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All right people, it maybe a long way to Tipperary, but it's an even longer way
to the end of advanced blending inside of Photoshop and yet here we stand
poised to completely finish this chapter and this composition that we've been
working on here. We've successfully established the transitional layers, one
multiply and one luminosity layer that will help us blend this young lady with
her new background. We are now going to top it off with an application
of yet another layer set to the normal blend mode, slightly blurred inward
as you'll see and it's going to basically we're going to create a composition
that makes it look as if she spent her entire life against this background,
she is going to look so absolutely credible.
So I am working on as usual the updated version of this image, it's called
Transitionals.psd found inside the 10 Advanced Blend folder. I want you to make
sure that the top layer Lum is selected and then go ahead and press Ctrl+Alt+J
or Command+Option+J on the Mac in order to jump it to yet another layer. We'll
call this one Norm for normal. She is not actually changing her name to a man's
name and then we'll switch the mode from Luminosity way here at the bottom of
the pop up menu to normal way here at the top.
So go ahead and choose the Normal mode. That's all we have to do inside this
dialog box. So click OK in order to accept that change. Miraculously her
original colors are reinstated. Bad news is that we have some edges that need a
little bit of work right here. So let's go ahead and work on them. I want you
to click on the layer mask for the Norm layer. So just go ahead and click on
layer mask thumbnail for this top layer in the stack. We don't need to choke
this layer anymore, I just want to go ahead and blur it.
So I am going to reapply the last filter we applied. Assuming that you've been
working along with me, that last filter is right there, Gaussian blur, so all
you have to do if that's the case is press Ctrl+Alt+F or Command+Option+F on
the Mac in order to revisit the Gaussian blur dialog box. I am going to change
the radius value to 40 pixels like so and I will go ahead and drag that preview
over so we can see the before version, then I will release. This is the after
version. Very fuzzy indeed, so I basically doubled the radius value this time around.
I will go ahead and click OK. Now we have that same problem we had before last
time we applied Gaussian blur just in the last exercise. Well, not only do we
blur inward which is a good thing but we blurred outward as well. By virtue of
the fact that we blurred outward, we've created this halo around the girl's
shoulders and around her hair and so forth. In order to get rid of that halo, we could
revisit that multiply layer mask once again. But this time we don't have to,
we just applied one filter and one filter only, just Gaussian blur so we can
fade it with the original appearance of this layer mask by going up to the Edit
menu and choosing Fade Gaussian Blur or you can press Ctrl+Shift+F, Command+ Shift+F
on the Mac. Just go ahead and choose the Command though and now you can
establish a blend mode. We want to adjust the areas of white inside
of the image. So in other words, we want the Gaussian blur inward but not outward.
That means Gaussian blurring into the white area, but not into the black
area. So we're going to take the blurred version of the image and use it to
darken the original version of the image and we're going to do that using the
Multiply mode. So go ahead and choose Multiply and watch this area is going
to go away, there it is. We totally get rid of that halo there because
we just used the original version of the mask in order to multiply away the
bright edges of the new version of the mask. All right, now that we've done it,
go ahead and click OK in order to accept that modification and we are done,
that's all it takes. And if you were to take a look at these various layers as
we will right now, you can see that every single one of the layers is making an
important contribution to the overall whole. So this is what things look
like without that Multiply layer. You can see that we're totally now missing
those dark edges that we need to burn in to the background. We desperately
need those edges in order for this composition to work. So go ahead and turn
Multiply back on. If we didn't have the Normal layer obviously, if I were to turn
Norm off, we wouldn't have any of the proper colors inside of the interior of
this image. So we wouldn't have the right flash tones, her dress would look wrong,
her lips would look wrong, her eyes would look wrong, her hair would look
wrong and so on of course. So I will go ahead and turn normal back on, but even
the Lum layer, the Luminosity layer is making a very important contribution. If
you turn it off, you'll see what the big difference is.
You'll see how our transitions don't look right at all. We're too dark, we're
too translucent here around the edges of the shoulder and the hair and so on.
With the help of that Luminosity layer though, we have a nice step in between
Normal and Multiply. So the entire composition works. All right, I am going to
go ahead and zoom out, and you can see it just looks great, feels awesome
inside of this new environment. Now, let's say we want to move her into a
different position. We need to be able to move all those three layers at the
same time. So go ahead and click on one, Normal is selected for me right now.
Then, Shift+Click on the last of the three. So I'd click on Norm and then Shift+Click
on Multiply in order to select this entire range. Then, I am going to go
up to the Layers palette menu and I am going to choose New Group from Layers in
order to group all of these layers together. Photoshop will invite me to name
this group and I will just go ahead and call it young lady because that's what
she is and I will click OK in order to accept that result.
So now we have all three of the layers grouped together, so that they will move
together, we can transform them together and so on. Now, I am going to tab away
my palettes and if I were to Ctrl+Drag the image, I would move all three layers
at once. So I will go ahead and cheat her over to the left hand side a little
bit and that is the final version of my image. I am going to go ahead and fill
the screen with the image, and I am going to go ahead and zoom in and voila,
there it is. What an awesome composition. Check out those hairs, those details around
the edges. Not only do we have every single hair intact,
but we have these wonderful bursts as well. So, all that softness that
we had inside of the original image has been conveyed into this new background
as well. So we're wrapping the warmth around the right side of her head and
we are -- just on and on. I mean we can see through -- even we can see through
these edges of her shoulder as well which is in keeping with the original
version of the photograph. So a beautiful, credible composition, thanks to
a little bit of masking and a whole lot of advanced blending inside of Photoshop
CS3.