Cinematic Photo Manipulation Artwork in Photoshop

Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Oops. Clicked the wrong thing. Just blackness. Oh, hello. How's everyone doing? I think the camera might be focus on the camera might be going a bit weird. So, if my face keeps going out of focus, please can somebody let me know? Oh my goodness. It's all right. Happy Friday. Happy Friday, everyone. We made it to the end of another week and hopefully you can hear and see me. Oh, dear me. I think the camera is going funny. Right. Um, I'm going to check the focus a second. It has a tendency to change the focus on its own. I hope everyone sees your pajamas. Uh, I don't know if they'll be lucky enough to see the pajamas. Well, just trying to bend around everything. There we go. Happy Friday indeed. Right, this is going to be a bit of a random one today. I was thinking earlier like I've done I've worked on a few different things this week and I was thinking what what shall I work on? What do I what do I fancy doing on this fine Friday evening? Uh and we were talking about astrology earlier and we were talking about star signs and things and I'm a Scorpio and then I thought, oh yeah, let's just do something with a giant scorpion very dark souls bloodborne big boss style. So, I've got a giant scorpion. This is kind of a mixture of different assets. So, we've got some Adobe Stock stuff, real photographs here. And then we've got Yeah, we got I think that's a photo and illustration. Not sure. Then we've got some AI generated stuff as well. So, I've got my heroine here. I did try a few others, but it's much better to just describe the sort of warrior person I want and then I can just kind of put them in. And obviously trying to find a trying to find a decent looking scorpion at this sort of size that looks badass was now an impossible. So that's where I would typically like generate my own stock assets. Um just because then like monsters, characters, impossible creatures become possible. So, I've got this this fella here at the right angle. We're going to get rid of him. And uh yeah, we'll see. This is going to be in the background. So, I don't really care if this is like has it looks like a bit sort of generated or whatever, but that's going to be in the background. This fella is the one that needs to look as delicious as possible. And I'm going to show you a very clever trick with her and the rotate object feature as well, which is flipping brilliant for this sort of stuff. So, do you think you can do a nebula? I don't know if we can get a nebula into this one. We'll uh we'll see. Cartoon character on the pajamas. Oh, what are they? I couldn't find my Peppa Pig one. Oh, no. My No, my Peppa Pig ones. No, I found my Peppa Pig ones earlier on. Spoiler, I've got Peppa Pig pajamas. Who got them for me? Well, obviously wasn't me. And then the cats did a [ __ ] on them. So, I was like, great. Well, I'm not wearing those. So, these ones have got I mean, they're clean now, but Oh, are they? Oh, here we go. He must have seen the Peppa Pig paj. I was going to guess Peppa Pig. Yes, you know me too well. Oh, I mean, I love Okay, they're comfy. All right, I'm happy to rock big pajamas, even though she is a little bit obnoxious and does get on my nerves. Daniel is putting on his pajamas. Oh dear, Daniel fell over. Right. Uh, we got pizza controllers and I think that I think that is a pint of something. Beer, lagger, or whatever. That is what's on my pajamas. Anyway, no one really cares. So, we'll we'll start with this. Um, normally I say don't rush this process, but I want to get something done tonight. I want to try and create something really cool and we're going to we're going to put a little bit of pressure on and see if it's possible. I don't know where this is going to go. I've got a rough idea. I kind of threw this together before the stream. Just rearranging bits and pieces, but uh we'll see. I think I'm going to go I don't know why I've got this idea that I mean you can probably tell I wanted to be Japanese themed with her and we got the pagodas and all this stuff. Scorpion. It's probably a Japanese scorpion as well. We got these things. I don't know if I can get those in anywhere, but yeah. Yeah. I I feel like black and red. I want to do something with lots of like desaturated colors and reds. And I don't know what it's going to look like, but we'll find out. Humpsky Dansky sat on a wall. A Peppa Pig blanket. I don't think so. Have I got a where I I've got a really soft wolf blanket. Like it's got like a picture of a wolf on a Percy hanging up there. We got Percy Pig blanket. Who the [ __ ] Percy Pig? Percy Pig? Yes. Oh god. That's a Is that not like a ripoff of Peppa Pig? No. Percy Pig was around before Pepp. If you say so. Pig great sweets as well. Sweets. Really? Pig sweets from M&S. Oh, if you say so. If you say so. Cupcake. Anyway, back to scorpions. Peppa Pig aside. We should put a giant Oh my god. Put a picture of Peppa Pig into Firefly and say, "Make this realistic." Cuz they've got like they've got like their 2D Picasso faces that look like haird dryers. It would look so terrifying. Someone else do that. It's really creepy. Oh my goodness. And then animate it as well. No. No. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. But you do have a pig blanket. Eli is obsessed with pigs. Oh, yeah. You've probably seen me covered in the pig blanket, but it is my son's. It's not mine, I swear. Promise. Right. Um, anyway, scorpions, come on. Let's stay focused. Uh, I need some music. So, Poppy, love, I am I will see you in the chat. Yes, it is definitely game. We're watching Game of Thrones right from the start again. I am for the fourth time for the Is it the fourth or the millionth? I watch clips of it all the time online. I am obsessed. Right, let's go. Oh, light of the seven. Right, so we've got Monu Scorpio. What size is this anyway? Oh, this is a bit Can I not get it? That's feels a bit low res. I'm just going to try and get that a bit bigger. Oh, yeah. I was going to try and generate some rocks as well. Let me open this up so you can see what I'm doing. Uh, where's my best scorpion? I think it was this one. So, if I go to edit, I should be able to just Oh, I think the knight's suddenly gotten bigger. Um, make higher res and remove the man. Yeah. So, I've set the size to 4K. I think I must have done like a low res generation before. I got to make sure the scorpion looks sharp because that is like the focal point. So, whatever you're going to do in your piece of and have a focal point, it's got to look crispy if possible. Nice and crispy. All right, let's get that in there. I don't know if I want him raising his claw as well. Yeah, like one claw raised. I will be around for a bit. Rao, there's a chance I might fall asleep. No. Happy Friday from the East Bay, California. Hey. Hey, Barry. Whoa. What the hell is What What's happened? Um, okay. That's not quite what I was hoping for. Where's my other one? I had a really good one somewhere. Uh, I will find this one. Oh, is it in the swear there's an upscale feature for generative upscale? What am I doing? Let me just use that. I forget some of these features. They just they're in beta and then they sneak in. Let's just try that. Uh yeah, we'll go Firefly four times. Let's be greedy. I've not tried this before. Let's see how this turns out. Love that I've got you live. Your content is so helpful. Awesome, Stevie. Awesome. Is it your first time here live? I hope if it is that you enjoy it and it lives up to the expectations. Okay. Oh yeah, that's Hang on. Let's do a comparison. Uh yeah, that's definitely that's definitely better. It's not perfect, but that is a heck of a lot better. So, right, we'll do that. And use the remove tool just to get rid of this fella here. Love this. This tool is so flipping good. There was a point where I would use it, I think earlier on, and it would just generate random things, like totally random things like people and stuff, but now it's just amazing. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't cost any credits or anything either. So, it just like things like the the clone stamp tool and the healing brush tool. They're still really good tools, but I just don't really use them for a lot of what I do anymore. Okay. Right. We got a Scorpion. Let's get you in. Where's my document? Have I closed my Did I even have a document to start with? Oh, good. this down. This is what a mess. Hang on. Let me open this. There we go. There's a document. I do know what I'm doing. Honest. Andrea, stop laughing. Right. Okay. We've got got the scorpion in. Let's get all the other images in. So, this is my scene. So, first thing is to make these smart objects. So, we'll call this um See, if you make them smart objects, it's good because you can then scale them up and down and you're not going to lose any quality. It will maintain that quality from their native size. Um sky feel like I'm This is a lush sunset, but I don't really know what I'm going for yet. So, I'm going to start with something a bit more drab. Go clouds, smart object. And this is the first part of the process is to literally just comp everything together. select subject, which is which is amazing. Now, it's does such a good job. If you do photo manipulation, you got to use select subject because it just makes such short work of everything. Okay. Oh, I lost a lot of rocks then. That's no good. Quick selection tool. We can just add to that selection. Yeah. Oh, it's just phenomenal. Look at this. Flipping brilliant. I