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Layers and Composite Images

Lesson 7 from: Photoshop Roundtrip in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

7. Layers and Composite Images

Lesson Info

Layers and Composite Images

now one of the things that you'll find yourself doing. Hopefully not a lot, but if you're an artist instead of like, just a straight documentary photographer, you might be doing this a lot more, but I don't find myself doing it a ton, but I do it sometimes. For instance, in this case, I've got an image here, and I really like this foggy boathouse. But then later on, these ducks came in, but I I saw the ducks and I'm I changed. I I spun over this way so that I could get the Ducks. But I didn't get the composition I wanted. And then the ducks were gone. And so I'm kind of disappointed in that whole thing. So what I want to do is I want to take this image and I want some ducks in the image on this right over here. So I need to composite these images together. So this is a great opportunity to shift click both images, and the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna edit them together. So we need to develop the images and I'm gonna turn on Auto Sync so that anything I do, the one is ...

done to the other. That way they're equal because we don't want them to be unequal. We want them to be exactly the same. So I'm just gonna work on this image just a little bit, and I don't need it to be, Ah, tack sharp because it's obviously foggy, so I'm not gonna worry about that. Um, I am gonna make it a little bit more blue like that. And then I'm gonna use the split toning tool in orderto warm up just the highlights. So I'm gonna go like this, find a little bit of yellowish and warm up those highlights. So now I'm just gonna go like this. That way, the highlights get warmed up a little bit, but the image itself is somewhat blue, and then I'm gonna crop it. So I'm just gonna get this thing cropped correctly for my tastes. Um, that that's it. And it's cropped this one as well. But this one's gonna be different because we're just going to use it for the ducks. But I need to kind of crop this one so that it's equally, um, correct on the crop. But it's going to be different because I was hand holding it. All right, so now I have both images and I'm ready to work on them, and I'm gonna right click them and I'm gonna goto edit in photo shop. But I am an open, um, in photo shop as layers. That way, they're actually sandwich together right from the start. So I'm gonna click on open is in. Photo shop is layers, and it's going to open him up Santa Trump together as layers and Photoshopped. So now here in a photo shop, we actually have two layers. You can see one layer has the ducks on the other layer has the just the boathouse eso We can just turn it on and off and you can see that it's moving around like this. But what I want to do is I want thes two layers to actually be fairly aligned. And so I'm going to shift click both of these images, and I'm going to go into the edit menu and I'm going to go in tow, auto align layers, and I'm just going to click on that, and it's going to ask me how I want to do it. Auto almost always works perfectly. So I'm just going to do auto, and it's gonna figure out what it has to do to make these images match. So it's gonna hit, okay? And boom, it's already done the work. Um, and it did a let's see how well it did. Yeah, I did a great job. See that? So this was the image that I took with my composition, and this is the part of it that matches from the other image. And there are my ducks, Exactly the same place that they would have been if I had had the composition and they had shown up on time because the ducks were late. So now all I have to do is simply I'm gonna take this layer and put it up on the top, and I'm just going to go and choose these docks. So I'm just gonna make a a little selection around these ducks like that, and I'm gonna make a mask. So when you have something selected in photo shop and you and you push the mask button, it's going to, uh, anything inside, that selection is going to stay, and everything else is going to get a black mask So now the ducks were staying, and all I have to do is come in and say, All right, this I have these ducks, I just need to go in with a brush. And I can just paint them out for some reason. The waters a little darker. So I wasn't super accurate about how, um exact I was on these photographs if they were perfectly the same. If the if the if the water was exactly same as this water, I could simply change the layer mode from normal to darken. And on Lee, the ducks would show up because they would be the only thing darker. But because the water itself is darker, I'm in at the painted out. So when I'm in the brush and I'm clicking on the mask itself down here, um, then I'm going to paint black. So I have to hit the X key to turn this stuff over here into black. And now I'm just gonna paying out the area where the ducks are. Whoops. You can always paint that duck back in. And then when it