MAX SESSIONS Hi, and welcome. I'm Julieanne Kost. Today we're gonna take a look at some of Photoshop's most recent additions, including Generative Expand and Generative Fill, as well as Adobe Firefly. And we're going to see how we can incorporate these new tools into our compositing workflows.
First, I want to start off by taking a moment to talk about my workflow. So, for me, I like starting with a concept, I don't like just staring at a blank page. Usually I choose an idea or I have a vision that I want to express. And not all of you will, and that's absolutely fine. But for me personally, the concept serves as a map, right? It kind of points me in the direction, it helps to lead me where I want to go. And I can always change direction as the concept develops, I can even take a detour, right. But the map at least is gonna help me to get started. Now, I usually get my ideas for my composites from two sources, either reading books or from my dreams. So, I read a lot. I find that I get more interesting ideas and concepts for images from reading than I do personally from watching like a movie or TV. I think that's 'cause the written word encourages us to use our imagination. It encourages us to visualize characters and locations and the environments that they're in. And when I watch a movie, I feel like it's a little too late because those words and the concepts and the ideas have already been translated into visuals for me. When I do read and when I do have these dreams or nightmares, I make notes of anything that creates a strong visual in my mind, and I write it down so that I have this kind of book or an idea bank that I can pull from so that I don't sit there and stare at a blank page. The idea for this image came from a dream that I had the other night, and I'll show you how I put it together in just a few minutes. But, first, when I start building a composite, I typically start by building the environment. Just like a movie has a set or a theater has a stage, I start by creating the background or the environment to place my subjects. Then I place the primary subject and then any supporting subjects or secondary subjects. So, we're going to go ahead and move to Photoshop so that we can see how these new generative technologies can help us to not only expand an image to maybe help build an environment, but also to help us retouch and generate completely unique subjects and supporting elements. All right. So, let me just get out of here and let's go to Photoshop. I want to start with the Crop Tool because the Crop Tool has this new fill type called Generative Expand. So, typically, when I'm creating composites, I make them 1:1 the aspect ratio so they're square. And in the past I would have had to either crop this image or make up a bunch of information. Well, that is really easy to do now. So, I have the Crop Tool targeted. I'll go ahead and set the ratio to 1:1 and then 'cause I don't wanna crop it, I wanna expand it, I'll drag out the crop. It's set to Generative Expand, and I'll click on the checkmark. That's going to tell it to go ahead and move forward with the crop. It's gonna take the information here, go up to the cloud and generate completely unique content to fill that area. So, we can see that content on the Properties panel and on the Layers panel. So, the Layers panel has a new type of layer. This is called a Generative Fill layer. I'll just make sure we can see that. In this case it's Generative Expand because I use the Crop tool and it's got this new icon. And it can hold as many variations as you want to generate. Here's the first variation. I think I'll maybe go to the second one. I like that one better. And here is the third one, which I really like, because I didn't want to add any additional flowers. So, to keep my file size smaller, I would go ahead and click on the Trashcan for the variations that I didn't wanna keep. And if you want to give feedback to Adobe, you can use the three dot icon and you can say, "Oh, this was a great variation," or "a poor variation," or you can report a variation. If you didn't find any variations that you liked, you could click on Generate again and Photoshop would go out and create three more variations for you. And you can keep doing this indefinitely, and every single one of them will be unique. So, we can see if we like. No, I don't like that one any better. Maybe not. And let's say you like this one, but there's just something in it that you don't like, like, one little area. Well, you could always add another Generative Fill, right? So, I can come over here and say, "Maybe I didn't like this yellow, and purple area." As soon as you make a selection in Photoshop, you're going to get your taskbar. And there it says right there, Generative Fill. So, I can also grab it from the menu here. But it's going to be so much faster if I click Generative Fill. Don't need to enter a text prompt on this one, just click Generate, and Photoshop will go ahead and create three variations, and it creates a new Generative Fill layer. So, this is going to generate new content for that area. I can select any of these that I like, and then just delete the ones that I don't like. Let's go ahead and zoom in to 100%. So, Command+1 will zoom in. And I'm going to toggle on and off the visibility of this layer. And, look, I mean, it looks really good at 100%. You cannot tell in this image what has really been made up and what has not. All right. I'm gonna close this, though, and I'm gonna move to this next image. One of the reasons you couldn't tell with that last image what was generated content and what wasn't was because it was relatively low res. It was 3000x3000 pixels. If we move to this image here and I tap C to get the Crop Tool, clear that, let's say, we want to add some space in order to create our environment for our composite here.
