From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

Setting the stage - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

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Setting the stage

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- [Narrator] One of the reasons that I really enjoy using Photoshop is that it enables me to evolve my images into something that can't be created with any other medium. In the next few videos, we're going to walk through the creation of this image, but before we start assembling the image, I just want to mention that I think to make a composite successful, it has to meet three criteria. It needs to tell a compelling story. In other words you have to grab the viewer's attention and get them involved. And hopefully that's both on an intellectual as well as an emotional level. It also needs to have a strong composition. Just like any image. But I want to stress that all of the elements in the image should focus on telling the story and there really shouldn't be any other extraneous items. And three it needs to have excellent technical execution. The image doesn't have to look realistic, but it needs to be believable so that the viewer can temporarily suspend their disbelief and enter into the image. So with this in mind, I like to think of the image as a stage, and we need to arrange our actors on that stage. When selecting images, I typically start with the primary image in this case the tree, and then I would add the supporting files, based on that tree and try to keep in mind the lighting, both the direction and quality as well as the mood of the individual elements. So in this case I chose the barren landscape because it reinforced the dead tree, and it helps strengthen the narrative. And then I wanted to add some secondary characters, in order to provide more information about the story and hopefully raise some questions about the image, so I added these bulbs. Alright, so we're going to begin with this image here. You can see is a multi-layered composite, and I want to begin by blending together the sky and the lava field. So I'll target the sky layer in the layers panel, and then I'll add a layer mask by clicking on the icon at the bottom. We can see that the mask is white, wherever the mask is white, we can see the sky in the image. So I'm going to tap the G key to select my gradient tool, and then I will right click or Ctrl click on Mac, and then reset the tool. Because my gradient is going from white to black, I want to start somewhere around here in the sky image, hold down the Shift key, and then drag down, until I reach the end of the sky. I don't want to go any further than that, I'll stop right here. And I have the Shift key so that I'm drawing a straight line. When I release my cursor, we get a nice transition, the length of the gradient that I drew. One thing that I should mention is that when I was creating this composite, I was using the full resolution raw files, but for the sake of the demo and the size of the file, I have rasterized most of these layers. So that's the reason that we're working with just these pixel layers and not the actual raw files. Alright at this point, I will choose the file menu, and select save as I'll just add an _ 01 saving this back into the, creating the surreal composite folder as a layered Photoshop document.

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