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- Welcome to the module that makes Photoshop Photoshop,
and that is compositing. And why do we say that?
Well, because when you look at it,
if you look at a picture of your friend
with an extremely popular celebrity, what do you say?
What do you say?
You say that it's Photoshop.
We literally yell it out loud. It's Photoshop, my friend.
Well, why do we say that?
That's the question.
We say that because we suspect that our friend
combined his or her photo with that of the celebrity
to create a fake photo.
Now, underline the word combine.
And that's exactly what compositing is.
But compositing is the reason
why most digital artists use Photoshop in the first place.
So, all in all, what is compositing?
Compositing is when you combine two or more photos
or graphic elements, any graphic element,
that's all there is to it.
Now, for example,
let's say we are changing a background.
What are we actually doing here?
We actually have two photos, one of the subject,
and one of the new background.
We are combining them together.
We are matching the subject with that of the background.
We are making sure only the subject
shows up in the new background, right?
All of this process is called compositing,
where we are combining two or more photos or elements.
Another example can be, let's say you are replacing the sky.
Here you have a landscape image with a clear sky.
You wanna make it dramatic.
You take another image with a dramatic sky
and you replace the original sky with a dramatic one.
So, what are we actually doing?
We are using two images.
We are combining both those images.
So, what is the process here?
Compositing.
And what is the result that we create?
Composite.
Now, there are two major pillars to compositing.
If you just to get these two things right,
you will have an absolutely perfect composite.
How good or bad your composite is, will depends upon
these two pillars.
Depends upon how good you score in these aspects.
And these two pillars are
masking, and the second one is, can you guess it?
Well, it's simply,
let's flip it vertically. Matching.
So these are the two pillars of compositing.
You have to get your matching right.
You also have to get your masking right,
to create a great composite.
Now we already know what masking is.
Masking is simply having just the subject or the object,
or whatever you want to place in a new background,
just that selected and masked properly,
so that it doesn't bring with it its previous backgrounds,
or any previous affiliations, right?
That's what masking is, in terms of compositing.
Matching is simply matching the color,
matching the lighting, matching the perspective,
the atmosphere,
matching all the things that would make it seem
as if the new object is the part of a new background.
Let me share this concept with you
with the help of an example.
Take a look at this composite I created previously.
So this is the original background, right?
On top of that, we placed our subject just like this.
Now it's not a composite yet,
because we haven't combined it properly.
Keep in mind the two pillars.
What is the first one?
Masking.
So we need to make sure
that the masking the subject properly.
So once you masking, this is what you get.
Now, the difficulty of masking and matching
will differ from situation to situation.
In some cases, masking will be absolutely simple,
but it is the matching that will be extremely hard.
And there are also cases
where masking is absolutely excruciating,
where you have to paint in the hair sometimes,
but matching, maybe you don't have to do a single thing.
So, in this case, masking was very simple
when I was creating this composite,
it was just one click of Select Subject
and a little bit of correction here and there.
Once we masked it,
we had to do a lot of things to match it
with that of the background.
And there comes the second pillar, which is matching,
because if you look at it, I have to turn on the shadows
to make sure the shadows look right,
then blur the background to show the depth of field.
Then make a lot of adjustments to the subject
to match it with that of the background, have a look.
So many darn adjustments.
On top of that, some other adjustments,
global adjustments, to bring it all together
nicely and beautifully.
Now, when I look at it, I see something wrong.
The light is right over here,
but the shadow is in this direction.
It should have been slightly in that direction,
slightly along the right-hand side.
So, we didn't do matching properly here.
So, you might or might not see the fault, but I do see it.
So how perfect your compositing is,
will depend upon those two factors, masking and matching.
Now while we are here,
why not correct it?
Let's just go down to the shadows.
I guess this is the shadow that I added.
Press Control or Command + T.
And just right-click on it.
And simply you can choose distort, skew.
Let's go to skew.
And then take it to the right.
There you have it, in line with that of this light.
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Something like this, and have a look.
It looks more realistic.
Now let me share with you one more thing.
When it comes to these pillars of compositing,
please don't take them absolutely literally.
Now what do I mean by that?
When I say the pillars of compositing
are masking and matching,
masking doesn't mean that you always have to create
a specific layer mask.
It's not limited to that.
You can mask using blend modes.
There are lots of other ways to mask, right?
You can use blend as well,
it doesn't have to be a layer mask.
The concept is, just separating previous affiliations
of the new object, when you bring it to the new background.
Make sense?
In similar sense,
matching does not
always have to be a ton of adjustment layers,
trying to match the object with that of the background.
There are some cases where we don't have to do
matching at all,
or do it absolutely differently
from the conventional methods.
Now let's take a look at this example for reference.
Keep in mind, we have worked on this example before
in previous lessons.
So here we have a simple landscape, right?
And we want the sky to be different.
We want the sky to be this,
this orange absolutely dramatic sky.
So, we could have made a selection of the sky,
created layer mask and then
place the orange sky beneath it.
And actually it is a longer process.
Now, since these branches are so detailed,
there's a better way to do it.
And that is blending modes.
And that's why I told you,
masking doesn't always mean creating a layer mask.
So what do we do?
Well, it's simple.
You turn on the orange sky layer. We know
that the sky is very, very bright.
So if we change the blend mode of the orange sky from normal
to multiply, it'll only darken things,
since the sky is already bright,
by changing the blend mode to multiply,
it seems as if it's replacing the sky.
And the land and the foreground is already black,
so it can't go any blacker.
So it looks perfect in this case.
Now, if you wanna make the sky even brighter, because
this sky is not absolutely white.
Here's what you do.
Select the landscape layer,
create a curves adjustment layer on top of that
and make the sky even brighter
by taking the slider, the right most slide of the curves
to the left.
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Now this is too much.
The branches are also going away.
So you wanna make sure of you're at a happy place.
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About this much seems nice.
But there's also one more problem with it.
If you have a look, this sky has its original color.
When we change the blend mode
to multiply for the orange sky,
that color is kind of interacting
with its existing color, if that's okay with you,
absolutely fine.
If you cannot bear with it,
well, again, here's the simple fix.
Simply just take it away.
You can create a hue saturation adjustment layer
and take the saturation, and now you have the original color
of the orange sky.
Have a look at the difference.
Before hue saturation, let me quickly take that away.
Before hue saturation,
you had the original color of this landscape
and it was disturbing right here, have a look.
Once you add hue saturation and take away the saturation,
look at the branches.
They look so much better. And now we can go back to Curves
and give it a little more room.
So, I will take it a little more to the right,
to have a little more detail on to the branches.
And there you have it, my friend, isn't that beautiful?
So, you don't have to take those two pillars
absolutely literally.
Understand it by concept.
In the coming lessons, we will focus on these two pillars
in much more detail.
First of all,
we'll cover advanced masking. Now keep in mind,
we have already covered
fundamentals of masking in previous lessons.
So if you haven't watched that yet,
I would highly recommend that you watch it
before moving forward.
And then we'll definitely cover the elements of matching.
There's a lot to it,
from matching color, lighting, perspective, atmosphere,
depth of field, so, so much.
We'll cover all of that
in extreme detail, so that you can create
an amazing, dramatic, beautiful, stunning composite.
For now, just keep in mind
that if you wanna create a good composite,
you just have to keep two things in mind,
masking and matching. That's all there is to it.
See you in the next lesson, until then stay tuned
and make sure that you keep creating.