Well, I don't need to add it to the whole thing. You can add whatever you want. But when I choose to generate this and I hit Generate, which I can use the taskbar or we can click on the plus icon, or you can hit Enter/Return. The problem is with this file is that it's really high resolution. It's 7400 pixels and the size of the content that is being generated is much smaller than that. It's like 1024. So, even though at this view it all looks good, we can look at all of the variations, we can choose between them, choose the one that we like. But if I zoom in to 100% and go to the Home, the upper left, you can actually see the difference, right? Because this is such a high-res image the generated content was generated at a lower res and then resized up to match the image. Yeah, but we can fix this. So, I'm going to delete that layer because we don't need it. And, in fact, let me just go back in time until we're at our original document here. I'm going to change the background into a layer and I'm going to change the fill for the crop to just be transparent so that when I use the Crop Tool to extend my canvas size here, you can see that we're actually adding transparency. So, I'm not using the Generative Expand right now, I'm using the Crop Tool to expand the canvas and add transparency. So, I'll go ahead and apply that. We get the transparent area. But now what I'll do is I'll switch to the Marquee tool, just the Rectangular Marquee tool. Instead of doing this all at once, I'll use that heads-up display and pick an area that's about 1000 pixels, or maybe even 2000 pixels, because it can up-res two x pretty easily. Then I'll hit Generative Fill, don't need to enter anything, there's a prompt, and it will go ahead and generate for that area. Now when we see the results, as soon as it processes this, because it's got to process it on the cloud, and I go back to that same top area there. Look at that. I mean, the resolution is so much better. I love that. So, let's delete those two. That's my choice of the variations. I would go down and then select the next segment here and do the exact same thing, hit Generative Fill, and then choose to generate. And, of course, like the tip says, you can add a feather or change opacity if you want to. It depends on the edges of your image and what it is you're trying to do. But this is going to create this second Generative Fill layer. And if we zoom out, we can see that it is going to be seamless with the one above it. we can change and grab any of these and then delete the ones we don't want to keep that file size down. All right. So, I think you get the idea. I don't need to go through the whole image here. So, let's close that and move on to this next image. So, this document actually has two layers in it. 'Cause I got to thinking, if people are trying to expand the canvas, sometimes they may not want to make up a ton of information. Maybe they want to put two images together. So, here I have Layer 1, which is kind of the steamy area. Then I have the Background layer, which is this volcanic area. I'll unlock that. So, now it's just Layer 0. And I'll use my Move tool and just scoot that over, all right? It'll snap when it gets to the edge. I'm gonna go further than the edge. All right. We'll toggle on the visibility of this layer and then I'm going to use the Image menu and choose to Reveal All. And Photoshop will automatically build out the canvas so that we can see all of the data that was off the canvas. All right. Now I'll select Layer 1. That's my top layer. Grab my Marquee tool again, and then to blend these two very kind of unlikely images together, I mean, the horizons don't match or anything. I'll select a little overlapping area and tell Photoshop that this is the area that I want it to change. Then I'll choose Generative Fill and again click on Generate. And again. I didn't enter in any prompt or anything. I'm just telling Photoshop, "Hey, can you look at the photos, and then can you create some unique content that will make those look better together?" So, there's the first effort. I am not sure I'm too fond of that, but I love this one. Here's the second one, so, we can delete the first