7 Combining Traditional Tools with AI - SCAI021

Hey there and welcome back. In this section, we're going to show you how to do traditional compositing, where we have a photograph of our subject and a photograph of the background. We're going to put them together, but we're going to use artificial intelligence to help us out in a couple different areas. We're going to help it define scale. How large or how small should the subject be? We're also going to help out with color and creating a shadow. All those things are really difficult, but AI makes them easy. Let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop, show you how it's done. Here we have in Photoshop the completed PSD here on the left-hand side, and here we have our background and our subject. You can see there are two different photographs, different time, different place. The subject material matches pretty good, but as we can see, we'll use our move tool to click and drag from one image to the other. The color is different, the scale is different, everything needs to get adjusted, and of course, she needs to get cut out. Let's hit F for full screen. We're going to start by cutting out our subject. Let's go ahead up here to my contextual taskbar, click on select. There we go. Now, the first thing we're going to do is hit L for the lasso tool. I'm going to hold Alt or Option, and we're just going to minus out any areas that are not actually my subject. So the select subject works really, really well. A lot of the time, you just have to go ahead and refine those results just a little bit to make sure you're getting the best selection possible. Fantastic, and we'll just do the same thing over here. Perfect, there we go, and we'll just do right here. Umbrella, fantastic. And when we go down to the shoes, well, I'm actually not too concerned about her feet because we're going to be regenerating her feet using artificial intelligence. That's one of the big helpers of this section, so I'm not too worried about this, but let's get this selection just a little bit better because we want to use AI to help us actually generate a shadow. All right, it looks pretty decent. We just want to update this umbrella just a little bit. There we go, fantastic. All right, I'm not going to spend too long making my selection absolutely perfect here just because I want to show you guys all the amazing tools and techniques for, there we go, for using artificial intelligence to help us out with our traditional compositing. All right, and that looks great. So the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and click on our layer. We've made a select subject. Let's go ahead and click on our layer mask icon. It's right up here on our contextual taskbar or down here in the layers panel. Boom, there we go. We've got our subject cut out from the background. Now, our subject looks pretty good. The color doesn't really match, and we're not sure how large or how small she should be. For instance, if I use my move tool, V for the move tool, if I put her down here, she looks tiny, right? She's standing on the ground way down there. If I put her right over here, she looks gigantic. It can be actually kind of tough to know how large your subject should be based on where you actually want them. Now, in this case, I want my subject to be right about there, but I don't know exactly how large she should be. So we're going to use AI to help us out with this. What we're going to do is hit M for the marquee tool and make a selection right about the size of our subject. We can make it a little bit bigger. There we go. We'll just make it a little bit bigger there, and then we're going to create basically right above our background layer. I'm going to put gender fill. All right, we're going to put in woman with dress facing away from camera. All right, and we'll just put a white dress. There we go. I'm saying facing away from camera because oftentimes this AI doesn't generate faces very well, and it can be a little bit weird looking. So basically what I'm doing is I'm using this AI. There we go. We'll just find... There we go. That looks pretty good. I'm using this AI to try to help me out with scale, like about how large or how small should this person be in this image. So as I make my subject visible, I'm just going to go ahead and put her right about there. You can see maybe she's a little bit small for this area, right? Let's hit control or command T. