Ben Willmore is excellent lector and I encourage the beginners to buy this class too. It's easy to understand and follow if you already know what is layer and mask.

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