Advanced photo manipulation techniques in Photoshop

Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Heat. Oh, hello. Hello. How's everyone doing? My goodness. Feels like it's been forever. What's it been? Nearly. No, probably about a couple of weeks or something. Well, well, well. I know. I was thinking thinking earlier like got to remember how to stream. Where where is everything? Fortunately, I've got it dialed in my head. Hopefully, the audio is working though. That's always a popular screw- up, isn't it? The audio not working. Oh, celebratory whiskey and coke return. Uh, something feels wrong here. I don't know what it is. I feel like a light's missing or something. The lighting is not very good, is it? Let's try Let's try and fix. There we go. That's That's balanced between the dining room and the kitchen. The light does fall on me. Oh, that's way better. That's way better. If the light does fall on me, we can all have a good laugh at my expense. Yeah, this thing. Hang on. We need some more. There we go. I knew something felt off. Shine a bit of blue. Much better. Yeah. We go. There we go. How's everyone doing? I'm very well, thank you. I'm very well. I've been uh itching to get back to this. This is something that we started about a couple of weeks ago, maybe just over, and it turned out pretty well. I think this was, was this your idea, Ka, of combining animals, and so we ended up combining a wolf and a raven and it sort of came together quite nicely. But then obviously going on holiday, me and Poppy went to South Korea. I proposed to her. The whole thing that happened. still can't quite believe it was all uh real to be honest. But um yeah, I started this before going and I've just been thinking about it ever since starting it. But here we are. I didn't want to go and just I could have just done it on the plane. I really wanted to, but I thought this is going to be a pretty cool one to do live so people can see the process as well. Hey, photo manipulator. So, where did we get up to? I've got to remember. Um, also it's way too hot in here. I put a hoodie on thinking I'm going to be cold and now I'm just sat here melting. All right, let's take that off. Oh, brand new hoodie. Loved it. Took it on holiday. 10 days. 10 days of eating everything everywhere. Didn't get a single thing on it. Didn't spill a drop of liquid. Didn't get any food on it. Despite eating all sorts of messy Korean food, we did not did not get anything on it. Got on the plane, got food on it, and now I've been back home for like whatever. It was like a day and then it was just covered in cat hair. It's just literally it's black and now it's covered in cat hair because obviously can AI destroy the graphic design fields. No, it's just going to evolve and change like everything in life. Hey Hannah. Right. Where did we get to? I've got to remember actually because I've not seen this file for a while. So I've got my exposure checker there. I think last time it was literally just composing the scene. We stuck rocks in. We've got a mage lady person there who I think is going to cast some sort of spell maybe. Don't know. We'll see. And it's cool for scale as well. It's sort of having a person in there gives this creature that we might have to call buckwheat now instead of buck beak uh a sense of scale. We've added some trees that have blended weirdly well into the scene. Apart from the obvious cut off at the bottom there, that that looks weirdly like it should be there. So, that's nice because it saves me some work. We've got one hanging on the side here. Again, it just gives that sense of depth like this tree is closer than this one. And we've got some uh terrible, terrible gamma mismatch over here with this landscape that attempts to blend the snowy mountain in the background with what's happening in the foreground. We might fix that. We might just put loads of fog. I have a feeling there might be a lot of fog in this one, so we might not need to cover it anyway. And then, of course, we've got a massive mountain thing and uh this chap here. So, oh yeah, and we've got some rocks over here as well. So, these look these are much closer. So, again, they just frame the whole thing. Uh, so composure composing, balancing the exposure, and then, uh, color correction, which wasn't too arduous either. That was there wasn't a lot to the color correction, so it's pretty straightforward. But now we come on to probably the most um impactful part of the process early on and that is adding the shadows in. So obviously you could see here if you zoom in these rocks they're just kind of floating. Obviously we got to fix that as well. These poor little flowers are kind of holding that tree up. They're doing a tremendously good job. Um, but when we start adding shadows in, we have to look at where the shadows and the lighting and all that stuff is in the images we've used. So, you can see here the light at the moment on this one. Let's let's get a color and do a nice big arrow. Oh, we've not done one of these in a while. So, the lighting is clearly coming from this direction for this particular image. So, we've got the shadows on this side here. Yeah. On the underside. And then we've got these like big bright highlights going along there. So, we've got to make everything logically make sense. So, over here, we're probably going to have to add some shadows as well. Make this a bit darker. Some of these the these aren't too bad. These have got the the shadows there. They sort of align quite nicely. This bit looks awful. It's not even in focus. So, I don't know what we're going to do there. You can see where it's been very lazily retouched by yours truly, but we'll we'll try and fix that hopefully. And oh, we've mixed a bit of it in here. It's like a more sort of granite type of rock. Apparently, I've decided to mix that in with the mossy rock for some unknown reason. Trying to be creative. Yeah. So, we need to get some shadows in down here. Shadows in here. So, the light is again for this image coming from this direction. It's a bit more subtle, but we can then reinforce it by adding some more shadows. Same here as well. You can see slightly different direction. We might get away with it. So here it's almost like Yeah, it's because I've mixed different images together. Here you've got these highlights along the top. So it kind of suggests the light is coming this way towards it and then this bit's in shadow. So we might have to just add a little bit more light coming through here just to try and fudge it and make it look believable. So that is today's agenda and we'll see how far we get. You definitely don't want to rush it. And this whole first thing, you might look at this whole first thing and go that doesn't look particularly good or retouched or whatever, you know, it looks very very rough around the edges. This took about 2 hours. So this part of the process, these fundamentals, they do matter and they do take a lot of time. So don't start if you if you start a piece of work and in an hour it looks terrible still. Honestly, don't worry. Sometimes it takes me several hours of just going through the the fundamental foundational steps to get to something that I look at and go, "Okay, this is a solid basis. I can then build something from here." If you're expecting a masterpiece in two or three hours, maybe you're very good and very talented, unlike me. Um, if you can do it that quick, great. But for me, this is probably going to take between six to 12 hours to finish, I think. And I've been doing this for quite a few years now as well. So, I've gotten a lot faster at doing it. It still takes a long time. So, don't beat yourself up if you've put an hour or two in and it isn't a masterpiece. You think the wing is too small? Yeah, you might be right. There's something about the the shape of the wing that is it's not far off, but it just feels like bit straight, like it needs to sort of curve out a little bit more and be a bit more dramatic. I don't know. Not really sure what I mean. Something sort of like that maybe. Do you see what I mean? So, it sort of kind of just tapers in at the bottom a bit more whereas this version sort of just goes like that. It's a bit more like a shark fin. Um, so I don't know. I don't know. And I could go and mess around with that and get that final before going to this next step. But I think what I'm going to do first of all is going to focus on the landscape. So I'm not going to I'm not going to touch birdie bird because he birdy bird. How's that done? Shut up. Because he's on top of the rocks. So I'm just going to get rid of him. And then do the landscape. And uh we can turn off mage mage lady as well because they're not important right now. We just need to get the whole scene looking right. And I need some music. Let's put something cool on. I've got that weird feeling that I've forgotten something. Andrea, if something happens, I trust you to tell me and yell at me that something's gone wrong. Okay. Right. So, what have we got? We've got all this layered up, which is it's a good start. And we kind of want to go front to back with it as well, which will make sense if we get as far as adding fog in as well. So, these trees. No, that's that's they're rocks. Dan trees. Got tree four. We got tree one. Right. So, we need tree one at the top. We want the things that are closest to the say the camera higher up the layer stack. So, what are you? You're you're technically closer. So, you're going to go there. I love this song. I just If anyone does want to listen to this very