[Music] [Jesús Ramirez] Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thank you for being here. Make sure that you put on your headphones. Otherwise, you won't be able to hear me without your headphones. And can you guys hear me? People wearing headphones. Awesome. It's so weird because I usually can hear my voice through the speaker so I know that it's working. But now, I'm just talking normally and hear my voice normally. I just want to start off by saying that this is Design Like a Pro Crafting High-Impact Assets in Photoshop. Just want to make sure that everyone is in the right class. And also, I want to thank everybody for being here because there's puppies outside, so I'm competing with puppies. So thank you. And I can see people running out now to go play with the puppies. That's where I want to be. No, just kidding.
Before we start, I just want to put this slide on screen. That QR code will get you to my website, my social media, my email, everything. So if you want to contact me after Adobe MAX, that's the way to do it with any questions, comments. If you have any complaints, Chris Converse is right here. He'll take the complaints.
He's another one of the fantastic speakers here at Adobe MAX. In case you don't know me, I've been a professional designer for over 20 years now, and I've created design work for companies like Adobe, Motorola, Microsoft. But most recently, I've been working as a finisher in the Hollywood industry, which means that I create TV and movie posters. Those are three of the latest ones that I worked on. And everything that I'm going to talk about in this session is going to be through that lens, through a professional workflow where I need to keep things editable, I need to keep things modularized, and everything just needs to change if I need to. So that's the context in which I'm going to talk about everything in this session. I'm just going to show you some of the other posters I've worked on in case you've seen one of these TV shows. By the way, fun fact, I've never worked on a TV show that I've actually seen and I know that sounds pretty bad, but yeah. I've actually-- I've seen a couple episodes of Hacks, and that's actually pretty good, but I haven't seen the other shows. My wife is a really big fan of Ghost Adventures, but I've never seen it. So you guys will let me know if some of these shows are pretty good. Poppa's House is not out yet as far as I know, so maybe I'll watch that one and I I'll know if it's good.
But anyway, the other thing I want to mention before we start is this class is about creating high impact assets. What does that mean? Well, we're going to discuss three things basically, patterns, brushes, and reusable images. That's what we're going to discuss in this session. So if you know that already, then this might not be the best class for you. I just want to point that out. I don't want you to be disappointed. I'm going to show you how to create patterns from scratch using images and other assets, same thing with brushes. And we're also going to use generative AI to create some of these assets. So that's what we're going to discuss in this class. Awesome. So let's jump right into the very first example. And by the way, one of the ways that I like to teach is by throwing out keyword shortcuts.
If I think of like a cool demo as we're working, I'm probably going to show it to you. If you're not taking notes, that's okay. This is being recorded and you can go back and watch it. So I might go a little fast, but you can always go back and watch the recording or you can use the QR code. Contact me and say, "Hey, what was the keyboard shortcut to do this?" And I'll reply. First things first. Missing assets. Have you guys noticed that, I don't know, about five or six years ago, Adobe hid all the brushes, shapes, gradients from Photoshop? There used to be a ton of them. A lot of people think that they're gone, that they were just deleted, but they're actually still in the application. You just got to bring them back. So we'll start there. For example, one of the first things they do in a brand new installation of Photoshop is go into Window, choose Brushes. And these are all the brushes that come preloaded with Photoshop plus a few additional ones that I added myself.
Before, we used to have a lot more brushes than that, but now they're gone. A way to bring those back is by going into the fly-out menu and choosing Legacy Brushes. Legacy Brushes. Fly out menu, Legacy Brushes. What does that do? When you click on that, Photoshop is just going to ask you if you want to put the list with the rest of the brush presets. Of course, I do. That's why I clicked on it. So here it is, Legacy Brushes. So what's inside of that folder? All those missing brushes that were there in Photoshop for years and years and years. Why are they hidden? I don't know. But they are hidden, but they're still there. And one of the reasons I like to bring them back is not only because you get hundreds and hundreds of brushes but one of my favorite brushes is there. Under the search bar, I'm going to just type in grass. And then you get this Dune Grass brush, which is actually created by my good friend, Bert Monroy. A lot of people here know Bert, who is Photoshop user number 6, wrote the very first book in Photoshop, and he created that brush, and I think it's fantastic. And I use it all the time to-- Let me just make a larger brush so I can show you what that brush does. It just paints grass, but I use this for a lot of things like painting flyaway hairs, obviously grass, and other things that have that shape. Sometimes, if I'm working in a movie poster where the character has fur, I will use that to mask things out. It's a great, great brush. I highly recommend it. Again, I don't know why they're hidden, but you can always bring them back. Again, you can go into Window, Brushes. Click on the fly-out menu, and choose Legacy Brushes. And the same thing is true for gradients and shapes and all that. I'll quickly show you what I mean by that. If you go into Window and choose Gradients, click on the fly-out menu and choose Legacy Gradients, and you'll get all the gradients that were hidden. There they are. All those color harmonies that were there before, you can find them there. And like I said, same thing is true for shapes. You can go to Shapes, fly-out menu, choose Legacy Shapes and More, and you have all those missing vector shapes from 2019 and the ones that were available before 2019. Again, I don't know why they're hidden, but they're still there. And of course-- And sorry. I'm losing my voice. I've been doing six or seven presentations now so my voice is not what it usually is like, so I apologize. But you can also do the same thing for patterns. You can click on the fly-out menu and choose Legacy Patterns and More, and you get all those patterns. So I just wanted to start this class by pointing that out that you have literally thousands of assets at your disposal. You just got to bring them back. Cool. Did people know that? Is that new to a lot of you? I'm curious to see if that was new. Alright. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. You can clap. You don't have to, but yeah. I expect you to clap every single time, Chris. Thank you. By the way, Chris Converse here is one of my best friends, and he is one of the speakers. We got his wife, Kim, and Sean Duggan, also a fantastic speaker. You and I have been speaking at MAX for the same amount a year, Sean, so super cool. Yeah. It's funny having my friends here because I feel like I'm talking to them, so it makes me more relaxed. It feels weird when I don't know anyone in the audience. But anyway, so let's jump into the first actual case study. So like I said, everything I want to talk about is in the context of creating movie posters. I might not necessarily reference a movie poster, but in my mind, I'm always thinking about how I can create an asset for something that I would use in a movie poster. And one of the most difficult things that people find is masking hair. How do you mask hair? Flyaway hair, especially with women or characters that have crazy wavy hair. I think there's three ways of doing that. You can use a photo, create your own brush, or even generate an image to create a brush. And we're going to look at those three examples now. So it's just going to be a simple case study here. And we're going to use this. Oh, by the way, before talk about what we're going to do, some of the flyaway hairs maybe not so obvious in this low-resolution image. But anyway, so the flyaway hair is there, and then we have flyaway hair with the other character as well. But anyway, we're going to use this as an example. So let me just close some of these windows so that I don't confuse myself...
