Photo Manipulation Tutorial in Photoshop CC (Beginner)

[Music] hello Gary Simon of designc course.com and today is January 16th with our 16th video of the year and we are going to focus on something new for the channel and that is photo manipulation so what is photo manipulation basically it's taking a single photo or M multiple photos and manipulating them in some way to create a different image so we're going to start off with a very basic introductory type of tutorial today we're only going to use a couple images to create something that looks really cool and as always visit designcourse decom put in your email or check out there may be courses depending on when you're watching this video already available and also the project files are available for free in the description below this video all right so this is what the image looks like that we're going to be creating today okay so let's go to file new and we'll just call this scl flower and I'm going to use 16 in by 20 and normally if you really wanted to do like a poster for example uh you would want at least 300 for the resolution but I'm not going to do that for the purpose of just this tutorial this isn't about print design or anything this is just about purely photo manipulation and getting started with it so I'm just going to start at 72 or leave it there rather and we'll just use this for the web and let's go ahead and for the paint bucket tool by the way if yours doesn't show up transparent it's only because when you went to file new you had it set it as white or whatever your background color is so I always have mine at transparent all right so I'm going to fill it in with black all right and then we could just double click over here and call this BG for background okay so I the first image we want to open up is linked here Below in the description and it is the skull this is going to be the basis from which we use and I used this in a previous tutorial for uh website design so I decided we would use this again so if you just download this it's like a massive image obviously right click it and copy image or you just save it and then open it up here in Photoshop and then once you have it open just copy that and close it out and then contrl V to paste it in now we have a very large image here so I what I want to do first is I'm just going to go to file new paste that in and then we're going to get rid of the background so we can use the background eraser tool so you just left click drag and pull this out and you know when you're working with photo manipulation uh a lot of times you're going to have to cut out different images and so if you have an image that has a flat background that needs cut out then and then you can use this background eraser tool pretty easily so I just hold alt click right there to get white and then will go around the edges just like this now you want to do it so that that little crossair in the middle stays in the white but you're also wanting to get the radius of the actual tool overlapping the object that you're trying to cut out so in our case it is the skull so I'm just going around pretty slow slowly and carefully and also real quick I will show you what settings I used so I used I 413 with a hardness of 100% and spacing is 25 all right so now I gu take the alaso tool and just go around it real quickly and end it there hit control+ C now we can get out of there and then just paste this in hit contrl T and we'll scale this down by holding shift and ALT all right right around there select a Ply so now we zoom up here this is 100% view on my screen so I'm just going to stay around 66.7 you know whatever fits well I would be fine so now what I want to do is go ahead and just go to image adjustments and Hue and saturation I want to take the saturation down just a bit right around to -26 I'm going to hit okay and now what I want to do is kind of prepare this and get rid of a few parts before we bring in our flower so I'm going to take the pen tool and we want path selected and then I'm just going to kind of cut out part of this so I'm just going to left click one once and then come up around here left click and drag a little bit and then come down here and then come over here now if you screw things up just contrl Z to undo and right around there you kind of want it to follow the Contour of the the shape of the skull all right so you just bring it all the way back and to the original point and go to right click and make selection hit okay and then just hit delete oops select inverse if that happened to you just hit delete there we go and then I want to kind of create maybe just like a a cutout circular cutout but not a perfect circle of the skull right around here and we'll right click make selection and we'll hit okay I don't know why it's doing that it's inverting my selection for some reason but oh well and there we go I and then just one more time over here I'm going to want to cut out just around this area so I'm going to zoom up just a little bit for that and I'm going to take the pencil just as we were kind of come up around here get it to follow this Edge and come up around here oops end it like that right click make selection and hit okay hit delete contrl D it's a deselect control1 okay now I want to get rid of some of the eyes the the inner eye portion so I'm going to zoom up here and I'm going to start right here we could just barely see the eye portion and come on around here all right and then I hit delete control D to deselect and then come over here real quick and do the same thing all right right click make selection hit