Advanced Photoshop Techniques from Two Hollywood Insiders

[Music] [Lisa Carney] Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. Day one, so exciting. My name is Lisa Carney. My dear friend, Jesús Ramirez. And we are, I guess, Hollywood insiders. [Jesús Ramirez] Yeah. Advanced Hollywood insiders, which is kind of cool. Jesús and I have been working together for, jeez, years now. Four years. But I want to tell you, I've been doing this for, like, 35 years. I started when he was four, I believe. Right? Is that-- Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Anyway, I'm going to sit down if you don't mind. Might be a little easier.

Let me go back a slide here. We do a ton of entertainment art, all kinds of different varieties. I mean, if you look at the styles, everything's different. But by the way, you skipped my work. One of my favorite pieces. Go back. Go back. That one. - Oh, heckfire. You're right. - Yeah. So Yellowjackets, in that whole entire poster, I created the spear with the fire. That was it. - Well, you know-- - Just part of that poster, I might add. Listen, when you start with someone, you only give them a little job first. Right? No. I'm totally kidding. You're right. And thank you so much. Can you guys imagine how much work went into this? Anyway, so as you can see, we do a lot of different styles of work, and I've got to tell you, the greatest thing I possibly did was start collaborating with someone else. It made the studio do a lot more work. Many of you guys are going to know you guys do Photoshop differently. You do it differently than you, than you, than you. So getting someone else involved in your workflow can be absolutely-- Oh, Jesús is in trouble already. Do you see it's day one, first session, and he is in trouble. - Welcome to your world, honey. - Welcome to my world. Cool. So, yeah. Adding someone to your studio can be amazing. And today in our demo, you're going to see we have really different ways of approaching Photoshop and the new tools. So there you go. That's our work. And by the way, this is really important. Make sure you take a photo of this slide. It contains two QR codes. One for me, one for Lisa. And that will get you to our website, emails, social medias, anything. All the information about us will be there. So if you have any questions, comments, this is where you can find us through those QR codes everywhere else. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. We're here all week. - Thank you. - Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Is Jason next door, I think. - I think it's Jason. - I don't know who's next door. It's probably Jason. Yeah. So by the way, this is another very, very important QR code. This is for you to sign up for new Photoshop beta features. That means that Adobe's going to be releasing some special features that are not going to be generally available for the beta release. But if you sign up through that QR code, you will get access in the near future to these new-- Access to these new features. So make sure that you sign up if you want those features before the rest of the world. And do it. I'm telling you, being on beta, I work on beta all the time. It's great. Alright. We're going to dive in. We have an absolute-- Wow. All right. I think we have to cheer now. - Yay. - One, two, three, go. Whoo!

It's going to be like that, gang. Right? This is where we're going. All right. So you know the remove tool and generative fill from 2023. Super awesome possum. Let's say you only get one or two zombies, but you have to fill a whole page with zombies because I know that is your workflow. And you want pockets in or out. You have to make them look different. Generative fill, Remove tool has been amazing. Heckfire, if you need to, you can make an extra little tie. Right? But I'm going to tell you, 2023 is not 2024. That Remove tool, thank you, Meredith and your Photoshop team, for making it amaze balls. But now, ladies and gentlemen, as Anna pointed out in the Keynote this morning, you now have some new features buried under the hood. Please make sure you have your Option panel up, so you can see this whenever you're working on tools. So now we have find distractions, but also generative AI inside the Remove tool. You're going to absolutely love this. You can turn it off or on. We're going to talk about that in just a second. And in fact, what I do want to talk about are the credits. Generative credits. That's right. So anytime you use an Adobe product and use Generative AI, you're going to use a certain number of credits depending on what tool you're using. For example, Generative Fill uses three credits because it gives you three generations. How many credits do you have or where do you find that information? Stock.adobe.com. Stock.adobe.com and you'll see they're just below your Adobe Stock credits, the amount of generative monthly credits that you have. What happens when you run out? It just becomes slower. You can still use it, just not as fast. So those are like the super-fast generated credits that you get. Yeah. And so why is that important? It's important because you're going to want to know when to use the Remove tool with AI and when not to. What do I mean by that? When you don't have to use AI, don't. Fair enough? All right. So I'm going to show you something. So look, in Hollywood, we have come up with all these elements to remove-- elements to use in a poster. Everything's on fire. I'm from California. Everything's always on fire in California. So I