Design & Chill with Dansky

Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Heat. Oh, hello. Oh, sorry for the constant switch around today with times and things. Oh, it's been one of those days. One thing after another, but we made it. We made it. I'm here. I've been a bit unwell lately as well, which is really annoying because I never get sick. So, it's just a massive inconvenience. It's like gh got to deal with this now. But I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I think I might have ate some funny chicken or something. Or maybe it was the batter. I don't know. I left some butter out of the fridge for like a few days. I don't know if people do that. If that's normal, Raquel, do you do that? Apparently, some people do it. But I don't know. You know, when like one of you's one of you gets unwell and nobody else does and you're just thinking, I've got to have eaten something. I've done something wrong. But yeah, it's just annoying. Bit of an inconvenience. And then obviously you don't eat for a few days. You end up feeling pretty weak and tired. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But it's fine. It's all fine. Right. More ge wings. We we did we did have ge wings the other day. It was my friend Tim's birthday and uh he came round. We treated him to his first ever g wings and uh it was it was magnificent. And then I got sick the day after. It's definitely not the Gatwings though. Can't be. Don't you dare suggest it was the Gat Wings. Oh, XM Tech. We haven't even done anything yet. Oh, thank you. You absolute legend. Oh man, you're leaving me speechless. We haven't even started yet. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you. That is Yeah, that's made my day. It has. That really has. Wow. Okay. Well, thanks for joining the stream and uh I'll catch you in the next one. All right. Come on. Stop mcking around, Dan. We got some We got serious work to do, right? Biski. Right. Where are we? What are we doing? Photoshop. Yes, we're going to do Photoshop today. We're going to just muck around with a bit of um double exposure. I know a few of you want to explore that a bit more. I've done some of it, but it's not something I do like a ton. Um but it can look really cool. And uh I don't know, maybe some of you have done it more and you've got ideas and we can just kind of pile them in and see if we can make something. Also, by the way, these noise cancelling headphones are flipping insane. So, if I am shouting, like if I'm yelling into the microphone and I get a bit enthusiastic, please tell me just to calm the down, okay? Because I can't hear how loud I'm talking. Just heads up. Poppy did take care of me. Yeah. Yeah, she did. She been looking She been looking after me. Right, Silus? Why do I feel like I've forgotten something? A audio is working. Everything's You are very softly spoken today. I I got to be honest. I am quite tired. I'm quite tired. I'm sort of still uh just recovering from not eating for days and feeling a bit blleh. And then it's getting back. I actually took time off work. I know it's so bad. I actually stepped away from the laptop. Oh my goodness, they're coming for me. Um, what was I saying? Sorry, I heard a siren and then just lost my train of thought. Anyway, uh, double exposure stuff, right? So, there's a few different ways we can do this. You see this quite often with uh, portraits of people's heads. And I don't do this enough to have a solid process down. There's loads of tutorials you can watch online. I could go and sit and watch tutorials, but it's more fun just to kind of jump into it. I got a couple of couple of heads here. In fact, I'll show you. I just literally grabbed these like five seconds ago. Um, I'll show you one. Where did I I was mucking around the other day actually. Uh, double exposure. There you are. Oh, this is another image as well. Oh, this is a cool image actually. You know, I really like this one. We'll open that as well. Bit more sporty. Uh, yeah. So, here's a couple that I just kind of did mucking around. So, this was this was inspired by Resident Evil Reququum, a new video game that just came out. And so, I used AI to generate me a real life looking grace. Um, obviously the hair is all scraggly and everything, but it's that iconic shot of Leon from the the trailer and then he's kind of inside her shoulder. And that is the very quick scraggly look at how you can do it. Uh this is another one using the image that I just showed you. So we got sort of more sporty image outdoors and you got to you got to figure out where you want the the image to to sit as well. Like there's there's so much to it. It's the kind of thing that if you just grab two images, throw them together, and try to force it to work, it doesn't always work. Image selection is pretty key. Oh, I did another one ages ago actually. I don't know. Hang on. Let me see if I can find it. I don't know what the hell I would have called it. I think I'm either did it did it live or just randomly did it for funsies. What would I have called it? I've got my like massive streaming folder of all the stuff we do. But I have no idea what I would have called the damn thing. let's do a search. It was like a um a woman's head and then I sort of turned her I got rid of her hair and turned it into like a mountain. Oh, I'll have to find that later. It look really cool. I'm watching Zutropolis. What on earth is that? Is that a cartoon thing? Right. Um so yeah, there's a quick look at how you can do it. Let's Oh, what image do we want to use? This image is good because it's got a lot of clarity. It's clearly shot in a