Discover the process of making adjustments to a digital image, with specific focus on removing unwanted elements and enhancing the ones you want to highlight. Learn how to manipulate layers and adjust opacity to create a more cohesive and realistic image.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to remove unwanted elements from an image by selecting the appropriate adjustment layer and using the brush tool.
- It explores how to manipulate the size and position of a selected layer in the image. This is achieved through the use of specific shortcuts and transformation tools.
- The process of adding and adjusting shadows to enhance the realistic appearance of an image is outlined. This involves copying a shadow layer from a different file, adjusting its position, and modifying its opacity to match the rest of the image.
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In this video, we're going to be making modifications to our hiker as well as removing some of these lines from our crane. So let's begin first by removing the lines from our crane.
First, we'll begin by zooming in on the crane, and as we can see, we have these lines from our mask, similar to the lines we had in our London scene. To remove these, we'll select the crane's removed branded adjustment layer, and then we'll be selecting our brush tool. With black as the fill color, we simply want to color over the lines in our adjustment layer.
If we need to adjust the size of our brush tip, we can right-click and adjust the size here. We're going to drag over all of the edges, and let's zoom in, and we'll make sure to hit all of these edges. Our crane is now ready for the image.
Next, let's start focusing on our hiker. To do this, let's hit CTRL + S to save our work, and now we're going to work with the removed layer. We'll select it, and we'll hit CTRL + T to transform it.
Let's zoom out, and similar to our London scene, this is a subjective process. We'll drag it up and place it at an appropriate distance where the proportions look correct. In this case, I like him right about here.
So, I'll hit ENTER, and using V as a shortcut for the move tool, simply move him over to the right just a little bit so he's more centered within our image. Next, we're going to want to add a shadow. While we could recreate a shadow like we did with our London photo, we could also copy the same shadow ellipse from our London image.
We'll go to File > Open, and we're going to open up our London banner 3 Photoshop file, then we'll click Open. Here, we can simply select the hiker shadow layer, click on it, and then hit CTRL + C on our keyboard.
Then, we'll go back to our West Coast scene Photoshop file and simply click CTRL + V. While this is obviously pasted in the middle and not in the right place, we can click and drag it down.
We'll release it towards the bottom, and let's zoom in to observe the shadows in this area. Currently, there are not many shadows, so for this shadow, our current shadow is a little too dark. We're going to want to decrease its opacity.
To do this, we'll select the hiker shadow, go to our Properties, and select the fill color, and then, for our left stop, we're going to decrease the opacity from 50 to 20 and hit ENTER.
Now we can see that there's a slight shadow below; however, it's a little more consistent with the rest of the shadows. To see what it would look like without the shadow, we can toggle the visibility. We can see that, although it doesn't add too much to the image, it is helpful in bringing the hiker into the image.
Let's move it behind him a little, and we'll zoom out.
We've now completed our image for our West Coast town, and we have the option of either the London scene or the West Coast scene. Nicely done. In the next video, we'll begin using these images for our Banner 3. See you there!