And I'm just going to open a new document. And the goal is to add flyaway hair to that hiker.
So give me one second here. Brushes. Here we go. We're going to start with this Adobe Stock image to create a brush to help us paint flyaway hair. Now before we actually do that, I'm going to talk about Adobe Stock just a little bit because I'm going to reference Adobe Stock throughout the demo, but I don't want to keep going back to Adobe Stock and just tell you the same thing over and over again. So I'm going to talk about it once and every time I reference Adobe Stock, just think about this next part. So if I say something like, "Head over to stock.adobe.com to find an asset," that will get you into this website where you can find all kinds of assets including photos, illustrations, videos, vectors, audios, all sorts of stuff. And for example, in that case, I did something like woman portrait profile with a white background and just found images that had women with flyaway hair so that I could create a brush out of it.
You can also go into the free section, use the same keyword, and under Asset Type, you can choose images and then you can just find images that are completely free to create your own brushes. So you don't have to spend any money. So I always recommend start with free and then if you can't find something there, then you might want to consider spending a credit or purchasing the image depending on how your plan is with Adobe Stock.
Also, a little later on, we're going to talk about 3D assets are found here, but you can also get them under the Free option. And then under Asset Type, choose 3D. In this case, there's no 3D assets that have women portraits profiles with white backgrounds, of course, so there's no option. But if there were 3D models with those under that result, you would be able to click 3D models. So I'm not going to come back into Adobe Stock anymore unless we need to, but I wanted to point that out. So when I say Adobe Stock, this is what I'm talking about. Stock.adobe.com.
Cool. So this is the image that I downloaded from stock.adobe.com, and what I want to do is create a brush out of the flyaway hair so that I can just stamp it on the composite that I'm working on so that I don't have to paint it in by hand every time. So this is an asset that I'm going to create. It's going to be reusable and I have assets like this where it's just flyaway hair, then I just stamp it and it's ready to go. I don't have to mask. Masking sometimes could be very, very difficult, especially if there's a busy background. And something I like to tell people is you don't have to be faithful to the edge, the original edge. As long as it looks realistic, it's good enough. So what I think of what I do is creating the illusion of realism. Creating illusion out of using brushes and textures and things like that. So that's what I'm going to try to do here. Just try to create the illusion of reality is what I'm trying to say. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the crop tool to crop to the areas that I need for my brush and maybe come down here and then drag this one way up here. There it is. That's all I really need. We're going to create a brush out of that.
You don't need to make the image into black and white, but I'm going to do so so that it's just easier to see the process that we're doing. So I'm going to press Ctrl, Shift, U to desaturate the image. That's Command, Shift, U on the Mac to remove all the color. And what we want to do is we want to make the hair as dark as possible and the background white. With a brush, white becomes transparent and black is-- You can think of it as the ink.
So in this case, we want the ink to be the hair and the transparent parts to be the background, of course, which is white. That's why in the search query earlier, I looked for images with a white background because I was already thinking that was going to be transparent and then anything in front of that wouldn't be transparent. I hope that makes sense. So again, the goal is to make the hair darker and the background wider. So many ways of doing that. One of the ways you can do so is by going into Image, Adjustments, and choosing Levels. And what I'm going to do here is grab this white point and drag it to the left to where I get the background as white as possible but not so far that I start affecting the flyaway hair. So it's-- You have to fine-tune it and find a good spot and then maybe drag this point and make the darker pixels darker like so. And all I'm really concerned is about making the hair stand out and the background completely white, and you can just keep adjusting the slider until you get a result that you're happy with. But notice that this part is completely dark so that wouldn't work. How can I target those areas? There's two ways that I like to use. One way would be to choose the Dodge tool which allows you to make pixels brighter. From the Options bar, you can choose what range of pixels to affect, Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights. In this case I'll choose Highlights, and I'm just going to go with a regular soft round brush, and I'm just going to paint. And notice how I'm affecting primarily the brighter pixels. I can reduce the exposure to build that effect in more so that I don't affect the flyaway hairs as much. See that? See how it's not necessarily affecting the flyaway hair as much, in this case. And by the way, I'm going really quickly here because I have so much to show you, but I probably will spend a little more time finetuning this image in-- If I was doing this in the real world, not a demo. But we're going to call that good even though I know it's not going to be 100% perfect. We'll call this good.