studio. This one's good. This is a little bit little bit blurry in places, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If we had to add in some additional hairs, that would be quite easy. We could draw in some hair because the head's black as well. It makes my life even easier. So, we could do that. And then maybe do a bit of hair drawing. Got this chap here. He's got dark hair as well. I mean, this one would be very easy to cut out. Or we could do a few. see what we see what we end up with. But we we need something to put inside their heads, which sounds incredibly weird, but we got to we got to think. So, is it just me or has she got an incredibly long neck? That is a that's a very long neck, isn't it? I'm pretty sure my neck's not that long. My neck is a lot more plump. try putting propaganda inside the head. I like that. Yeah, let's make let's make a political statement. I mean, yeah, that is, you know, you can be as creative as you like with it. You could get all sorts. You could get like pictures of newspapers and headlines and whatever and you could stick it in there. uh phones that you know too much phone usage or you could do all sorts of things. I think a nice place to start maybe uh we try and get like some sort of scene or a landscape or something. Maybe she's thinking about something. Oh, I wish I could grab some of my older work. I swear I've done some some other double exposure stuff. I just don't know where I would have put it. What an underwater scene in the Oh, how would we do that? We'd have to Okay, hang on. Let me just grab my my browser thingies and queue them up. Okay, so if we if we were to do underwater be a bit trickier, maybe some corals. Could we do that? Let's just type underwater and see what we get on Zodorish stock. We'll find her underwater. These are interesting. Oh, that one's where you've got the the surface of the water. That's really cool. And honestly, like if if any I I'm just kind of making this up as we go along. So, if anyone's got any ideas or you want to throw out there or you think, "Oh, Dan, that image there. Grab that." Honestly, you you shout it out and we'll um Oh, that's a nice one. Oh, I've used that before. Ah, that means it's free. Yeah. Redown for free. Pinterest. I mean, yeah. If you're on Pinterest, Reco, and you find anything, honestly, please do chuck it in the the old Discordian and I will I don't know why I said that. We'll have a look. My brain was thinking accordion, Discordian. No. Um, right. So, first thing we got to do is select our subject. Oh, we don't have to, but I'm going to. And we're just going to cut her out and then pop her back on a background. So, we'll go with like we'll go with white still just so it's basically the same, but she's cut out. And then I can add my water thing here. And this next bit kind of depends on the images you've got because as you can see this image here, the subject is very, very light and obviously she's got like a light skin color as well. So, different ethnicities and skin colors, hair colors. You can see the difference here between the the lighter tones and the darker hair color. Um, if she had blonde hair. So, light and dark, it matters because it will affect how images blend, but also what blending modes you need to use. So, you could That's kind of interesting. It's like the waves are crashing onto her face. So, what we could do is just pick a blending mode and then add a clipping mask. And you can sort of obviously it's a bit rough, but you can kind of get a sense of Oh, that's interesting. Actually, it's like her it's like she's she's filling up. She is like literally she's wearing like Oh, this could be kind of cool. Oh, there she's driving there. Let's bring it down. This could be really interesting, actually. Yeah. Where do you put it, huh? That's pretty cool. Oh, wow. I love that example in the Discord. That's very creative. Wearing water. Yeah, wearing water kind of kind of rolls quite nicely. Will the half water make this feel like a Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, like a sort of because what we could do is we could have the cut off there almost like she's wearing water. I really do like that. Then we could do something with the sky sunset or something. I don't know. Something pretty pretty awesome. But then as I think you might have said earlier, some sort of coral, some sort of sea life. The the blue is down here is just a bit boring. We could have a shark or something. Just something underwater. Okay. So that's that's option one. So let's just I guess we could look at other half and half images. So if we go find similar We got a little bit of little bit more of an idea of what we're doing. This one could be good because it's just got white above it. So, I could then add my own sunset in. Yeah, maybe a sunset. This one here has got some sea life. Let's Let's download them both. Actually, we'll try this one because it's got sky and it's got a bit of sea life. And then we'll grab this one as well. Then we'll look for a uh incredible sunset if we can find one. Right. I need some music. Oh, this is going to be fun. beer infected mushroom. Oh. Oh, beautiful. That's nice. It It's a long neck, right? Like, it's fine. I'm just saying it's a long neck. I looked at it like that and I was like, is this has this been stretched or Oh. Oh, look at that one. Oh. Skies on fire. I didn't even think that through. Then I just hit download. Sunset. It's a bit different. It's giving me Lion King vibes. If Lion King was set in the sea. Oh, grab that one again as well. God damn, you've been busy. Oh, I mean, or we could we could go