lovely song I'm listening to. I think this is fanmade at Elden Ring music. Very nice. I said support Andrea, not not laugh at me. You're meant to be supportive here. Right. Rocks. We don't want that there, do we? Because that's going to get rid of the rocks. Although it doesn't look terrible. You see, just by adjusting the position of the rocks. Could even have some of the rocks covered up actually. Yeah, this looks a bit This I don't like this. Okay, let's um and th this granite stuff is just not great. So, where are you? S this one here. Right, let's go and add a layer mask to the whole rocks folder. And we're just going to grab the lasso tool. Just do like a real rough cut like this. I think if I do this, I can blend the rocks a little bit better. And the super graysaturated granite does look a bit weird and out of place. If anyone's got any questions, by the way, as we go through this on certain techniques, tools, whatever, just honestly, give me a shout and uh I will try and be helpful. Let's see if we can get this back in. Oh, actually, this is like a grass. Oh, yeah. Hang on. I'll show you something really cool. I wouldn't normally jump to this, but it's a really good technique. So, let's brush a bit more back in. Right. How we going to do this? Was my I got some garage brushes somewhere. these ones. If you like this stuff, by the way, um I have a Photoshop course. I've got two actually, beginner and advanced. And I haven't even put them at the top of the chat. Oh, no. That's not very good, is it, Dan? Hang on. I will retrieve them just so I don't have to keep mentioning it. Uh yes. There we go. Oh, I've missed this. I've missed you a lot. This is fun. Yeah. So, if you are looking at this sort of stuff and you're thinking, I wish I create that. It's not as hard as you think, but you just got to learn the right tools and techniques. I did it wrong for years. And um you don't have to suffer like I did. So, in the beginner Photoshop course, it's like an introduction. In the master class, we do four projects like this. Uh, right. So, I've got a grass br a grass brush. It looks like this. If I stamp it in, it's got a bit of transparency. So, you might want to do a few clicks to give it a bit more density. We definitely don't want transparency in here. And if I brush this into the layer mask right now, watch this. I've got to obviously match the size to the surrounding grass, but we're going to go one, two, three. Look at that. Look at that. It's flipping. It's flipping cheeky is what it is. So, we go over here. We've got all this horrible gray nonsense. We're just stampy stampy. We could do a few bigger ones as well. And then we'll go and do some smaller ones. So, we're just matching the surrounding area. like so. I mean, to be honest, it's so a lot of this blends pretty naturally anyway. And what is what is that? Obviously, you could, as you can see, you can do this very lazily. We could actually do this and then just click a few times there. I mean, you can see it's makes it so easy to blend grass. It's utterly ridiculous. Let's do some uh do some big ones. Have I got any other grass? What about you? You're like a bush. Let's see if you're any good. Yeah, maybe we could do some kind of shooting up. I'm just clicking a bunch of times. One, two, three, four. Just cuz any brushes that have like grass and uh not grass. What are you saying, Dan? Goodness me. 10 days away and you can't speak. any brushes that have transparency in. You definitely don't want transparency when you're compositing. And I'll do a little bit that. There we go. Done. That's I don't know why I didn't plan to do that originally, actually. It just made my life a lot easier. Hey, Joyce from Nigeria. So, that's taken work of the the blend. We can obviously go back and do that a bit more later, but now let's get on to shadows. So, well, let's start with these rocks anyway. So, we got the Griffin rocks. We're going to add a new You can do levels, curves, and exposure. I'm going to do exposure. I do like this one because it's very simple, and for a lot of people when you're getting started, even if you've been doing this for a long time, you just have these two main sliders here, exposure and gamma correction. they will do a huge chunk of the work. So, you can use levels and curves, but unless you really need to stick with this because it's just two sliders, you can't really go wrong. We want to go as dark as the darkest part of the shadow we're going to add. So, let's just go really dark for now. Got to got to change that grass brush because that's no good. When it comes to shading, this is the brush you want here. Soft brown, pressure, opacity, and flow. Then you can brush in like so. So, we're going to invert the mask, use white, and then we can brush in our shadows. But we don't want to do it like this. We want to drop that flow down super low. If you if you start just trying to brush in like this and blanket brush shadows, it will look terrible. Hey, Kyle, congrats on the engagement. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Nobody saw it coming. I blindsided everybody. I thought Poppy was on to me at one point. I thought she was on to me cuz I was being a bit suspicious, scouting out places to propose. And there was one point in the evening where we weren't we were trying to find somewhere to go um for food, but the lights we went to like a light display and they didn't come on. And we were like, "Oh, if we go now, they're probably going to turn on as soon as we leave." Um, so we were just sat there like, "Oh, should we leave or should we wait or should we get food?" And then she said something really weird. She said, "Oh, yeah. It's just trying to find the right moment, isn't it?" And I was like, "What? What did you just say?" Such a weird thing. She meant find the right moment to go and get food versus staying to see if the lights come on. But my brain was like, "I've been busted. I've been rumbled. But now she didn't have a clue. Right. Anyway, let's brush in these shadows. So, remember the light is coming from the right. So, we got to just very very carefully brush in some shadows. And you don't want to want to rush this. As I've said 50 billion times before, it's like when you see an artist doing an amazing drawing or painting or something and they just gradually build it up. So, we're just looking at existing shadows. Some of these do line up with that kind of right to left light direction. And we're just kind of beefing those up and enhancing the ones already there, but then adding a few more in the aren't there. Uh yeah, we don't want to go in too heavy over some of these. So, we're just thinking logically about where the light is actually touching. Now, we do have shadows cast by the wolf. We're not worrying about that now. In fact, let's get rid of him. You see, we're just going through and leaving the the highlights on the right side like here as well. You're going to get like some falloff, lighter around here, and then it's just going to gradually get darker towards that left side. And it'll be dark around this bit because it's kind of hidden by a lot of the rock. There is actually a lesson in the master class if you're in the Photoshop master class. I think it's module seven or eight where we create a bunch of flat shapes in Photoshop and then you have to practice lighting and shading those those sorts of techniques. If you're in the course, check it out because although it's doesn't it's not photoreated, it's a really good exercise because we use those same techniques here. So, what I mean by that is if you have a I'll show you what I mean. A circle, what we're doing effectively on all these rocks is we're doing this And it's a really good exercise to practice um shading. And so we shade a circle, turn it into a sphere, and then a few other weird shapes. I think we do a Taurus and like a donut shape and a few others. And that technique, you'll see what I'm doing here. is just effectively doing that on all of these flat surfaces. So, we're just brushing on the underside. You can see by adding shadow under here and leaving the top lit up, it it creates that um depth and makes it look like like it's a bit more 3D rather than flat. And hopefully across an entire design, this should look pretty impressive when you turn the layer on and off. So again here, we're just going to brush down that bottom part. Bit darker. Leave the top lit up. Yeah. Same down here. So, let's see if we can see what we've done so far. Turn it off and on. You can see it's subtle, but it does make a difference once we've done it across the whole thing, though. That is the real test where you'll see it. Hey, Rob. Thank you so much. Good job, young man. I like you. He called me young, unlike some people I know. Not naming any specific 25 year olds. We'll do that. All right. Yeah, this top bit here looks pretty flat. So, we're going to go around the edge as well. And again, that could just help make everything feel a bit um less flat and a bit more rounded. But we'll come back to that in a bit because wolf thing, whatever it is, is uh casting lots of shadows on there. Hey, good to see you, Chris. How you doing? Um, wouldn't it be easier if the light comes from the left side? Yeah, possibly. Actually, that's a really good point. How did I miss the giant mountains in the back? But we could flip that round. Um, hang on. We can fix this. Oh, god damn you flipping lemon. There we go. It's fine. It's all fine. There's nothing to see here. Uh, I need one of those technical difficulties. Standing by things. Uh, where are they? Is it? Yeah, I would say, how on earth did I miss that? But, you know, been designing for so long, I still miss things that are right in front of me. Clearly. Um, all right. What do I want here? So, I want to add a layer mask. Oh, yeah. There we go. There we go. And we don't want that. So, we're going to have to select the mountain. Yeah, there we go. Okay, we should be good. Crisis averted. Thank you, panicking wasa. Uh yeah, that isn't Yeah, it still looks fine. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, good spot. Noticed everything else in the scene. Missed the giant mountain. Anyway, back to these rocks. Yeah. So, we'll leave that as it is for now. What else we got? these ones in the foreground. I think these I'll probably darken them even more because then it puts more emphasis on the thing. Think we'll call it the griffin. So, you'll see what I mean in a minute. We'll just we'll go super dark on this for now. We'll just do a real real lazy first pass. Just figuring out where the light's coming from. Something like that. And then over here as well. Do the same thing. So you see some of these were reinforcing the existing shadows. Other ones we're just completely obliterating them and we're just brushing over them. Yeah, like you do that. This is going to be quite dark as well down here. This bit here is way too bright. Yeah. Yeah, this looks pretty good. A little bit down here. See the difference? Massive difference. This This one over here is a bit terrible, but that's fine. It's not the end of the world. I'm not sure if I even like this one, to be honest. So, we'll we'll go and do a little bit, but I'm not going to spend too long on this because I have a funny gut instinct feeling that I am going to change that at some point. So, just try and get a few little highlights in there. And again, I'm still brushing around with that low flow value. It's just just way better. And it's just a great way to just add like a bit more contouring to the to the rocks. I can't make it too dark. Because I got to remember at the end of the day we are outside. So sometimes when you've got a project you'll have like a very specific light source. And if you've got a very specific light source, it's going to create very specific light and dark areas. Whereas this is outside, so there's light everywhere. So, it wouldn't really make sense that this entire section is fully dark unless there was something else in the scene. What's this bit? Darken you a little bit as well. Yeah, there we go. Okay. All right, we'll leave that for now. Um, this bit feels like it needs something. A bit of a gap here. It might need another rock or something. Oh, good. I'm glad it's uh I'm glad it's helpful, Rob. Yeah, this this one actually I definitely recommend watching the first stream if you've not seen it cuz this this one I went in with the idea of I think combining a wolf and a raven. Um but I didn't really know how this was going to come together. So I was quite pleased by the end of the last stream which was two hours where the actual concept had formed enough where it was like this is a good idea. We should pursue this. So, I I don't know how this is going to take shape as it goes, but that is part of the fun as well. I think just doing it and then you kind of get to see a bit more realistically how I sort of think and hopefully maybe that's helpful. I don't know. So, we're going to do this beauty again. Uh let's get that flow back up. Am I just going to go? It's Oh, it feels dirty. It feels dirty. It's just It's just too easy. It's one of those It's one of those like magician secrets. You Oh, how do you do that? Get it to blend so well. You just use a brush. No skill involved. Love it. This one here, I'm going to leave that alone actually because it looks like it's got some sort of roots or something protruding from the side and that isn't just grass there. So, it wouldn't make sense. It's a bit more bushes and things. So, we'll leave that one alone. Um, what on earth is that? Oh, it's another mountain. Okay, let's get in there. We got to do some mountain surgery. If you're doing shading, hardness of zero. If you're doing like cutting out of things, 80 to 90 normally. So, you have a much harder edge. You definitely don't want to be using a soft brush to cut things out. I did this wrong for a very long time. I still see a lot of people do it now and it's a massive no no. In fact, I'll show you why. Because if you cut this out with a soft brush, look, you introduce transparency and feathering and things don't look like that in the real world. So whereas if we cut this out like this, you can see I could almost effectively sculpt the side of the mountain. Uh right, what are we doing? Yeah. So let's what is this bit here? Wonder if I Yeah, this brown bit isn't really ideal, but I can change the color of it. Actually, I just remembered I'm using Photoshop. I can do this. So, we're just going to go and grab you saturation. We'll do colorize. We'll try and match it to some sort of bluey tone. Desaturate it, but not all the way. And then if we hide that again, remember we're shading, so we're going to crank that hardness down. And we should be able to just blend this in. Again, it's probably going to be covered in fog and some of the nonsense that I fill in. But at least for now, let's just blend it in just a little bit more towards the green side. There you go. Yeah, that'll do for now. Yeah. So, let's just go and clean this up. We're going to use very shaky hand and a small brush. So, if you have a very unsteady hand, this is an advantage here because you don't want your mountain to be perfectly smooth cuz that's just weird. We want lots of little maybe your snow will be a bit smoother, but Oops. But yeah, rocky mountains and things. Nice bumpy unsteady hand is what you want. Yeah, perfect. Trees, right? Um this bit here. Yeah, that is from the original photo. So that is how it looks. Obviously there's like a a change in the gamma between foreground and the background. I could try and add another curves layer to it. Just try and maybe bring it a little bit more in line. I still want it to act as like a intermediary between the green and the snow. So, I'm not going to Yeah, maybe the top parts up there, I'll leave them a bit I'll leave these alone a bit more lighter and like a bit more snowier We're just going to run this over. That is good. Let's have a look at that. Yes, that's a bit better. Oh no, I'm getting out me also doing photoation in my YouTube channel. Can you check? Uh, no. Uh, I'm I'm I'm a little bit busy at the minute curves. Think I need that on a another layer as well. What did I do? Okay. Slight pull down. Yeah, there we go. And then maybe some of this. We'll just lighten this up a bit. So, just trying to blend all of the different steps. There's a few different images that make up this transition back to the snowy mountain. I don't think What do you think? I don't know if there's much else to do on that. Obviously, any sort of personal bits and pieces, like I want to add another rock here, and I'm still not 100% on this, but in terms of um actual shadow retouching, the mountain's pretty much done itself, which is nice. And I think it's going to be a lot of fog back there anyway. So yeah, all over the planet lives like these are rare. Excellent. I'm happy to be rare. Yeah. No, I think I mean when it comes to the art stuff like the AI art does not interest me at all. Like for me like the art and I I create a lot of this stuff obviously for education but I do it for me as well and the process is the fun. So if you shortcut the process it takes out the fun. So if I generate this amazing masterpiece with AI I just some people might enjoy that and being able to do that but for me I get nothing from it you know doesn't do anything for me. I'm like a unicorn. Andrea. Oh god. Wonder if Paul's here. That'll be in the Discord later. Okay. Right. Characters. Ah. Um, she's the wrong way around. So, we'll flip her because it just makes the lighting make a bit more sense. Yeah. When you when you compose your scene, you can have uh certain images flipped a certain way and you can in terms of light and shadows, you can stack the deck heavily in your favor or heavily against you. So, even just that flip there, same with the mountain. We could have kept the mountain the way it was, but why fight the shadows and the lighting that's already there? Yeah, I I agree. I think it's it's definitely very useful. Like I can't deny that it's useful. I probably use it in I use GPT more. So I use it less in a creative way and more in a information way like a soundboard. I have so many ideas and things and I just sort of throw it into GPT and say pros and cons go possible solutions. That's where I found that I get a lot of value from it being a pretty much a oneman team is I could just kind of throw my ideas in there and get back, you know, input from a supercomput. You got to take it with a grain of salt, though. like it. There's a few there's a few times where I've put something in and said, "Well, this is this is total nonsense, you know, like that doesn't make any sense." And it goes, "Oh, yes, yes, you're absolutely right. It doesn't make any sense." So, it does have a tendency to just kind of kiss your ass a bit and just agree with you sometimes. So, I don't uh I don't trust it, but I can't deny that it's um it's been useful. Right. color balance on Zig Griffin. Right, we'll do shadows on this fella. I don't know what's going to happen with his tail. Maybe