At this point, I can create a brush by simply going-- Actually, you know what? I just noticed that this area wouldn't work because I can see how dark it is and that will really show up. Just to show you another way of doing this is you can choose the Brush tool and then choose either soft light or overlay. We'll go with soft light just because it's a more subtle effect and I can just paint up here and it's not going to affect the darker pixels. It's going to affect primarily the brighter ones if, I'm doing it wrong, if I paint with white. So white needs to be my foreground color, and then when I paint, it'll turn the brighter pixels whiter, like so. Anyway, so I think this brush will probably work at least for the demo. And all I'm going to do now is go into edit and choose Define Brush Preset. And that's just going to create a brush out of that. I'm just going to call it "MAX hair" so I know which one it is. And there it is. See how I have a brush now? What does this brush do? Well, when I come here to my hiker, and I'm just going to fill with white so we can see what it does.
It does this when you-- The reason it's not showing is because I changed the blending mode to soft light. I need it to be back at normal, and it does that. And since I use a high-resolution image, just a giant, giant brush, and all I need to do now is tap on the left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce the brush size. And when I type, you can see the flyaway hair. That will be very time consuming to paint all of that. So I'm going to use this brush just to paint in the edges to make it a little more realistic. So when I go back into my composite here, I can create a layer below the hiker. By the way, you don't have to click and drag layers up and then the layer stack. You can hold control and the right bracket key to move the layer up the layer stack, the left bracket key to move it down the layer stack. And if you hold Ctrl or Shift right bracket key, it jumps to the top of the layer stack. If you're on the Mac, the control key is the Command key. Cool. So now I want to just add a little bit of flyaway hair back here. It doesn't look that good. The mask is not great. But if I paint, the hair is facing the other way. How do we fix that? We can go into the brush settings and click on Flip X and now the brush is facing the other way. We're flipping it. And when I click, the hair is perfect in terms of direction. Now I can use the left bracket key to reduce my brush size, the left and right arrow keys to rotate the brush. See that see how the brush rotates when I tap on the left arrow key or the right arrow key? And I can just find a good spot to paint. And actually, this needs to be below the hiker so I'll move her there. And when I paint, I have the flyaway hair. And at this point, it's just finetuning to get the best result as possible. I think that will be good, but what I need to do now is select her actual hair color and paint and you can see how I'm getting very realistic hair. See that? So super cool. Right? Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. And like I said before, those hair strands are not faithful to the original image, but they look realistic. So I'm creating the illusion of realism. I'm not actually trying to spend hours making sure I get the real hair strand. A lot of the times, it's impossible or extremely difficult and it's just not worth it. So if you have brushes like this when you see a problem, you're like, "Oh, yeah, I have a brush that I could use." You click once, you're done, and then you move on to the next thing. So this is really what this session is about, creating assets so you can keep reusing for multiple projects. Cool. All right. So let's move on to the next example. I'm going to close this, and I'm going to close this one as well, and I'm going to close this one too.
So I'm going to open up two images.
So what if I'm working with a subject like this where I have this weird fuzzy pattern on a sweater? How am I going to mask that? This will be really difficult to mask. It's blurry. There's not a lot of contrast between the foreground and background. So one of the things that you can do is you can make your own brush. This is what this whole section is about. Make your own brush. So I have a document. This document is 1080x1080 and you can make a brush with pretty much any tool in Photoshop, but I'm going to use the Curvature Pen tool right now, and I have no fill. I'm using a shape, and I have a stroke of five pixels. And all I'm going to do is just create little fuzzies, like.
So. And then I'm going to make a few more. Oops. I wanted to...
Do something like this. You know, maybe drag this one out and turn like so...
And maybe-- Oops.
And we're going to call this good just for the sake of time. I think it will work even though I'm not 100% happy with it. I think this will work. Great. So that's going to be our brush. And all I'm going to do is go into Edit, Define Brush Preset. Once again, I just want to point out the background was white, that's what becomes transparent. The "ink" is black. That's what is at 00% opacity or intensity. If this were a gray hair strand, then you can think about it as like having reduced opacity. So Define Brush Preset. We'll just call this sweater or whatever. The name doesn't matter in this case. So now what does this brush do? Well, I'll create a new layer and I'll fill it with white. White is my background color. Oops, wrong keyboard shortcut. White is my background color, so that's Ctrl, Backspace on Windows, that's Command, Delete on a Mac. And B for brush and it automatically selects the brush I created if I was in the Brush tool when I made it, but if not, then you can come and click on it from this dropdown. It'll be the one at the very bottom. The one that you make will always go to the end. Sweater, there it is. And if I paint with black, you can see the result but that doesn't look a lot like a sweater, right, or those fuzzies. So how can we make it look more like fuzzies? We can go into the Brush Settings here and we can use shape dynamics, increase the size jitter. So basically, what a brush is is just a bunch of stamps like that next to each other. Right? A bunch of stamps. So what size jitter allows us to do is that every stamp that we make is a different size.