um uh cosmic sky. Like we could go instead of sunset, we could go like cosmic stars and the moon. You are right. Yes, the orange and the blue could contrast flipping beautifully. This is also nice as well. Simple, but we could then add some stuff to it. Oh, that one. We'll save these. Right. What have we got so far? We got a few. I think finding the right images first is going to be pretty important. So, yeah, we'll throw this one in. Where's it gone? Okay. So, the water line's a little bit high there. Huh. I could try and squish it somehow. The other point actually would be the water around about the mouth right in the middle of the lips. I think that that could be an interesting point. That's all right. What do you reckon? Does it look weird? Or maybe maybe halfway up the nose. I quite like that. It's almost it's almost giving me sort of like mermaid vibes. Half mermaid, half not. I don't know. Do you use AI to connect the images? Uh, probably not. No. If there's a use for it, we can like we can explore it for sure. But you got the fishies. I like the you got the seabed and the coraly things. Let's just chuck a sunset in and see. In fact, it makes more sense to chuck it in here. There is a feature that I don't use very much. It's called sky replacement and I don't really use this. Let's Let's have a play. Anyone more familiar with this, please feel free to point out everything I'm doing wrong. Oh, it's got some built-in sunsets. Oh, this is good. This is really cool. Wow. Should have done this first. Oh, that's nice. Can I load an image? Huh? The multiplier is obviously going to affect this. That's pretty cool. Right. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take the color out of the subject. So, we'll add hue saturation, whip out the color just so we don't have skin tones and other things kind of impacting what we're trying to do. And this is very uh what's the terminology? It's very well exposed. Let's put it that way. So, we can go and play around with that. If we want to, we could go in and we could grab, say, these parts of the skin and we could darken it a bit, boost some of the highlights, just introduce a bit more contrast. and do this directly on the canvas. So you just click on this icon here and then it lets you just grab parts of the image. So we could lighten the hair. We could Whoa, that's weird. We could darken it. And obviously when we introduce more contrast or less contrast, it's going to adjust what you see. I wonder if we should get rid of the sky actually. What do we do? Yeah. What could we put in the sky? Let's uh let's just try this one. So, we'll chuck it in there. Wonder if there's a way to Oh, I mean, that is lovely. See, this is different now because we've got the this image over the dark hair. You'd use a different blending mode. Cool. There's something quite nice about the the sun going around the air. Quite like that for some weird reason. Get rid of the sky. Well, on this one. Yeah. S just making her face a bit like bluey. Wonder if it lets me just get rid of it or if we just go with a plain one. Let's try Let's just do this real quick. And this is just one one image as well. Doing it with water. We could try chucking some other images in. Let's close you down. Ah, this is quite cool. So, we could write. So, I'd probably keep her skin color for what's out the water and then desaturate it for under the water. Or not desaturate it, colorize it. So, turn it blue. So, we could hide that. And then we're just going to brush in blue under here. Yeah, there we go. Let's just try Something like this. That's random. I think we need some other images as well. Let's get some mountains and do just so we've got a few other bits and pieces. Oh, person on mountain. In fact, actually, if we're using her, let's go. Woman standing on mountain. If we could try and get someone like from the back so you can't see her face as if she's conquered a mountain, that could be pretty cool. Almost like she's remembering like something like that. She's remembering that time when she did that thing. Yeah. What about the angle there? So, we'll just pretend this is her but with her hair down. Let's chuck this one in. This could be quite cool actually. Just depends how it plays with her interacts with her hair. All right, let's grab everything. Hey something like that could work cuz it's not kind of encroaching on another part of the head. Then I wonder instead of a clipping mask, let's add a layer mask and try something. This might look a bit weird. Just that little bit of rock coming out. bit different. Maybe we combine them. looking out over the sea. And then we could do a little bit of grading on her to make her warmer. You go. Just warms her up a bit. Maybe a bit too much. The hard line's kind of throwing me off a little bit. Wonder if we can. Wonder if that will blur the line a bit. Yeah, there's something about the sun going around the air. I don't know why. It's just sort of drawing me to it. I want to soften that line. Yes, I have my Photoshop course pinned at the top of the chat. So, if you want to get started with Photoshop and get from beginner to well, the most advanced stuff I teach, there is a link and uh I will teach you Let's see if it stitches the water and the sky together. I'm hoping it will. Darn. Okay, let's try something else. Oh, there we go. That works. Just trying to soften that horizon line so it just blends a little bit softer Let's try a combination. Set one to overlay, one to multiply. Drop the multiply one just so it softens the blacks a bit more. Did I grab some mountains a minute ago? Did I imagine it? Passing