he'll have this tail. I'm not sure. And maybe the Oh, no. I've got to change the wing before I do the shadow. All right, let's tackle the wing. Sound like a sulky child. Uh, right. So, we got the wing now. Um, I'm going to go and we're going to warp it. Ah, that doesn't really help. It's a put a warp mesh on the whole thing, which isn't uh ideal. So, if we go into the smart object, yeah, what we can do is we can crop this and then it should, if I put it back in place, I should be able to warp Yes, just that. That's what I want. Right. So, what what do we want to do there, Dan? What are we doing? We stretching those feathers out and Yeah. So, this is where we can really sculpt exactly how we want these wings to look. So, if you pull it down here or push it up there. What is a good-look wing? That is a Oh, maybe a bit of curvature. I don't really know actually. I'm just maybe just pulling in a bit tighter at the bottom. Don't want to go too too high and wild with it. Oh god, now you totally completely butchered that, Dan. What the flipping heck were you thinking? Right, let's try that again. Andrea, be quiet. Let's just do this a bit more slowly this time. Pull you in. Here we go. A little bit more carefully. And someone said the wings need to be bigger. I feel like they're right, but I don't want to be too big where they just completely dwarf the creature. I can hear you laughing through the computer. Oh, I don't know. I think they're too big there. Maybe let's just leave the wings alone. Let's go and add a shadows layer and we'll just get started because otherwise I could deliberate this forever. So, we're going to go super dark. invert it. Soft brush. Right. Light's coming from the right. So, we're just gonna brush in bits here. Brush in the shadows here. So, we're just leaving a lot of the highlights down that right side. Legs. Again, we're just going to reinforce shadows on the left. Uh, under here is going to be pretty dark as well. We might get a bit of light catching the fur along the bottom. And what we got here? It's a leg down. Down the back of the leg. So you see there, I'm fighting against the existing lighting. I'm just going to get rid of it along the bottom. down here as well. Coming up a little bit higher here. Yeah. And we can go in and add some more highlights if I need to. Tail go around there. A little bit Yeah, a little bit here. Just really, you can see I'm just doing this super gradually. So, before and after. We'll do some highlights as well. Maybe let's just get a few more of those feathers back in there. Don't want to just ruin all the detailing. Um, obviously this bit here looks totally awful. So, we got the wing. Oh, yes. I remember what I did. I blended a wing. I'm looking at it now like, why did I do that? Let's try and not do that because we've got some nice snow on the back as well, which is really good. So, let's try and blend this in. We can always add more snow at another point. So, we're just sort of trying to brush in some details here to sort of blend some of the feathers with the back. I don't know. I think that that looks okay for now. Then we can go back to the shadows and carry on with that. So obviously these wings are going to be casting a degree of shadows here along the back. The wings as well was tricky there. I'm going to catch some of the light. Let's try just doing this. We'll darken some of these. Just do like a quick quick flick of the wrist. Run down each wing. Getting darker darker down Actually, that might be a bit I don't know about that. Yeah, we'll dial that back a little bit. So before and after. And then we could go and add some highlights as well. So we'll do the same thing, but we're just going to push this the other way. We could just exaggerate some of these highlights. You see that? There we go. I've not listened to Sonata Arctica in ages. And we'll do a little bit of a highlight here on the leg. This sort of part. Is it called like the hind part of the leg? Not sure. Sort of big round leg muscle. We'll do a bit on there. Just do a little little brush pass through here. So you can see the difference when you turn the adjustment layers off and on. So before here just completely flat and then bush. You see it makes it feel makes it feel a little bit more cinematic. Just adjusting the position of the the highlights to have more pronounced shadows and uh sorry the position of the lighting to have more pronounced shadows and highlights rather than just being flat. Crowolf. I like it. Yes, I like it. It could have could have many names this So that's typically how I do this. I'll start with um obviously you've seen the process hopefully up to this point, but then just go between different pieces and work on them individually. So we've just done a sort of first pass here on Monsur Griffin face. We'll do one here on redheaded mage. Although I don't think she's going to need a lot of work because the lighting we flipped her so the lighting is pretty good. Um, we are going to get rid of this weird thing. You get this edging here. It's like a some people call it a halo fringing, whatever. It's like this weird pixel line. You can see it down the left side here. Totally ruins. Really, really good ideas. So, we're going to make a selection of the layer with command or controlclick. And hopefully we can then go contract. And this is going to pull the selection inwards. We'll go, it depends on the size of your image. I think if I do a pixel, she's going to lose some fingers. So, I'm going to go half a pixel. Oh, that might still be too much. And then, okay. Right. So, we've done that and added a lay mask. You can see it's completely gone. She's going to have to have finger amputation surgery now. Or not. No. What's What's the reverse of amputation? Well, we put it back. We're like, "Sorry, we amputated a bit too too hard. Let's reverse it. We'll rebuild your hand." There we go. Add your pixel fingers back in. But now we've got rid of that horrible white edge thing. Yeah, that's something you want to do actually. Check that on all your images. There was a little bit of on the wolf here, but because he's got fur and I might end up going around that and brushing it, I'm leaving it in. But yeah, definitely when you select subject and you quickly cut out stuff in Photoshop, you want to just make sure you don't have that that horrible edging around it, right? Um, hair. Have I got any hair brushes? I should have. Unless I've Wait, what? Those aren't my hair brushes. I should have some because we do there's a whole massive lesson on hair in the course. Where are my own hair brushes? Oh my goodness. Where have they gone? I've got so many so many brushes. Well, we'll come back to all of these cuz these will play a big role in bringing it to life. Flip it. Uh, right. Let me just have a little look on my hairbrush. There's a bunch densy hair brushes. Well, that sounds promising. Hair brush set. Oh, that sounds promising as well. Right, we'll grab both of these. Let's open these and we'll see if they're actually any good. It would just be nice to have some kind of stray hairs sort of, you know, fllaying around There's one. Yeah, there we go. Uh, let's try this one actually. No, let's go with this one. I think this would be good for more dense hair. Let's see. So, we could brush in like a block of hair. Just got to figure out where I'm going to have this. Maybe resting on top. And let's switch to hair small. So we're just sampling different colors. and brushing in some hairs. And then we'll go out here. God, this is so hard doing it at like a tiny pixel microscopic level. I'm so used to doing it like much higher res. Yeah, that is brushing. All right, let's grab Some of the brushes come with like preset um settings and things that you can access in the brush settings panel. Yeah, this one's a bit more what I want. You can just actually just brush in some individual hairs. Yeah, a few trailing off. One off there. Going to make them a bit bit more pronounced just so you can actually see them at this sort of size. So when you zoom out, you should be able to see them a little bit better. could even do like um like a braid or something like let's not get too wild with it just yet. But Just got to blend that. Yeah, it's like this weird little halfway point. All right, I think we won't go too crazy with the pixel hair because it's so tiny. But that looks all right when you zoom out. Yeah, we could add a few more stray hairs, but you honestly just you're not going to see them. It's just so tiny. Right, let's get some shadows in. So, underneath we're going to add an exposure layer. Go super dark and then flip it around. We're going to go back to that default delicious brush. 