wish I had that back when I did that. Do you remember when I cut out Big Ben? It took me about two hours to pencil around Big Ben. And now it would quite literally take seconds. Right, we got clouds. Let's stick them behind. And so we'll start to build this out first. Right, what are we doing here? So let's build our scene. We've got to pick a part of this. So, we could we could have the landscape there or we could try and build something here. So, we could have the subject down in the corner. I can't wait to show you this. This is s This is This Have you tried the new rotate object feature? It's so flipping good. The amount of times that I find a picture of a character that I want, whether it's a stock or whatever, and I just I want them like from behind, you know, if they're drawing their sword, I want that shot from the behind. And I just so hard to find it, and sometimes the prompts just don't understand it. They don't get what you mean. It's your first live. Excellent. Is that more progress than earlier, Andrea? Let's go and refine that. Quick selection tool. Let's go. Beautiful. Yeah. So, select subject and quick selection tool. They quite literally make short work of anything. Okay. Uh let's just call her Ronin. I just had an idea. Uh huh. Something just popped in my head. Actually, this is totally random, but actually this could be quite good inspiration. It's not quite what I had in mind. I've not played this game. Rise of the Ronin. It's the same people that do the Neo games. And it just pops into my head. Very Japanese theme. Slightly different. But I love how they've got that one palette. The clearly the blues and then they just got that splash of red. That's what I really like. So, we'll keep that as a reference somewhere. Hey Vun, your first live. Excellent. Right, we're going to pop her down here. She's obviously way too big. We're going to rotate her and we're going to have her facing the scorpion. You think so? Okay, cool. I will check it out in a bit. Yeah. What am I going to do with this? Do we have one scorpion or loads of scorpions? Clash of the Titans vibes. Yes, a little bit like that. I play like a lot of Dark Souls games and things, so I love the sort of massive bosses. A few other bits I've done are like that, but yes, very much. Clash of the Titans. Let's look at the artwork for that. actually one of the Titans. Was that the first one with Sam Worththington? I think I think I saw that where he goes after Medusa. It's going back a few years now. Yeah, it's got like a very I think it's sort of similar to 300. It's got that like is it sepia yellowy very warm palette. Right. It's obviously it looks terrible when you're doing it because it's just loading, but we can now rotate around. And this is amazing. I I've used this feature for a few things, but this probably takes the cake for me. I'd love some cake. It's kind of mucked up the sword, but we can fix that. And she's now got two ponytails. But we'll see. She's going to be very small. I need your other leg in there. Yeah, they fight a scorpion in that. Do they? One is enough. And we got our scorpion. So then maybe we have this kind of come Oh, coming out of the sea would be good. So, we'll have it on an angle, which is cool. It makes it feel a little bit more a little bit more dynamic, but also it makes it more interesting as well because the whole thing is very obviously rectangular. And as soon as we start introducing some interesting angles, it can become visually a bit more eye-catching. I wonder coming out the water. Let's mask off the bottom. So, we're just going to crank the hardness up. See how this looks. It's about framing it as well. Competition. Competition. The composition has got to look right. So maybe something like that. And then for the sky, let's open this up. And then we will we'll put the clouds. in here because this is kind of part of the scene. So, I think it's probably easier if we just work on this in its own smart object. So, we'll just really quickly select the sky with the quick selection tool, which is bloody phenomenal. There we go. We'll come back to color in a minute. Something like maybe like that. So you got that light patch. Probably could make it a bit smaller actually because we're not going to see the whole image, are we? Yeah, that looks nice. Well, not done. That was pretty good. Got this fella coming up out the water And is this going to be water? Should it be lava or something? I don't know. Might be making more work for myself there. Maybe I should Maybe I should shut up. castle. Castle. castle that could fit quite nicely there. Actually, actually, I should. I've screwed this up a bit. I should actually convert that back to layers just so I can move all of the bits around independently. Cuz on this one, uh, the C image, I might get rid of some of this rock. So, remove tool again. We'll just get rid of this bit because we got our own rock. Cue the Godzilla music in the water. It looks like Well, that's the the goal is to make it look less like it's been beaten. And I know what you mean. Yeah. More like it's coming out. Unless she has already beaten it. I don't know. Yeah, it's a really nice symmetry there, but that's going to be fog and it's going to be all sorts. We could have a crashed ship. Um, I don't really like this rock. It looks weird. I The sea looks all right. This does look a bit AI generated, but I don't think it was labeled as one, so I'm not really sure. But the rock looks a bit rubbish. But I think I've got some backup rock, which that's no good, actually. Let's find some rock. Oh. I have some. Oh my god. I think this this rotate object feature is going to be insane for Oh my god. I just I've got some rock. I got some rock. We're good. Right. I want to try and get her up on there if I can. That'll be really sick. So I think back to when I first started my career. We'll call it Pride Rock. And I had to I had I couldn't I don't even know if the quick select tool was around at the beginning. Magic wand tool was manually selecting things with the pen tool was. Okay, let's um shrink this down. Yeah. So, obviously we're going to have to reposition it. Actually, no. I think that might prefer that cuz the scorpion it feels like everything needs to be a bit higher. Yeah. like it's not quite filling enough of the scene. Obviously, we can fix that there. We could play around with the scale as well. We could give it two tails, two stingers. Just for fun. Let's see what that would look like. Copy. Paste. Yeah, let's just get that in there. Just do it super quick for now. We don't want to spend long a long time on it just because we don't know where this is going yet. So we don't we want to just rush through the not rush but get through the compositiony bit to see if this idea is actually even worth pursuing because it might be might be terrible in which case we don't want to spend ages retouching it. Two stingers or one. Yeah. Have him him away from the edge so you can see a little bit down the side there. I like the angle. And I also don't want the character to be over him because it makes it harder for them to stand out. And I don't know what kind of crazy wizard sword they got there. That ain't a katana. But she can all be quite small. So we'll we'll pop a proper sword back in her hand. In fact, oh maybe I could use this one. I knew there was a reason I had this. Let's see if we can just quickly stick this in her hand. Give her an upgrade. Is it going to select it on that background? Yeah, it is. It's so good. Oh, I flipping love Photoshop. Right, there you go. Oh, mini segue. I teach this stuff as well. So, I have my full course. It's pinned in the chat, linked in the description if you want to learn all this mad stuff. Um, I teach it and when you get stuck, you can message me for help and I will give you feedback, ask questions. It's not as hard as you think. It's just take it takes a bit of time to learn the tools and the right techniques, but that's why I teach it in my courses just because you don't have to take ages learning it. I'll just shortcut it for you. All right. I spent 20 years learning how to do this. It doesn't take 20 years. Oh dear. That's where I draw the line. Yeah. I'm sorry. Gone gone too far, haven't I? I crossed the line, Stevie. Do you know I wasn't sure if the angle would work, but this is actually going to work perfectly. Okay, this is a turntable layer. So, we're going to Yeah, I can mask it. Okay. Get rid of this. We got a second ponytail there as well. So, we'll do something like that. But we will come back and Yeah, we'll redo all the hair. It's quite a big sword. Don't think the angle's quite right. If I can be bothered to, I will rotate object on it, but I don't need to right now. This needs to be bigger, though, because it's way too small at the minute. Yeah, I think we'll do that. I was going to get rid of the scabbard, but I think we'll keep it. Probably change it for a different one or a more interesting one. Or maybe we'll just make our own scabbard. Make a completely unique one. Give it nice texture or something. Oh yeah, I was I was going to say it's worth it, Stevie. Obviously, I would say that. No, I think it is. I think it is. And I think any of you in the chat that have taken whether it's my Photoshop courses or my Illustrator ones, I'm sure you'll attest to not just the quality of the course, but the support as well. Like I I do support people. It's not just like a, you know, one and done, right? Can I get away with removing that rock? I'm going to have to, aren't I? Yeah, let's