From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Adding wings and angelic light

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Adding wings and angelic light

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- [Chris] Hello, I'm Chris Orwig and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. This week's episode is part two of a small project that we began in the last week's episode. So if you haven't seen that one, you may wanna go back and check it out. And here in this one, we're gonna continue the project. In particular we'll look at how we can add wings and a lighting effect as well. Alright, we'll let me do a little bit of review. We started off with our image then we added a back light here and we used a mask in order to limit that to the background, we applied an overall adjustment to the image and then also a little bit of a glow which we'll especially be able to see if we kinda dim the lights there, you can see that glow effect in the background. Alright, well whenever I get to a point where I'm ready to move to another step, I like to organize things a little bit. You can do that with a group so click on the layer group icon and then I'll go ahead and name this one step one and click and shift click and drag all those into step one. Close that up so we can start to focus in on step two. Okay, well what is step two? Well, step two is about working with these wings. This is from another photograph that I had and so I'm gonna bring these over and I'm bringing these in. I need to position them in just the right spot and I've already pre-transformed them so they kinda fit to that right spot. Now I wanna add a glow effect and I also want them to be behind the subject, not in front of the subject, so how can we do that? Well if we go into our step one group, you can see we already have a nice glow effect. We can copy and paste that up here. Just hold down the Option key and then click and drag that and that's Option key on a Mac, Alt key on Windows and you can see that this is adding this nice glow around the wings. Perfect, same exact glow as before, great. Now we need a mask and what we can do is we can Option and click and drag one of these. So Option click and drag on a Mac, Alt click and drag on Windows and that will bring over the mask. Currently this mask is saying only show the wings where the subject is which kinda looks cool but that's not the effect I'm going for, I want the opposite of that. So if we click into the mask and press Command + I on a Mac or Control + I on Windows, or if we go to the Properties panel and click Invert we can see how we can change that in that way. Alright, so far so good. Now what we can do is we can experiment a little bit and I was moving that around and you can see that didn't work so let me undo that. I need to unlink these and then click into the wings and now when I move these around, these are always behind the subject here so if they weren't in exactly the right spot I can move them around or I can use my arrow keys to nudge them around as well. Another thing you might do is Command + T on a Mac, Control + T on Windows and you might need to rotate an image or an object like this and so here in this case I might rotate it like that, that's a little bit too much, maybe something more like that. Okay, point is you can move things around once you unlink those two. Okay, great. Now we have the wings in the image. Next, we have this layer which is this sunburst light layer. I've talked about how to create things like this in other tutorials or you can find graphics like this online. And with this one, what I wanna do first is remove the color. So I'm going to Image, Adjustments and I'm going to choose Desaturate, all the way down here, just get rid of the color, I'll add color later. Then I'll change my layer blending mode to something like soft light or over light and try those out. So there's soft light, there's overlay. Overlay is a little bit too intense, right. But keep in mind that we're gonna limit this light so it's not on the subject, it's behind the subject. How do we do that? You already know. Hold down Option on a Mac, Alt on Windows and click and drag the mask from one layer to another so you can now see how that light is in the background. We can have that light underneath the wings so that the wings aren't quite so effected by that. Can you see how that layer order really matters there? And of course, we can decrease the intensity if it's a little bit too intense. We can make the wings a little bit transparent if we wanted to, that might be kind of fun. And we can experiment a little bit with our layer order and opacity. So you could have a little bit more wings, a little bit less of the light effect and it's gonna be a mix and match. But the whole point is opacity and layer order will give you the, they craft different looks. Okay, we need some color in this. So if we go to our adjustments panel and if we choose an option, let's try color balance for example and I'm just gonna do something really kind of outlandish here for a moment, really strong color. If we make that color effect and click on the layer clipping mask icon, this effect as bright as it is or as strong as it is, it's now not quite so strong because it's on this layer here which has a low opacity and also a blending mode. So the blending mode and the opacity is going to define the overall intensity of this. If I bring it up, we're gonna see more of that, right. So again, it's really a stylistic decision here on how you wanna go with that and then of course, go back and you can just fine tune it. What I wanted is something a little bit more glowing yellow, not quite so red so I'm just gonna add some more yellows there, go to my highlights add a little bit more yellow into that area as well, maybe a hint of red there too. Alright, well something like that I think's kind of fun. It takes out, it was a little too gray, right, it takes out all that gray that we had there especially down here in this area and adds a nice color look to the image. After having done that, I will wanna experiment with my layer order. If I have the wings up top I need to bring some color into those so just like before we can use color balance, maybe a little yellow red and have that come down into those. Ew, that doesn't look good. The red, the red was horrible. It was like, you know like that, that's (laughing), that doesn't really work does it? Anyway. We all make mistakes but I was trying to find the right, I think it's just yellow, we need some more yellow in there. But I don't think I'm gonna do that anyway, I think I liked it better where the wings were underneath, they're just kinda glowy and a little bit in the background. A little bit blending into the background is what I meant to say. Alright, well that wraps up these final steps here so let's organize these. We click on the group icon, call this step two or call it whatever makes sense to your own workflow and we will select the layers, drag 'em into step two. So we now have a nice cleaned up layers here and we can just say okay, well here is the original image. First, we worked on lights and glow and then we also worked on some other effects. And the nice thing about this is we can always go in and decide you know what I don't really like this or one of these effects is too intense, I want this to be a little bit more mystical or something like that and I could change the values in order to fine tune that and really easy to work with, non-destructive and kind of fun and creative. There it is, our before and after. Alright, that wraps up this week's episode. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks for joining me. See ya next time, bye for now.

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