need to make elements. So I took this shot. I'm going to show you how to do this. Just at the capital, you use the Remove tool. I want to get the-- I leave it on auto, by the way. That's what I do. I want to find people. I'm sorry, I'm going very fast through this. But automatically, Photoshop's going to find the people, and you hit the return key, bada-bing, it's going to come out. I want to point out that it also took out the bicycle. So when you're doing a period piece, you don't want modern people. Now I need a little more of the capital here, just a little more, so I'm going to use Generative Expand for the background to just get a little more of the background. Right? This is so handy. Firefly is going to say, Lisa, do you need some more capital building? Girl, I gotcha. And it's going to give me three variations. Right? You guys should know this. You might need to pay attention to historical accuracy. I got in trouble once for this, so be careful. Be careful. But in a second, I have an element I can now use in the poster. I cannot tell you how long this used to take me. Now I'm going to show you a different situation with the same tool. So Chichén Itzá, it's very hot there. I'm just going to tell you. Even hotter than Miami. And let's say the new Apocalypto, did I say it right? You said it right. Apocalypto. Movie's coming out, and I need a background. I want to generate a background. What I'm going to do is the same technique. I'm going to use the same Remove tool, Find Distractions, People, but look at this. It didn't find the main people. Oh, bummer. No bummer. It thinks it's the subject. So Photoshop doesn't know everything, but it's no big deal. You just click that Remove tool, get on them. I didn't even pick the shadow. Look at this. I didn't even pick the shadow, and it's going to fix it because Photoshop is my friend. Takes a minute. Especially if there's a lot of people here, it takes a little longer. So look. Now I've got a base image, but I need a background. Generative expand, once again, is going to be my friend here, gang. But listen, do you know that when you pull that out, you can actually touch your item? Check this out. I'm going to touch that picture, and I can place it wherever I need to. So I can actually start designing the background right now. Oh, it's so handy. I have to tell you, from my industry, could you imagine before you'd have to mask it out, do sky replacement, do all this stuff? No, honey. Now you can still do sky replacement later, but at least it's already in the right position. So this is-- Oh, there you go. That's pretty rocking, right? All right. I'm going to pick the first one. I think it's much better. Clean housekeeping. Get rid of your Generative Fills that you don't want. It takes up memory. I'm going to talk a little bit or spice these things about-- Oh, enhanced detail. Sorry. I just clicked that too fast. Enhanced detail, once you like the image you have, click Enhanced Detail, and you can get a better render. Okay? It's a new feature. It's tiny. It's small in the corner. Look at that. Really small. My finger's over it. So clean housekeeping is when you're done, get rid of the images you don't want. Okay? Now this background's not perfect. Right? I'm going to turn Generative AI off, and I just want to make some grass. Look, people or Indians and Mayans are going to be over this. This doesn't have to be perfect. I did not use any credits for that. No credits. Just super-duper fast, just because I need to make a background. Cool? So two different ways to use the same tool. Just remember, you can move some stuff. Jesús Ramirez, would you like to show them some retouching? Absolutely. And I'm going to switch over into my screen, and there we are. So, Poppa's House, I don't think this show is out yet, but we-- - This week. This week. - There we go. It comes out this week. - And-- - Come on, everybody. So I'm just going to show you a very simple quick study where I use generative features to just make my life easier. This is not going to be an example where I type a prompt and it's going to generate a beautiful poster for me. We can't do that. We need layers. We need flexibility. We need everything to be modularized. So we use Generative Fill in a much different way. It just makes our life a lot easier. It takes the basics and it just does them really, really well. So this is just basically a new approach on how to use Generative Fill. A lot of the times when working with these posters, you wouldn't believe how many revisions we have on things that to me are irrelevant. Like, we don't like this wrinkle on this jacket. All the other ones are fine, but that one we don't like. Why? I don't know. Someone's job is to not like wrinkles on jackets, it seems like. And, for something like that, we could use the new Selection Brush Tool, which just allows you to paint over an image, and that's really a selection. That's a selection. It's very similar to the old Quick Mask. I'm old school. I still like quick mask. Quick mask simply means that you make a selection, you press the Q key, and you enter a workspace and where you can continue painting with a brush. And that's not the brush I would like to use, but I'm just going to scroll up and select another brush. There we go. Painting with this brush. And for some reason-- Oh, soft light, blending mode. You got to check your blending modes. So when you paint and then press Q again, you make a change to your selection. So that's the old way of doing it. The new way