try it because then most of your scorpion can go there. hijusting as goodness me that might be going too far. Or maybe we maybe we replace the stingers and we just have like a serpent instead. There's a mythological creature and I can't what it is. It's like a lion, a goat, and a snake. And it begins with C. And I've forgotten the word. I don't know if anyone can remember it. This is better. So, I'm going to have part of his claw snippy thing, I think. Or yeah, there we go. That's a bit better. So, he's kind of coming out the water, but it also nicely fills this area down then fried rock. No, that's a silly idea. Don't Don't do that. There we go. Just going to go around some of this. Just freehand these rocks. Sculpt them a little bit. Change the color and all that later. I'm just using Photoshop's default brush with a hardness of zero just so you don't get a soft edge. If you use the the 0% one for cutting stuff out, watch this. You get like a feathered edge and you really don't want that. So, we'll just keep it nice and hard. Quickly cut stuff out. Probably should try the sunset. Whether we go boring gray clouds or sunset is going to change the vibe of the scene quite considerably. And let's just see if we can generate more sunset. This is the sort of part of the design where I would just use something generative because I don't want to spend ages retouching a sunset. It's like probably one of the most minuscule parts of this whole thing. Ah, it's not going to do it, is it? I want to take it. Oh, no. It has taken it a bit lower. Let's just try and do the whole thing. Let's just go sunset. Chimera. Is that the one? It might be. Well, it's giving me water, what I don't want, but it's a bit lower down, so I'll take it. Yeah. Oh, that's fine. That works. I'll just add a new layer. I'm just going to This time I will use a soft brush. Just brush it in here. Maybe we don't need Yeah, that's fine. As long as there isn't any water. That will do just fine. If we're going to have the sunset a bit higher, it does look It will look pretty cool. Oh, maybe the sunset would look really good. Oh, thank you, Andrea. Yeah, right. Let's have some of this submerged as Let's strip out the color as well. This will be the exposure checker in a minute and explain why. So, at the moment we are like looking at this with color and obviously it looks weird. It's not going to look unweird. It's not a word. But here, at least we can strip it out and we can focus more on the composition. Definitely got to have some sort of cape blowing, I think. And maybe a few more rocks. Is it coming out of her neck? Have a look. Oh, have I moved it around? Oops. Good spot, Stevie. Just Just testing. Just testing. Okay, hang on. Right, I've got more rocks coming in. I mean the other option is actually we just abandon the sea and we go full rocks. completely change the the vibe of this whole thing and have it stuck in the ground. These are quite cool actually. I like this could be used as a really nice framing device. Oh, damn. Might be on to something here. Oh, actually, these are really good. That is quite a cool. What do you reckon? Make this a bit smaller so it's a bit further away. Then we'll have to add a bit more rock there. Yes. Yeah, you're right. Actually, it's almost made it like a little bit of a gauntlet, hasn't it? You ain't just walking around this little pickle. You got to go straight through him. And I like the framing here as well. These kind of where they kind of curve in. It does. It almost This is like Princess Peach's castle off in the distance. And this little chicken here, he's not having it. He ain't going to let you through. Yeah, bit more interesting. That's why we spend so much time on this part of the process because, you know, we've made some pretty, I'd say, structural changes to a lot of it. And we don't want to be ideally doing all that after we start the retouching. Ooh, there's a cave here as well. Well, yeah, it looks like a cave. That's perfect. Kind of little cave off of the water. Yeah, I think we're going to keep the We got these rocks down here that don't really fit now, though. So, you know, I really like these rocks. In fact, I think we're going to be cheeky and reuse these. Yeah, we're going to reuse these. I think Pride Rock might have to go. Makes a bit more sense if it's all the same sort of rock as well. Just need a bit for it to stand on. And there you go. Maybe something like that. There we go. And we've covered up the other rocks as well. Almost. There's a little bit there. That's an easy thing to fill. So, I'm not going to stress about that. Now, in fact, no, I am going to I'm going to fix it. We're just literally just going to grab some rock here. Copy merge. Rock is great because it's so heavily textured. Look, you can just throw it in and you'd be hard pushed to tell whether whether where where it starts and ends. There we go. So, rather than having three different rocks in one environment, which makes no bloody sense, it now makes a bit more sense. These rocks over in the background, don't they? So, we're going to use probably the same rock there as And let's just get rid of all this. We'll just clean it up just in case we do like move some parts around. We don't want no dodgy retouching showing. So, we've got a slightly different rock here for the castle, but I think we're not going to see a lot of that. In fact, yeah, even better. Oh my god, it's amazing how much use you can get out of one bit of rock. We'll just distort this a little bit so it comes up around the castle. And this one's going to come to the front. So, we're just getting the order right as well. And this bit here meets the water as well. So, we're just going to really lazily do that because you're not going to really see this anyway. Pride Rock, I'm sorry. You probably are going to go because it's just the texture doesn't match. I mean, I I've just had an idea actually. You just give me an idea, Stevie. What about if we cover It might be a bit too much, but if we cover the creature in rock almost like it is a rock scorpion. It's either going to look terrible or really cool if it works. shrink it down first. This is uh it's getting a little bit rockalicious, but let's just get some rock texture there. You don't want to start doing blending modes yet. I'm being a bit cheeky here, but uh where is it? this one. Yeah. So, we might even be able to blend some texture through and then use a blending mode. Some sort of combination to put a bit of texture on him in a few places. Yeah, you want the underlying layer shadows to come through. There you go. But it could be a bit much. Maybe just in a few select places. But we'll leave that for now. The only thing I'm not really sold on is the character here. I'm not 100% on the character. Wonder if it should be more of them. I always typically have like a hero or a heroine in my artwork or some sort of focal point. What if there were three of them? like a like an elf, a like a dwarf and a ranger. Let's go. Lord of the Rings or something. I don't know. This is cool. Or Spartan. Go for like a a Spartan with the shield and the red cape. That That would fit the theme. This could fit the theme actually. We'll put Gerald Butler in there with the red cape would look really, really cool. Yeah, golden axe. That's what I was thinking. A mixture between Lord of the Rings and golden axe. I need a good a good shot of Leonidis. The only problem is I've got a Japanese castle in the background. So, I don't know. Maybe the Spartan got lost on his way to Greece and he ended up in Japan. Right, let's just try it. So, what I'm going to do for this is I'm going to use GPT to write me a better prompt than I'll write because I'm not very good at prompt writing. So, we'll paste that in and say I need a Spartan warrior. That' be a good fit. Let's see what it does. Oh, no. It's going to I don't want it to make it. I want to I want to get the prompt. Oh, let's see what it does. I If it does a good enough job. It's only tiny. So, we'll see. No, I need the I need the written prompt. I can't even spell I know either written prompt 8K detail. We're not going to get that, are we? But let's give it a go. I use the banana, too. Uh, have it up. See what it does. I like how the composition's come together there. It looks very like rock heavy at the minute, but that's because we haven't actually done anything. We've not like retouched it or done any depth or shadows or anything. So, the whole thing at the minute looks very flat. But in the end, some bits will be a bit more blurred. They'll be darker or obscured by fog. And we will get this long distance, that s sense of depth as That's exactly what I want. That is exactly I couldn't have I couldn't have asked for anything better. That is exactly what I want. Oh my god. The shield's a bit small. Make the shield 20% larger. solid white background. Let's have him 2K. Make him bigger. Yeah. Like I don't I don't have any interest in generating um just full-on full images. I just I like it on a plain background, usually pretty flat or, you know, uninteresting lighting. So then I can go and retouch shadows and things myself. Otherwise, if you've got very prominent shadows and highlights in the thing already, it you know, it can you have to really contend with it if you need to like reverse it or something. Yeah, you space within. How's it going? Yeah, that's what I want. Is it? That was better than I even imagined. And I love the fact the cape is torn as How the flipping heck did it know that? That's what I