20 Photoshop Tips, Tricks & Secrets for Architecture

In this video, we're gonna talk about 20 tips, tricks and secrets in Photoshop that I wish I knew them when I was starting. And if you consider yourself an advanced user, don't worry, I'm pretty sure there'll be some interesting ones in this list that will improve your workflow. If you're new around here, I'm Oliver and here we talk about architectural representation and visualization stuff, so don't forget to subscribe to not miss out on future content. And now, let's not waste any of your time and jump right into the video. Okay, so initially I intended to make a list of 50 tips, tricks and secrets, and I actually wrote all of those 50 items, but the video was getting too long. So if you liked this one and would like to see a part 2 of this video so that I can continue the list, please let me know in the comments below. First up, and I'm pretty sure you've been using the alpha channel the wrong way, this image usually comes with your render, if not, make sure to activate it, and here's how to use it correctly. Select all with Ctrl A, copy with Ctrl C, then go to the channels tab and create a new channel. If you have RGB, red, green and blue here, which you should by default, the next one will come as alpha. Then simply paste here the alpha image you just copied, and if you want to select the white, Ctrl click on the thumbnail, and finally work with it as usual. If you click with Ctrl in a mask thumbnail, you will select the mask content, Alt allows you to see what has been drawn, and Alt click again to go back to normal, and then Shift disables the mask temporarily, which is very useful. Now, if you click with Ctrl in a layer thumbnail, you will select its content, as you would expect, but Alt and click will zoom into that layer, which can be pretty handy to find what you're looking for. When you're working with a low-quality tree that isn't transparent, and you try to remove a white background, or any background to be honest, sometimes there are those white pixels left in the image. You can fix that, or at least minimize it by going to layer, matting, the fringe. Now, it's not always that it removes the white completely, but it can certainly clean up a bit of the edges if you're in a hurry. This one is short, but pretty useful. Hold Ctrl when clicking to create a new layer, that will create one below the current one instead of above it. This is useful when you have a cutout and want to create a layer to add shadows for example. Now, let's say for example you rendered an image that has a concrete precast wall, or even a concrete flooring, but the material didn't come looking that great from the render. You can overlay a concrete texture on top, adjust the perspective using the distort option with the transform tool, and then set the blend mode to multiply, which will get rid of the white pixels and only show the black ones. If the grey part of the texture is altering the concrete look, you can rasterize it and use the levels adjustment to make it more contrasty, making the grey turn into white, so that it doesn't show when you change to multiply blend mode. Here, I'm just doing a small section, but I often use this technique to give details to all of the concrete or metal or any material in the image at once. There's a tip later in this video that will show you how. On the same idea, you can add imperfections to metal, not only using the multiply blend mode, but the screen blend mode, to get rid of the black pixels. Again, if the texture is altering the overall look, use the levels adjustments to turn the grey pixels into black. There's an amazing feature in the move tool, it's called auto select. Leave it unchecked, and then whenever you're working and want to select a layer that you haven't named, or there are just too many over your layers tab and you don't know which one is which, hold ctrl with the selection tool, the auto select will enable, and simply click on the object. That is pretty useful. Alt plus left click on the visibility eye to isolate one layer, do what you gotta do on that layer, and then alt plus left click again to go back and show all of it. A pro tip I can give you is to master the brush tool. It's probably the most used tool in post production. The essential moves are, with the brush tool selected, alt plus right click and drag left or right to increase or decrease the size, and then up or down to make it harder or softer. And also, if you hold alt, you can eyedrop a color. It's all about making your workflow faster. Okay, now let's say you want to change the color of a material in your image. Instead of manually selecting the object, make sure to enable the render elements in your render engine, so that you get this type of image alongside with the final rendered image. This colored image can drastically improve your workflow. Just make sure you place them below your render, for example the material id here. I usually leave it at the bottom of the layer stack and make sure they are aligned in your photoshop file. Then, using a magic wand, and in the actual material id layer, click on the color you want to select. Pretty useful, right? By the way, this is the tip I was talking about back then when we added more details to concrete and metal. But you can go one step further here. You can select all of the same instances of that material if you uncheck the contiguous box here. Still talking about selections? Here's a good one. If you hit Q with something selected on canvas, you go into a quick mask mode. It makes everything that is not selected red, and then you can use a brush to continue that selection, painting where you want the selection to expand. Then when finished, hit Q again to see the resulted selection. When placing cutouts in an image, make sure to use the ruler, Ctrl R to activate it, so that you know more or less how tall each person has to be. They should all fall with their eyes close to the horizon line. In Sketchup, for example, you can see where the horizon line is, so it's easy to bring over to photoshop. If you draw the vanishing points, you can also see where the horizon line is, because the vanishing point is always placed on the horizon. Using this horizon line will only work if you actually place your camera, back in 3D, around a person's height. Which, most often than not, you should. Obviously, there's some variation between taller and shorter people, and even children, but that's a good start. When there's moving cutouts in a scene, usually they are supposed to be blurred, so go to Filter, Blur, Motion Blur, and set the direction that the person is moving. Change the value, and hit OK. And make sure you're applying this on a smart object. Smart objects are layers that cannot be altered, you can scale them back and forth without losing quality, and there's no guides here on when to use them, but as a general rule of thumb, all images inserted will come as a smart object, so don't rasterize it until you actually need to alter the pixels. To convert a smart object to a normal layer, right click on it and choose rasterize it. Or to go the opposite way around, to go from a normal layer to a smart object, right click on it and choose convert to smart object. When we applied the motion blur to the cutout that was a smart object, it came as a smart filter. And that's pretty good, so that we can come back later and modify the motion blur value. This is pretty handy so that you don't ruin images, and you can test out many values throughout the process. Overscroll. This one is something that, since I started using Photoshop, I craved for this option. You know when you zoom out and the canvas just gets centered and fixed up there? I don't like this. It's so useful to be able to pan around and make the corner of your canvas stay in the center even though you're zoomed out. That way you can still work around the edges without having a fixed position against you. To activate it, just go to edit, preferences, tool and check overscroll. Perfect, now we're talking. This is so helpful, especially when we're working with big formats. An example on why I like this is when I need to paint a vignetting on the sky and I actually work with my brushes outside of the canvas. This is just one of many examples. And last, but definitely not least, let's say you have a collage or even a render that you need a solid background with gradient or brush effects. A smart way to do this is to create a solid color under this icon here. I'm going to place it below our base image. And then I'm just going to create a simple mask here to better illustrate what I'm going to talk about. Then create a new layer on top, add all your gradients, brush effects and blend modes. And this is just an example on how to use this. Okay, be creative. There are endless options on how to enhance a collage sky. This is usually the way I do it. Now, usually layers of different effects make a nicer final result. Then you just finish up with a shortcut Ctrl Alt G to clip this layer to the solid color. Now if you need to change color, double click on it, choose a new one and hit ok. The last tip is actually more about the shortcut than the actual color. The Ctrl Alt G shortcut is so useful. Adjustment layers have it with a button. Or you can even alt click between the lines of a layer to clip the layer above to the one beneath it. Wow, many possibilities here. And you can even clip multiple layers to the base one. Now, clipping a layer is something that you should use constantly throughout a post-production process. Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed. This was a fast-paced video with loads of important info, right? Let me know in the comments below how many of those tips you already knew. And we can chat over there. And if you learned something, don't forget to give this video a like. It really helps a lot. And as always, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!