See that, see how every stamp that I make is a different size? So that's what size jitter does.
And when we click and drag, it looks like that.
Now I'm going to do the angle jitter. Basically, the same idea. Every stamp will now have a different rotation, so it's not 100% the same as the one before it.
So when I click and drag, this is the result. See that? And then I can start doing other things like scattering. You know, I can scatter them a little bit so they move away from the center. I can increase the count to get more or fewer. In this case, I'm going to do a lot and then I may have to come back and readjust depending on the actual pattern of the sweater because I just don't remember what it looks like. So once I get something that feels like it works, I'm like okay, this probably could work. I can now go and try it on my mask and we'll see if it works. And if not, we can always come back and refine it. So select our person here. Click on Remove Background and obviously it's not going to do a very good job on those fuzzies there. And here, let's zoom in to see what it looks like. Yeah. That's not very good. So what I like to do on something like this-- And by the way, I'm only talking about the sweater. Obviously, we would have different challenges with the hair, but the example right now is for the sweater.
What I would do in this case for the sweater is double-click on the layer mask to bring up the mask. It used to be called-- Select and Mask, right, is what it's called these days. It used to be called something else and I just forgot what it was called. But, anyway, you bring up Select and Mask, and you can click on-- It used to be called Refine Edge. Now it's called Select and Mask. You can click and drag on the smooth slider here to try to smooth those edges like that. I want a sharper edge for the process that I'm doing. And maybe I'll feather it just a tiny bit so that it gets a little blurry, maybe not too much. That's probably good, and I'll press OK. I'm not going to shift the edge here because watch this. When I click and drag Shift Edge to the left, it's going to push it in, but it really doesn't push it in that much. Like you probably didn't notice how much it moved. Right? It's just a tiny little push inward. So what I prefer to do is just leave that at zero, and there it is. And there's a better way of contracting and expanding masks. If you go into-- You got to make sure that your focus, the white outline, is on the layer mask. And if you go into Window and choose-- Oops. I'm sorry. Not Window. Filter and choose Other, there's a couple options here. Maximum and Minimum. Maximum expands the mask. That's not what we want to do. We want to contract the mask. So we go into Minimum. I recommend choosing the option that's labeled under-- Why is this thing not moving? Now my computer froze. Oh, there we go.
I recommend selecting the Roundness option here because you can work with decimal points. If you choose Squareness, you're down to whole numbers. So why is that a difference? Well, maybe 28 pixels is too much and 27 is not enough. So maybe I can do like 27.5 or something. You know, you can really have that fine control. And I don't know if you saw what happened, but with a radius of 0.2, that's what the mask looks like. And I want the mask to come in pretty deep, maybe, I don't know, 16 pixels. Let's see how far that mask is coming in. Maybe even a little bit more.
Yeah. That's probably a bit too much, but I think for the example, it'll work. I'll press OK. And I was just able to contract the mask and it's, in my opinion, the best way of contracting or expanding masks. So with this layer active, the layer mask active, I'm going to go back into the Brush tool with that brush we created and I'm just going to experiment for now. I'm just going to reduce the brush size by tapping on the left bracket key and I'm just going to paint. And, you know, that might be a little too much. So I can go back into my Brush Settings here and maybe reduce the scattering, reduce the count, and we'll see how this looks. Okay. That's a little bit better for what this sweater looks like. And, of course, I can keep finetuning it to get better results, but I think you'll get the idea. No need to spend time finetuning for the class. I would just go back and adjust the slider pane again and see the result. But as you can see, this is getting us a much, much better edge that I would have never gotten had I tried a mask. You might be thinking, well, that looks good, but there's a lot of depth of field in the image. The original fuzzies were blurry. Right? So what do we do? Not a problem. We have this brush here called the Blur tool. And with the Blur tool, I can just paint over the mask. And see, I was blurring the fuzzies, and it just creates a much more realistic effect matching the edges of the sweater. Once again, you don't have to be faithful to the original edge as long as it looks realistic, creating the illusion of realism. - That's all we're doing. - Ooh. - And it's-- - Thank you.
Awesome. Thank you.
We have one more example on creating brushes, and I need to hurry up because there's other examples. So I may go a little faster on this one, but I think you'll like it. So if we have...
Now a subject like..
Like this one, what do we do to create a brush that'll help us mask those edges? Well, we can use generative AI.
I'm going to use the...
Prompt I have here just so that I don't have to come up with a new one or like misspell it or something. But the generative AI that I have or the prompt that I have for generative AI is black hair-- hairball on a white background. By the way, what I did to get there is click on this very new icon right here at the bottom. The last one down in the toolbar which is the Generate Image feature. And I can just paste that prompt black hairball on a white background. I'll choose photo to try to generate a photorealistic image and I'll click on Generate. And what I'm trying to get here is something that I could use to make a brush so that I can paint those edges. So we'll see what results we get.
Pretty good. I like that one. That one's really good, actually. I think I'm going to go with that one. This one's really good. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to rasterize it, which means it's no longer a generated fill layer, just a regular pixel layer. And I can make a brush out of this. So I'm just thinking about the easiest way to do this. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut it in half.
Yeah, I'm going to duplicate the layer...