wanted. Ridiculous. Anyway, let's stop gushing over Firefly. I will take it. Yeah, bit closer match on the angle as well. sorry Ronin. Spartan, Spartans, lay down your weapons. Persians, come and get them. That's been brilliant. I love that film. When I first saw that years ago, I was like vibrating with excitement. I swear. play around with perspective and we have something a little bit different. We'd have to make the rocks here a lot bigger for this to make sense. Yeah, he's got to be stood right at the edge, isn't he? Like, screw you. You're here now, Carrie. We've not really done anything apart from make a composition sort of thing. I mean, we could make it truly horrifying and add a serpent instead of the stinger. making more work for myself. Um, generate a no hydra. Oh god, making so much work for Okay, we've gone from Japanese to Greek in the space of an hour. Has it been an hour? I haven't done anything yet. generate a three headed hydra. Just bump the resolution just as No, I'll do it this because otherwise I just use loads of credits and then I can upscale it in Photoshop if I need to. Let's do we'll we'll try this and if it turns out crap then we'll go and get a prompt and for it. So, write me a prompt to generate Yes. I can't type. It knows what I mean. I love to do photo impulation. Awesome. just generate me. Wait, why can't it generate me a hydra? Flipping it. That's terrifying. Maybe we take two of those. Let's try two. We'll just We'll see how it looks. I think three heads would be a bit much. So, we'll just grab this. I mean, even two might be too much, but I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. What the hell are you doing that? I don't know if it looks a bit [ __ ] now. Uh or if it's it's getting like a little bit too like AID. I don't want that. And the angles don't match anyway. Let's keep it to a Scorpion. You like the hydra? I don't know. One thing that would be fun to try just to try and rotate the hydra and see if it see if it fixes it. Yeah, I think you got you got to call it done, Carrie. Otherwise, you can you can end up in design hell where you just the project never ends. I'm sure you've got loads of cool ideas you want to move on to. Let's see if it's any good just before we write it off. Yeah, that's what we're doing. It's called rotate object in Photoshop just to complicate things. It's slightly different to be fair. It is a slightly different feature and it's really good with raster stuff. So, we'll get we'll keep these bits at the base and we have to attach them to And then what we're going to do is we're going to try anyway and separate them. So we're going to separate this one and separate the other one. So, they're on their own separate layers. And then I'm going to adjust the angle of this one. Just tilt it slightly just so it makes sense. So, it's pointing pointing the same direction forward as the scorpion. You see how much work goes into doing this, doing it properly before you even get to the crazy Photoshop part. This is what I did wrong for years. Oh no, it's reset my angle now. Okay. Could even have one of them actually. No, that would make sense. You could have one floating in the water already dealt with. Yeah, look, he's looking right at him now. That's way better. Could even make this one bigger. What does that make not make sense? No, let's let's not [ __ ] around too much. I'm eating my cheese and going to bed. You're going to be used as background noise again. I'm eating my cheese and going to bed. You get nightmares. Doesn't it give you nightmares? That's what I was always told as a kid. If you eat cheese before bed, you get nightmares. Then again, I was told that if you eat carrots, you can see in the dark. And that was all rubbish, wasn't it? So, I don't know. You lied to me, mother. Wait, Andrea doesn't sleep. Hey, Andrea doesn't sleep. She does now. Really? she's turned She's turned over a new leaf. She's She sleeps. Um, what do we what do we think? Hydras or just regular scorpion stinger? What do you think, Pops? You've always got opinion an opinion on something whether it's invited or not. An hour behind on the stream. Hold on. Well, you got to catch up, aren't you? Hold on. Let me Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why's the dragons coming out his butt? It's like a Do you hear that? She said, "Why is there dragons coming out of us?" But I mean, we could go back to one stinger. It was one stinger before, but I feel like it's not big enough. So, if we just expand the canvas, I feel like the claws are really big and the stinger is just a little bit disappointing. It's It's almost a bit like I don't want to be mean, but it's like really is that it? maybe let's do a bit of stinger surgery. We'll chop it off and make it a bit bigger. Yeah, maybe that's too big. I don't know. We'll go for one though. Oh, I don't know. I think that's too big Yeah, maybe maybe one stinger because then you can see the castle as going to try this as well. Although the sun sunset water are really just generate some more sky. I think the sunset will look a bit better. The sunset will illuminate everything and create some very dramatic shadows which may might make the creature actually look a bit more terrifying because it'll be very like in shadow. This would be like a slightly different vibe. Yeah. A little bit of whiskey. Stingering surgery. Oh, I don't know. Gray clouds or sunset? Sunset would be more epic. You all right? Pops the door of me. I started dancing. So I start dancing too. As you do. Carry on. It could have some additional rock there that could be like blurred out or something. Yeah. Right. Okay. We'll we'll leave that there. We'll get rid of Ronin. Um Rock. Let's just get rid of all that. have our scorpion there. We got a lovely Extra rocks. We're going to name everything so I actually know what on earth I'm doing. Rocks bottom. Go rocks middle, rocks right, left. And this process that I'm doing now, we've taken like nearly an hour and a half on this, but this is how I create some of the work that I love the most. So, please don't rush it. It's about following the process. So you could you've seen me probably do it in the streams. If you want to learn it in depth without watching like a twohour stream or six hours of stream, then I teach it in my Photoshop course, the advanced one that dives into like all the advanced stuff. First class does cover an introduction to compositing and retouching that you take a guitar and dunk it in water and all that cool stuff. But you want the advanced stuff that's in the master class. Right, I'm pretty happy with that. We've got space up here for a few birds maybe Could have something like a mask there with something attached to it, a trinket And we got some water. Um, that's pretty good. Let's get rid of that. Okay, next thing we got to do is balance the exposure. So, we're going to turn on that exposure checker that I made earlier. And we're not adding all the shadows at the minute. We're just balancing the exposure between the different images. So, you can see that Spartan and Monu Scorpion are very dark. The rocks are not. So, we have to balance all of these effectively like set a level playing field before we start doing anything. So, let's use levels for the rocks. And you'll see bring the shadows down until the shadows, mid tones, and highlights on the rocks match the Spartan. Something like that. You drag that onto the other rocks that are nearby as well because it's same piece of rock which does make life a lot easier. There we go. In fact, actually it's it's all the same rock. So in theory, these ones up here probably a bit too dark now because they're showing different parts of the rock. So I'm going to dial it back a bit. And then the one on the right just maybe maybe the because we've got a lot of shadows there. Maybe bring the highlights up a little bit. Does that make sense what I'm doing? So the dark parts of the image, the medium gray parts and the light parts, we've got to balance in between everything. That's why we do it without color because balancing exposure here is just super hard. So, we just take the color out of the equation. Sunset. We'll leave the sunset as is because it's like off in the distance and it's kind of its own thing. We'll do the same with the the castle as well. So, we're going to use levels. Bring up some of the highlights. Push down the mid tones. Drop the shadows a little bit. Oh, and the C as well. Flipping C. Don't forget that D. Yeah. So, we're going to bring some of the shadows down, highlights up. This one. something like that. Don't worry that the sea blends into the rocks because once we start adding shadows, it's going to create that depth. But right now, you see what we've done? We've just balanced A full body dragon. Andrea, what are you still doing here? I thought you have your cheese, right? And now we got a balanced color. This is going to be a bit more interesting because we've got a sunset. This is going to be like our primary light source. So for this, all our rock is already the same, so we don't have to touch that. I feel like the Spartan has got like a very warm uh look to him, so he isn't too far off the rocks already. Going to have to get rid of that halo around the edge, though. I'm just going to contract that selection and then add a new mask. You see it just strips off all the the white glow around the edge. Nifty little trick. All covered in the course. Uh yeah, let's see. Obviously, this looks totally off at the minute. So, how are we going to do this? There's