one. And how is the third, oh, I like the third one even better. So, there we go. But I don't really like the clouds. So, let's just take our Lasso tool. And again, I'm telling it what area it can change. So, it can change the mountain. It can change the top of the lava here, just a little bit. And then it can change those clouds. Again, just click Generative Fill, hit Generate. Photoshop will do all of its calculations. It's giving us all of the variations over here and we'll take a look at those in just a minute. Now, I could have typed in "clouds," but I didn't feel that I needed to because there's so many clouds and mist in the image. I think it will get it right without me even having to enter anything. So, there we go. One with smaller mountains. Oh, one with barely any mountains. I like this one a lot. But it really just depends on what you were doing. If you were putting a figure in your image or something, that will probably change whichever one you choose. None of them are right or wrong. It's whatever you want to add. All right. So, just great ways to make backgrounds, expand your backgrounds, put multiple images together. All right, Let's close that. Now, what about if you have a subject? And in this case, I have a bird, but I clipped the bird's wing. Well, now we can return to crop. So, this Generative Expand isn't just for the background images. Think of it also for maybe your subjects. I also have brought back a lot of images to life with using it. So, here I've got the Crop Tool. I'll just scoot it up a little bit, right, the bird. I want to give it enough room so it'll complete the wing and then I'll just change the option back to Generative Expand and apply that. And let's see what Photoshop creates. Now, it might have helped if I put in "bird wing" as the prompt. But, honestly, I feel that most of the times in a case like this, if I don't enter in any prompt, it does a better job than what I would have entered in the first place. And there's our first rendition. So, we've got the full wing there. We have a second variation. I don't like that one as much. Let's try this third variation right here.
I think that one's the best one. That would be the winner for me. Don't think of it for backgrounds, but also for subjects. Okay. This image I really like, I love the rocks, but I knew when I photographed it that the background was terrible, but I was hoping that I would composite it. But I never have because it would be a huge amount of effort because I want sand in the foreground and I kind of want it going off to like a misty dune. So, I'm going to convert the background to a layer. Grab the Move tool. Just scoot that up a little bit. And then I'll just use Select Subject in order to select the rocks. Now, it does a good job. Yeah, I'm just going to grab the Lasso tool, hold down the Option key and just get rid of that. That'd be the Alt key on Windows. Okay, great. So, the background selected, I'm going to use the Taskbar because it's so great. It's constantly giving me tools that I need so that I don't have to go and find them or remember the keyboard shortcut. So, I'm going to invert this. So, now the background is selected. And then I'm just going to type in a prompt on this one. All right. And what I want is I actually want white sand. All right. So, let's go to Generative Fill. I copied and pasted this, by the way, because I'm a terrible typer. But what it says is "White sand in the foreground, fog and mist in the sky." And we'll hit Generate. So, now Photoshop, while it's looking at the content in the image, it's going to really focus on the prompt that I put in and create that information. And so we can see here's one option, one variation, here's the second one and here's the third one. Now, all of these have kind of dirty sand that I would have to fix. So, let's just hit Generate again. I said, you can hit Generate as many times as you want. You'll always get unique results or variations given back. What I like is the way, it would have taken me a long time to try to get the shadows and everything around here. So, I don't really like that image. We've got a lot of dirty sand here that I wasn't getting in previous.
