Lessons

Lesson Info

Transplanting Clouds

if you ever want to put clouds in a sky that didn't have him to begin with because just the sky looks too boring when it's just pure your blue Take pictures of clouds when you see him get a collection of clouds that you can store so you can use them in any time you like. And then here I'll show you how you might go about incorporate them into another photograph. I need to scale down my picture of clouds. If you look at my layers panel, you see how much bigger the cloud images compared to this one just so I can see them visually, The difference. I'm gonna move the other layer on top. What it looks like to me is I scaled down this image to a J peg small file just a safe space on the hard drive. And I didn't on the other one. I'm gonna then click on the layer that contains the clouds in I'm gonna scale it down one way of scaling things down its code of the edit menu to choose free transform. Then I'd be able to grab the corner of the image if I make it down to the corner and pull on it to...

Reese size most of time, I would hold the shift key to keep the proportions of the image so I don't accidentally squish it in one direction or another. One problem with doing it this way is that if later on I decide that I scaled the clouds down too much and I need to scale them back up. Anytime you scale something up, it gets soft. So before I actually scale this up, I'm gonna hit the escape key to to say I didn't want to scale it. Here's a trick you can use if you think you're going, Teoh scale a layer and you might need to scale it up again. You might change your mind a little. That was token. T falls 30 minutes from Crater Lake in California that are known for your organ somewhere their so justly No, it is spelled t ok. E t I I'm sorry, T ok. E team A Okay, Yeah. Copper blue and the chat room said on the kwah River. Yes, that's right. Now I'm starting to remember there's actually bunch of waterfalls in that general area that could be cool to shoot. So what I was going to say is, if you know you're going to scale a layer, but then later on, you might add a mask to it to only show part of the layer. And so you can't quite visualize how big it's gonna because you're seeing the entirety of the layer you haven't mastered yet. Down to what you need. One little trick you can use is if you go to the layer menu, you can go to a choice called smart objects and convert something to a smart object. What a smart object does is it takes those states of that layer as it is right now and protects it, it says. If you put it in like a little protective bubble so that whatever you do to that layer, let's say it's scaling to the layer. It will always refer back to the original size of that image so that I could scale it down and then scale it back up without losing quality because it's always looking back to the original. So it's going to the layer menu, choosing smart objects and choosing convert to smart object just to show you what I'm talking about. I'll scale down this layer a tremendous amount, and then we'll scale it back up and you'll see what I'm talking about. Take a moment that files pretty big that file Comptel, because of the file extension, is off of a Nikon D 800. Nikon d 800 is a how many mega pixel cameras and we know 36 megapixel camera. I'm gonna type command T That's the same is going to free transform the same menu item I showed you a moment ago from the edit menu. And I'll scale this down press returner enter to say I'm done and I'm gonna drag it to the top of the layers stack. See, like little clouds. I'll crop my image because I don't need that extra space that's there. And then let's see what we can do with that layer because it's a smart object. I'm gonna transform it again, making really small type command t to transform, and I'm going to scale it down to Can you see the numbers that are showing up there? I'm going to scale it down to two pixels wide and two pixels tall Press return to say I'm done if you did that to a normal picture, you would have a total of four pixels. In fact, I can't even see it from the file. You know, so small. Then I'm gonna scale a back up. I'll type command t to re scale it. And if I can find the corner handle, we'll pull it back up. And if this waas a normal picture, instead of a smart object, all you would see us four pixels getting bigger and maybe getting blurrier. But here it's always looking back to the original. If I hold the shift key, it will keep the same proportions is what I had, although I might have pulled a little bit before holding shift. Let's just get it in here. But now let's look at the tip of how might you transplant some clouds from one image to another. Clouds are usually brighter than the blue sky. When have you ever see clouds that aren't brighter than blue sky? Let's overcast where you have no blue sky and there is a way to make a layer show up or disappear based on how bright it is to accomplish that, you go to the bottom of your layers panel and down there you'll find the letters F X. If you click on the layers FX, the top choice will be called Blending Options. Just clipping the letters FX, The bottom of my layers panel. I come up here and I choose blending options. It's a lot of choices in the blending options dialog box. We're only gonna look at these sets of sliders. These can show or hide things based on brightness. You notice that they're labeled this layer or underlying layer, so this layer is talking about the layer that's active underlying layers. What's under it? So I'm thinking about this layer, and I went on a dark parts of this particular layer to go away. So here I see the dark end of this Grady int, and I'm just gonna pull in this end. And there might not be anything in this general brightness range. There's nothing near black in this layer, so nothing's happened yet. But the moment I get this to the stage where it hits the darkest part of that layer, you'll find the darkest parts slowly going away. Do that. The only problem is, is it's an abrupt transition. It's is