a few ways we could we could color balance it, but because it's totally the opposite of everything else, maybe hue saturation is a bit better. So, maybe command or control- maybe we just make it a color. We just drop the blues. Yeah, like maybe like really muted. So, it's still got like a hint of blue. It is water, but it's really just set back. I'm pretty happy with that. And we can collapse all this stuff because we're probably not going to touch it again once we've done this. as long as we've done it right the first time. So, there we go. Those are the the three key steps at the minute. You've got to compose the scene, balance your exposure, balance your color, and then the fourth scene thing, which is the best bit, which we're going to get on to now, is the shadows. These make probably the biggest difference. And you'll be like, "Oh my god, this looks insane." once we finish doing these. I'm eating. Sorry, you're eating your cheese. Do you know I did think that Vernon I did think that I thought having like sort of leaning into the mythology having like blood red water or I mean I think in reality I probably will I might use a plugin called uh flood two for the water because then it'll reflect the sunset in it but that will come a lot later. We could try and do color balance on it on top of Now we've desaturated it to warm it up a little bit. we got the highlights. So here we can actually change color in the shadows, mid tones, and highlights. That's a slight difference. I'll keep it. It's negligible though. go in my alpha music. Yeah, the water will look quite different by the end. Right, shadows. So, we've got our light source here. First thing is obviously going to be the castle. So, we're going to add a lots of ways you can do this. I'm going to use exposure. I like teaching this as well because it's two sliders. And so it keeps things very simple if you're new to it. And here as well, this is going to be quite dark, so we're just going to reuse that adjustment layer. And then these ones as well. So, rocks left, it's going to be dark, rocks right, and then at the bottom as well. This is one of the benefits to reusing all these these rocks. So, we're going to drag this in here. In fact, no, let's apply it to the whole folder. It's easier. And then scorpion. We're going to do the exposure And then what we're going to do is we're going to where this sunset would catch our scorpion for example, we're going to use a nice soft brush, a low flow value of like 10%. And we're just going to start to brush away where the light would catch. Just catch it on the body here. A bit down the leg. spilling over here a bit. Could even make the scorpion darker. So, it's kind of catching here. You see, we've got a lot of these like lumps and bumps. We got these little spikes. Some of these bits here, these like ridges, we're going to go along. We're going to highlight some of those individually. Maybe it's just catching on the eye. And then it's sort of falling off down here somewhere. And we could go through with like a softer 10%. So I'm just literally varying the flow value up here with that same soft brush. This brush here, default Photoshop brush. You need nothing fancy. Uh let's go. In fact, let's actually know. That's okay. That's fine. So there's the difference. Fully dark and then just a bit more light and dramatic dramaticness. Yeah, we've done color matching already. Uh, balancing the color with highlights. Highlights we're doing, but we're not doing the warm ones yet. You can go straight into it, but for me, I like to build it up. So, we're just figuring out where they go at the minute. Nice slow process. This is G. This is even It gets more interesting as well when you've got materials. So like cloth and metal, they catch light very differently. This might be a bit trickier. So we're going to start slow again. Just Nice big soft brush. Do the big surface areas first. Just spilling over spilling over the arm down the shield cuz obviously that that sun is going to be or sunset is going to be catching on a big part of the shield. Definitely the spear, his hand, his shoulder, probably some of these parts of the cape as well. legs inside of legs. When you get a bit more confident, you can start to bump the flow value up. But I just do it super slow from the start. This thing's going to it's going to catch a lot of a lot of light. Little bit more on one side. One thing I forgot actually, I forgot to reposition his feet. You should have done that before shadows and stuff. but shouldn't be too much of a problem. So you see here before and the after. We'll go and do some more dramatic sunset highlights later, but for now we're just making sure he is properly lit. Not too dark either that we can't see him. But again, when we're doing all this, we're using our exposure checker to make sure we don't mess up the exposure. This would be a bit darker, I think. So, I'm going to drop the exposure on the castle. and the rocks that are close to it as Well, we have our light source. We have um yeah, if you add your own light source, that's one thing. when we've got such a distinctive light source, we're going to leave that and work up to it. So, you see the difference already. We've done we've done some very basic preliminary shadows, but if I were to do a before and after, it make you'd be able to see the difference, especially the scorpion. Just lighten up a few more bits. actually the scorpion. Should we make him like black or something? Scorpions are Well, you get the different colors. No, I'm over I'm overthinking it, I think. Right, let's start adding some of the more dramatic highlights in because it's going to look pretty tasty. few different ways we can do this. I'm probably going to start with a solid color layer. And we're going to pick like an orangey red. We'll make it really punchy. Nice sunset color. There we go. We're going to reuse this quite a lot. There's so many different ways you could do this depending on the highlights you're going to add. So we could start brushing in like this, but you can add a blending mode. And it depends on the material as well. So my favorites are linear dodge screen can be good. This this one can be quite good sometimes. Overlay and soft light and occasionally some of the others, but for this because it's rock, just brush in around the edge. And again, we're doing this at like what? 20% flow. No, too much. 10. Do it really, really slow with nice soft brush. So that light is just spilling over. You can do it too much. It's very easy to do it too much. So, we're going to start by keeping it real subtle. And it's going to be less orange as you get around here, this area, because the sun isn't really catching that as much. But over here, you can see it really is. But look, you can you can easily go too far with it. So, just do it nice and slow. So, we've got one. And then we're going to just copy that for Yeah. For the rocks on the right. Add a new mask. Yeah. Overlay looks more realistic. When we come to do the metal though, linear dodge works better for metal. So it depends on the material as well. So yeah, going to go along the tops here. And honestly, like when I first started doing this, I was like, "Oh my god, how the hell does everyone seem to know where to put all the colors and the highlights and things?" Honestly, it just comes with experience. Comes with experience. But if you were to sign up to a Photoshop course and you have questions, That was good, was it? Oh, that was good. That was a good segue. Um, this is what I do. A lot of people in the community, students, they message me and they say, "Oh, why does this look not right?" And because I've done it for so long, I can usually tell them and say, "Oh, yeah, you need to do this or you need to work on the shadows here. Fix the light in here." So, I think it's quite handy to have someone to be able to go to and say, "Ah, why does this look wrong? What's missing?" Right? We got the rocks in the middle. This is probably going to have like a really slight orangess, but not a crazy amount because it is obscured by the castle. So, we'll go do the castle now. So, we're using the same orange on everything. This is going to be a bit different, There's a lot of the castle. In fact, let's do one pass just orangifying it. And then around the edges, it's going to catch more a lot more. Just down some of the edges, the tops. Yeah. You see, you can you got to be careful with it. you can really just easily overdo it. So subtle at first and then let's try it again, but this time we're going to try it with a linear dodge. You see the difference? We're just going to run this right along the edges. They maybe maybe even some of it. Don't know. Yeah. So, this whole top part, the light is because the the sun is right or the sorry, the sunset is right behind it. It is going to blow out a lot of the um the darker areas. So you see the difference there. Massive difference. That second layer, it's good having separate adjustment layers as well because with separate adjustment layers, you can turn bits off and on. Too dark. It might be too dark. I don't think it is, but it, you know, it's one of those, it's a constant backwards and forwards. I think that's spot on. And we're going to add some We're running ahead of ourselves a bit, but just to show you what I mean, let's uncip this. Yeah. So, watch this. Now we're going to add like a flare. We're just making the brush. Bigger. bigger. You see it just adds that like whoa, that cinematic glow to it. Yeah. What a difference. And if