Which one should I go with? Maybe I should type in "clean sand" or something like that. Well, for now, to save time, I'm just going to go with this one. So, I like the foreground, but I kind of want a little bit more mist in the background. Maybe some trees or something. So, I'm going to use Select again and I'm going to select the Subject, and that will select the rocks again, right? And then I'm gonna select Inverse. Now all the background is selected. But because Photoshop is going to affect the areas that are selected and I don't want it to affect the sand, I'm gonna grab the Lasso tool and again, holding down the Option or the Alt key to subtract, I'm just going to subtract this whole bottom area over here and maybe come up like right under the rock there. All right. So, now all of this top area is selected and I'm gonna type in "fog and mist on an overcast day" and let's generate that. All right. So, don't stop. If it doesn't do everything you want it to do in one try, you can always go in and select smaller areas and then recalculate on those areas. So, there, I like that one right away a lot better. How about this one? I like that one. I like over here a little bit better. And yeah, the trees. I like the trees a lot better. Then we could always come in, and it might be a little bit much for this image, but, and I don't really want to take the time, but I could go in and we could select all these small areas. Oops, I have to hold the Shift key if I want to add to my selection. So, let's select all these. And so you could go in. I could even do, like, that area right there. We could do bigger areas. You understand the point? I could go here to Generative Fill, and I don't want to type anything in because even though some of this is sand, obviously, this isn't, I wouldn't want it to fill this area where the little plant was with sand. But I could go in and make smaller selections and fill that and it would get rid of all those little areas. Again, I've more variations, and I could pick the ones that I like. I could trash the ones that I don't want to keep my file size down. And we can also use the three dots if you want to share feedback with Adobe. Was it good? Was it poor? Or, report it. All right. So, it's not just for your expansion of the backgrounds, for fixing subjects, but also for completely replacing backgrounds. All right. So, let's close that. And I just want to show a few other examples of that. I'll go to Lightroom here, and this was what was created with a little bit more patience there with the white sand and then the background. So, again, every time you do it, it's going to be different. Here's some bubbling mud, which I was able to prompt the steam at the top and then just fill in the mud below. Here I've got these rocks and I wanted them to be sitting in water. So, I prompted green water with reflection of rocks, and it created that for me. And then in this last image, I just wanted these to appear as if they were fading off into the mist and add some additional sand in the foreground. So, I went ahead and prompted those, and that's what it gave me. Okay. So, what about creating entirely new subjects? So, let's return to Photoshop and let's just create a new document, 2000x2000 pixels. And again, I'm just going to copy this and then we're going to select all because as soon as you select all, or make any selection, then you get the option for Generative Fill. So, I'll click on there and we can paste in our text, which is a calm lake with dark blue water in fog and mist. I'll hit Generate and you can actually see in the Layers panel that Generative Fill layer is being named with the prompt that you gave it. You can also change the prompt using the Properties panel if you want to, and you can also go through all your variations using the Taskbar by just clicking on each one of these. And I really like number three and number one. I'm going to go with number one. And now I want to fabricate or create or generate a completely new item. This is going to be a white paper origami boat with the reflection. All I need to do is select the area that I want to put the boat in, and I could try to draw the boat, but that would probably be sad. So, I'm just going to draw a marquee, click Generative Fill, paste that in and then hit Generate. All right. So, again, we see the Prompt there. It's named the layer of the prompt and we're getting our variations. Now, I've had this where if you make the selection really long and skinny, it'll actually create two boats for you. But I like that one. I don't like that one as much. And how about the third one? Nope. But again, I could go in and change the prompt. So, I could say, yellow.
So, now I want a yellow paper origami boat in water with a reflection and hit Generate, and it'll go ahead and regenerate this. And I should get some yellow options. So, really easy. If you're just trying out, you want to try out different things. There's a yellow boat. There's another one. All right. So, I like the first one better. This one may be right here. Now, I think the reflection is too strong, but that's okay, because look it. We've got the layer mask, which is showing us the initial selection. But if I select the layer mask and I grab my brush and maybe I set the opacity to like 30% and I paint with black, I can just paint some of that out because it is quite a foggy day. So, I don't know that I'd want the reflection quite that opaque. All right. So, that's one way to create content. And Photoshop is looking at the surrounding area and it's going to merge that content into it, and it's looking at the direction of light and everything. If you just want to create something completely separate, then you can go to your browser and you can go to Firefly.adobe.com. Now, I'm going to use this Text to image option right here and just show you that you can just start typing in. In fact, I'll type in the same thing, "yellow paper origami boat." Now, I might not want it in the water with a reflection because it doesn't know what kind of water it is. And I could always do that in Photoshop, make the reflection. But now when I hit Generate, let's see what Firefly gives me.