on a hill. This is cool. Oh, I like this one actually. could do really something really interesting with this. Yeah, honestly, sometimes it is just trying a bunch of images. I almost nearly didn't do this. Yeah, I love how we've got this space to play with here because we could even go photo manipulation and we could stick a castle there or do some something else. This is almost like turning her into a mountain. Then we could bring her facial features. So we could bring her up here, take the color out, and then use blend if to do something cool like this. Love that. Whoa. gone zombie vibes now. How the hell did we trip, stumble, and fall into this? So, these are great because you can then try and find a balance between the texture of the rock and the facial features. Okay, let's see where this takes us. And we still got the blending modes as That could be quite nice. That is nice. That's a bit more bit more subtle. Bit more sort of muted. But look, I need a castle there or something. Something of some sort of meaning. erase the hair. Yeah. I mean, with this blending mode, we don't need to, but yeah, I think we could have the her head be the mountains. Get rid of this this bun on the back. God, I've got so many layers now. What have I done? Okay, we'll call that face details. Yeah. So, we're clipped, aren't we? I I need to select the mountain, don't I? Right. So, let's get rid of everything. And then we're going to gradually brush some of it back in just around here. We're not going all the way out here. No hard edges. Obviously going a lot more extreme here. And we could have some smoke or fog around the top of the head. clouds. Nice. And then we can move these around. Where's that sound? Can you hear the cat in the background? What's going on, Crumble? Oh my god, the door's open. It's freezing. Yes. Oh, good. H how's it go? Yes. Hello. I made woman with Mountain Head. How you feeling, Mr. D? I'm all right, Gary. I'm Batman. Spoiler. Think Bruce soon, right? Castle. Castle. Castle. Castle. Shut up, Gary. I've been dying over here, man. That could actually I should know. Oh, this one. Let's get some good ruins. I got to make sure we don't muck up the layers. actually, no. What on earth am I doing? What am I doing? Dan, you idiot. So, this is where it sort of we're bringing in some of the compositing skill that we're skill that uh we do in the courses and that you've seen me do a gazillion times over. So we'll try and composite this properly inside the smart object and then when we bring it into the main document it will look just like one image. So we'll stick it there. What's the position like on that? Ah, totally wrong. I don't want to move the rest of the image because it's looking great. yeah, the mountain position's right. So, I've just got to keep adjusting this. There we go. That's a bit better. A little bit bigger. Bit more central. Some of the detailing on this one gets a bit lost. We don't want to go and do all of it. Make sure we don't get too close. Do we keep the ear have it lodged in the mountain or do we And then we could just just run this over just a couple bits of the beaches, eyes, nose, and mouth just so we can see it. That looks really nice. This is a bit dark down here, but I'm going to always adjust the exposure on that. Thanks. All right. This feels a bit like I need something else though. Clouds. Yeah, we'll keep the background light. probably need to try and move everything into the middle. Yeah, that's a bit better. What else can we do? Like smoke coming up or something? Maybe more clouds. Actually, I've got quite a lot of hog. I mean, I wasn't planning on doing that, but I actually quite like the way it runs through across the whole image. Birds. Yes. Very good. Little bit much. Oh, that's more like it. Yes, I like that. That's subtle. We could have one there as a background. this one up here. I swear I've got some other cloud brushes somewhere. Maybe these ones. Oh, these are nice. Look at that. So, we're brushing back in to the mask. got an idea. Some of this has gone a bit flat now. Let's just try and bring just a little bit more contouring back into the rocks. So, just darkening some of those mid tones just so the whole thing looks a bit less less flat. That's better. Let's get rid of that bit of hair as you come from. Someone else said birds as well. The eye needs popping. Yes, you're right. It's not too bad. I like the cracks as well. It's almost like it's like there's a scar. Have I got any birds? Please have birds. Yes. That's That's too many birds. That's like an army of birds. We don't want that. Drop the opacity just so it makes it look like they're behind fog. Not the best birds, but I'm not sure what to do here. with this castle thing. Hey, thief. You got a airplane flying past. All right, let's try and go around. See, we got this sort of double edge here. It's because we've got the original under here. No, that's no good. Done. That'll do. Then we've got rid of the hair. Mountain goes up. What else can go on top of the mountain? Unless we get rid of the land down here. If I can't find something meaningful to go in that space, it's it's a it's a long neck. What we could do actually is we could bring some more details in the her as a whole, shoulder details and things. So, we'll start there. Then, we're going to use levels to drop the mid tones. We're going to boost the highlights a tiny bit. Bring the shadows down. This is going to create more contrast with the contouring around the neck and the shoulder. Then we can try and blend that in. So you see here we've now got some of the the collar bit of the skin