20% flow. And if the light's coming from the right, then she will be casting some kind of shadow in this direction. So, we're just going to start working this in. And this doesn't have to be surgically precise. A little bit under the dress there because the dress is off the floor. Got a foot in there. Maybe we'll just You see it makes such a difference these sorts of shadows. I think you call these contact shadows. So there were there something the subject or something on a surface makes contact with that surface. And if you went in a bit hard with the with the values, you can do this to make it like more pronounced and more visible, but you can always adjust it. And you can see it just it really does cement her in the scene. I think she's too dark though. So I'm actually gonna I'm going to adjust the curves a little bit. Yes, you're just a pinch too dark. That's why I always keep the exposure checker on in the document. Right now, we got this bad boy. so we're going to add our shadows. Actually, no. Where are we going to add them? We need to add them to the rock and the landscape. So, I think we'll do those separately. So, first we're going to take Where am I? Midground. No. Which ones are the flipping rocks down? Griffin rocks. There we go. It's hiding. Yeah. So, we'll add the exposure adjustment layer to this. Clip it. Go nice and dark. and we'll hide it. And then we're going to just Oh, yikes. This is bright. Just going to brush it. This This going to be very dark, actually, because this this creature is going to be casting a pretty big shadow. So all around here. So we're doing some pretty dark shadows right around the bottom of the feet as Might even have to go darker. So you want to go as dark as the darkest part of the shadow. Um, I cut his feet No, that is his foot. Okay. So, we're going to pretty pretty dark under here. Let me dark down here. That's not bad as a first pass, but then you see you get a bit of a mismatch when you make this darker. This looks too light. So, we now got to go back to our wolf shadows layer. Let's name these because it can get very confusing with a lot of adjustment layers. We're going to go and darken these. You see what I'm what I'm doing there? just makes a big difference in blending those together. Same here. Otherwise, it just looks weird and fake. And we're going to need to cut around the rocks, I think, because they look a bit weird and fluffy, and we definitely don't want fluffy rocks. So, let's just do this. Yeah, just kind of cut into some of that weird little fringing around the edge. Oh, yuck. What is that? Yeah, you can see we got it over here as Let's cut into this or cut it down. Let's go back over here. What do we reckon? Anything standing out as that looks weird. You should fix that. I think actually I can I can show you the before and after of what we've actually done because it might not look like much but when you kind of do the before and after look at the difference. Obviously, we didn't talk about the the mountain flipping. Before, after. It's one of the most significant parts of the process when, at least when I'm working on a project, my work goes from, "Oh, yeah, this is a cool idea," to, "Oh that looks good." It's just getting those shadows in. Because when you compose everything and then balance your exposure and you balance your um color, you're sort of like stacking the deck. You know, you're setting the deck up or you're setting the board up. Let's do a chess analogy. You're setting the board up and you're ready to go. Boom. That's the starting point. But then when you actually start doing your shadows, that's when you start making your moves. That's good. I like that. I like that chess analogy. We'll keep that. What do you reckon, Andrea? Do you like my chess analogy? Yeah, that's so cool. That's not cool. That looks awful. Tell what's going on here. Come on, Dan. Sloppy. Oh, cheers, Rob. It's it's one of those things. It's I think it's good to look at the before and after one because it's really cool to sort of see the difference that you've made going through that, but also it illustrates the point I'm trying to make that you know as you're going through and you're just brushing in these tiny little shadows on these rocks and you're brushing in the shadow of every single buttercup or whatever, you think, "Oh, does this make a difference?" But then when you actually do the whole thing and you compare it, it's like, yeah, it really does make a very noticeable difference. Right, we got to fix this mountain down. I think it's honestly my favorite part of the whole process, maybe second to putting in brush effects and things and making it cinematic, is because it's so transformative. Like you could you could probably just leave this like that and go, there we go. That's the finish thing. And it would it would still be like, "Yeah, okay. That's all right. It's good." Obviously, we're not going to do that. I've got a lot more to do. But, right, mountain. What on earth have I done? We're going to bring Look at that. So lazy. So flipping lazy. Honestly, Dan, you've been to Korea for a week and you just flipping Come back, Mr. Cutting Corners. I mean, that's not too bad, is it? Oh, come on. That's all right. It's It's really fun doing this sort of stuff because I go back like five well, four, five, six years and a lot of what I'm doing now I really did struggle with. And it's so nice to be able to just kind of in in a way like some projects are harder than others, but when it's like something that you're pretty confident with, you can sort of almost just dance around it and enjoy it. Like, oh, okay, I need to do this. We use that tool and then we'll do this. And it's really nice to I remember what it felt like to struggle and to be like gh I need to blend these images. It just it looks rubbish. Why can't I get it to work? I like I remember that feeling and it sucks. So, it's nice to be able to kind of move past that. And then like obviously some of you, some of you we talk over DM and you send me your work and when you've been doing it a long time as well, you could look at someone else's work and go, "Ah, yeah, your lighting's off here. Your exposure is not balanced there." My boss says, "Work smart, not hard, so it's all good." Absolutely. Yes, 100%. Cheese analogy. Oh, I don't even know how we do that. Goodness me. I don't think I'm quite ready for a cheese analogy. Andra, right? This thing here. What am I going to do with this? Do I need to bluffify him? And that probably is a word. You can look it up. grab this little piece here and move that down. Neck feathers. All right, we're going to try and contort this a little bit. Um, how we going to do this? I got no idea how big this file is. I feel like I feel like Photoshop hates me right now. Stop making smart objects. Yeah. Let's see if we can line this up. Oh, this warp feature is just insane. Oh, look at that. That's cool. Maybe we just connect it up here a bit. Uh, we just warp again. Flipping great feature. Yeah, it's just kind of having them sort of curve out a little We could call that leg feathers. and we're going to go back to a nice soft brush. Or you could use a hairbrush. Either or. And we're going to connect this. Obviously, the hairs are running in different directions. We've got some lighter hair here. So, let's see if we can try and blend these seamlessly. go a lot smaller. So if you have gone through the uh the almighty hair lesson in the Photoshop master class, then these techniques are the same things you can use. There's actually a lot of stuff in the photography module at the beginning, that's the first one, that is very relevant for photo manipulation and then vice versa. I do find myself using the same tools and techniques for quite a lot of projects. at least for the the sort of fundamentals. Does that look good? I think it looks good. I don't don't really sound sure. Let's um maybe shrink it down. Yeah. I got to figure out what leg it's on. It's coming down his right leg. And then just blending everything nice and smoothly. Got part of the wolf there I might have to get rid of as well. Hey Carrie, what's up? Oh yeah, maybe we get rid of the wolf um sort of fluffy chest area. I think that's a bit better. How's it going, man? How's the the Star Wars poster coming on? Slight bit of um color adjustment needed there because it's a bit yellowy and the legs a bit more red. I have a feeling Poppy's going to be home soon and so I do apologize in advance if all manner of chaos kicks off. Uh and desaturate a little bit. Yeah, that's cool. It sort of blends the raven's head neck area with the leg a bit more. I think I need to darken it though. Get rid of some of those highlights. try and bring some of them. Ah, yeah, that's a bit better. Yeah, just a bit too bright before some of this as well. Look. Yep. Just going to blend that in there so it really does seamlessly connect to the little furry leg. That's probably going to be the most pronounced fur berry bit. Um, I think yeah, got to fill in some of this. Maybe I need to fill in a bit under there as well. Just looks a bit weird nothing being I can come back and brush in some feathers or hair strand feathers things. I don't know. We'll figure out a technique for that. Yeah, it's not too dissimilar really. A lot of hair is about layering in different like you have like a Yeah, you can see it here. The hair technique works pretty well. It's about layering in like you got like a base color and then you have some darker strands, some lighter strands, some highlight strands. And by the time you've kind of done all that and mix them in, you can create something that looks very, very realistic pretty easily. There we go. Just a bit of a little bit of filler. Haz a tan. No, I don't think uh with my incredibly white fair skin and ginger ginger hair, I'm not known for my tan, Carrie. I think there was this one time many years ago where I think I had a tan, but it could have just been a dream. I don't Oh, what's next? We could do more work on the griffin, but that's um probably not as interesting as adding some fog in. Fog could be quite tasty. Thank you, mate. What are you talking about? I've got a stunning complexion, Carrie. Oh, I've just realized I haven't even put shadows on the ground yet. What a turnip. Let's just do that quickly. Um, I'm not entirely sure where to put them though. Probably here above this layer. just so it affects