is to use the quick-- I'm sorry, the Selection Brush, which I use all the time. So how would I use the selection brush with the new generative features to solve my client's problem of "I don't like that wrinkle on that jacket"? Very simple. Just click and drag from the taskbar. I can click Generative Fill. I can leave that blank and then click on Generate. Photoshop is going to give it a good guess to know what's going to be under that generation. It may work, it may not. We're going to get three variations and we pick the one we like the most or we can try again. We'll see what result we get, and that's pretty good, I mean. Yeah, so you guys see this is the same tool being used for something completely different. It's for retouching, not actually for creating brand new elements, but it's the same tool. Right, so again, this would have taken a long time in the past using techniques like frequency separation and other ways of doing it. But now it's just very simple. Just create that generation. It removes the wrinkle and it keeps my client happy and I didn't spend hours doing it. Also, you might have noticed that there is a slight imperfection here with whatever that is. Not a problem. This is just the layer mask. If you disable the layer mask, you can actually work with what's outside of it. Not disable it, but paint over it. So I can go and paint with black, and I can hide that imperfection. So the generations are not perfect, but I can always paint things out, paint them back in, do another smaller generation on top of the imperfection, whatever you like. Another useful way of using Generative Fill-- This is so good. Hold on. Attention, Kmart shop. That was the original photo. - This is-- - Original photo. Really good technique. You really want to pay attention here. Yeah. And it's very simple. Original photo. And we get photos like this all the time. For whatever reason, they really like the talent in that pose, but there's a shadow, there's a distraction, whatever it is. We ask for a better photo. They say, "No, we have to use this." With Generative Fill, we can remove all those shadows actually really, really easily. It doesn't require a lot of time. All we need to do is simply do what I just did with the wrinkle. Select the Selection Brush and just paint over them. I don't like to do all the imperfections at the same time because if I were to do the entire face right now, I may love what happens in the forehead but maybe not so much on her cheek. So then I have to do more work. So I rather just focus on one piece, get that right, and move on to the next one. So again, make that selection, Generative Fill, leave the prompt blank, click on Generate. The results will not always be perfect, but that's okay. We can generate again or we can refine them if they're close enough. So we'll see what we get in this generation. We'll give it a second. Always read the tips, by the way. Really, really good tips. But see how great that was? We still have our skin texture. Everything looks very realistic. All the generations in this case were pretty good. So there we go. And then now what I would do at this point is just continue removing the shadows until I get something that looks like this. Look at all the layers that were required in this particular job just to make those imperfections disappear. And those are exactly the same techniques that I used on when I was working on that poster. I had to remove wrinkles. Wrinkles work the same way. Other different areas here, for example, with the hair, if it's not lining up properly, you can just paint over it, generate wrinkles on the jackets, the sweaters. That sort of stuff used to take hours, and now we can bring it down to just minutes with Generative Fill. - Awesome. You want to switch things? - Yeah. So listen, one pro tip I want to say about what Jesús just did, he did it with Generative AI. Try it with just the Remove tool first without Generative AI. If it works, rock and possum. You're happy. And if it doesn't, then go to AI just to save yourself some credits. So this Selection Brush is, no kidding, amazing. You don't have to be an expert masker when you're using it. I like to show this screen because this is how I learnt. When people do demos, sometimes it's hard to see where they're clicking, so I just want you to take a look here. You've got your Selection Brush. It's with the lasso tool, and you can change the opacity of that brush. You can also change the hardness and the size of the brush, which is amazing. Then you go ahead and use Generative Fill if you want to. Okay? Selection Brush. So Generative Fill, let's say we have this social ad we have to do or a media piece. Most of us have to do this this way. Watch this. These people are masked out, you know? All right. My masking sucks. Let's just say the truth. Use the Selection Brush. Again, you can change your opacity. You can change the brush size, the hardness. You can change the color overlay. I want her to have some flyaway hairs. I bet a lot of you aren't very good at drawing flyaway hairs. It's a hard technique to do, and it takes a while. You don't have to do it anymore. Use Generative Fill to generate, and it's going to generate some hair edges for you. And a lot of this can be, by the way, proof of concept. So you get the job signed off on. You see which one you like, and then if you have to go fix it later or refine it, you can. So I'm going to pick this one, good housekeeping. Now pay attention, gang. I can type in wispy blonde hair.