texture back in. And we can choose where we want that to appear as well. So I could do it there, bit there. Maybe a little bit. So, we're just bringing back definition in select places. Could even do it around the face. So before after. It's my strong head. It's a long way to climb that neck. Could add some color here. Where did I desaturate it? I mean, there you go. Yeah. Even bringing back it the color back into the the rocks looks kind of cool. Although it sort of loses its color halfway off. So I've obviously got some sort of adjustment layer or something in play that is affecting the color. Yeah, I actually quite like a little bit of color back in there. Black and white is quite good because it's less complicated. It sort of loses the color here. Oh, I don't know. Maybe that's part of the image actually. No, that's part of the image. Yeah, it's a bit warmer over this side and it's less so here. So, that's that's fine. Let's get rid of those clouds. I mean, one thing I love trying is it's just fun. This color look up. Some of these can just give like a I mean, look at that. Yeah. Just changed it and given it a totally different feel. I love that way more. What's that first one? Two strip. Yeah. Think of these as like color profiles or presets. And sometimes you can just pick one and it just it just fits. Drop the blues. That's quite nice. This almost looks like an album cover or something. We could actually make up a fake band name as well. That's nice. Fall colors gives it sort of a slightly more warmer autuminal feel. I haven't even thought about gradient maps, huh? Let's try a gradient map because these can be flipping cool as well. So, black and white. Maybe we go for like a dark purpley color. We'll throw in um reddish orange. And then we'll chuck in a yellow or something. Creamy beige yellow. And then what it does is it maps these colors to the shadows, mid tones, and highlights. So you can fine-tune them. Oh, flipping it. You could obviously go very wild with Oh my goodness, that looks insane. That's like molten lava or something. The broine leaked out of her head. Yeah, that's really cool. Blender 2. I don't know. I've just gone a bit bit off the rails now. Gradient maps can be a lot of fun though. And you can obviously set this back or use a blending mode on it. Right. This uh castle looks a bit bit rubbish. So, we need to properly composite this now. The placement's good. I'm going to make it a bit taller. Bring it down. so I think we'll have it running here. And it's the edge is a bit hard at the minute. So we're going to soften the edge. We're going to contract it by a pixel. So it just creeps in. And then we're going to feather it by half a pixel. And then we're going to just get rid of everything around the outside. And it removes that hard edge. It's just a bit softer now. I feel like I want a giant bird there. Like in Dark Souls 1, you got a crow. I want a crow. Snuggly the crow. Anyone? Any Dark Souls fans? The giant crow on top of the ruins. That's a flipping great shot. Might even match the angle. Oh, we've done it. We've done it. Photoshop's going to absolutely smash this selection. Snuggly the crow. There we go. Right, let's duplicate this. Let's whack our giant bird in. What do you reckon, Carrie? Okay. I mean, actually, this crow and this ruin would make a fun thing in itself. Yeah, that's a win. So, now we got to sort his feet out. We want to make him look like he's sitting on there, which it almost does. So, we're going to go and grab puppet warp. His foot's good. So, we're going to keep the placement there. We're going to keep his posture upright. Didn't expect to be talking about a crow's posture this evening, but here we are. And then what we're going to do is we're going to grab this foot and we're just going to move it and puppet warp it so it looks as if he's grabbing on to the rock. We could do shadows there, but it's pretty dark anyway, and we don't really need to. And here's I don't like the way I'm getting a bit designery here. This feels a bit too sharp and fake and weird. So, I'm gonna give him some tail feather surgery. I'm sorry, Snuggly. And it's just a I don't like the way it's touching the castle. So, call me call me a fussy pants, but I'm changing it. It's my crow and there's nothing you can do about it. There we go. Just so there's like a little gap there. Could even like that. Yeah, that looks good. What are you doing over there, Janet? Get out of there, Janet. There's a giant crow. And I think this looks cool. It looks a bit stark the way it's just castle and nothing. So, I feel like I need some ruins. I need more castle ruins. that could go in the background. I need small ruins. This might work. I do think I can work with that. Screw up our little muscle. Uh, I'm going to grab a bit more. Actually, let's grab a little bit more of this. I quite like these these rocks down here. Just quick select them. Copy and paste to you. name our layers. We got mini castle. Right. So, I think compositing wise this is pretty easy actually because obviously the exposure is totally off. But if you've enrolled in my course or you followed these streams, you'll know that we can fix that pretty easily. That's a subtle little promo there. Did you like that? I got to I got to try and get it in there somewhere. Kind of fits the contours of that bit of land there. And what else was I going to do? Oh, yes. I had more, didn't I? More landscape to go behind maybe. Or maybe we just put sandunes behind or a forest or something especially interesting. Also, we're going to give this album and this artist the name. So, think up album