if you're using an Exacto knife to cut out the clouds instead of having to be really soften the edge. Well, that slider that I pulled over is actually two sliders stuck together, and you can separate the two if you know of the keyboard shortcut that gets you to hidden features. Remember, I had a little cheat sheet written down at one time in that you'd want to commit those things to memory. Just think about any other hidden feature I've shown you. It's usually the same key. Yeah, Option Alton on the windows. So I'm gonna hold that key down, and I'm gonna grab the right edge of this slider, and it's going to separate when it separates. It's gonna give me a softer transition from the areas that are hidden to the areas that are visible. And I'm just gonna continue to pull that over and see how much why I want to be able to see through those clouds Depends on the picture as far as how much I need to be able to see through. But I need at least a little bit to get a soft edge. I'm only looking up here at the top. If I was looking at the bottom, I would probably pull both of these over a little further to get rid of even more. More like that for those clouds. But for the top clouds on, the more over here. Fine tuning it. Then when you're done doing that, click OK, and you could add a mask to get rid of any other clouds you don't need. So I can come up here with the mask, grab my paintbrush paint with black, Say I didn't need him down here. I just needed him up there where the sky is. And because that way you don't get the original blue sky that was in the photograph that contains the clouds. You get the blue sky that's in the photograph, you're putting them in, so it looks like it fits their a little better. I'm not gonna mass this precisely. I could click on the layer that's underneath, though, if I wanted to use something like the quick selection tool possibly and get it to make a selection for me, which might help. Then I can paint with that selection there so I can't get any over spray. I'm seeing black show up on my picture, which means the wrong layers active or the mask is an active and it's that the wrong layers active gonna be appear in the mask. You can go back in and re edit those sliders. So if you're done masking and then you're like I wish it was just slightly different, just make sure the layers still active. Go back to the letters FX. Go back to blending modes and then you'll see the sliders. They'll be in the same position and you come in here and find Tune them. What would you do if you needed that blue sky? Like if the bottom one this guy had been blown out completely, then I would have to use the whole thing. And I wouldn't have to do this kind of say you and I would be trying to adjust the image such that the contrast in the general color was close to matching the rest of the other photo so that it looks like it fits in and maybe lowering the opacity of the clouds and what not want. It depends. It depends on the image, you know, whatever it is that makes it look. Yeah, uh, soothe Kenyon wherever the shot is, has a really strong sidelining, but the clouds, like most of these I just grabbed two random images. I would usually look for clouds that are appropriate and such, and that I just didn't have handy. As an example, I was gonna ask, Is there a way to fix these clouds to match? So it looks more like the light is coming from the same direction or something. Let's see if the light was coming from over here, I would flip the image horizontally to get it on the other side. In this particular case, it's not gonna be really possible that I can think of because these clouds, if remember correctly, were actually backlit. The sun was sitting right behind the clouds. I'm shooting straight out. And so it's not really inappropriate won for this. It was something where I just wanted to share with you the technique of how to do that. I would have to end up searching out clouds that are appropriate. And so one thing that could be nice is just whenever you see interesting clouds, especially if the clouds have surrounded with blue on all edges where they don't continue. All the way to the edge of your frame is to shoot him and started library of them so that you have a lot to choose from. When you do that, this just happens to be some clouds from Panorama and we're gonna stitch later. Do you happen to have a quick technique? You don't have to show me, but you say you have a blown out sky and you're adding in ah, blue sky. But you have trees on the horizon. You have any thoughts about trees, trees, air. Difficult to think about, but they can be dealt with. Let me just see if I can find a picture of a tree. Wait, I got a picture of a tree. It's down. Here is a tree. Okay, so it's a matter of how do you mask around that tree? Well, it can be done, and there is a technique that I have for doing it. This one is that gonna be a little different? Really? Depends on what this looks like. The more this looks like the sky, more difficulties. So the problem is, a lot of this looks gray in here interview Gray in your sky. It's gonna treat them very similar. But here's just a quick technique I'll share with you because you asked I would actually use the eraser tool even though that sounds like a good a manually go in there and do their I'm not gonna manually dio if you click and hold down on the eraser tool, there's more than one version of it in that little tool tip is covering them up, but the middle one is called the background Eraser. Now, the background eraser is designed for deleting things. I don't necessarily want to delete him all the time. Sometimes I want a selection instead. Maybe I'm going to use curves. That technique of make this area look like another one. So I could use the numbers for here in the upper right and plug in the numbers for the blue over here. And if so, I need a selection. If you need a selection, then you want to duplicate the Slayer before you do what I'm about to do. Okay? Otherwise, what you want to do is grab the background eraser tool and get a massively