everything underneath. Nice soft brush. Very, very low flow for this one. And just brushing in some shadows. Using this to sort of create that kind of roll, reinforce the sort of rolling hills look a bit. Yeah, it's not a lot. subtle, but it just creates a little bit more lumpy bumpiness in the landscape. This bit looks a bit weird. I got an idea. Let's uh try the quick and dirty approach. We'll see if we can just gen fill those out. It's pretty This is probably the way I use this feature the most. I don't really generate things into my scene from the AI features, but it's very good at removing something and filling the scene. We'll see. It's a couple different versions. I think there's a newer version. We'll see if it works. Yeah, that's all I want. Just something like that. More of the more of the grass, less um yellow flower. It looks a bit weird there. You can see it blends a bit more. Yeah, landscape's coming together, right? Let's get some fog in. So, this is where the layers become pretty important. And the trees as well. Right. So, we're going to add solid color layer. I can't believe you saw me in Thailand. Can a ginger get a tan? Well, the legends say it is possible. We're going to pick a light color for the fog. Grab a brush. Um, we'll go 2%. And what we could do is we could just Hang on. I'll crank it up a bit so you can see. We quite literally can brush in like fog, density, atmosphere, and we want to have more as we get further away. Okay. So, as you get further into the distance, it gets harder to see. So, there's a so many ways we could do midground. I'm going to try and do it on one layer. You can clip it to different layers. I'm going to try and do a soft first So, we'll do a little bit. And we don't have to do it consistently as well. We can just brush weird wavy lines in and just try and add in waves of fog. And then maybe a little bit more around here. Obviously doing this can change your exposure a little bit. So when you add the things back in, they might be slightly off. Should we just move it to the top? Yeah, that's not too bad. And then I'll just remove a bit of the atmosphere over the Griffin. We'll keep a bit so he's like lighter, but we don't want the whole thing. And what about uh don't Yeah, we'll just do a little bit down It depends on the the the piece you're you're working on. Like I've done this before where I had a on my Oblivion one with like a burning castle in the background. You had a castle close, then was one further away, and then there was more in the distance, and you had to add layers of fog in between the castles. And so each layer of fog got more dense as you got further away is quite tricky. Yeah, it does as well to some extent. Gives it like a slightly natural quality because it's you're just adding a little bit of atmosphere. You don't want to go too hard with this though. You could easily go overboard. if you do and you get it in the right place, just dial the opacity back. You know, keep it real subtle. Yeah. See, I might even I might even drop it to 50%. Don't know because you can go where is it? Midground here. So, we could do like another pass and then go in a bit more aggressively with the the distant land like this. Bit more mysterious actually. Yeah. Know, I really like that. That's That's quite cool. And then I need to duplicate this exactly what I've just done because obviously the trees don't make sense at the minute. I've got to duplicate it directly above by dragging with alter option and then clip it just to the trees. So then the trees get caught in that fog as well. And then for that I might just drop it down a pinch so you can see it. So we've got one here. This is for like the ground and the mountains. And then the tree is caught in there as well. And then we've got the one on top. The one on top kind of includes everything then because obviously if you turn this one off, you've got fog everywhere, but all this stuff in the foreground isn't really affected. So, it doesn't really like synergize very well. On my poster, I use blend if on the shadows and the highlights. Worked a treat. You need to you need to send me the file, man. Send me. Is it finished? Is it final? Final or is it final? Final almost final.psd2 final. Where we at? Right. We'll call this fog light. Go. fog dense. It's definitely worth naming all your layers like this, right? What else do I want to add to this? It's not even remotely close to being finished, but I'm just not sure what to add next. Actually, there is something we could do that might work. We copy the whole thing. We'll paste it here. We'll try this. This should look a bit insane. And then we get some water. And we could even try and sort of map out an area to have some water as if she's kind of approaching a body of water. The reason I really like doing this as well with water is, and I did this in my wolf artwork that I did years ago, that's kind of similar in layout to this is because if you've got any lights or really cool things in the scene, you reflect them in the water and it just instantly looks flipping ace. It's so cool. Yeah. So, we could make some sort of weird quirky shape there. We'd obviously have to go around that properly, but it reflects whatever uh is above it. So, if I did want to add I was thinking of adding some magic in our hand. So, let's go and let's go and create some sort of spell. So maybe something like that. And then we'll duplicate the layer. We'll go lighter. Scale it down towards the center. Duplicate. Crank it up almost white. Scale it down. So we got like a little energy ball of sorts. Then we could put that in her hand almost. Change the blend mode so it kind of is a bit brighter. Linear dodge is great for this sort of stuff. Yeah, could even do another one like a really outer layer with a different blending mode. There you go. And it just like makes it glow even more. I'm not entirely sure what what that is. I have to have to invent some lore or something. But then we could go and add some really cool Oh, actually, no. Let's make it float. Let's make it levitate. Yeah, that's cool. Oh, way too bright though. I've overdone it there. Yeah, let's go 25 on that one. You don't really want to use too much transparency on lights because if you look here, it goes very like dull and weird and blends into the stuff behind it. 90%. Don't go any lower than that with lights, but I'm going to leave that nice and high. And then when we get to her, we're just going to add some Lots of different ways we can do this. I'm going to go add a solid color. What am I doing? Oh, yeah. Highlights. Okay. So, we'll clip this to the mage. So, we can then start doing this. We'll go screen or linear dodge as blending mode. Maybe overlay is quite good as well. No, we'll go linear dodge. And we'll do some soft ones first. Yeah, there we go. So, lots of Go in really slow. If you go in too fast with the blue, it can look terrible. a little bit up here as well. And then catch it up here. Catch it a little bit more there. And if we duplicate this, we could try a different blending mode as well. Another good one is overlay. This is quite good if you just want to have like a a blanket like you see here. like it's very intense sort of light. A soft light is like a lesser version of overlay. So, I'm going to keep the overlay one there. So, it's super intense where the light is. Oops. made it a little more natural. I got to change Darth and move the titles. What are you doing to Darth? I think you said about the lightsaber. The lightsaber, it's got that sort of cuz it it was baked into the Darth image. It's got that kind of muddy look, isn't it? So, I think we we talked about before adding a new lightsaber over the Yeah, we could we could use blend if um if we did it on this one. So it will remove it from the shadows. So you can see there it kind of removes it from the darker areas but keeps it in the lighter areas. might work better on this one. Yeah, maybe. Oh, I don't know. Yeah, we'll do it on there. It's subtle. Don't want it to be too like overpowering and distracting. Uh, you said about glowing lightning. I'm not going to do lightning, but I am going to do some particles, assuming I keep this weird glowing orb that I've made. I'm just kind of made that up. But I should have a good particle one. Which direction are they going to blow? Or maybe they just surround the ball and a few kind of spread out a bit further. particles and then what have we got? Orb and then orb glow. Yeah, there we go. That's getting there. Yeah, to be fair, you could do it with any brush. So, you What we could have done, we could have turned that into a flame. Maybe we'll do that instead of having it as um energy, we could turn it into fire, and I know you know how to do that now. So, we could turn that into a fireball. You could find a fire orb brush online. I'm I'm very sure you could. So, instead of a flame going up, you could find a ball of fire, like an orb, um, and then do the same thing that you did in the the fire text lesson to just make that realistic. And then add the highlights orange and yellow instead of um, blue. I think in this piece that I'm going for more of a calming pacifying energy spell or something rather than let's destroy the big thing with fire. But and I like this color as well. The color they could to be fair they could both work but this sort of nice um turquoisey color blends with what she's wearing. It blends with the whole greens and tones in the thing and you know what I'm saying. It just blends really nicely. I mean to be well h we should