Do you guys realize, on that first one, I did not have a prompt? No prompt. The second one, I typed in wispy blonde hair. This way, you can see sometimes it'll give you a more refined bigger hair, in this case. Not so much. 1980s hair. No, thank you. I think I'll stick with this one. Right? So two different ways of using the same tool, gang. Going to do this little section down here. I like to do them separate, just like Jesús says, in case you didn't like the way it turned out, you don't have to redo the whole thing. Firefly is saying, "Girl, I gotcha. "I'm going to make some hair." That's a nice little bit. Let's see. Fuller. Oh, frizzy. No. No. Miami. We're in Miami. Now what if your client says to you, "We don't want that poll in the back of the head. "And the dude in the back, no, thank you." Oh, my God. Do I have to do the whole thing over again? No, my friends. You just click on the Layer, tap on the Properties panel, hit Generate. It will redo it for you. Pay attention. It will never be the same. It will never be the same. It's going to do a reiteration, and hopefully, you'll like it. You might like it better. I think it looks a little more contemporary here. No. That one? Yeah. I think that's the one I'm going to stick with. It's a little more contemporary looking. So I just want to be clear, gang. It's not the exact fix. Okay? It won't be the exact same image, so don't get too attached. But look how quickly I can change the background out. Heckfire! I can put her in front of a beach or something and regenerate the hair edges, and I don't have to hand-paint it. I don't have to type anything. I hit one button. I mean, I don't know about you all, but that's amazing. For my workflow, heckfire. Really helpful. Now I'm going to show you the same tool, something kind of complicated. Y'all ready? All right. Same tool, same stuff, Generative Fill, but what is this? Reference image. You're going to love this. You can now add a reference image to your generation. So I have this job. They shot these kids, brand new show starting this week. Hey, CBS, you go. And let's say they wanted a denim shirt on him instead. And let's put some khaki pants on here. Oh, but we didn't shoot him with that. Is that a problem? Not no more. Ain't no problem no more. Let me show you. Same tool. Selection Brush, opacity controller. Remember, it's all the same. This makes a huge difference. The opacity slider makes a huge difference in this section. I'm going to loosely select him, and I'm going to go to my bar. I'm going to move it to the top. Do you guys know you can actually pin the bar so it always shows up in the same spot? Handy little pro tip.

Jean shirt. Okay. Now I could just do a jean shirt, but I'm going to say, hey, I found a picture of a jean shirt. Can you put that one in for me? Yes, please. Generate. Firefly's got you. I want to remind you proof of concept. I'll have to clean this up, but let's take a look. Well, not bad, right? Let's see. It's not perfect, but it's definitely good enough for proof of concept. I can clean it up once the client signs off on it 'cause you know we have to do, like, 75 of these. Right? You need to have the chambray shirt. You have to have all that. The hands are going to suck. AI does not do hands well yet. I don't care. Capri pants, check this out. I did the exact same technique with the Capri pants short, super short. Client, which one would you like? Oh, thank you. I'll fix it after you sign off. Because you guys have to do a lot of iterations, right? They never shot these people with it. So, look, you can pick. You can decide what you need. Yeah. Do I need to fix his shoulder? Yeah. Do I need to fix her back leg that didn't get a pair of pants on it? Yes, I do. But you can get it signed off on and then spend the time. You are not going to be outsourced by AI, guys. Someone still has to fix this. But heckfire, I can get my comps in and get my iterations in and have them sign off on it. Can you see the power in this? Yeah. It's a pretty rockin' tool. All right. Selection Brush, variable. Please, please, I beg of you, pay attention to the opacity variable. It changes everything. I mean, night and day changes everything. Use Generative Fill with a reference image. I pull my reference images first. Okay? I pull them from Adobe Stock.