And, of course, Firefly has all these different options. You can make it a graphic or a photo or artwork, and you can apply all these different kind of styles to it, and you can keep going. If you if you like one of these, you could select it and say, "Oh, you know what, let's go ahead and show similar with this," and it will go ahead and look at that image, or you can set a reference image and then it will create additional images based on that. Right? Or you can hit Refresh and it would create a whole new series of images. Now, once you find the image that you like, then you can go ahead and either download the image, or you can use the three dots. And for this case, I'll just copy it to the clipboard. Return to Photoshop. Let's hide that layer and we'll just paste it in. All right. So, well, let's see. We could put on a new layer and let's paste it in. All right. And then we could go to Select and select Subject. Let's see. You might want to put in your prompt, like on a white background or on a gray background, so, that it's easier to select. But that looks good. Right here, look at I've got my mask icon so I can just add my mask, use the Move tool and just scoot that around. I could resize it. I could make it look more realistic by making a dupe and then flipping it and everything. I want to move on to the next image 'cause we're almost out of time. So, this next image is this one that I want to create. And it was made from these images here. So, I've got two layers that I created using the Generative Fill in Photoshop and then the rest of all of these assets you can see were created in Firefly. So, to save time, I've put them all in the same document so we can just open up this document and we will get all of our layers. All right. So, now all it is is a process of just selecting the layers and removing the background. So, this I did in a different image a little while ago, but I really liked the robe. So, let's just go to Select and select Subject, that will select the subject. I don't want the face, so I'm gonna hold down the Option key or the Alt key, and I'm gonna kind of come around the shoulder here with the Lasso tool and just remove the area that I don't want. Then look, right here with the Taskbar, click on the mask. Terrific. We can go ahead and add the circle. This one's from Firefly. I'll tap the M key to get the elliptical marquee tool and then just drag out my selection.
And then again, as soon as I release the cursor, I can just add my mask. All right. I'll do something similar for the scary white antelope mask. I'll pull this further so you can read the whole prompt there that I've pasted in as a text, and we'll go up to Select and Subject. I mean, I can't believe how good Select Subject has gotten, how much quicker it's made my workflow, and I'll just reposition that right there. Now, I probably don't want that at full opacity, so let's just go to the Layers panel, bring that down a little bit. All right, then I've got this other texture. This was this old tarnished, scratched mirror that was created. And I just want to add that on the inside of this mirror. So, let's just make a quick selection right there. All right. And then I need to target that layer and then create a mask. All right. And if I needed to, I could unlink those and then I could use the Move tool, for example, if I wanted to move that around. Might move it over there a little bit. We can use different opacities, we can use different blend modes. In this case, I like the subtract blend mode for this image, but I'm kind of missing the shoulders here. So, I'm going to grab the Lasso tool and I'm just going to drag shoulders and then up like a neck and then over here, kind of down and around. I don't really like that. Let's try that again. So, the shoulders would be coming up to the neck and then down and over to that shoulder. Okay. Then I'll simply add a solid color. So, now we've got this more like, a shoulder look which I kind of like. It's a little weird, though, that it's on top of the mirror. So, let's do this. I'll fill it with black, but I'm gonna clip it to the mirror, or to this layer below it, so, that it only shows up within the inner mirror area. We can do that by gonna Layer and creating a clipping mask right there. Turned white when I did that 'cause it's taking on the same blend mode as this layer below, which is subtract, which if I wanted it white, that's great. If you want to change the color, we could just change it back to black that way. I think that's kind of more interesting. So, I'll go ahead and apply that. All right, great. Then we have a few more layers to add here. We've got the wings. Again, these are beautiful wings just generated in Firefly. I'll say Select Subject. And this was just a front view of bird wings spread out on a white background. All right, so we can add our mask. I might get my Lasso tool because I don't think I'm going to want these bottom feathers here, and then we can fill this with our foreground color. That's just Option Delete because we're on the mask right here. And let's go ahead and turn on all those other layers. And, of course, we can reposition any of these at any time. If I wanted to move that