5 Color Match Challenge - SCAI021

Hey there and welcome back. In this section, we've got a great composite for you. It only uses blending modes and levels adjustment layers to get this effect on. It's kind of a simple image, but I also really, really like it. Let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop. So here we are in Photoshop. This is the PSD, as you can see, downloaded. I really love this. It's just a beautiful photograph to begin with. And all I did was added this moon and this rocket ship. Okay. It's all using stock photos. So let's go ahead and show you here. I'm just going to get out of this. Go ahead and open up your sample images. So you have your person running. And again, kind of like the last section where we had the girl looking down into the ice, and then we added the hole there. This is kind of like a similar idea, right? When I think about conceptual compositing, I'm thinking about, okay, what are the people actually doing in this? For me, I found this image of a girl running through a field, really beautiful, light, everything fantastic. But what's she running for? What's she excited for? And then I was like, oh, let's put something like a space event or a launch event back there, make it otherworldly a little bit. And then she's kind of excited for it, right? So it's like, where is she going? What's the point of this? What is she looking at? Make that cool. So we're going to do it. Again, let's grab our move tool. Let's grab the move tool. And I've got this moon. We're going to click and drag right there. And then we've got this other image. We're just going to click and drag and hit F for full screen. Let's go ahead and close these out. F for full screen. Go to our layers panel. Okay. So we're going to go ahead and start with this moon. Now, really simply, we're going to just cut this moon out using the elliptical marquee tool. And you don't even actually have to use this. I could just make this blue a little bit darker and use the screen blend mode and it'll go away, but we're going to cut it out. So I'm going to go ahead and click and drag here. I'm going to hold the space bar to just allow you to move this elliptical marquee as I'm actually creating it. And I'm not necessarily even trying to make this absolutely perfect. I don't even know like if the moon, like, I don't think this is like a perfectly full moon. So I'm not holding down shift. I'm not trying to make a perfect circle here. There we go. Something like that looks pretty good. You can see I've got a little bit of space on around the edges. If I need to, I can always contract this selection a little bit later, but you can see there's, you know, just the moon and darkest. So here we have our layer one. Let's go ahead and click here on our layer mask icon. Boop. All right. We have our selection and then we have, there we go. It's a layer mask. Okay. Next thing we're going to do is, you guessed it, change our blend mode from normal down here to screen. Okay. Fantastic. Looking good. So we can kind of put our moon there. Now keep in mind the moon still has like, kind of like a blue sky color to it. You can even see a little bit of it there. So we have to use our levels adjustments to make sure that the color matches too. So up until now, we've used levels adjustments quite a bit for making things darker and lighter, but you can also use them for colors as well. Okay. So let's show you how to do that. So we've got our moon with a layer mask. It's set to a screen blend mode. We're going to go to our adjustment layers and go to levels. Levels are so powerful because you can adjust color, light, and dark. They're just, the more and more I use Photoshop, the more I just do most of my work with levels. They're so great. All right. Levels, clip it. We're going to click on our clipping mask icon. Remember, so it's going to push it over to the right. We got a little down arrow that's telling us it's only going to affect this moon. Okay. Let's double click right here on this levels icon, bring up my properties window. Okay. Now what we're going to do, we can take our, if you're not sure where you should get started, just grab each of these sliders, grab this one and move this to the left and see, does that actually help? Yeah, kind of does, right? Grab this middle one. Does it help to the left? No. Does it help to the right? Yeah, maybe a little bit. Grab this right one. Does this help? No, not at all. Grab this one. Does that helping? Nope. Grab that one. Is that helping? No, not really. So it's kind of like here, this is where we're going to be doing the majority of the work, right? So you can kind of like get that idea when you're in your RGB mode. Let's go ahead and reset that. But you don't necessarily want to do all the work in RGB. You want to first go to your red channel and pull that. Okay. So you can see it's pulling some of the reds out of the shadows. There we go. You're going to go to your green channel and we're going to pull that. Okay. Then we're going to go to the blue channel and then we're going to pull that. Okay. Somewhere around there. But see now what we have here, we're actually getting there pretty close, right? We have the moon starting to look pretty good. And you can see how it has a little bit of a yellow color. See before it looked like real blue. Now it's having that yellow color. Okay. We overdid a little bit. So we're just going to go back to our red channel. We'll just pull this back this way a little bit. There we go. Put a green channel, pull it back a little bit and go to the blue channel and pull it back a little bit. Okay. Somewhere right about there. There we go. Green channel. We'll just pull that black a little bit. Red channel was pull that back a little bit. All right. Cause I actually want this to kind of like be red. All right. It shouldn't