and artist names. Let's say this this is going to be a a singer. She's a solo singer. She needs a name and an album name. We'll turn it into something something proper. And then we're going to Bump the offset. Fade that into the background a bit more. Desaturate it to whip out that that punchy color. This might look awful, but we'll see. Diana, we're in the mountains. almost connect. This one here is should be straightforward. You can see this is a bit more greeny. So, we'll call this mini castle. What we're going to do is grab color balance. Introduce just a little bit more green. Not too much. Yellow is a good shout as we also need to hue saturation. We're going to take the color here I'm going to make the grass a little bit more dead grass color. Desaturate it We're going to get rid of the sign here with the remove tool. Oh yeah, definitely join the Discord. We're all bonkers and lovely anytime I catch a stream. Hello. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, the Discord's amazing. It's free to join and uh if you get stuck, just give us a shout. We're all in there trying to help each other. right? We're just doing this the sort of very quick and lazy way at the minute because once it's blended, I don't think anyone's going to notice that at all. Now, the light is coming from this right side and there's no light here. So, we've screwed this up already. Now, we're going to have to fix it. So, we're going to bump the exposure on this right side. Nice soft brush. We're going to mirror this castle by brightening this side up Actually, this one's still got I think in the highlights it's got a bit too much red. and we'll darken it ever so slightly. Yeah, we could obviously spend ages retouching that. We will need to add some shadow in there though because if we've now added a light source and we're trying to be logically consistent. We are going to have to be consistent. So shadows exposure make it nice and dark. Going to go with a low flow value. And just brush in brush. There we shadows being cast. And then there's some shadows over here as well. This area is all a lot darker down into these little crevices. In fact, let's move this up above everything else. Actually, no. We'll keep that one there, but we'll do another one for the castle. darken part of that interior. You see it's subtle, but these things completely flip the lighting from flat to slightly more cinematic. little highlight coming in over here and shadows in here. Right. Same for this one. And if we're darkening it, we've got to think as well actually that this one here might be blocking out some of the light. So there might be a bit more shadowing on this one naturally. Anyway, yeah, I mean, when you we're we're retouching it pretty quickly because when you zoom out, it's like the tiniest detail. So, there's no point spending forever on it. I got some fries to eat. H. Yes. Okay. So, you can use black to brush in your shadows. Um, sometimes, and the reason you got to be careful with black, I see this a lot with product shots as well, is how do I illustrate this? Let me try something. So, let's say you've got a yellow background, right? I need a thing. Okay. Now, don't ask why I have an image of an egg. That's irrelevant. The the point is that if we going on a tangent now, we have this on the yellow and we pick black as our color, like proper solid RGB black. The thing is when when a shadow is cast from an object onto let's say a yellow surface, say this is like a yellow studio. I'm just laughing. X god no Paul no. So you've got a shadow that is being cast on a yellow background. So what happens is the shadow is usually obviously very dark in places but they're not necessarily black because the shadow is resting on the yellow surface. it's going to adopt some of the color from the yellow. So having a and yellow is the worst example because your black shadows on on yellow just can look really horrible. Other colors you'll get away with it So you you can end up with this very murky color. So, if you're going to brush in your shadow, what you want to do is not go for yellow like this because you end up with sewage color. Go for a slightly warmer color and bring it up from black. So, not black, sort of brownish, maybe a little bit more. There you go. You see the difference there? So this brown represents the shadow being cast, but also then that shadow being fused with the color yellow. So you do get like a slight bit of color in a lot of shadows. The problem though is if you change the background color. Let's go to blue. You can see I've still got that color that was based on yellow. So now my shadow doesn't work. If you use an exposure adjustment layer, you can do curves and levels, too, but exposure is really easy. So, let's say we do our shadow with an adjustment layer. There we go. There's our best best ever shadow. Not really. It's terrible. What we can do now is this doesn't kind of interfere with color at all. So now I can go in and I can change the background color to anything and it's always going to work. So sometimes I would brush in with a specific color as long as I know the background and all that stuff isn't going to change. If it could potentially change, use an exposure adjustment layer because then if you change the background color or whatever, it usually won't change anything. Maybe the egg should Maybe this needs to be a nest. Come on, Dan. We can find a use for the egg. Had to go make it weird, didn't you, Dan? I mean, eggs aside, this is actually turning out really well. I'm quite surprised with this, considering there was no plan right before the stream on