if it's not quite right, you can go in and tweak the color and stuff. So we could maybe warm it up a pinch, drop the opacity if it's too powerful. But I think that's pretty nice, actually. So then when we put it all together with that castle, you've gone from that to that. That scorpion stinger reminds me of the strong hand. Yeah, speaking of the scorpion thing, I don't know. Maybe the smaller one was the better one. I don't know. I made it bigger at one point and I probably should have just left it alone, but I don't know. I think it's okay. Unless we go back. It feels a bit naked now without the other one. Where's the other stinger? Did I get rid of it? No. There we go. There's a second one. Let's go on to the scorpion next. So, we're going to use that same orange. Now, this one, we can test the blending modes out here. Um, I'm going to go for linear dodge. And again, I'm going to do this in two passes. I usually do two soft and then a bit more pronounced. So again, you can do this when we do the exposure stuff at the start. You can jump straight into it, but I like to just figure out the placement of things first. Yeah. So, real subtle. I just realized there's one bit I've missed on Scorpion. I adjusted the exposure or the sun, but I haven't gone and added shadows. So, we're going to do that now. going to make Oh, flipping it. This is going to make it look so good. How did I forget that? Turn him off. So, there's a lot of parts here where the light just doesn't reach or he's obscuring himself. I think here I'm going to get rid of his because I want his claws to have lots of clarity and I don't want the legs getting in the way. So, got more scorpion surgery, I'm afraid. Okay, let's go around there. And this is an AI scorpion as well. So, you know, you can still get some odd well visual oddities. So, but that looks pretty good, right? Again, low flow value. Light source is the sunset. So now there's going to be lots of parts that are darker. This is going to make such a phenomenal difference. So we're going to shade down here. Going to shade in this gap. So it's going to look a bit, you know, this bit here is a lot darker. So, it's going to look a bit more set back with it being in shadow. This bit, we're going to run that around the edge down the bottom here. We've got his face. So this bit kind of comes out over it. So this bit would naturally be a bit darker down here. Sort of got like a little bit of a hood coming out down here. His underbelly or whatever this is is going to be super dark cuz he is obscuring a lot of the light that just isn't getting there down here as well, this part. So, we're going to add some shadows coming up here. It looks a little bit scrappy there, but doesn't matter. As long as you get it in the right place, you can always come back and refine a lot of it. Yeah, this sort of crevice here. And then a lot of this is going to be obscured. So lots of shadow down here. This would have shadow on it being cast by this leg thing. Uh, some of this here, we could just build on these shadows and enhance the sort of bumpy contouring of that down here. Some of this. And then if I turn it off and on, see what a difference it makes. Got some more here as well. So, let's just go around the edges. under right under here is going to be super dark. And then here as well Then some of this in here again like a little sort of lip like a hood. And we can always go and adjust once we've got it in place. We could even darken them even more. Then bump the gamma a little bit. Spartan. Right. I need to fix his feet or go any further. I'm a bit drunk now. Excellent. Raquel's drunk. Excellent. Well done, Raalo. You've inspired me to have another whiskey. Fantastic. Good job, Raquel. Friday night. There's got to be a song about Friday, isn't there? Oh god, it's Friday. No, not that. Not that. Oh lordy, loading loading. We don't need that, right? Um, okay. Feet surgery. So obviously he it looks a bit flat. We got puppet warp. This feature is just ridiculously stupidly good. So we're going to pin stuff we don't want to move. I'm going to pin his ass cheeks. We're going to pin the shield. Um pin his sword. We don't want that stuff to move because I've retouched it as well because I'm a lemon. We just want his feet to change. So, I'm going to try and rotate his foot without messing up his bones basically. So, I got to do this very carefully. might be able to get away with that. It's not the best thing I've ever done. But the thing is, oh, actually, no. I have the layer mask in a minute. This one's not that there's harder because there's the toes facing away, so I don't have a lot to work with. But if I go and grab that hard brush again, I might be able to make it look like there's a a rock in the way like he stood on a rock. I mean, another thing is I could just put a rock in the way. This one here is a bit easier. Oh, actually, hang on. No, no, no. Um, just thinking I could warp it. Warping it would be quite good as well, but I think because I've started with the puppet warp, I'm going to try and stick with it. Let's get rid of that pin point. put it lower and then arch his foot up. You see? So it looks like he stood on it a bit more. So flat. We'll get away with that, I think. Have the rock come in front of his foot. This one. Um, unless we just remove his foot and say it's behind a Actually, we could probably get away with that. I'm all right with that for now. Yes, you're right. Doing it. So, when I do this live, I always get to like a point and then it's um even just this point takes Yeah, it's been a couple hours. It's taken two hours to get to this point, but this is like the beginning. This is almost like the the the start of it and then it's either the next stream or if I finish it off in my own time, that's when it transforms. The shadows are incredibly transformative. Like if we've got time, I'll take this version and then turn all the shadows off we've done cuz it's a lot of little brushing here, brushing there. But when you do a before and after, it's like, oh my god, what a difference. And you know, we've got to add splashes of the waves coming up. And I kind of want to give him some eyes, but it might look weird. Let's Let's see if this will work. Actually, just out of curiosity, I've got a some sort of reptile eye here. I don't I don't know if you can put this on a scorpion and have it look normal or not, but we're going to try it anyway. Uh, we'll grab the the hood of the eye as well. Why not? This might look really stupid. my third eye. Oh yeah, you probably No, we can probably get away with that. Oh no. Oh my god, that might actually look even more terrifying. It like fits pretty well. All right, we'll leave that there. Actually, maybe this is going to go an even weirder direction. let's try and make it round. What is going on with my resizing? Just got to try. I might make him look like crosseyed or something, which is probably not going to not going to be the look I'm really going for. Oh, that makes him look cute. That makes him look cute and friendly. Okay, that doesn't really work. The single eye works better. Do you know? I actually I think I quite like that. As weird as it is, maybe we put it down there. Yeah, I think Cyclops is pretty good. And it sort of fits pretty naturally. It's got similar sort of textures, like a scaly texture. And then if I go around here, just give that a little bit of a clean up and then blend it in. Might get away You can't really see it now, so I don't know if it looks stupid or not. We could make it like fiery either. So, we could, but we're going to have to rework some of the shadows, aren't we? So, here. Some of the light would catch here. Some of these parts would be very dark indeed. And how would we make that look fiery? let's try yellow. God, my laptop is my laptop is struggling I think. Yeah, obviously you could see some blending modes really don't work. Maybe the green bit more desaturated. Yeah, I think cyclops you'd get away Yeah, I did think about a red glowing one maybe. Yeah, I think you're right, Raquel. Actually, it's quite a nice I don't want it too overpowering, but the whole palette is very warm. And he's a slightly different color anyway. And that green, sits really nicely. He's almost like reptilian in his scorpions reptiles. I don't even know. There might be someone more learned than me. can definitely probably answer that. Anyway, um so we've got our soft highlights here. Probably should name these layers. We're going to go and do some more pronounced ones. Now, again, we're using linear dodge. These ones can be a bit trickier. Um and it depends on the material as well because when we come to do the shield and that in a minute. So, you want to put these in a few key places, but not everywhere. You don't want to just like blanket brush these on, but they can have a massive impact if we just put them in the right place, which does take practice as well to As you can see, it's very easy to go all in and then overdo it. You can go all in and then just slowly dial it back. And you know, it's one of those things you're not going to get it right first time. I certainly don't. It's just an iterative process. Sometimes you'll put highlights in and go, "Oh, that looks weird." A highlight definitely shouldn't go there. But you can see it also helps certain areas stand out. So like here I can use it to sort of break the different parts of the legs up and then here as well. So on this kind of edge, just go along there. Certain bits here that are like raised up, they're going to