huge brush. Uh, big brush. I'm gonna make it just ah, semi soft brush. Now, when you click with this tool, you'll find that you have a brush with across here in the middle. If you click, it looks at the color that's in the cross hair, and it tries to delete Onley that color from within the circle. So when I click here, there's a bluish scion under there, and when I click, you see how it deleted a little area. The only problem is with default settings. It's not going allow you to do enough of what you might want. There's a setting here called contiguous. Contiguous means only delete one unbroken chunk. And in fact, I was surprised what it deleted when I clicked here. I thought it was only gonna be in this general area right here. Um, but it actually got some down the bottom, which is actually somewhat beyond unusual. It shouldn't do that, especially with a straight line there. There's something odd going on in this, either in this file or this version of photo shop. Usually it will be one unbroken chunk that it deletes. Do you see how it jumped over an area and then suddenly deleted somewhere else? That's unusual, but usually what I want to do is change. This setting, called limits from contiguous to a setting called discontinuous discontinuous means allow me to delete independent areas of the image, not just one and broken chunk. So when I click, it should delete in larger areas, like in between all the branches and stuff, See what I mean? So I'll choose. Undo. And so that's a saying. They used a problem with that setting is oftentimes I can't get a brush big enough to go across the whole image, and so the little cross hair will end up bumping into the tree. And if that happens, it continuously looks at what's underneath the cross hair, and the second it bumps into a branch. It says, OK, you're telling me to delete something dark now, because the way it works is to delete on Lee the color that's underneath across hair from within the circle. So what I end up doing is there are three icons up here. They're not very obvious what they do. If you want to know what they're called, just hover over them without clicking. This one sets a setting called sampling to continuous, which is the default, and it means keep a constant eye on what's enter the cross hair. The next one over sets it to once. What once means, which is what I want is only pay attention to the color that's underneath across there. At the moment I click and then think about that same color the entire time and painting and only look at what's underneath across here again. If I let go my mouse and click again so I could get a smaller brush here, I'm gonna click on the color I really needed delete, which would be like here where the blue is click. And now I can drag around a lot of the image here and see if we can delete that. If it didn't delete everything, I let go, and I look for some residue, like I can see just some haze down here at the bottom, where it doesn't look like a solid checkerboard. So it tells me there's a hint to something there. I can click. It'll pick up whatever color was in there, and I can go over this again. I want to get out here and get these colors do that. It's just if the color of the sky is similar to the color of the tree, then you have to use smaller brushes to not get much overlap. Because I can see a little bit of this tree being deleted with this technique to a portrait, and you needed to clear out behind hair or something offer hair. Actually, it's better to use something called Refine Edge with refine edge. You make a basic selection of the hair with something like the quick selection tool, and then you use the sliders in things that are in refine edge. It does a better job with things that are furry fuzzy. Harry This tool. I find us better with trees, and it can be a tree with a bunch of leaves on it, that kind of thing. But doing this would allow me to delete the background of the tree, and then I could insert something else behind it. So the key for this waas go to the eraser tool. There are three versions of it. The middle version is the background eraser. The background eraser will delete on Lee the color that's under the cross there, and so you want to change to settings, and those studies are set the limits to discontinuous. Otherwise, you'd have to click in between each opening and the branches. It wouldn't be able to leap over toe independent area, the image. And to left of that, there's three icons. Choose the middle one. Then, if you're using this, the tolerant setting determines how much it will vary from the color that's under the cross hair. If it deletes too much, too wide of a brightness range. Uh, lower that. So if I found when I clicked on The Grace Guy, a huge chunk of the tree disappeared. Lower tolerance. Bring down to 30. Try again. It's still did it bring down to 20 until you get it, where it can separate the difference between the sky tree, huh? That's actually very glad you asked that question, because that's usually a very difficult thing to do and not uncommon to have to dio eso. It's good that, you know, I could show you it, but just make sure if you see any part of the checkerboard that looks just a little hazy, where it doesn't look like a normal checkerboard that you go and get your cross there right on the checkerboard and click. It's gonna pick up whatever color is still kind of partial a part way there, and then you can drag across it. You see a little residue on top, and you could then just go back to the background eraser tool. Make sure the layer that contains the trees is active, and you just use it again, or if you were to use a mask instead. If you convert this into a mask, you could just view the mask and you'd actually see it. Eso. But that's where you have to have a duplicate of the original layer. First, if you know you don't want to delete things, and all you do is when you're done, you would move your mouse on top of the thumb. Now for this layer, hold down the command key control on Windows and click on it, and you'll get a selection