It's an assist. You are not going to be replaced. It's an assist. You're still going to have to clean it up afterwards. I want to be super, super clear. And then look at this. Let me get my Keynote going here. I just want to call out, shoulder and pants need adjusting. Yes, they do. No lie. But, man, you are halfway to the party. - Maybe even more than halfway. - Yeah. - Definitely. - All right. Jesús is going to show you something amaze balls. The Generative Workspace. You're going to absolutely love this. Generative Workspace. So this is an example of how you can use the new brand new Generative Workspace which is found in the Photoshop, the new Photoshop beta that just came out today. It's not in the general release yet. And it allows you to generate an ideate with generative images. And this is an example of-- We have done several posters for CSI: Las Vegas. And in this particular poster, we needed to create-- This happened when the rider strike was going on and we couldn't have the photos of the actual actors. So we needed to create a bunch of media images to promote the show before it came out. So we had to get creative, you know, playing cards and chips-- And I'm going to stop you there for a second. Can you imagine for a second going through Adobe Stock and trying to find cards perfectly lined up exactly the way you need it? - No. - Right. - Not going to happen. - Exactly right. But with Generative AI, this process becomes much, much easier. So why don't we recreate, the very least one card for this particular project. So there we go. We have our background. We need to play some cards. You can go into Edit and choose Generative Workspace. Alt, Shift, Ctrl G. If you know shortcuts, it's actually very similar to the clipping mask shortcut. Ctrl, Alt, G. Just set the Shift key. Like the YMCA thing when he says that. - Yeah. - Alt, C, Ctrl, Shift. And that will get you into the Generative Workspace, completely new today. And as you can see, I haven't even used it in this particular version. I had to update it this morning. So my old version is gone. Now we have the brand new one. So how does this work? It works a lot like Firefly, like the website, in terms of the options, the reference feature here that Lisa was just talking about, the aspect ratio, all that good stuff. It's all there, and you can just type in a keyword or a prompt. So I'll just do an ace of hearts playing card on a white background. And ace of hearts playing card on a white background, and I'll click generate. The difference between this feature and everything else is that while this is generating, I can continue and just do another prompt without waiting. So ace of spades on a-- Finished generating before I could finish typing, but I could click on generate again, and then it would generate the new set of playing cards. We're going to come back to this in a moment, but I just want to show you how this works. So now that we have the cards, I can just select one of the cards, the ones I like best. I can either open it or I can add it to something. What can I add it to? I can add it to my open documents or a new document. In this case, I only have one open document, which is the Generative Workspace PSD that I'm working on, as a separate layer, that works great. Or as a variation in layer, I don't want to do that. I don't want to have a generative layer just because I don't need the extra memory on my file. I don't want to bloat them. So a separate layer is fine and I'll click on Add. And that should bring it up into Photoshop here. At this point, I can now start working with this image and treat it just like any other Stock photo. So I can quickly make a selection, and I'm actually going to use a rectangle. I'm going to use a shape. The reason I'm using a shape is because nothing will get you sharper edges than a vector when it comes to masking. So I'm just going to quickly get the shape. It's not going to be perfect. I'm not trying to be perfect in this example. I'm just trying to show the workflow. I'm going to place that below the card. By the way, I always like to throw out shortcuts and tips as I'm working. Ctrl bracket keys will move the layers up and down the layer stack. Ctrl left bracket key down, Ctrl right bracket key up. So you don't have to click and drag layers. That's the Command key on the Mac if you're a Mac user.

So my generative image is there and I'm just going to clip it. Ctrl, Alt, G which is very similar to the new Generative Workspace shortcut. Anyway, there it is. This is my card. What I'm going to do now is place it in-- make a selection of both cards or both layers, excuse me, convert it to a smart object, and now I can continue compositing just like I used to before. I'm not even thinking of this card as a generative layer anymore. I can just continue doing a distortion. By the way, so notice right now that I press Ctrl T to transform the bounding box, it's not around the card. I want it to be around the card because it just makes it easier to work with. So what I'll do is I'll double-click on my smart object and then just press Ctrl or Command and click on the layer thumbnail, and it's going to make a selection around the active pixels. And then I'm just going to go into the crop tool, and it automatically selects that area, and I'll crop it out, close it, save it. And now when I press Ctrl T, the bounding box is on the card, and I can better control it. That's a really important key because when you guys try to transform something that's bigger than the object, you never get it right. So I know that was a subtle little tip, but that's a super important tip. It just makes it a lot easier to transform. So at this point, I can just right click and do something like perspective and, you know, distort, whatever I need to do to make sure that this looks like that card is really on there. I'm not going to spend the time to make it perfect, but I think that you get the idea. So our card is there. It's fantastic. And we'll just call it good for now even though I know it's not perfect. Now back to Generative Workspace. What if I show it to my partner or the client, and they want more variations? They don't they like the card, "It's fine, but you know what, just give us more ideas. "What