catch the light a lot more. And then some of these bits, you'll probably want to go back in and take the highlights out because they're just not going to make sense. The sky is getting more attention than the monster. The sky is lush. Yeah, the sky. I mean, the sky is pretty powerful. So, let's go over here. And then we've got a lot of these like little ridges. This is a great opportunity to add some highlights as well. Some of these areas. some of these bits. on the eye itself. This bit needs a bit of work. This bit probably wouldn't catch as You see the difference this makes? Just doing it really slowly. Just building it up really, really gradually. But I have one for soft highlights and one for the more pronounced ones. So, some of these things with like a really kind of sharp edge, they get like a more pronounced one, and it just kind of helps them stand out a bit more. This needs cutting out a bit more. it's got like a weird glow to it around the edge. Yeah, this this white kind of it's called fringing or halo. There's a couple different words for it, but this white edge will totally mess up those lush highlights around the edge. Some images have it, some of them because when you cut it out, the highlights get picked up as part of the selection. But you can see it does make a difference. Getting rid of it. The here as well. Especially if it's against something lighter, it stands out terribly like here as well. So, let's just go and remove it. This is a very bumpy surface as well. So, I actually want to use a very small brush and I want to deliberately use a very unsteady hand. Same when you're cutting out rocks like this. You just want a very unsteady hand. You don't want smooth rocks unless you've got smooth rocks. So, shaky unsteady hand does work in your favor here. All right, let's go out. Oh, night Andrea. Hope you enjoyed your cheese. Yeah. So, it's so easy to go in at 100% and then go, "Oh, why do my highlights look rubbish?" And it's all about patience. Just going over quickly. Just adding a bit more bit more oomph to some of the glow. Yeah, take Yeah, you're right, Rael. Have a break and come back to it later. If you try and just bang your head against the wall, it just you need fresh eyes on it sometimes. Right, let's do let's do matey boy cuz he's got some some lovely lighting on him that's going to look fantastic. again, we're going to go solid color for this. We're definitely going to use linear dodge cuz I mean look, you can see already on the shield. It's going to look flipping amazing. So, we could do it in two passes or we could just try one. So nice and low. 5% I'm using 5% really low. This is that sort of spillover light. It's just warming everything up. Warming his spear up here as well. He's got a little bit of lighting on him as well, which does help. In fact, no, I'm going to do it in two two layers cuz the metal is going to need going over So this bit, this bit here is quite interesting as well. So we'll do a soft pass for some of this. And then we'll do another one for the more pronounced highlights. And this is going to look really cool on some of the metal. So, I'm going to go 30% hardness. We'll see how that looks. this edge here, this bit as well is going to be brighter because it's raised up. Yeah, similar angle to Viking girl, isn't it? Some of the cloth here. definitely on the spear head. Even down the spear here, that side that is facing the sun, we're going to illuminate that. down here. So yeah, just really like accentuating those metal bits. And then just dial it back if they don't really look right. Let's add some more shadows as well. So we can go super dark with that part of the shield and then just erase it there. So it just kind of darkens that part of the shield. Leaving the rest of the shield to shine a bit more, I think as well actually. Yeah, we don't want to overdo it. Hey, K. How's it going? How's it going since earlier? Oh, I think part of his helmet's missing. Oh, no. Oh dear, Gerard. Don't worry, we'll sort that out. Oh, actually, hang on. It's an AI image, is it? So, maybe maybe it missed part of his helmet. That's fine. We'll just resculpt this bit here so it makes actual sense. this bit as well. We got that white weird edge around it. So, we're kind of doing reverse hair. So, Raquel, like when you did the hair lesson in the Photoshop course, we added hair. We're now doing the reverse. We're removing hair cuz we want to get rid of the white, but we don't want to lose the hair texture. Wait, what? Spank away. What on earth did I miss? Um, Rafael said she wanted permission to spank you for playing games. What? I said, "Sure. You said you were drinking wine, Raquel. Goodness me. Has it reached that point on a Friday night when we move on to spanking? God, don't let Carrie see. He'll he'll come back and blow a gasket. Like, what? What are you talking about now? Carrie let you left us for an hour. Never been on the stream. Yeah. Yeah, he popped in earlier and then he left and it it just went all got out of control really. Oh, yay. Thanks, Raquel. I mean, you your work is amazing. and you've absolutely smashed it. Like I said the other day, I just love seeing you doing so many different things from like logo design to scyther to photo manipulation. Just whatever it is, doesn't matter. All right, let's light this up. Yeah. H It's already kind of lit up here on the face, which is handy. Yeah. So, that's that's all right. as a first pass. I think maybe we could do a little bit more on the cape. so before after. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And then we do before all the way. That's our original Spartan. And then bush, that is sunlight Spartan. Yeah, our exposure is still good. It's getting there. Um, I want some fog. Oh, we've not done the shadows here, have we? Down. No. So, we've darkened everything, but we need shadows. really dark. Yes, you're right. He does. There's loads of little bits and pieces. My process is never a straight line. Right. I'm going to try and speedrun this cuz putting shadows on rock is really uninteresting and somewhat dull. I'm going to try and speedrun it without cocking it up. So, just Oh, this is super dark down here. This is where the the sun doth not shine. Dark there. Dark there. Some bits are darker than others. And it kind of creates this really nice depth just running the shadows here. So you can see boom flat boom suddenly got a bit of depth. And you could even Oh, we could even do another one. Our darkest layer yet. I always try and use as few as possible. Few different adjustment layers because it makes it just easier to manage, but sometimes a few on separate layers is good because then you can turn some on and off. we got our first pass that darkens it a bit. Second pass that gets some shadows in there, makes it look more 3D. And then the last pass just lays in more darkness. And we're going to do the same for rocks left as well. Super dark. And then some of these rocks here that aren't near the edge, they ain't getting no light. Before. After and then rocks middle. Let's hide our little scorpion friend. So again, I'm just going to really quickly brush in a bunch of shadow down here so it kind of leaves the top of the rocks a bit more exposed. yeah, I'm going to go and just brush in a little bit more lightness along the top. And then that should separate them from the castle a little bit more. And then when it comes to the castle, where are you? This one's going to be a bit trickier. So we got to go in and add shadows where no light is getting. So some of these this kind of gap here bit behind. No shadows getting there in this gap here. So the stuff that's like further away and set back. We're getting in there. Added shadows cuz that light just ain't reaching. And we're trying to do this as quick as possible as well. because it's not the most interesting I think when it's like a part of the image as well that's pretty, you know, it's not prominent, it's in the background, you can definitely get away with it more. So, just a quick pass there. Before, after Might be too early, but because we've got a good sense of how this is looking, let's try flood two. First time here. Impressive work. Thank you so much. Um, is that Michelle? Oops. No, don't muck around with the spin. I think the altitude No, altitude is It's hard. I wish there was a preview button. Blood 2 is a really good plugin that lets you generate water based on your scene. So that's the water I've got in my scene, but it kind of takes your whole scene and then so it reflects what's in the top half in the bottom half if that makes sense. Yeah, it's really cool. I could take it into the distance actually so it covers the whole image. That's probably not going to make sense though. Got to try and get the height right. I think this scorpion is blocking a lot of uh Let's try that. We'll see how it looks. Um I don't know what. No, it's a plugin, so I'm not entirely sure how it works, but you have to install it. Search up um Blood 2 Flaming Pear. There's a free trial. But even to buy it, I think I bought it ages ago. It's like it's not expensive and it's it's worth it if you want to have water in your scene. You can do water manually, but it's just so time consuming and it just this gives you a lot more realism. Although that doesn't really look how I hoped. I wonder if I go into the sunset. Wonder if I do it on just this actually and take the rocks out the equation. I want like a Yeah, maybe that's better Hey Andrea, how's it going? Highlight to the right leg of the scorpion which