up a little bit, that's just fine. I can also use the blend modes here, so maybe set this to Multiply. I think that looks a little bit better. Maybe nudge it over a little bit to the left. All right. And then I have these balloons that I wanted to use as eyes. I know it's a little weird, but I don't really like balloons. Let's do Select Subject again. I'm going to make these really small. So, I'll add the mask and then we can go to Edit and then Free Transform, and let's make this, they're gonna be super small because they've got to fit within that eye, right? So, I'll apply that and we'll just bring those right there. Now, if I want to duplicate it, that's just Command J, right. Command J will duplicate it and then I can go ahead and use Command T to Free Transform because look at in the Taskbar I get this really quickly I can flip it the other direction, which I'm sure is hard to see on screen, but I just wanted them to be the opposite of one another. All right, so let's say I like those, but they're little too bright. So, let's just bring down the opacity of them a little bit. Maybe to there. All right. And then we've also got this light switch. So, again, Select Subject. I can't believe how much time Select Subject saves me. We add the mask, Command T for Free Transform. I'm going to make this small. I'm also going to hold down the Shift key because, I don't know, all the light switches in my house were always narrow. Now we have that shadow. So, let's add a shadow here and that'll make it look, like, it's actually against the wall, which I kind of like, because it might make someone ask a question like, "Wait a minute, what is the light switch doing outside?" Right? So, we add the Drop Shadow there. And then once we've added the Drop Shadow to one layer, if I wanted to copy it, say to the mirror, I can hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows, and then just drag that down. Now we've got that same Drop Shadow here. All right. Let me just do a quick time check. Okay. We're almost out of time. So, a few last things. One thing I would probably do is this statue of the woman it doesn't look great 'cause, she's not fading into the water or anything. If I didn't want to ruin this mask, I would probably select the layer and then use Command G and add that into a new group, because your groups can also have masks, right? So, now I can add a mask to Group 1, and then I could select, say, the Gradient tool or something, and I could click and start dragging up my gradient to slowly fade or to hide all of the areas that are black within that group. So, it's a nice way to kind of separate the two different masks. All right. So, at this point, I am running out of time. We could go in and we could either, we could make a reflection I could take this layer and do a little, Command J would make a duplicate of it. We could take it out of the group, and then we'll need to do Command T or Control T to flip that, right. It's pretty big, so I'll just flip it horizontally there. Or we could have not horizontally, I want to flip it vertically. I should have just used the Taskbar there because it's visual and then we can scoot this on down and then, of course, if we convert it to a smart object, right. So, I can convert this to a smart object. Now, we can go ahead and add something like a blur to it. So, I could go to Filter and maybe Gaussian Blur. Let's add a blur of, yeah, sure, let's do about 30 pixels here. Click Okay. And then we can also decrease the opacity of that, right? Because it's just going to be like kind of a reflection there. And then because I've added the blur as a smart filter, it has its own smart filter layer. Again, if I grab my gradient and I start dragging the gradient down, we can see what happens is it goes from, it'll hide and show the blur. So, I want the whole thing to be a little bit blurred, but now it's going to go to more and more blurred. So, we can just change the length of that gradient as needed. I think it's still far too opaque. So, let's just take that statue and drag that down a little bit more. We could also add a Drop Shadow.
I think this is also way too bright, so I know I'm out of time, okay, but still, I want to add a curve. Just add a curve right there, and we'll just drag this down, and we'll drag the curve down. But I only want it to affect the gown, so I'm gonna click right here, and that's gonna create a clipping mask, and I can take the white down as well. And that just looks a lot better. But what's really, really fun is just the ability to do this so quickly and then go find and create and generate new files so that you can iterate and kind of change the story that you're doing really quickly. And whether or not you use this in a final image or not is going to be up to you. You might go and re-photograph all of these different elements, but at least you didn't waste a lot of time photographing the wrong elements before you made your final composite. So, I'm really sorry that we're out of time. I just want to thank you so much for joining me for this session. And I really hope that all these new generative technologies really ignite your creative spark. I'm Julieanne Kost. Thanks for watching.