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and take my control point and bring it down to the very bottom. If you don't see your control point, just make sure this check mark is checked right up there on the top left. All right, so she's there on the bottom. I'm going to go up to where it says W for width, chain link, and height. You can just click and drag on W or H and scale, and it's going to scale about the control point. So we're just going to put her right about there. And perfect. I think that looks pretty good. And we're going to go ahead and move her over and then just make that invisible. And we can kind of zoom in and out and just kind of put her about where we think she should go and see like, okay, how does that look in terms of scale? I find that the AI generally gets scale pretty right. Maybe she looks a little bit too big. She's maybe just a little bit shorter. So let's just bring her down a little bit. There we go. Generally, the AI helps out a lot because it analyzes the size of everything in the images and usually it gets scale pretty good. Okay. So that's the first thing we want to do is basically have the AI help us out with scale. Okay. Next thing we're going to do is color. You can see I did a woman with a white dress here kind of on purpose because this woman is wearing a white dress. It might be like cream, but it's basically like white. Now, because this woman here, the AI woman was generated with this background in mind, white actually looks a little bit cool. You can see it has some blue tones in it, some cyan tones. Okay. Now this woman, because she was on this background originally, it's very warm tone. So we basically have to take these warm colors and convert them more to cool colors. Okay. We can do that using a color balance adjustment layer. So let's grab our adjustment layers. We're going to go to color balance. There we go. Let's make sure to clip this. So let's click on our clipping mask. Again, in our layer mask, make sure our, whoops, that should be on my, that should be on this woman, not the AI woman. Okay. Let's double click here and make sure we click on the clipping mask. There we go. Okay. Now it's correct. Okay. So this color balance, let's start with our highlights. I'm going to pull those towards cyan. There we go. And we're going to pull those towards blue. There we go. Now it doesn't have to match perfectly, perfectly, perfectly with the other woman. There we go. But you can see it's giving us a really good, like baseline. It's giving us a good idea that like, oh, Hey, maybe it was really too warm before and maybe a little bit cooler is what we want. Okay. So I started off with my highlights. That looks pretty good. Let's move into our mid-tones and see what we can do there. So push a little bit of blue into the mid-tones. There we go. And a little bit of cyan into the mid-tones. There we go. Fantastic. Maybe a little bit less blue, a little bit more cyan color. All right. And between magenta and green. There we go. Let's go to our shadows and see about pulling some cyans into the shadows and maybe some blues into the shadows. Fantastic. I'm looking mostly at the dress, but I want to make sure her skin tone remains nice too. Okay. Now it doesn't have to be an exact match, but we can see there's the before and there's the after. It's looking much, much better. Fantastic. I'm happy with that so far. Next thing I want to do is isolate this color for the umbrella because it's just a little bit too magenta. So we're going to grab an adjustment layer. Let's go to hue slash saturation. Great. Let's clip it. So it's only visible on this subject. We're going to go to our reds, grab our eyedropper tool, and then we're going to eyedrop this umbrella here. And then I'm just going to take my hue slider. We're going to push that over to the right a little bit. Okay. There we go. And it's just going to bring my hues over to the right. You can see just kind of matching this image a little bit better. And I'm taking a look at her skin too, just to make sure her skin is a decent color. All right. And all in all, I would say that looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and turn those off. So you can see that's how we're like originally, she was just in this image, really warm color. Now, boom, she looks a lot more like she actually matches this scene. Okay. So this AI image not only helps us out with scale, but it also helped us out with matching colors. So let's go ahead and make that invisible. Let's go ahead and group all these layers together. And we're just going to push this over here to the left or to the right. Okay. Now, the next thing you want to do, I'm just taking a look at my image. It looks really, really good, but you can see right here where my subject touches the ground, the ground is actually a little bit out of focus. Okay. Now back here is in focus, right? So if she was standing back here, she would be perfectly in focus, but because she's actually standing here, she should actually be a little bit out of focus. Now we're going to cheat. We're not going to push her like way out of focus, but in order for the composite to look a little bit better, she should be a tiny bit out of focus. So what we're going to do, we're going to right click on this layer. So our subject with the layer, we're going to right click here and go to convert to a smart object. There we go. So now that it's a smart object, I can still go back to my layer mask at any time. No big deal. But we can go to filter, blur, and over to Gaussian blur. And I'm going to give her just a little bit of Gaussian