other cards do you have?" This is where I think Generative Workspace is really, really powerful because we can come back in here and we have our ace of spades playing card on a white background that we did earlier, but now we can actually add styles to it and different types of variables. So for example, ace of spades playing card and I can type in the style-- in a-- And then my variables. So what are my variables? When I click on variables, it'll add brackets and whatever you put in there will create separate variations based on those variables. You'll see what I mean in a moment. So ace of spades playing card in a cartoon-- Did I, oops, misspell cartoon? Cartoon style. The hardest part of AI is learning how to spell. - Exactly right. - Yeah. Comma, another different style could be futuristic-- And so on and so forth. I don't want to add too many variables because you'll see it generates in multiples of three. So look at my button here. Actually, multiples of four. I'm sorry. So this is the difference. Generative Workspace generates four variations whereas the, text to image in Photoshop generates three. So now I'm wasting four credits. - And four. - Yeah. But notice here, it says generate eight. That means it's going to generate four in a cartoon style, four in a futuristic style. So I'll click on Generate, and I'll click on this icon here to see the timeline view, and you can see all the images that I've generated so far, and these are the separate generations. See, I don't know if the cartoon style is going to work. These futuristic ones are pretty cool. - They're really cool. - So I can just-- Maybe I like this one the best. This one, here's probably good. I can add it to-- Aren't they amazing? And just for a second, I just want you to contemplate if you had to do a Stock search this way. Can you imagine how much time or I'm certain there's no one in this room that was doing Google Image searches and pulling images that were illegal for you to use in your document, right? - Yep. - I know who you are. Once you have it in here, all you need to do is just drag it into a new tab. I could have opened the tab first and brought it in from Generative Workspace. I didn't do that, but that's okay. I can just simply drag it in here, place it into position. Maybe I have to scale it a little bit. It's not exactly a perfect match. I can definitely just store it and spend more time getting it perfect. Not going to do that for the class, not important. But once I save my smart object, it will update on the one I placed there earlier. So this is a way in which you can keep generating images. You can use multiple variables. Just to show you guys, I'm not really going to-- I want to say one more thing about this. You know your clients. They say, "Oh, can I see that in black? "Can I see that in red? Can I have it candy coated? "Can I have it gold?" And then two weeks later, they say, "Oh, can you go back to the gold?" It's in the file. If you don't throw out your variations and you leave them stacked in that smart object when they come back in two weeks and you still charge them a fee for having to re-illustrate it. That's right. I'm going to change the suit of the cars by adding a second set of variables, so spades. And we'll just do hearts. Just hearts. - Just to-- - You're a lover, not a fighter. That's right. That way I only generate 16 images as opposed to 32. So there you go. I'm clicking on Generate. I'm going to go back into my timeline view, and all those images are generating at the same time. And if we wait a second here, we'll see all those different variations that I can use for my composite. Yeah. I mean, you guys are seeing it, right? You can kind of get how much time you can save, and these are objects or backgrounds. We're doing it for all kinds of things. So cool. - Do you want to switch me back or-- - I'll switch you back. - There you go. - All right. So I'm hoping you're starting to see the power of how much you can get done with these AI tools, but remembering you still got to work on them, right? It's not one and done. I just want to be really clear. And please don't be afraid to do second or third iterations. So when I did that Reese Witherspoon's hair, if I didn't like the first one, hit Generate again. It'll keep cycling through new stuff. All right. One of the major jobs Jesús does for me is crafting what I call immersive background. So you all see something kind of akin to this when you see advertising on your streaming channels. But guess what, ladies and gentlemen? This is what we have to deliver for almost every single job in entertainment now because there are so many different streaming platforms and whatnot. So we have to build a shot like this. You know there's no set like this, right? This does not exist. And you have 10 minutes. Go. That's basically our life. So Jesús is the master of creating these immersive backgrounds from absolutely nothing, but now you guys are going to be able to be immersive background people. So I want to give you a case study. Let's talk about a real world job because I'm hoping this will work for your guys' workflow when you see what you have to do. So we get a sketch. We're like, "Hey. We have an idea." This is Young Sheldon. The idea that's given to us, if it's even sketched out, is one vertical, but we know full well we have multiple purchase buys we have to plan for. That's a lot of Ps. Do you know what I mean? Like, look how big of a source. Now they provide imagery, right? We're not on the set shooting the job. They have a photographer on set who will shoot jobs. Do you think that photographer was told what this is used for? No. Do you think this photographer owns a tripod? Evidently not. Do you think they do reductive shooting? I'm going to explain a term in case it helps you guys. When you have a set that you need to do compositing on, you do reductive photography. And what that means is you take the first shot, then you take the front elements off and you shoot it again. You take the mid items off, you shoot it again. You take the top elements on the table off, and you shoot it again. Look, the table has food on it, doesn't it? Look at the plate they gave us for the table. Is there food? No? Are the plates in the same spot? No.