Mask that. Okay. I'm thinking of the easiest way, but here we go. The easiest way will be to make a selection there and just delete those pixels. I don't need them. And then press Ctrl + T to transform on that layer and then right click and choose Flip Vertical. And then I'm just going to move this down like so. I think this would work. I probably deleted too many pixels, but that's okay.
Yeah, I think I might have deleted too many. So I want to do this the right way, so I'm just going to go back because I didn't want to delete that many. There we go. What I'll do is I'll just mask it. That way, I can bring back some, and it'll just be easier now.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just trying to make sure that this looks like an actual furball, and I'm going to get...
This soft round brush, maybe increase the hardness a little bit so that the edges are not so soft, and I'm just going to paint with white just to make sure the edges work like so.
I think that'll work. And I'm just going to crop the rest of the image because we don't need those other areas.
Image, Crop. Yeah. I think this should work.
I'm just going to resize it now, Ctrl + T to transform and just make it more of a circle rather than like an egg shape. And I think this will work. Just like before we need to make the background completely white. So I'm going to go into Image, Adjustment, Levels, and I'm going to make the background as white as possible, create contrast, and for the sake of time, we'll call this good. But I will crop it...
Just so that we have that. What I'm going to do now is go into Edit, Define Brush Preset, and now we have our furball. The name doesn't matter. So there it is. So now with an image like this, what I can do is go into Remove Background.
And I'll do the same minimum filter. You can repeat the last filter you used by selecting the first option. It's going to just push it in and that's fine.
There we go. And there's probably more than we needed, but I think you'll get the idea. What I'll do now is just simply paint on the edges, but I need to go and adjust my Brush Settings here. So Shape Dynamics, a little bit of size jitter, maybe not as much as before. Angle, we'll rotate it just a tiny bit, maybe not as much as before. And we might increase the count a little bit, and we might scatter it just a tiny bit. And just so that we can see what we're doing, I'll create a new solid color. I'll make it black so that it's obvious. And with the Brush tool, I can continue painting on that mask and you can see now how I'm getting fur and that's probably too much.
And of course, just like before, I would probably finetune the size of the brush, maybe go back into the settings so that I can get something that looks more like what I'm looking for. But I think you guys get the idea. It's just adjusting those sliders until you get what you want. I think the important thing here to realize is you don't have to go into Adobe Stock. You don't have to create an image. If you think of an image that will make a good brush, you can use generative AI to make it for you. Just use white background as part of the prompt so that it'll be easier to mask and create your brush. But I've created a bunch of brushes using this technique that allow me to paint the edges over the composites that I make in those posters that I showed earlier. And a lot of the times, I do have to use the Blur tool to match the blur of the image because a lot of times you might see a little bit of blurring on the edges. Cool. All right. I hope you guys like that one.
Thank you.
All right, we'll move into a different kind of asset now. Let's talk a little bit about patterns. I'm going to go into the brick patterns here. I use patterns all the time, like these movie posters that we create are super huge. We need to have stuff that could cover pretty much any dimension. So I use patterns a lot, for example, if there's a rock in the background, I'll use a rock pattern that just covers the entire thing. And with generative AI, making patterns is a little bit easier. I'll show you a couple features that Photoshop has to create patterns. If you go into View and choose Pattern Preview, Photoshop will ask you, hey, are you sure you want to do this? This works better with Smart Objects. Even though it's probably true, I always just press OK and rarely convert it into a Smart Object. But the point is is that now we can see what that image would look like if we were just to create a pattern right now. One of the techniques to make sure that your pattern looks as seamless as possible is to first work with the brightness of the image. So for example, if I were to go into hue and saturation and remove the color, I can see the brightness. See how we have almost like a vignetting effect that's darker on the edges and brighter in the inside? Well, we would need to fix that in order to create a seamless pattern. A lot of ways of doing that. One of the ways that I prefer is just by creating a curves adjustment layer. You could also do it with any of the adjustment layers that control lighting, brightness and contrast, curves, levels. And I'm blanking on the other one. What is the other one? Exposure. With any one of those, you can select that adjustment layer and just change the blending mode to Screen if you want to make things brighter or multiply if you want to make things darker. In this case, I think I'll choose Multiply and just make the center part darker. That's the same thing as duplicating the layer and changing the blending mode. But no need to do that. You can just create an adjustment layer instead of duplicating the layer.
And then the layer mask, press Ctrl + I to invert and making a black mask makes everything invisible. With the Brush tool, you can now reduce the opacity to build that darkening effect back up. I'm also reducing the flow. And what I'll do is I'll just start painting here in the center. And see that? See how it updates all the other tiles? And I don't have to paint inside this blue box which is the canvas. I can paint anywhere. I can say, hey, that looks a little dark and this looks a little bright and I can just paint on it until I remove that center highlight that makes it more obvious that it's a pattern. So, again, creating the illusion of reality, this is a pattern. It'll never be 100% seamless, but we can definitely make it very difficult to tell. So there we go. That's the first thing I would do. One of the things that I do when creating patterns is work destructively. You'll rarely see me do this anywhere else, but I'm just going to merge that layer down. Ctrl + E on Windows, Command E on the Mac. It just merges it down to one single layer. And then I can now show you another feature of making patterns. If you go into Filter-- Let me actually make this larger so it's easier to see. If you go into-- By the way, if you double click on the Hand tool, it fits everything to screen.