what exactly I was going to do with it. Go so far as to say it's excellent. Get out. If I just Oh, I've actually Yeah, obviously I dumped that in there and broke all my adjustment layers. I mean, why not? Let's just stick some eggs in the the castle nest thing. This is just It's all gone a bit weird now. Definitely making my life harder. Let's just go around the bushes really quickly. What am I even doing? Eggs. H eggs. Oh, I thought you were bringing me food. No, it's my food. Savage. It's okay. It's not okay. Okay. What's not okay? I still love you. Then why don't you feed me? That's all right. Told everyone that we're going to Korea. Uh I don't know. Have I? I got an idea. I might have mentioned it once or twice. Yeah. Well, uh but but from the 1st of April to the 12th will be 10th or 12th. one of those numbers. But me and Pops will be in South Korea. So if anyone's in, we'll be staying in Soul. So uh if anyone is around and wants to say hello, we will be lurking in Soul. We know nothing. That's basically it. Trying to learn the basics. Trying trying our very best. Let's make this egg a bit smaller. Stick that back there. That's so weird that you just said you've got eggs and I'm cutting out an egg. I know. That's why I said it. Crazy, man. Mad world, eh? What are the odds of that? Slim to none, I'd say. Excellent. We've already done that joke. What's in here? Come up with something original. Feel like I'm gonna get told off in a minute. Raquel's gonna be like, "Don't you I was gonna try and do a Portuguese accent now. I thought it nearly came out Scottish. There we go. We've got some eggs. Sorry, Raal. You're now Scottish, by the way, FYI. Don't even know why I've done two to be honest. But anyway, let's let's move past this because we we haven't got a name. We need a name for whatever we're going to call this album thing. more exposure. Much much darker. Just going to brush in some and do another one over here. So these these this exposure adjustment layer can be really good for contouring as well. So it can make things feel a bit more round and spherical. This is very these eggs are very slap dash eggs and I've done a terrible job cutting out this here. But it's fine. Let's just color balance them quickly. Hopefully no one notices. There we go. Random. I think this castle turret I want to move a bit closer. It's just annoying though cuz I've done all the shadows on it. So, it's a bit of a pain in the ass. move it in front. Yeah, that's that's sort of okay. Just Where's the other shadowing? Oh, that's not too bad. Yeah, I mean normally I would say like get obviously get everything in place before you start brushing in shadows for things that because if they start moving position afterwards, it's just going to it's going to [ __ ] it all up really. And then we've got more birds up here. A little more more crows crowing. Right, we need a name. We need a name for this music artist. Someone said Diana earlier, which could be quite nice. We've also got to think where on earth we going to put the text. I've gone off the mini castle. Damn it. That's unfortunate. Let's just add some some here. That's all right. That looks pretty good. There you go. A little bit more contouring on this one. So, just some more shadowing here. It's just going to make the whole thing just like this wall here. Just darken that down. It's just going to make the whole thing feel a bit more dramatic. And the birdie as well, he needs a slight color adjustment. Diana Crow. We're just going to make up an artist. Oh, I don't know. Let's um I mean, what do we think as far as double exposure goes? I feel like that's turned out pretty well. Uh but let's make them a little bit more pronounced. Diana Plowski Now, let's just type the word Diana. Diana Reed just came into my head for some reason. And then we need a name for this album. I feel like I'm not going to get a sensible name out of you. Diana Ski Exki, come on. We need a serious name. Birds of I don't know. Let's Let's try Let's uh What could we do with the text? We could We could float it over here. It's a bit of an odd Let's try and like figure out where to put it. Die in the sky. I That could work. Die in the sky. I just love this font. I got to stop using it because it's just too nice. That is just amazing. Bev uh Bevas. Diana I'll look at fonts and you can uh continue coming up with excellent names. Albert sands the different weights. Yes, we do. Yeah. Where the text is going to go as Cuz I mean you could have it fill the whole the whole thing and then try and blend it. We could we could just have Diana to be So something like that and then sample something like a Diana Long Neck. Andrea, get out. Dear me. so we could do that. Duplicate it and flip it around that. Set that to overlay. I mean, this is kind of cool if I do this correctly. I've done this in a while. So, you can move it around. We cover this in the Photoshop course as well. link to the top of the chat. So then you can freely pick fonts and move it around. Where you go over the image, you see the texture. Where you're outside, you don't. Yeah, I don't know. I might have to think on I might have to think on that Con consonant neck. Yeah, I might have to think on that one for the name and the text. I mean, you could you could do something really simple like uh you know that's your album name. And there's your artist name. And you could just rest it in that space. That's probably the the easiest way to do it. I'm sure there's more fun we could have trying to blend things in. But yeah, I'm going to put I'm going to put a pin in the text for now actually one thing I