actually add some snow because it would make sense. There's snow on the back of this creature and there's mountains that are snowy in the background. I don't like going crazy with weather effects like because I used to have a really bad habit of doing very shoddy retouching and then it was like ah we'll slap some rain on it and it looks fine but then it I don't know it felt like I was covering up lazy work you know. So, I want some You got to have some snow in there, but it has to make sense. So, for this, you want to have snow at different distances. So, we're going to do some distance snow first. So, first of all, we're going to add we're going to get a small brush and not do that. Going to brush in uh got to get the right brush first. So, this is going to be distant snow. It's all the way over here in the background. We're just going to stamp that everywhere. And this is going to sit under everything under the trees. Yeah. So that's off in the distance. Very, very small snow. And I'm also going to drop the opacity because I don't want it too pronounced. I'm going to call it snow far. You're missing one thing. The thing you kept telling me more. Yes, good point. Yes, we do need someone there on the grass. So, now we're going to do snow medium. This is around where the bird thing is. So, again, this is going to fill the entire scene. We can stamp this in pretty comfortably. You're not going to be able to see the repetition, so it's fine. And we'll do 75% on that. We'll call it snow mid. And then we'd have snow close. And this is going to be above everything. This one is an optional one, but you make it really big. And this is snow that is close to the camera. This can be a little bit much sometimes. it it's can be realistic, but it can be just a bit too much. So maybe you want to add just a few pieces of snow. So I don't know. Yeah, I might leave that one. And snow mid. Typically, we don't want to see the snow going all the way to the ground. So, some of the snow down here, we're going to either get rid of it or we're going to lessen it to drop its opacity. Keep it more to the higher areas of the image. We'll just run through a few bits here as well. Just I'm just running the brush through. Just taking the density down a little bit. Just getting rid of a few snowflakes. So, the mask looks a bit wild. We've gone from that with the original brush to just dialing it back a bit so it's more intentional. Yeah, I'll leave that layer there, but I'm probably not going to use it because it does look a bit too too much. And you can as well if you want to take your snow and add a motion blur and have it run in a specific direction. So if you want to have more of a blizzard, have it blowing in a certain direction and adjust the speed reflecting on the snow. Sod off. Take every snow bit of snow and reflect the blue onto that. Every single flake of snow. I don't think so. I think not. Carey Doodle. Uh oh. That's on the mage, isn't it? What am I doing? Um sometimes you can just do this to find the right blending mode as well. Yeah, this is a good that's a good use of this technique, Carrie. The one you mentioned. So, we've got screen and then that blending mode. And we can just kind of in fact we can squish our brush down and make more of a very sharp elliptical shape. do something like this. Oops. It's not even underneath it, is it? Let's just shuffle it over. I want it to be subtle. I don't want it to be too too pronounced. This is looking cool. Again, just do do your exposure checker just to check you've not cocked anything up. I don't think I have. Yeah, blendiff's amazing, isn't it? It's so good. All right, I'm just thinking what else to uh actually I know what this this fella needs. Oh, I remember I had an idea. She's casting a spell to tame him. Yes. Right. Let's lock that. I remember now. Um my idea is coming back to me from all those weeks ago. We are going to use a flame brush. Kerry Doodle. Not sure which one though. I can't remember the last time I did blue fire either. So, we'll see what See how this turns out. Yeah, it's trying to find a nice shape for the brush as well. Maybe this. So, we got that. We'll stick a blending mode on there. This might be a bit easier than fire, actually. We'll change the color and make it a bit more greenish. That doesn't really do a lot, does Super soft brush just to add in a bit of glow. All right, let's see how this looks. that one. Ah, I think it looks weird having the middle a bit more visible like seeing his pupil. Let's gloss over it a bit more. Don't know. Not sure about that or not. I mean, another option would be to take the eye and do something different. So, we could go for like a yellow. This might actually look quite cool. I did this recently on a tiger. It made a massive difference. Can't remember the exact technique I used, but it's something like this. just makes that eye properly pop Oh, and then we'll I'll do an extra bit of blending should Yes. Yeah. Enhance it even more. So it does make a difference especially when you zoom out. So it's good if you do want the eye to pop. Uh, I I like, what are you thinking, Andrea? What's something around the raven's head? Yeah, possibly. I'm not sure. I feel like with her pose and everything, she's mid-stride. It feels like she's walking up to it and approaching it and getting ready to cast something rather than having already cast it. I don't know. That's the narrative or the story I've invented in my head. I still need to sort that water out. I've done a flipping lazy job there. It's not the worst thing in the world, I wonder if I could use the grass brush, but upside down. No wonder. Oh, look. I just love that the green. Or this should make it a lot harder. We add a moat going around the rock and she's walking across the water. That would be flipping sick. That would Oh, that'd be a lot of work let's try it. Oh, no. You can't do it on smart objects. It's a shame. I wish you had the option to like edit it. You like the idea? Oh, okay. That was like a That was like an Yeah, like an of approval. I thought it was like a You sure, Dan? You sure you're not gone a bit bit funny? It's hard to tell sometimes. Yeah, let's go with that. Greetings, Mr. Dansky. Zakaria, a follower from Algeria. Oh, hello. Hello from Algeria. I mean, water does just make everything look flipping cool. Uh, stick a few bushes in there. Where's Mage? She's still on land at the minute. It's You can see with the brush tool, it's almost like sculpting. It's It's really fun actually. It's like you're sculpting the scene. May Colato from South Sudan. Hello. Oh, I hope you're enjoying this. I hope you have as much fun as I am. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. I can't remember the last bit of photo manipulation I did. Uh, it's been a while. This is going to be sick. Yeah, I think it's it's already coming together pretty There will be some like extra details and stuff that will make it even better. Like, I think it looks really good now, but I know that once I stick another five or six hours into it, I'll be looking back at this version and it'll be like, it won't even be close. It'll be crazy. Yeah, I think I like the water like that. The sculpting of it. Obviously, I'm using a soft fluffy brush, so it's not bad. You get away with it, but I think that yeah, maybe a bit of clean up later on would be good. We'll probably need to add some more snow to this little little nugget as well. Ah, this rock. I really don't like this rock. Something about this that looks really weird. It needs a lot more. This granite bit in particular needs more contouring. Yeah, that's a bit better. Leaning into like the the contrast a bit more, the Yeah, this area here looks a bit not sure what it is. Something looks off. Um, right. The blue on that wing needs to go as So, we're going to go hue saturation. We're going to pick this thing here. we're going to hold command or control. Nope. Actually, let's just let's just colorize it. And we'll make it brown. That's wor pretty well actually. Nice. How do I upgrade Photoshop 25 to 26? You should be able to do it in the Creative Cloud app. So, in this thing, so just go into here and uh apps update, you should be able to see all the latest updates. Hey mate, first time here. Can I ask a question if I go? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Infinity Shadow 20. Yeah, you go for it. What is your question? I will try and be as helpful as I can. Raquel, she's arrived. Put mom in from the hospital now cuz now she's has half her face white, half black. Is she okay? What's she doing? Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, goodness. Bru bruising. Yeah. Yeah, I did wonder I wondered what you meant for a second. Oh, it's lucky that she's relatively okay, though. Yeah, man. You got to be careful. I mean, obviously as you get older, it's it's even my mom as well. Like, she's what did she do? She she sat down on a tree stump when she was on holiday. just literally sat down and there was like a bit of a branch or something sticking out and it went straight into her coxix, you know, tailbone at the bottom base of your back. And she's been in agony and had all sorts of problems since and she's got to be so careful. Yeah, I know. It's ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. Just the littlest thing. Poppy fell in a hole once. There was We were at a farm. There was a bunch of walabbees bouncing around and she fell in a hole and she twisted her ankle. It sounds funny saying it now. Poppy fell in the hole, but at the time it was horrendous. She probably like twisted her ankle. Okay. So, I'm not using uh So, I'm not sure if some techniques you're using here could apply to this, but I was wondering what I should take away from this. Learn and improve on to make YouTube thumbnails to the best of my ability. Um, I mean, yeah, this is a little bit different to YouTube thumbnails. It's very It's very different. I think the biggest takeaway I'd probably say is um get familiar with the brush tool. This is something that I teach all my students about is the brush tool. It underpins a lot of techniques I cover in my courses. I ra I know you love the brush tool. I don't even know if I'm joking anymore. Have you come around to the brush tool now or do you still hate the brush tool? Because it's one of those tools that is so useful. You might have seen me shading a lot of stuff with it here and using it for probably 90% of today's stream. but if we're talking about a thumbnail, it can be very useful for brushing in color or gradients. This is obviously a terrible example, but say you've got some Oh, I don't really have an example ready to show, but say you got some text on your thumbnail. And I kind of need an image really. It's not standing out. You can This is Sorry, it's a terrible example. Actually, I know what I'll do. Hang on. Right, hang on. Forget that. Forget you saw that. Nothing to see here. Right. Say you've got a thumbnail like this and you're like, "Hey, and you got the text there and whatever." The brush tool is great for thumbnails. That's why I do my thumbnails in Photoshop because it's like, well, that white's cool. It doesn't stand out an awful lot, though. Whereas you can get the brush tool and you can just use like a levels layer, darken the scene so it stands out and then just brush over that one area so you've not had to like darken the whole scene but just where the text is. It's really useful for that. Um we've gone off on a bit of a tangent here but off we go. I suppose uh it could be very useful for having fun with color. So you could do this. We'll brush in some red. Let's get a nice lovely orange in there. Oh, look. We've made Instagram just from brushing. Yeah, you can do all sorts really. So, the brush tool is probably the the biggest takeaway. There's so many applications for it, whether it's design, whether it's giant wolf bird eagle things. I once sneezed myself to the floor with three weeks of back pain afterwards. Yeah, that is no joke. Sneezing is no joke, is it, Ka? And I swear as I've got older, my sneezing has got so much more aggressive and louder. It's like retro. But yeah, you can really screw your back up sometimes. I went through a phase, this is like about a year ago now, where I think I I think I had a back injury or something. I can't remember what the hell was wrong with me, but every time I sneezed, I had this excruciating pain in my back. So, every time a sneeze was brewing, it was like, oh god, here we go again. Brace for the pain. Love hate. Yeah, it's like Marmite, isn't it? You know, Marmite's a lovehate thing. But let's be honest, if you gave me a pot right now, I'd stick my face in it. So Oh, you got hay fever as well. No, I don't know. Does anyone else know about photo? I've not used it personally. I know it's like a it's like a copy of Photoshop or something or similar. I don't really know. Yeah, I've I've been a Photoshop Adobe guy my entire life. Pretty much not my entire life. I wasn't I didn't like arrive out of the womb like, "Hey, let's let's look at my layers." But um my whole career anyway. I've not done many highlights. on birdie. Have I? No, I haven't. Oh, no. I did a few. I feel like we could make them a bit more pronounced. Actually, we could go highlights around, too. There we go. Done. Maybe some of the wing details. Lighten them up. Maybe this whole right side actually. Whoosh. Just going to lighten you up. All right. What we doing, Danny boy? What else are we doing? See, this actually this lazy brushing actually sort of works because it makes it look like it's underwater. So, I think I might actually get away with a lot of that. Oh, that's funny. Hey, you're welcome. More attention to the little figure. I don't know. I really want this fella to be the centerpiece. I mean, I could do. I still got the shadow. Oh, wait. Where is my shadow? Have I lost my Mage Shadow. Oh, I feel like that's it there. Why is it not showing up? Ah, cuz they clipped it in the group. I'm being a donut. Yeah, there we go. This has actually been pretty good progress today. I didn't exactly know where this was going to end up. Uh, but it's definitely getting there. Call that um weather effects fog dense. I try and put everything in groups because it makes it easy to scan folders. Mage mossy rocks in the foreground. landscape shadows. We'll stick that in its own folder even though we're probably not going to use And we got fog. Something else I quite like as well are color lookup light profiles. These can be you could call them one hit wonders. I guess they can be pretty insane. And you could create these with the other adjustment layers, but they're just nice presets. Yeah, you see that one makes it a bit more green and vibrant. Uh, this is what you'd use for nighttime as well. I was thinking about making it nighttime, but I don't know. That's crisp warm, bit more wintry. Drop the blues, which is quite nice. I think this doesn't really have a lot of blue in it anyway. It's kind of cool. Yeah, these can be quite good as inspiration as well. Sometimes you can just have a look and it's like, "Oh, wow." Gives you like an idea of how it could look. Uh, but yeah, I just wanted to kind of show that. Let's try something. I wonder. I'm going to get rid of that. I'm going to try something. I need that in exactly the same place. And then I need to go color range. We're going to sample this. Those of you that have done module 2 in the Photoshop master class will recognize this technique. Got to get the right balance selected. No, not enough. That's fine. We'll go back. It's a little bit of trial and error. We're effectively turning the grass into It's a pretty cool technique. You like that? And then what we could do actually is uh it depends how far we want to bring the snow. It could keep it for more over here. I don't know. I actually quite like quite like the snow. Although we'd have to do it on the trees as well. Oh, it's the water reflection. Yes, you do. You got to finish it. I I also you started your um crash before saving thing. I'd love to see you finish that Raquel. Obviously, no pressure, but secretly all the pressure. Do you teach only or work on the projects too? No. In my So, in all of my courses, every lesson gets you working on something. So if there's project files for that lesson, then you get given the project files. So I I think it's better to learn by doing. So you got the video that will show you what to do and talk you through the process. You then get the project files. But the thing is with the master class, I would I would say to anyone who enrolls in it, you're learning a lot of advanced techniques. You're like this has taken me 20 years to learn and you're learning it at a very like accelerated speed. So, as you work through the different project files and you finish one, send what you do to me because I'm there to support anyone who enrolls in my courses and I'll give you feedback on what's working and what's not. So, it's not just the course and the project files. It's me in person going, "Yep, this is good. Fix that. Do that. Tweak that." And it's just the it's it's probably the fastest way to learn Photoshop. Like if I'm just being honest because you've got as someone who's been doing it for like years there in your corner able to point this stuff out. So I pro I probably should show we'll do a we'll do a quick segue plug. I don't show these courses often enough. So there's the beginner Photoshop course that does um uh let's go down here a bit. Yeah. So, stuff like this, you know, how to make smart selections and masking. Uh, how to take not very nice looking burgers and make them look flipping delicious and cool and then build a 3D set from 2D images. That's cool. This is awesome. Raquel, you smash this guitar. So, this is this is the introduction to photo manipulation. If you've never done it before, this is like your first steps into the fundamentals of how to do it. Uh mocking up stuff. So, loads and loads of cool stuff. I'll keep it more photo manipulation focused. And then we build on the photo manipulation here. There's a whole module on that. Doesn't really do the module justice to be honest. It's way beyond that. Uh this sort of stuff. So, we dive into much more advanced techniques. Oh, I've not got the the flipping crash before saving on here. Oh, it's this one. So, we create that's module two. We create this whole thing from scratch. Uh we we even draw some penguins. You'll learn how to draw and paint penguins, which is a lot easier than you think. But then later on in in another module, we then animate it. So we build that whole crashing big Ben into the side of the earth in Photoshop and then we animate it with a little bit of After Effects as well. So but that one's the masterass. So first class is beginner level if you've never tried it before. Masterass is much more advanced. It's taking it to this to this sort of level really. So yeah, if you got any questions about them, just email me [email protected]. I'm always happy to help. Sorry, I've got Graeme Norton on an…

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