have too much green in it. That doesn't make any sense. I want it to be kind of like reddish and yellowish. Right? So there we go. We're looking pretty good. The color of the moon starting to look pretty good overall. I would say in the sky, let's say here's a before see how it's much too blue. The whole moon itself, much too blue. And then the after, Oh, you've got like reds and oranges and stuff like that coming in. Right. Looking pretty good back with our levels adjustment layer. Let's go to our red channel. We're going to go to the other side now and see, it's going to make it a little bit darker. So you can see it's going to go ahead and push some, uh, pull. It's going to pull red out of the highlights. Does that help? Let's go to our green channel. That's looking a little bit good, right? Pulling a little bit of the greens out of the highlights. There we go. Let's go to the blue channel, pulling a little bit of blues out of the highlights. That's looking pretty good there. So we can see now it's just a little bit darker. Like the lights aren't as light. So we're kind of like matching the colors a little bit better. So you always want to think about colors when you're compositing because like it's the moon, right? But it's not like the before, you know, if you just set it to a screen blending mode, then you got a bluish moon. It's not gonna look good. See how much better that moon looks. It's not even there yet. Let's go back to that green channel. Pull a little bit of greens back in there. There we go. That's looking a lot better. Okay. And then keep in mind, you can go in here and you can adjust this at any time. Maybe just a little bit more. There we go. Let's see. Our green channel right over here. Fantastic. And back to our red channel. So this is, it's subtle, right? You're like, you could make these subtle adjustments. I like a little bit of red in that moon. See how nice that is with a little bit of red in there? That's looking really good, right? It's just like, ooh, it's nice. Let's take this moon, hit control or command T. We're just going to scale it up a little bit, right? Because I think my original, by the way, when I do this stuff, I'll always take my time on it. I'll do it and make adjustments on it and I'll do it again and again and again and again, right? So I think in the original one, I had the moon kind of like slightly under the horizon there. Okay. Let's do the same ish here. There we go. And I like to be zoomed out when I'm making my composites because I can, I can just get a sense of overall like shape and scale a little bit better. Okay. I think the lights of the moon are a little bit too light. So I'm going to make, I'm going to make the lights a little bit darker. So let's go to our red channel. Just bring the lights a little bit darker. That's how we do that with our levels right there. The green, there we go. And then the blue, there we go. That's looking pretty good. Okay. Now the next thing we're going to do, we're going to do a couple things here. We're going to go ahead and shift click the two of those layers. So we've got the moon and the levels adjustment. Let's just group that with itself. Okay. Then I'm going to go ahead and group this with itself and make that invisible for now. Okay. So we've got this one, let's call this moon, M O O N. And then this one, we're going to call a spaceship, spaceship. And then I'm going to shift click both of those and group them together. Let's go ahead and open up that group. And we're just going to call this composite. There we go. And in the composite group, this is where we're going to create a layer mask, right? Because let's go ahead and click on our layer mask. I don't want it to be visible below the surface of the ground there. Right? So let's hit L for our lasso tool. We're just going to go ahead and lasso that. There we go. I did not do a perfect job, but I'm going to fix that in just a little bit. Okay. There we go. Hold shift and you can add to your selection. If you want to hold alt or option, oops, uh, alt or option, and you can minus out from your selection there. All right. Not, not perfect here, but pretty good. Pretty good. There we go. Okay. Now I just want to blur the edge of this a little bit. So here's one of my favorite tricks, um, to feather the edge of a selection, right? Because right now, like, let's say here, just, I'll just include that right now. If I go to like here and I go to feather selection, I get this dialogue box, right? And I can be like feather by 30 pixels, but I can't even see anything. I'm like, I don't even know what I did. Like you can't see the change you do with feathering and who knows 30 pixels. I don't know that. Let me hit undo. Here's my tip. If you want to feather an edge and actually be able to see what you're doing. First thing is hit Q for quick mask. Okay. Q for quick mask. You can also click on this icon right down here. This is your quick mask mode. Okay. Just click on this. Boop. That's your quick mask. Now what that does is it changes your selection into what's called a quick mask, and you can apply a blur on a quick mask. Okay. So a blur on a quick mask is essentially the same thing as feathering on a selection, but I can see it, which is like, uh, thank God. Okay. So let's go to filter down here to blur and over to Gaussian blur, Gaussian blur. And now I can actually see the blur, right? I can see like, that's looking pretty good based on like how far away it is and like the other material that was going on in this image, right? Like that, that's good. And it's 13.4 pixels. And who would have known that? I have no idea. Okay. Let's hit. Okay. And then you just hit, click on this button again, boop. And it goes back to your selection. Okay. Or you can hit Q, Q, Q, Q, Q, Q. All right. Pretty cool. So now that we have this selection, I'm going to click on my layer mask. Okay. And I'm going to hit control or command I on the layer mask, just invert that area and then control or command D to deselect. So you can see now it's like, okay, it looks pretty good, right? All right. I think that's where we're in business. And then I can put the spaceship in there. No matter what I put in there, it's all going to be, uh, it's all going to look pretty good. In fact, I think I maybe blurted a little bit too much. So let's hit undo a couple of times. Okay. Q. Let me hit undo. There we go. Let's put the blur on there. 