blur. Okay. We don't have to go crazy with it, right? Just a little bit of a Gaussian blur is going to help her look like she's actually integrated into this image a little bit better. So like 1.1. There we go. Now, the nice thing about this, because we use a smart object, you can see my little smart object icon. I can turn this off and on at any time. So let's just zoom in here. There we go. You can turn it off and on at any time. And I can go in here if I need to. I can double click and I can change the blur. Okay. If I want a little bit more blur. But you can see way too sharp to begin with. And even just a little bit of a blur. You can see even over here, right? Way too sharp. The edge is way too sharp compared to my background image. Just a little bit of a blur really helps out. That's a big thing with compositing. Sometimes edges are just a little bit too sharp. And sometimes, you know, I know it doesn't make sense always, but sometimes you just kind of have to blur your subject a little bit. Okay. The next thing I'm seeing is she should maybe have a little bit of noise. You can see there's some noise in the background there. So let's go ahead. We're going to create a new layer right above this. Okay. Let's right click and go to create clipping mask. So the new layer is clipped to my subject. Again, we're going to hit shift delete, which is the keyboard shortcut for the fill dialog, and go to 50% gray. So we're going to fill it with 50% gray and hit okay. There we go. Now we're going to right click on this layer and go to convert to smart object. So we've got a gray layer that's a smart object. Why would we do this? Well, we're going to go to filter and add noise. And then once we add that noise, we're going to change it to soft light. And it basically creates grain just over top of my subject. It's a really cool trick. Okay. So again, just a gray layer over top of your subject that's clipped. So it's only visible where the subject is. And we made it a smart object. Okay. Now filter down here to noise and add noise. Okay. The reason why we did a smart object first is because then if I did the wrong level of noise, I can always get back and change it. Okay. So if you know you're about to apply a filter, always make a smart object first. Just makes your life easier. Okay. Now we did a gray layer and added noise. So we're going to change our blend mode from normal right here. We're going to change this to soft light. There we go. Soft light. And you can see this noise now applies above our subject. And if I go to this add noise, here we go. Check this out. It might've come on like this when you made it. We just want to make sure we click on monochromatic. And now I can just lower the amount of noise, right? There we go. Lower the amount of noise. Hit okay. And look at that. It matches much better. It's not perfect, but let's just see this before. Here. What we're going to do is I'm just going to turn off the blur. So we're going to do this. Okay. Let's look at this background. Okay. Not that high quality versus our subject. Zoom out a little bit. So background and the subject. Let's give a little bit of a blur and add some noise. And all of a sudden it looks like it fits much better into that photo. In fact, the blur might be a little bit strong. So let's double click on there and let's just bring it down to like a 1.1 blur. Okay. So again, there's the before. Looks like two separate photographs, a little bit of blur and a little bit of noise. And it looks much more realistic. It looks like one photograph. So big, big tip on compositing. Just match those two things. It's going to help out a ton. Double click here. We'll just call this subject. Fantastic. So she's looking really good. We're almost done with our composite guys. It's like really, I'm pretty happy with it so far. Let's go ahead. I want maybe her hair to be just a little bit darker. Here's another cool trick that you can do. On a new layer, right in between these, I'm going to hit B for my brush tool. And I'm just going to sample this color from like this. I'm just going to assume this is like close to black, right? B for the brush tool and sample that color, right? By holding Alt or Option. Then I'm just going to paint it over her face there. Why not? I'll just paint it over there. Cool. Next, what we're going to do is change our blend mode. We're going to change it to, well, let's see. I'll leave my blending mode how it is. I'm going to go ahead and use Blend If. Let's double click here on my layer. There's a bunch of ways you could do this stuff. Let's double click on my layer. Okay. And then I'm going to go where it says underlying layer. I'm going to hold Alt or Option and separate out these two sliders. So it starts off with one slider here. Alt or Option is going to separate them out. And I'm going to take this and drag it from the right to the left. There we go. And what it's doing is it's making it disappear in the highlights and only appear in the shadows. Like literally what I'm doing