But yeah. Anyway, so if you go into Filter, Other, there's an option called Offset, which allows you to push pixels past the edge of the canvas and then come around the other side. This box is sticky, which means that it-- Whatever setting you had in the past that you used in the past, it comes back next time you open it. I wish it was just set to 0, because it's just easier to explain when it's set to 0. When I drag this to the right, you'll notice that it pushes the image to the right 3,826 pixels, and you can see the seam. See the seam right there? That's the seam. And I can do the same thing on the other side, and we can see the other seam.
The old way of doing this was just to clone, maybe use a Spot Healing Brush tool, whatever, but now we can use generative AI. We can just make a selection going this way, another selection going that way, and I can click on Generative Fill And click on Generate and let Photoshop try to merge those edges together so that we have a seamless pattern.
There we go. It does a fantastic job. You can click through the variations to see which one works best. Quite frankly, in my eye, they all look fantastic, so we'll just keep that one. And again, I'm going to do something that I rarely do. I'm going to merge things. So I'm going to merge these two, and then I'm just going to run the Offset filter once again because there are a few seams in here. If I just zero them out and then just start dragging, I might see a seam somewhere where the Generative Fill-- Right here. You see that? That's because when I made that cross, the edges on either side and on the top and bottom were not seamless. Everything else is except for those edges that Gen Fill created. So I have to go and fix them, and there's one right here as you can see. And we won't worry about the vertical one just for the sake of time. I'm just going to zoom in and show you that. See that? See how that's there? So what I'm going to do now is I can use the Remove tool. I can use the Spot Healing Brush tool, whatever, or Generative Fill again to fix that seam. So I'm just going to click and drag here and use Generative Fill, click on Generate, and then Generative Fill will remove that seam. So we'll just give it a second here. Always look at the tips, really good tips when using Generative Fill in that box. I've learned a few things by reading the tips that Adobe gives us.
And there we go. I can look through the variations. That one's terrible. I don't know why that happened. That's so interesting. Anyway, we'll call this one good, right? Ctrl + E on Windows, to merge down and now I can use this as a pattern. I can go into Edit, Define Pattern, press OK. Let's not worry about the name. I'm going to just create a new document and I'll create a pretty large document like 3,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels.
I'll press OK. And then from the new adjustment layer icon, you can choose pattern. And then at the very bottom, you'll see the one that we just created. There it is. Press OK. And I can now reduce the size, the scale to 25%, 50%, whatever you want to do. You can also adjust the angle of that pattern and it looks pretty good. So I really think that the key thing to remember here is that if you're making patterns, use Gen Fill to help you with the edges because it's a lot easier than using the Clone Stamp tool or the Spot Healing Brush tool, and those tools. So Generative Fill to help you with that. Now before we move on, I do want to talk about another set of patterns for just a moment.
A lot of people don't use them, but if you go into Window and choose Materials, you'll get access to these seamless patterns that have controls with different settings. So you can select any one of these, and I'm just going to go with-- We'll go with this ash wood one and we'll give it a second here. And actually, I think I'm using a pretty large document so it would have been a little faster but doesn't matter. So we have this seamless pattern. It's always going to be seamless, but we have control. I'll set the resolution to draft just so that all the changes that I apply are faster. But when I'm done and if I really wanted to use it, I probably would choose the ultra-resolution.
But you have different presets. We have Plain Cut Glossy.
There you go. And then I can control the wood color variation, the vein contrast, wood roughness, all that good stuff. So all these different materials give you all the settings for that particular material. And you also have control over scale under Transform right here. Scale 1 is basically 100%, but if I wanted the scale to be half of that, I'll do 0.5. I think I didn't do the point there. I think it did 5, so it's going to make it pretty large. Let's see what it does. Yeah. I meant to do 0.5. There we go. And that is just going to reduce the scale of this particular material. So you can either use patterns or use materials to help you in your projects. I use materials primarily for stuff in like backgrounds and stuff like that. It's that I can apply a blur because it's blurrier and it looks pretty convincing when it's in the background and it's in the shadow or something like that. So when I'm working with those posters, I often use materials or patterns just to make my life easier since I need giant, giant canvases that expand, and they'll fit pretty much any format that my client asks for.
Cool. Let me-- I also want to talk a little bit about images to build my asset library. So a common problem is I'll get an image like this and some studio will say, "Hey, this is the image we want to use, but we want this to be a leather couch," for example. Or this is the image that we want, but her pants don't have any texture, any denim texture. Can you add that? And of course, we can definitely add that. So why don't we just run through a quick example? I went into stock.adobe.com and I just typed in leather texture on gray. Just because I wanted to see if there's something available. And there was. I found this texture. It's just leather texture on gray, nothing fancy. I already removed the seams. You can kind of see it here. It's not 100% perfect, but that's okay. I didn't need it to be. For something like this, the seam probably wouldn't even be noticeable since it's going to be so tiny. But this is going to be my leather texture and all I'm going to do is go into Edit, choose Define Pattern, and I'll just call it leather.
And I'm going to go back into my working document and what I'm going to do is just show you what this looks like first. So I'm going to go into pattern and is it this one? Yep. There it is. I'll press OK and that's what we created. Not 100% seamless, but I don't need it to be, especially for this purpose. So what do I need to do? Make it seem like this couch is made of leather, right? Even though it's not, I often have to do things like that where I have to create, again, the illusion of detail. In this case, they want a couch that's already there, already shot, but they want it to be a different material for whatever reason. One of the things that I would do is this technique. First of all, we need to make a selection out of the couch.