comes to that trail in the water with the ducks, um, that's Ah, that's an interesting little tricky thing that I'm gonna have to do. So I just have to be aware that I need to deal with that. So I'm just first get the ducks not to be super amazingly accurate because, uh, no one's gonna see that, and then I'm gonna go into black. Are I? Sorry, White, and I'm gonna do it like 30%. And I'm just going to kind of trail behind the duck. Maybe you go it 10% trail behind the duck trail behind this duck, and then I'm gonna go back to the black and go back to about 50%. So now I'm I'm erasing back just along the edges so that I get a nice blend. So I'm 50%. I'm just getting a blend. They're So now let's go back. They're perfect. So now I have my ducks exactly where I wanted him to be. I've got the composition that I want and I'm going to highlight both of these Click command E. So now they're flattened. And the beauty of this is that I can still go into the crop mode and remember, I've got that content aware fill crop on. So I've got my crop ready. So I'm just gonna What's shrink this down and change my crop toe? Whatever it is that I want to dio and kind of want this Toe X and this way a little bit, I'm gonna expand. Actually, I'll crop that. That's a better crop there, but I like having that. So now I'm gonna hit the check box, and here we go. It's gonna fill in those areas for me Eso that I get the crop that I want and I get the ducks that I want. Uh, it's perfect. Here we go. Oh, look at that. Because I I cropped it. So that's interesting. It didn't know it thought that this post part of the photograph So let's let's go backwards, and we're going to crop it here. Okay, So if I want to crop this, But I want to use the content where Phil? Because it has a crop, um, has blank information. It's actually going to assume that that's part of my photograph, and so I'm gonna have to crop it, But I'm gonna have to make sure that I use this option here, so I'm gonna turn off content aware fill I'm gonna delete the cropped pixels because otherwise light room saves onto him. So I'm are Photoshopped saves him, so I'm gonna crop it. So now those hoops I didn't quite crop it is as much as I should have. So I'm gonna crop it down just a little bit more still deleting those cropped pixels. So now the crop pixels have been deleted. I can go back into the crop tool, and this time I can go in and change my crop, and I can expand the top a little bit, and I can expand the bottom a little bit, and I can crop this side in a little. So now that I've done that, I can then turn on the content aware, and it will fill in those edges because it has actual data and information there. So remember, if you if you're trying to crop something that you already have empty space on vacancy than you, it's gonna copy that vacancy and wait for it to fill in all of the edges. There we go. And I'm always excited to see what it does with things. So notice that it kind of screwed up here in the corner. It kind of grabbed something from the boathouse and then down here at the bottom, it did a little. It did pretty good, but it did a little bit of weirdness right there. So just simply take your stamp tool at 100%. Simply grab on here, fix the little reflection issue that you have there and fix the sky issue that you have here. So just grab sky. Be careful where you grab sky because sky actually changes a lot really quickly. So if you grab sky too far away, you'll end up with, like, lighter sky up in the corner rather than darker skies. You got to be careful about where you're grabbing the sky. And I think everywhere else it did a great job. So I've expanded my canvas. I have the crop that I want have the ducks that I want. And so now I'm just going to close and save, and it will be back in photo shop so that I can use it. Okay, so it's back in light room where I can use it. Now I'm going to simply click on all three of these images. Let's just do all four of these images. And then if I highlight the photo shop document and I hit command G, it's going to stack them so that the only one I'm looking at is the relevant one that has the ducks and the crop that I want. It's all set to go now. Why do we keep going back to photo her back toe light room? Why not do stuff outside of light room? Why do we keep bringing the Photoshopped documents back Toe light room. This is why? Because we want to share them and light room. Being your digital hub is the perfect place to share your images. You can edit them in light room. You can work on them in light room. You can organize them in light room. Then you can go to photo shop and edit him when you come back. Now you have everything that you want in one place to be able to share it out in 100 different ways. So now we need to talk about doing that

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workflow in Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Mobile Cloud
Adobe Lightroom Image Pipeline System
Black & White Preset Collection
Color Art Pro Profiles

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