will do is I used to add camera raw filter to finish off with the effects but Adobe have actually added clarity and ga grain into the adjustment layer. So, I've sort of found that I don't really need it anymore. And I do I love a little bit of grain. So, let's look at this is quite cool. Let's add loads of grain. And then clarity. Yeah, you can bump this up so you sort of get the same effect. So, I don't really need to use camera raw as much anymore. Oh, that was a good rhyme, Dan. 50 points to Gryffindor. yeah. So, I just I love a bit of clarity and a bit of noise. It's just like it's just a there's the original and then it's just like a really cool finish and it just makes some of the details and the textures pop out a little bit more. Maybe maybe go 20. Don't want to go and overdo it. Just one other thing that might not work and make sense, but might look cool. I'm just going to just going to try it anyway for fun. black screen and then we're going to go lens flat. This probably isn't going to make any sense if you want it just blasting through the gap in the in the rocks. I don't know. Could could just make it a little bit more dramatic. Not really necessary though. But Oh, hey Jason. I'm glad you are liking it. Bring back Princess Pickle. Which one's Princess Pickle? Am I Princess Pickle? Forgotten who Princess Pickle even is. You're Princess Pickle. Am I Princess Pickle? How can I bring her back if I'm me? What was your Discord name? Oh, yes. Sorry. You're right. Princess Pickle. I have actually just had another idea before we finish this one. Uh, I'm going to add a texture princess pickle. That is my alter ego. Oh, just flipping brilliant. Well done, Dan. Oh. Definitely definitely earn yourself a biscuit. So, this is going to just make it look even better. We got like a really nice bit of texture. Oh god, what what have I done? Look at that. It's almost not quite teastained, but just dirty. dirty kitchen cupboard texture. And we could and that's just multiply. Just blend it over the top. Bosch. Nice and easy. And then let's type in um grit texture or splats ink texture. I don't know. Actually, no. No, no, no. Dust. dust texture could be quite nice. Yeah, maybe maybe this one. This might be a bit much That's a great thing about this as well. There's just so many blending modes you can muck around with. Ah, no. That's just too much. It's too And then that one, I'm just going to dial it back to like 95%. I think that that does look nice. And then you just got that texture if you do want something a bit more subtle. And then I'm just going to make sure my adjustments are on top. So they need to be top of everything actually, just so the grain and the clarity affects everything below it. Huh. fire. There we go. That is that's that's it. So, uh yeah, that turned out right. We got a a mountain lady with a bunch of birds and some eggs inside a castle for some random reason. Oh yeah. Honestly, like uh adding texture to things when when necessary can be such a game changer. Yeah. I mean, I think in this example because because of the way I've set the layers up and everything, uh you know, the subject isn't cut out on every single one. And then you start adding background colors and it makes it can make things look a bit weird because you blend you've got loads and loads of blending modes going on. So as soon as you start changing fundamental things like the background, it can break some of the blending modes. And that's why I thought for this one, yeah, we've got white, which looks great, but it's easy to just plonk a texture right on top of the layer stack, pick a blending mode, and it blends into everything. That turned out all right. Well done, Dan. Go and have a cookie. Yeah, this was this was fun. This was really fun. I enjoyed this. You sure are, Princess Pickle. Mountain Dreams. Yeah, it was nice actually as well because it was it was bit of bit of double exposure stuff at the start but then actually ended up sort of photo manipulation as well. So sort of mixing those two things together. And that's the great thing about when you learn Photoshop is you can just like it it might look like a lot seeing all these adjustment layers and seeing me doing all this stuff really quickly, but once you learn like I'd say probably these uh hue, saturation, color balance, you don't really learn that, but it can be fun. Maybe gradient map and then these two here. And these ones are really simple. Once you learn how to use these ones here in particular, really well. A lot of the time when it comes to compositing and combining images together, you can think, okay, I've got this idea. I need to achieve this result. How do I do it? And so, it's just knowing what tools to use for what um result you want to get. We can make a competition about this technique. But what would be really fun would be to take a a real artist or something and take their latest album and then reimagine the cover art for it or Eroded Mind. That's interesting. I like Let's put Let's add that to my thing. Erodive mind, erosion of the soul, something like that. Oh yeah, I like the erosion idea. Okay, any questions before I go and move my legs? It has been. Yes, it's been completely abused. If it was possible to fall in love with a type face, then it's happened. I need to eat something. Oh, sorry. I haven't even said goodbye yet. I'm getting rid of the putting the mic over there. Right. Oh, thanks guys. Yeah. See you now. A thank you Jason and thank you XMT for the the super chat earlier. I really do appreciate that. Right, you lovely lot. Um, have a fantastic evening and I will see you soon. Bye.