is defining. Let's hit OK here so you can see it. Okay. I'm defining the darker colors of my subject right here. Like her hair and this umbrella and stuff like that. I'm literally defining those colors by sampling colors from my environment and then painting them in. So that's going to help that composite look more realistic too, right? Pretty cool. Now I can do that with the highlights tool. Let's try it. B for the brush tool. I'm going to grab this color for the highlights here. We're just going to paint it right over here. Let's try that. Okay. Double click here. And this time we're going to go from the other side. Alt or Option. Separate these two out. Okay. Bring that over there and then bring this over here too. There we go. Looking pretty good. Let's just make that visible and invisible. There we go. Double click here. I can even bring that back a little bit. There we go. And then obviously we just want a layer mask. Paint away where her face is, right? We don't want that on her face. But the umbrella. There we go. I wanted to define that color for the umbrella. All right. And you know what? I can make it a little bit brighter even. Let's just try this color. And this layer. Let's go ahead and lock the transparency of that layer. And then I'll fill it with this color. There we go. Like a really nice bright yellow. There we go. So you can see that's very, very subtle, honestly. But it's the same idea as we just did in the shadows. There we go. That's working a little bit better. So I grabbed this color here. There we go. And I just literally defined my highlight colors as that color. So we did both, right? The shadow color and the highlight color. There we go. Boom. All of a sudden, she should look much more like she's actually in that scene. Okay. We'll do that one more time because I feel like I went that a little bit fast. Let's just grab a color here on the ground. So if I grab a color on the ground. So B for the brush tool. I'm on a new layer. Again, these layers are just clipped to my subject. So they're only visible where my subject is, right? If I just happen to paint this color. Let's just paint this gray color here, right? Okay. If I double click on this layer, boom. I hold alt or option where it says underlying layer on the left-hand side. It's going to disappear from the shadows and then only be visible where the highlights are. And I can grab this side too. So that's basically that color on the highlights. I can do the same thing on the right-hand side. Grab it and tell it to disappear from the highlight color and only be visible in the shadows. Now, another cool trick we can do is right now the blending mode of this is just set to normal, right? It's just literally that color right there. But if you change your blend mode from normal down to color, for instance. Okay. Let's hit okay. Then I can literally, let's just zoom in here. I can literally color the shadows of her dress. So I can make that visible and invisible. You can see it's subtle, but I'm coloring the shadows of her dress. Okay. So if I make a layer mask on here and then I paint this. Okay. Let's just zoom in. I know this is really subtle, but it helps the compositing. See this before and after I'm coloring the shadow color of her dress here. Okay. Which because the dress is in this environment, it should actually reflect some of the colors of the environment. So now that's exactly what's happening. So now her dress is being reflected. Here's that before. There we go. And the after you could see it's just, it's a subtle effect, but it does help. So that's kind of the idea. Grabbing colors from your environment and then defining colors on your subject to match those exact colors. Whether it's a normal blend mode or in a color blend mode. And then boom, your composite looks a lot more realistic. Let's just turn those off. There you go. You can see the hair is a little bit too blue for like this actual image. Turn them back on. And the hair is like, wow, that's literally the exact same color as a dark color in this image. They look more like they should, they belong. Okay. We're doing great. Last thing I want to do. We're just going to create a new layer above this. Hit L for the lasso tool. Okay. And then we're just going to go ahead and drag area right down here. Okay. Just right down there on the very bottom. And I'm going to hit generative fill and just hit generate. Okay. That's the hardest part right here. It's generating shadows. So it's going to cut her feet off, but it's something I can live with. Basically what we're doing is we're having this tool redefine where the shadow. Okay. You can actually type in shadow there if you want to as well. But it's going to do a much better job at actually like figuring out how the subject should hit the ground. There we go. It's doing okay. Let's just try that again. I'm going to hit delete here. I'm going to just select a little bit more. There we go. And click on genitive fill. So literally just doing generative fill with like the very bottom of the image, it's going to help generate shadows. I'll try it one more time with the shoes and stuff like that. But generally in my opinion, like this tends to work a little bit better if you don't let's type in shadow. There we go. And it's going to give you like a different bottom of the dress kind of every time we'll do in just one second with the shoes. But you can see like if I wanted to generate that on my own, like with a paintbrush and stuff like that. All right. Shadow. Man, that didn't really work so well. Let's just cry. Let's zoom in and let's literally try. There we go. Let's try to keep her shoe in there. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but we'll try. Okay. Generative fill and then just hit generate. We're just going to try to keep it and we'll see. We'll see what it gives us. It's AI. So it's going to give us a different result every single time. But you know, sometimes it works really. Yeah. Like that's that's really weird. See here. We're just getting weird stuff here. All right. So let's hit delete one more time. The first time I did this, I got like a really beautiful result. And you'll see that in the PSA that's included with this file. So, you know, it's just a luck of the draw. When you're doing this, it's going to give you slightly different results than it gives me. But that's okay. You can just keep hitting generate and hopefully you get something that actually works pretty well. Let's hit generate one more time. I might have to go a little bit higher on the dress to actually get something that's usable. There we go. We're almost done with our composite. Yeah, that's okay. Let's hit delete again. I'm just going to go a little bit higher up on the dress and even just like select here. All right. And then hit generate. There we go. Basically, it's going to figure out, you know, hey, this person should be touching the floor. Let's figure out that area. And I'm just kind of defining a little bit of a larger area. That's not bad. It's kind of much better. A little bit higher up. I can live with that. Honestly, that's totally, that's better than I can do. Let's hit generate one more time. So with a little bit of a larger selection, it just did a little bit better of a job. Maybe it just had more context to figure it out. But even with this, I'm happy with that. Like this is, yeah, I think we're just going to go with that one. And that looks pretty good. I mean, that's a nice composite image. Honestly, like she really looks like she was there. If we take a look at this original image, let's just hit F for full screen. Okay. Zoom out here. Like this is her in her original environment here. This is her in this environment. I think she looks great all in all. There we go. Looking pretty good. This is the, this is the original one that I did. And this one looks pretty good too. The scale, I think she looks a little bit small in this one. So if you want to make her scale a little bit bigger, you can do that. Just control or command T. There we go. You can make her scale a little bit larger. There we go. And that's why I say with compositing and stuff like that, like always just like look at your image over and over again and like, you know, take a break, take a break, come back and look at it and be like, do I like this? Does it actually look right? Because I like the scale of this original one a little bit better. I like the color that I did in this one a little better. I think it worked. But I think the scale and the way that it did that dress, I think it's stunning. There we go. That looks pretty good too. All of these are great options, honestly. But as you can see, I don't have much control. Let's do one more and we'll just really just try to give it a lot of room and see what it gives us. Fantastic. I like the color. I think those tips we did with the color, grabbing those colors and then using blend to make it visible in the highlights or shadows, I think that was a really, really good move. All right. There we go. The thing here is it's making her shorter. Like it's bringing, you know, it's bringing the dress down, which we really don't want. All right. Let's try one more. And there we go. And we'll hit generate fill. After this, we'll be done. It's addictive, right? Because it's like, what's it going to give us? We don't know. But there we go. There we go. And yeah, all those look pretty good. I do like this original dress a little bit better. I can't get it to really duplicate that, but all these variations look pretty good. So there we have our finished image. I think it's fantastic. And as we can see, AI helped us out a ton. Helped us out figuring out the scale with the original image. Helped us out with our color and creating a shadow under our subject's dress. I hope you enjoyed this section. Thanks so much. If you haven't already done so, please leave a review of this tutorial. It means a ton. Thanks again. I'll floor you later. See you in the next section. You know the drill. See you guys. Bye, everyone.