I prefer to use the quick selection for this. Other people might want to use color range, but then there might be problems with the shadows. So I'll just play it safe and go with the quick selection, and I just essentially click and then click and drag if I want. And in any area that it misses, you can hold Alt on Windows or Option on the Mac and click and drag to subtract from that selection.
I also got her arm, so I'll remove that, and maybe I will make a smaller brush and paint over the yellow areas here at the bottom. What I'm going to do now is enable this pattern and I'm just going to click on the layer mask icon with the selection active and that will create a mask that basically covers the couch.
So all I really need to do now is blend this texture with the couch. Very easy to do. Remember I told you that I searched for gray? The reason that I searched for gray is that gray if it's 50% gray, it becomes invisible when using the contrast blending modes. It's not 50% gray but that means that a lot of these gray areas will be almost invisible and some cases invisible. But what I really, really want is the shadows and highlights which will come up. So I can either choose Overlay or Soft Light. Soft Light is subtler than Overlay but so that we can see it easier, I'm just going to go with Overlay. And I'm just going to zoom in so you can see the result. Obviously, the texture is just a little strong right now. All we need to do now is adjust it. I'll double click on the icon here and change the scale to maybe 25% and I think that's pretty good. And if not, I can come back and change it later. I don't think there's any need, but I could also change the angle. I'll press OK. And we can reduce the opacity just so that it's not so obvious that it's just a texture on top of it or we can be a little more fancy and use an advanced feature. I can double click to the side of the layer here to bring up the blending options. And from the current layer slider, I will affect the pixels of the layer that I'm on, but I don't want to affect those pixels. I want the pixels of the layer below to come up. So I'm going to click and drag on this dark point slider here and drag it to the right.
And I'm going to hold Alt on Windows, Option on Mac, and click to create a smoother transition so that those shadows here are not so intense.
I don't know if you saw that. I'll bring that back just to show you.
See that? So then using this black point slider is making the darker pixels of that couch come up in turn making the texture not as obvious. And then what I'm doing here by splitting these in half. You split them in half by holding Alt or Option on a Mac and I create a smooth transition. So all the pixels that are this shade of gray or darker are completely invisible. All the pixels that are this shade of gray and brighter up to this point, there's a smooth transition from invisible to visible and everything that's this shade or brighter is completely visible. So that's what I'm doing there. And then at this point, I would bring down the opacity maybe just a tiny little bit.
But the point is that when you look at this image, it looks like this is actually made of leather, not necessarily the fabric that the couch is made out of. And I do this same technique for denim all the time. Denim is like something that we just do it all the time because a lot of the photos that we get look like this, but the posters need to look sharp. So that's why we apply this technique to create the illusion of detail where there isn't any or to even change the detail like in this case. Cool. Awesome.
Thank you.
Let's look at one more example.
We are going to go back into the Stock website just to show you something that I use a lot.
So we'll start from the homepage.
So we'll stay with free and what I like to do is look for assets just so that I can have them in my Asset Library, but I don't want to spend the time to mask them out. So in Adobe Stock, you can find a lot of assets that are already masked out. So if I type in plants with a transparent background...
In search, we might find some plants that have transparent backgrounds. Look at that. We have all these plants we can use...
For our designs and they're already masked out. I don't need to mask them and start from scratch. So I can just select the one that I like best. A lot of the times, I might just go with something like this. It just has a bunch of stuff. By the way, notice that this was generated with AI. I probably wouldn't use that. I probably would find something that wasn't AI generated, but I definitely would probably look for something that has more than one plant on there. So like this one I might use. Even though these are trees, I would probably download that or something like this. We'll go with this one. I'll just license this right now, and Adobe Stock is going to ask me if I want the JPEG or the PNG. I want the PNG because I want the transparency. I'll click on download and that is just going to download it and I'll just put it on my desktop so I know where it is. And I can go into File, Place Embedded...
And bring that in as soon as it finishes downloading. There it is. And here it is in my image. What I like to do is bring it in but then open the Smart Object so I can see the actual full resolution of the image. And then from here, I can just copy the one that I'm going to use. So I'm going to use the one on the bottom. So I'm not-- I don't care about cutting the pixels from the one on top. I'm just going to cut that away, come back into my composite, paste it in, and then I can press-- Oh, by the way, what I'm going to do now is convert it into a smart object again. Why am I converting it into a smart object again? If you press Ctrl + T to transform, and scale it down, by the way, keyword shortcut. If you've ever pressed Ctrl + T to transform and can't see the transformation handles, press Ctrl + 0 and Photoshop zooms out so that you can see how our transformation handles.
So if I don't convert it into a Smart Object and scale this way, way down and then transform it again and then make it way, way large again, it just becomes pixelated. So we want to avoid that. So what I'm going to do is just convert these into a Smart Object. There it is. Ctrl + T to transform and just place this into position. Maybe go into-- Before I do that, I'm going to go into maybe Filter, Blur, and do like a little bit of a Gaussian blur and that's too much. Maybe just a tiny little bit, and then adjust the contrast and shadows and all that to try to make it match the scene a little better something like that. But the point is that I often use Adobe Stock images that are already transparent so that I don't have to mask them. It just saves me time. And if I can find an asset that has multiple plants, multiple trees, or whatever it is, I just have this library of assets that are free that I didn't even pay for. They're free on Adobe Stock. So I highly, highly recommend that you check out Adobe Stock for those free assets and just use them for anything that you need in your projects. Cool.