13. We'll just call it 10 pixels this time. All right. And then on my layer mask, just fill it with, there we go. There we go. Fill it with black. Looking a little bit better. Okay. Fantastic. Now we have this moon. It's looking pretty good. Pretty good all around. I would say let's click on the layer mask here. Okay. And we're just going to maybe just like bring the mask in a little bit. We're just going to contract this mask a little bit. So let's double click here on the mask. Okay. Which is going to bring up our, uh, our selected mask. Okay. Let's go ahead and zoom in there. Fantastic. And I'm just going to go to where it says shift edge. I'm going to just bring up my feathering a little bit, my contrast a little bit, and then I'm gonna shift my edge in. There we go. And that's looking a little bit better. The more you feather it, the more you can shift the edge, right? So you can see, I can shift the edge out right there, or I can shift the edge in. There we go. That's looking a little bit better and hit. Okay. So I just, basically you just double click on the layer mask and it, if this is the first time it might ask you, if you want to go to your layer mask properties or to your selected mass dialogue, choose the select mass dialogue. All right. Perfect. Now this layer in itself, this is the moon. It's supposed to be kind of far away. Right. Uh, and like, it should be out of focus. It's much too in focus, right? It doesn't look, look real, right? It's like, you know, that that's not how it works. She's in focus. This is out of focus. The moon's gotta be out of focus too. Right. So let's right click on this layer. We're going to make that a smart object. So convert that to a smart object. So we've got the moon with the layer mask already applied. Okay. I can double click on this and get back to my layer mask. If I need to, I have my levels adjustment that I can change at any time. And now I can go to filter blur, and I can go to gaussian blur. Where is it? Blur gaussian blur. There we go. And I can blur my moon. There we go. Perfect. I made it a smart object, which gives us the smart filters. I can turn this gaussian blur off or on at any time, and I can double click on that gaussian blur and I can change my blur. You know, if I decide later, like, Oh, that's not enough blur, too much blur, whatever it is. Okay. Now the cool thing is because I look at this, I have this moon and I have this spaceship and they're both in the same group called composite. So if I decide to move my moon, let's go ahead and just move this moon around. Right. I can move it. And it's always going to go under the horizon. Right. But look this, we got another thing we need to do. My subject should be behind my subject. Right. So that's, we're going to add that to the same composite layer mask. Okay. So let's go ahead and make that layer invisible. We'll click on our background and I'll just go to select subject, boom, select subject. Okay. And then on my layer mask for the composite group, we're going to go to edit down here, fill, and then we're going to fill this with black. Okay. Cause I made a selection of my subject and we want it to not be visible in this group. So we want to fill it with black and let's hit. Okay. Filled with black control or command D to D select. There we go. So if I hold alt or option and click on my composite, this is what it looks like. Okay. Alt or option. And I click on the layer mask for the composite. So this is basically the layer mask of the group that the moon is in this group and the spaceship is in this group. So anything that I put in here is only going to be visible where the white areas are, where the black areas are. It's going to be totally invisible. All right. Alt or option. Click on that again. All right. Let's add our spaceship. Cool. So this spaceship here, now we're going to take this layer kind of same like we did before, right? What we're going to do is change our layer blend mode from normal down to screen. Pretty cool already. Okay. We're going to grab our adjustment layers right over here. Let's go to levels. Boop. Okay. We want to make sure it's clipped. So we click on this clipping mask icon. We're always going to double check. Yep. Push it over to the right-hand side. It's down arrow pointing to there. Okay. Double click right here. That brings us back to our levels adjustment layer. Okay. And then we want to think, okay, what we got one, two, three, four, five little sliders. Which one do we want to change, right? Do we want to change our black point? Is that helping us out? Actually pretty good. Our midpoint, is that going to help us out? Yeah. That's actually helping us out a little bit too. Okay. Our white point, do we want to help that out? Nope. That's not helping, right? Because we want the background to be disappear. We only want to see this rocket ship, right? Here we go. Do I take this point here and move that? That's not helping. Do I take this point in here? Maybe because it makes it a little bit darker, but that's not where the majority of the work. So it looks like we're going to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, right? If we do both of those things, then, you know, so let's hit reset. If we do that over there and this over here, we're