Photoshop Tutorial - Using What is There
Hi friends, here is another cool photoshop videos, we are going to learn some easy trick in Photoshop.
In this lesson, we can take a look at how you can leverage tools and features to coax a mask that already exists in the image in one form or another. In this beautiful image from the picture press library, we have to replace the sky with another image. Now, at first sight, it might seem hard to isolate all the blue areas spread out in the image. Especially, amidst the wispy tree details. But it always pays to take a quick glance at the individual red, green and blue components that make up this image. Now, this particular channel has a strong silhouette of the tree and practically a complete selection of the sky just waiting to be cleaned up. In fact, this particular channel would be useful even if the brief was to select the channel instead of the sky. All you would have to do is invert the data to select the tree. First, I will duplicate the blue channel before I will start to edit it. Again, to end up with a selection of the sky, this part needs to be set to white while the rest is massed out, so it needs to go to black.
I like to use the levels command to force the areas to white and black. First, I will make sure that the RGB values for the set white eye dropper are set to 255. Then click on a region of the sky to quickly force it to white. To slowly deepen the shadows, I will move the black input slider in. You can keep the gray tones as they are or you can darken them by moving the gamma slider or the gray slider slightly. Then all you have to is to use any combination of selection or painting tools to fill in or clarify this amazingly easy selection mask.
I will go ahead and use this tool with the option or ALT key held down to create a polygonal, around this area to select it. And when you get close, you just release the mouse, so it completes the selection for you and then fill with black. At this point you might want to view the RGB composite channel as an overlay. To see if you missed anything, you can always edit this further in the view by painting in black or grey to mask out an area or to paint in white to select an area. I have loaded this channel now I will switch back to the layers palette. Now invert the selection by typing command or control and shift and I and float it to a new layer. Now I will drag this other image with the bountiful clouds over and sandwich it between two layers. You can deepen the colors by incorporating the range of blue tones for the sky and the image below. This will always create a more realistic composite. To do this, double click the layer thumbnail for the clouds layer. And down towards the middle I will remove the shadow areas from this layer while keeping the clouds which fall in the light to highlight range.
This removes the shadow to this point. Then to soften the effect and bring back some of the smooth transitions, hold down the option of the ALT key, to split the sliders. Move this transition back to create smooth edges. And you can see how easy it was to composite these images because we were able to coax an excellent selection from one of the component color channels.
Tags: photoshop help, filters photoshop, photoshop sharpening, adobe photoshop plugin, adobe photoshop elements 2.0, adobe photoshop, photoshop trialTags