okay and hit delete okay and then finally we're going to get rid of this section here and start up here this is going to be our last piece we cut out all right and hit delete okay so I let's go ahead and zoom out here all right this is what yours should basically look like so far um so now what I want to do is get the actual flower in so uh that is linked here below the video as well and it is this image right here and got this advertisement blocking get the hell off damn you there it is that's beneath it okay so just click download on that right click copy the image and then I'm going to bring it in here back to photoshop and we're going to create uh just go to file new it automatically has the uh dimensions of the flower image there and and what I want to do is use the same technique for the background erase I'm going to get this down slightly maybe around here and then come up here alt click this blue color and then just go around and you may have some areas that you will need to clean up afterwards okay I don't care if I get rid of that stem there okay so let's take the lasso and we'll go around oops try not to touch any of the pedals here on the flower copy that we'll go back here and behind we're going to select on uh the background layer and then just paste in all right so all right so the idea here is to take this flower and try to get some of the petals to come out of the eyeballs or in the skull and uh and also here we'll see some as well so what we have to do is first what I want to do is to save a copy of this so just right click we'll just duplicate that and then we'll call this flower original and hide it and so now I'm going to scale this down contrl t hold shift and let's see right around there I'm just focusing on the top portion a little bit all right select the move tool and hit apply and now what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this portion or this whole copy that we just did and we're going to move it around just a little bit so what I'm going to do is take this and push it or drag it up above the skull and we're going to take the opacity down and then going to hit contrl t with the flower copy layer selected and almost flip it entirely and then what we want to do is we want these pedals to come out of the eye so the way we have to do this is we can see we have a a low opacity and I'm going to zoom up real quick first hit apply so basically we want this aligned perfectly right there so that this Edge right here basically meets the top portion of the orbital all right so now what we want to do is take the pen tool with path selected and we want to click right there and then follow the actual orbital and what I want to do is is stop right there because we can see this second pedal if we call this the first one and then second ends right here so we come and we try to follow that as best as we can maybe come in a little bit all right and then come all the way around right click make selection hit okay and still doing that yes for me have select inverse and I'm just going to hit copy and not delete or what you could have done if it if it did inverse go to select inverse and then just hit delete all right so now let's turn the opacity back up and let's go to control one just to see what that kind of looks like all right and what I want to do as well um we're going to do this as second time except we will cut our put part of the skull this time uh to get this how we want it so what we'll do is take the skull so just Auto Select layer with the move tool and click on it and we're all layer one we'll just call the skull real quick we will take the opacity down get back to the pen tool zoom up here and we want let's see here we will have me click right here we'll start right here and we'll go right along that edge okay and then what we'll do is come all the way down here we can see that there's just like a very faint portion it's a uh looks like a shadow so we want to go right along that and follow it up just right around there all right right click we will make selection hit okay I'm going to select inverse and then hit delete with the skull layer selected all right and let's hit control one and I'm going to on select layer with that uh with move tool we're going to select this one right here I don't want this pedal showing let also let me go ahead and turn this back up let's go ahead and just erase that oops okay and this as well kind of just trying to clean it up a little bit all right so let me go ahead and zoom out just so we can see how this looks so far all right that looks uh pretty decent so now I'm going to take these copies right here and I want to actually no they're going to we're going to keep those separate so now what I want to do is change the uh Hue uh and saturation of the bit of the actual flower so with the flower layer selected we'll go to image adjustments Hue and saturation and take the saturation down around -30 hit okay and then take flower copy and do the same thing as well and hit okay and now to make this look like it's you know a little bit more realistic we need to add some Shadows here so if I click on the flower layer we want to create a new layer control shift and N click on create clipping map and then we're going to take the paintbrush here and with a black selected for a foreground and we'll take the size down quite a bit maybe around here we'll just color in right around there and I'm going to get rid of that that wasn't supposed to happen so I we'll just work with this for now we take the opacity down maybe right around there that will be good get rid of