starting to get a little bit of a better, you know, better looking image, but there's all this blue, right? So we need to get rid of that blue. Okay. So let's go ahead and start there. We're going to start with our red channel and we're going to take a look at that. Is that helping with the blue? Nah, not really. Let's go to our green channel. Is that helping with the blue? Not really. Let's go to the blue channel. Is that helping with the blue? Yeah, that that's starting to help with the blue. There we go. Maybe we don't want to go too far. There we go. That's something like that. Looking pretty good. Now let's go back to the green channel. Pull a little bit from there. So the thing to remember here is it's always color. You don't really want to just do RGB because when you only do RGB, it's like the grayscale version. It's just going to get lighter or darker, but everything has color in it. So you always want to adjust your color as you're going. All right, there we go. Our red channel, that's going to make this, you can see a little bit more cyan. We don't necessarily want that. Okay. Our green channel, pull that a little bit of magenta, a little bit of magenta looks good there. And our blue channel, pull that a little bit more yellow. Yeah, that's starting to look pretty good too. Because like these colors and stuff like that, I want to be affected there. Okay. And our blue channel, maybe we'll just pull that a little bit there. All right, that's looking pretty good. So there's the before and the after. So with that, like the color of the rocket is cooler, like it looks better. Okay. And our background is less visible. Like I can't even see that line there. Okay. So let's hit control or command T. There we go. You can see how beautiful is that? Like no matter where I put this, right, I already have, hit enter there. No matter where I put this, I already have my composite. That's like keeping it where it needs to go. Okay. The moon, let's go ahead and put that over there. Now on this layer, I'm just going to put a layer mask. So let's click on our layer mask icon. Boop. There we go. B for the brush tool. And then let's just make a large soft edge brush and just kind of paint it out here. Okay. There we go. I'm going to hit shift two. I'm going to bring my flow to about 20%. Shift two on your keyboard. And then I can just gradually paint this away. Okay. Nice and gradual. I'm not trying to create a perfect layer mask necessarily. That's like just the, just the rocket, you know? I'm okay. There we go. I'm okay just fading that in. Fading it in. There we go. That's why we do a flow of about 20%, 10%. There we go. It allows us to just kind of fade that in a little bit better. Fantastic. Nice. You don't need any special tools for this. Pretty cool. Now let's hit control or command T. Let's scale this up a little bit. There we go. Now we can start playing with our composition a little bit more. All right. I want that to go a little bit on an angle right there. Now it's cool, right? She's like excited. She's like, Papa, Papa, the, the ship is leaving. We're, we're saved. Or we should have been on that ship. Ah, the earth is in really good shape, but I want to go to another planet. Okay. We're not going to get too far into the story, but there's a little bit of a story happening here, right? Like that's, that's kind of the goal is like, ah, there's a little bit of a story happening here. All right. I think it's a little bit too red. Let's go to our red channel. Maybe adjust that a little bit there. Go to our blue channel and let's, let's pull a little bit of blue out of there. There we go. We have a little bit of a story. What's going on here? I don't know, but she's running towards something and that, that's kind of fun, right? It's got a little bit of a sci-fi feel to it. Make the moon a little bit bigger. Maybe make that spaceship. There we go. Going out that way. Got a little bit of a sci-fi feel and I love that sometimes. Okay. It's getting pretty good. Sometimes if I'm not sure, like this spaceship, if I'm not sure if any of the edges are visible, like with this, this layer here, cause you can see it's kind of just like at a big angle right there. Sometimes what I'll do is above everything, I'll just grab like a levels adjustment layer and I'll just like crunch and compress my image. And this is what I'm looking for is like edges. If I can see any edges, right. I'll just like crunch my image, like over, you know, all the way over here. Cause like, you'll, you'll just see all kinds of detail that you, you don't normally see. Right. So if you just crunch it everywhere and it still looks pretty good and you're in good shape, everything looked pretty good. Whoa, something just made a noise next to me, but we're in pretty good shape. All right. I think that's pretty nice. Right? Like, yeah. Beautiful image. She's running towards, you know, she's excited. Something's happening. Um, I'm excited too. Something's happening too. Pretty cool. Right? So we have our composite group. Let's hold alt or option and click on that layer mass there. So this spaceship and the moon, if I want to move those anywhere, I move that too. It's going to be in, you know, it's going to look good, right? We, we put the, we, we didn't even bother with, you know, putting a layer mask on each of these layers. We just grouped them together and then put that closet there. There we go. Got that spaceship, got the moon. And then of course you can just feel free and put whatever you want back there. But goal being the idea being here, we just use screen blending modes, some layer masks, and then levels adjustment layers to get those colors right. And then boom, we had a really cool conceptual composite. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this. We'll see you in the next section. Bye everyone.