meets the cave. Okay, right leg. was doing something. Yeah, Flood 2. It's a plugin for Photoshop. It's thinking about it. Let's see if I can pop this in. Where's my C Huh. That's uh Yeah, that's better than I thought. Uh actually, no, that is that's Yeah, I'll take that. I'll take that. That works enough. I can always go back and drop in more C if I need to, but that's cool. And um we'll call it water. And then we'll go to curves. We should be able to boost the contrast. And then what we'll do is we'll go and add exposure again because there'll be some parts where there'll be shadows cast obviously by monster scorpion. So some of these bits Yeah, And then I wonder if I could add some like punchy highlights to it to make it even more intense. Like there's a sun reflection in the water. Yeah, there we go. Just brush over a few of those waves again. Overlay just to pull out the sunset in the And then maybe here as well where the spider is what spider scorpion isn't blocking as much of the light. So before flat, after dramatic, and the sky feels a bit more muted. Oh, I think that's all right for now. Yeah, I don't want to overthink it just yet. Uh, what did you say, Rael? right side of the pinser or something. I think pair with the sunsets top notch. Hey, thank you, dude. Andrea does these amazing um pieces of photography with Oh, I'm going to sound like an idiot now. I can't remember the technique where you what is it like long exposure and you sort of whip whip fire around and everything uh in different shapes. It's flipping awesome. You should definitely check out his work on Instagram. It's absolutely stunning. So beautiful as well. Very clever and not something not something I've ever seen before actually. Scorpion his um Yes, Raquel, you did say about shadow for this fella. Spartan. So, we'll go exposure, darken it down This is really tricky, this bit, because you got the shadow being cast and you got lots of rock as well. So, it's very tricky sometimes to know how the shadow will then fall over the rock behind. So, I'm kind of just going to really make it up. And for a lot of stuff like this, honestly, you could probably get away with it. Just generally around the feet, as long as you darken some of the rocks and because the shadow would zig and it would zag over all the rocks. As long as you kind of got those contact shadows around the feet, you could probably get away with that. Do you know what I mean? It's definitely something very odd about the water that's not quite right. But I think the scorpion something looks off with the scorpion. think he might have to be a bit darker Oh yeah, there we go. Little bit of gamma correction. We've got to add splashes and other details as well, I think. Is he standing? No, he's in the water. He's creeping out the water like a right creepy old scorpion light painting. Okay, cool. On the right side where it meets the stone. This bit here. Is that what you're thinking, Rao? the sting. Oh, sorry. Like round on the right side parts of the sting I do feel quite dark. Come on, Photoshop. Keep going. Yeah. And this is a constant backwards and forwards. this little dance like like Raquel said earlier, take time away from it. You take time away and you'll come back and see things that you didn't see before. Photoshop is struggling. We are at that point now. It's going to end up in the nightmares tonight. Oh no. I could put the friendly eyes back in where he had a really nice kind face. We need some fog as well. I like fog. Uh fog, fog, fog. What color is it going to be? You want to sort of pick a a color from the like hue? So, we could we could actually do like a very rich. I usually use like whites or light colors, but let's try it with something a bit different. We're going to go for 2% on the flow. Just brush this in. Got to get this layer in the right place. That's the wrong layer. fog. Let's call it fog as well, just so I don't forget. So, we'll move it up. So, this is going to be for the background stuff. So, we can do this and just brush in loads of fog. Lots of fog like rising a bit on the left and right, but not too much over the rocks here. So, keep that more to the background. And then we'll do the same but in front. So we'll duplicate this nice and high. And for this one, we could just brush in loads of mist and fog, but I'm actually going to use a brush because I've got some pretty swanky fog brushes. And if you've not used brushes before, obviously they're a secret weapon for this sort of work. So, we could find a nice one. Maybe this. We can just stamp in some fog. Now, obviously that's way too strong, but it just adds like some flipping atmosphere to it. Uh maybe this one here. This is like a bottom So, we could add that down We don't want to overdo it because you can definitely overdo it. I'm going to do that. But there's a lot of variety here. So, it's worth playing around. So, this one. So, we'll stamp it in at like 50% and then uh actually no, let's go 10. Yeah, there we go. So, look at the difference. Before, after. Just gives the whole scene some like atmosphere. And it's so simple. CS2. Yeah. Honestly, the thing that there's so many tools, but the thing that excites me so much about all this is it's like a lot of what I'm doing here might look really difficult, but it's it's so much easier than people realize. Yeah, exposure's still not too bad. He's he's drifted a little bit out. I might just darken his shadows a tiny bit. Maybe the mids. Oh, what other effects can we do? This is the sort of icing on the cake. You got to save this to the end really, but it's easy to pile in the effects and it can you don't want it carrying the design too much. Um, right. What else do we have in our atmosphere? Dust particles. Oh, make them white and go to overlay and they will blend into the colors in the image. So if you want a few little dust particles in there, you can do we could make that super subtle. What else? I'm probably forgetting something really cool. And you could even do some of these as Oh yeah, it really does care. There's a few key things that just once you stick it in, it's like, oh wow, it like levels it up. Snow. We don't really need snow or rain. Lightning. Don't really need that either. Stardust. Oh my god. Let's just try it. Let's just for fun. That's disgusting. Let's uh Let's not stamp that in. Yeah, we don't need lightning. Water splashes. Ah, these will be useful. This might work here. I've got think I've got a better splash brush. Probably want this over here where he's sticking his pinser It'll probably be the first of many because you kind of want the ripply bits where the claw is connected to the Uh, that's not going to work, is it? So, quite low. Let's take that. Oh no. Whoops. That has to go there. Let's see if we can blend if I one of these. Good for water. That's fine. Don't want to go too hard on transparency. Let's try hue saturation. Clip it. Colorize. Bump the saturation. car. I think my computer is starting to chug a little bit. I might have to stop soon. And it's also been like a long Yeah, I don't know. I could come back to that, I think. Or maybe levels. Sometimes it is just a case of finding the right adjustment layer and then it's like, ah, there we go. the right side of the rock on the top left. Yeah, you go for it. This bit Yeah, you go for it. What What technique would you use? I think at the minute that's just an overlay. Just a soft overlay. Oh, I know. I know what I want. I want some like dirt blowing in the wind or Um, what was it? Yeah. Yeah, this is what I want. Stuff I can just add some atmosphere. Whether it looks good or not, I don't really know. Could add a little bit of motion blur. So like it's blowing in a particular So just static before. Oh, that's Yeah, that is it. That is it. Um particles. Yeah, that's way better. What was the other thing I did? Yeah. So, overlay and then duplicate it. And we could even duplicate it a third Set it to normal. Then drop the opacity down. So before the splash slip a bit crap, I don't like We'll come back to some of that. And the water. Wow. Water looks weird. What we doing, Dan? What are we doing? Ah, there we go. That makes a bit better. Yeah. Oh yeah. Look at that. Way better. Just some of the vibrance coming out of it. That is so much better. Just a little bit on the temperature as Yeah, it was just too punchy and saturated before compared to the top of the scene. There's a lot more shadows to do though. If you did want to give me some tips on the rim light on the top left, I'd love to hear it. yeah, more shadows. Scorpion. It's water, isn't it? Let's use curves just to mix it up a Yeah. So, this is a problem, right? When you get this I see I this I get this all the time and I see it all the time. You got very very dark down here because we did lots of shadows but then the water's not dark. It's doesn't doesn't match. It's weird. Soon as you do that, you can see there's much more synergy between the thing in the water and the water. we can leave that for some of the darkest parts and then just go and brush back in those lighter areas and then keep the shadow around there. Yeah, much better. We'll leave that. No, that's fine. This bit here again, too light. Just looks It's got that weird outline that I'll fix as well, but it's it just doesn't doesn't look right. So, probably shouldn't add any more adjustment layers, but I'm just going to add one and just make it as dark as I need to so I can fix this bit here. You still up. Still up. forgot he was…

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