this and then we'll do the same thing over here oops that's a different uh layer control shift n new layer create clipping mask just like that and what was that AAC we had 60% so change ours down here see what that looks like oops 60 and all right so that looks okay for now and then we'll do the same thing up here so we'll click back up on that layer and slightly over here as well you know what I'm going to step back a couple times I'm going to create a new layer a clipping mask as well and I want to be able to wait was that hold on one second oops Yeah wrong layer sorry about that we'll create a new layer on the flower right there clipping mask all right and then we'll just come down here just slightly and I'll go ahead I want to be able to adjust that a little bit differently I wanted that opacity down around 39% all right and then I do want to put a shadow down here as well so let's see if we could just select on that first clipping Mass layer and just kind of go oops we don't want to do that like right around there all right all right so so far uh that looks pretty cool um what I want to do is just a couple more things I'm going to zoom up here take the pen tool select the skull layer and get rid of a tooth so we just come kind of follow this right around here and end it right there right click make selection hit okay and delete and then one one of the last few things we're going to do I'm going to zoom out here want to create kind of like a stem so I'll take the pen tool we'll go here at the very like the last layer and I'm going to create a stem that kind of goes all the way down past the bottom of the document and we'll take the direct selection tool get rid of the fill what the heck it won't let me click it uh you know why I have path selected sorry about that so I'm going to right click and delete path make sure shape is selected now we can do that again real quick maybe run around there now it will let me okay so we're going to make a kind of like a green here and we're going to take the size up a bit and I'm going to choose yeah right around there looks good so it's just about 12 points and that's a little bit I want this to flow a little bit better so if we take the direct selection tool we can move these points around as needed just like that so you can take those anchors and adjust how it looks and then what I want to do is I'm going to duplicate that so right click and duplicate the layer hit okay and this time the color we're going to change to be slightly lighter and the size we're going to drop down as well right around there and then we can move it over with our move tool selected with the keyboard maybe right around there and I'm going to go right click and I'm going to ruze the layer it's kind of off the screen so you can't see it on mine and then go to filter blur gajian blur turn it down just right around there okay I think and then I'm going to take both of them both these layers holding shift hit contr e to merge them and it's kind of a little it's it's way too I I guess you could say there's too much Hue or saturation so if we go to Hue saturation and take down that just a bit and hit okay and then create a new layer and make it a clipping mask so I just hit Tab and space to get there real quick hit okay and we'll use our brush tool again I'm going to make it a little bit larger maybe right around there and then take the opacity down just a bit all right so I think that looks pretty cool let me zoom out here so we can see more of it okay so that's what mine looks like so far I just a couple other things that we can do is you know just so we can give it more of a background there's there's so many different ways you could potentially tackle this so let's create a new layer just above the background layer so we could do this if we wanted to take this with a real large brush okay bigger and then maybe bring that down just a bit so that gives us a kind of a cool background all right uh we could you know I think I'm just going to leave it like that okay the one last adjustment I wanted to make is to take the magic wand tool with the skull layer selected you can see we kind of have like this uh very thin white outline so what we want to do is select out anywhere outside of it go to fil or select modify and expand we're going to expand it by just one pixel hit okay and make sure before you selected and used the wand tool that anti-alias is on and we have a tolerance of 32 now we can just hit delete hit control D to deselect and we see we got rid of that line so it just looks better that way all right so let's uh zoom out here one last time just to see what we came up with and I think it looks pretty cool and so hopefully you learned a lot in terms of uh uh just basic photo editing and photo manipulation um I just okay I'm going to keep aggravating people here I'm going to take this again I'm just going to take these two layers duplicate them real quick delete that one as well and I'm going to move this all the way up right there okay now let me zoom out because it just kind of looked like it ended there should have not done that so let me get rid of that all right there there we go all right so yeah hopefully you learned I you know some basic photo manipulation so I'll be doing some more of these and this will serve as you know the most basic or beginner type of photo manipulation um so hopefully you enjoyed it and as always check out designc course.com like me on Facebook and uh the other networks if you can and those links are in the description of the video all right so I will see you tomorrow [Music]