The next thing I want to show you and the last thing in the class is something that is new that I really, really like. So I'm going to start with these two images.
And it's a brand-new Adobe product called Substance 3D Viewer. It's my favorite new feature in Photoshop this year. By the way, this is in the Photoshop beta, the one that came out Monday. So starting Monday, this is a new feature in the Photoshop beta, not the general release.
And what it allows me to do is to-- Actually, I should open up this image as well because we're going to use her. And what it allows me to do is to bring in 3D assets and work with them in Photoshop. So File, Place Embedded, OBJ. It should open it up in the same composite that I'm working on.
There we go. There it is. So this is my asset. I'm just going to make this asset as large as my canvas and there it is. We have a spear. And by the way, the reason that I chose a spear and I don't think I actually have it here. Oh, yeah, there it is. The reason that I chose a spear is because I worked on this TV show Yellowjackets and we created I don't know how many designs for it. And I worked with my friend Lisa Carney on this project. And there were so many different versions of this poster and then we shared assets. So I would create an asset on the version that I was working on, give it to her. She would place it somewhere else.
After so many different tries, the studio ended up going with this design. And the only thing that I created out of this whole thing is the spear that's on fire right there. That was it. That's it. This is it. Thank you. Thank you. It's probably the best piece and the best asset in this entire thing.
So that's why we're using a spear. And by the way, the little flames here, the sparks, Adobe Stock is just an overlay with sparks. I typed in sparks on a black background, and then I got those sparks, changed the blending mode to screen, and I'm done. Anyway, so yeah, so that was the spear that I made so that's why I had a spear in mind.
So spear. So we have our 3D object here. And what this allows me to do is to double click on it now that it's a smart object. Just like with any other smart object, when you double click on it, you edit it. So where do you edit the smart object? In the brand new Substance 3D Viewer. This is a new application from Adobe and it allows me to move the spear around. I can rotate it, do anything I want with it and place it anywhere I want. I can make it larger. Maybe it's coming towards her, maybe she's holding it. I don't know, maybe we can make it look like she's holding the spear. Probably not the right angle, of course, for that. But it's a fantastic, fantastic way of bringing in assets, 3D assets, and make them match your scene. They can rotate. It matches the lighting. For example, if I click on this icon here, this one, and I choose light presets I can click on the different lighting presets. You can see how they affect the spear. I can adjust the brightness, reduce the brightness, adjust the rotation so that I could match the lighting of the scene is really, really cool.
I don't need it in this case but if I had a ground plane, I could enable this so that the shadows will be casted on the surface where that 3D object is sitting. Not needed in this case. There's also generative AI. With this feature, you can use generative AI to generate models. You could also use it to create a composite in your scene which means that, in this case, I could say something like "mountains with a castle" or something like that and click on Generate and photo-- Not Photoshop. Substance 3D Viewer would generate a background image for the spear. Obviously, this wouldn't work in this case. We wouldn't necessarily want that. Oh, look. It added cables to it. Not really sure why.
I could also generate materials. So if I wanted my-- Let me just undo that since I don't necessarily want that. I'll close it and I'll open it up again. Don't save.
The other thing you could do is generate-- Oh, I thought I just closed the-- Doesn't matter. Another thing you can do is generate materials for the spear. So maybe if I wanted the spear to look, just to make it look like bricks. So we just-- Well, I'll type in brown brick. Brown-- Or actually not brick. We'll make it rock. So I'll make it red rocks, and I'll click on Generate.
Substance 3D Viewer will now apply-- Will create that texture and then apply it to the 3D model. And I can just click on it and you can see how it looks like red rocks. And when I'm done, I can click on To Photoshop. And now that spear should look like that and, of course, I can control it and place it anywhere I want. But the whole point of this is that not only do you have assets from Adobe Stock, you can download those 3D assets from Adobe Stock and just put them virtually in any position with any lighting and it just allows you to create really, really cool images. It's my favorite feature that came out this year at Adobe MAX. Loved it. I'll show you guys one last thing, which is-- Actually, everyone in one of my classes-- Excuse me. In my classes has been asking, "What is that banana tool?" That question has been asked after every session. So I'll tell you guys what it is and I feel bad because I didn't talk about it in other sessions. So if you want to add a banana, click on the three dot icon, go into Edit Toolbar. For whatever reason, I don't know if it's my computer, but ever since installing this new version of Photoshop, I don't get the buttons on the side. So the way to get those buttons is by shaking it. I don't know why. So I don't know if it's just-- Let me know if it's your computer's too. But anyway, once you see the buttons, hold Shift, click on Done, and Photoshop will add a banana to your toolbar. So super fun tip. You can play pranks on your friends.
Also, please, please don't forget to fill out the Session Surveys. This is how we as speakers get invited back. This is my eighth MAX. I like to come back next year. So please, please fill them out. Thank you so much. Last thing I'll say, if you enjoy the class, as I said, fill it out. If you hated the class, my name is Aaron Nace from Phlearn. Send all complaints there. Thank you. And I'll stick around for questions if you have any. Thank you. [Music]