Sweet Jesus, Mary, mother of god, what are you going to do? Right, you're going to call Jesús Ramirez because Jesús is genius at this. This is what we ended up having to deliver. How do you build it? So one of the real big problems was the room. Look at the room. We have a room here. The original shot, there was no room. Jesús, honey. Sure. Do you know how to fix this? I do know how to fix it. And I think the best way of explaining how something like this works is to simply simplify it, but also show you the file just so that you can see that it's not that scary. But also, I know that some of you may be thinking, "Well, why don't you just use Generative Fill?" Right, like, "Why don't you just generate the edges like you did earlier?" Two big reasons. Reason number one is a lot of these files are like 8K or something crazy in the resolution snap generative expand. And also, these things need to be modularized in case they change their mind on the positioning of an object. So let me show you what I mean by that. I'm going to open up this smart object here, and this is the actual file where that background was created. And it's going to take a second here because even though we downsized it, there's still huge, huge files. And there we go. So if you really look at this image, what it really is at the end of the day is four sides, the back wall, the side wall, ceiling, and floor. That's really it. So that's all in my mind, like, how can I take care of each individual piece? And quite frankly, this room was created using just patterns, really. At the end of the day, just patterns, two chairs that were just a simple composite. Probably the most challenging thing were the curtains because I wanted-- Again, we weren't sure what the client was going to need in terms of the placement of the curtains. So I just needed to keep the curtains modularized so I can move them around. Maybe the curtains are cutting somebody's head in half and they don't like that. So maybe we need them to move to the right a little bit or the left, right, whatever it is. - Flexibility. - Flexibility. - That's correct. - All of that have to be flexible. Right, so besides that, everything else in here was essentially created by using simple patterns. So let me walk you through an example of how I created this room. This is genius. These are just basic patterns he's going to use. This is a standard traditional Photoshop tool, but you just have to think differently about it. I think you're going to love this. Yeah, so we have this photo here and this is not unlike the photos that we get where all we have of the background of the set is literally something like that. And then we have to generate an image that covers the entire room as you saw earlier. So at the end of the day, this is just a simple pattern, right? So we can create a pattern out of it. How can we create a pattern out of something that has weird perspective like that? Well, remove the perspective. Step number one. And we have a lot of great tools in Photoshop to do that. One of those is a Perspective Crop tool. - Hold on. - Yep. Perspective Crop tool. People don't use this tool. Perspective Crop. Perspective Crop, no worries. I had to emphasize, honey, because this is amazing. No worries. And all you do is just create a grid, right? And then just grab the handles and try to match the edges as best as possible. Again, in this demo, I'm not going to be perfect. I usually work with a mouse. I don't have a mouse now. So I'm not as accurate as I usually am, as fast as I usually am, I should say. And I can click and drag and place this into position like so. And then when I hit Enter or Return, that removes the perspective of those tiles. Now I can work on-- Yeah. Super simple. Right? Yeah. Feel free to clap.

- [Man] Whoo! - Whoo! So at this point, we can make decisions, right? There's so many things we can do in here to create a pattern from here. I'm just going to show you a couple options. All of these options could work, but I just want to give you options. So the first thing is under View, we have the Pattern Preview, which essentially just duplicates the pattern so you can see what that would look like in if it was just repeated endlessly. Right? And I'm already noticing some problems, some problems with color, some problems with shadows. I'm not going to fix it for the final version, but I'll show you a way in which you could fix it if you wanted to. So you could always create, for example, a curves adjustment layer and if I wanted to brighten something up, I can just drag up, but then now it's affecting the entire image. I don't want it to do that. I just want it to affect certain areas. So I can just click on the layer mask and invert it to make it black so it hides everything. Ctrl I on Windows, Command I on the Mac. And then with the brush tool, I can bring down the opacity and the flow so that I can build in those highlights and just increase my brush size. And no matter where I paint, it will affect the image. So I don't know if you can see this little blue box. That's really the canvas there and everything else is just a repetition. So I can paint on the canvas and it affects everything else or I can paint here in the corner or wherever I paint on, I will affect the image. And there you go. That's one way in which you can control the shadows and try to make them match. As I said, not what I'm going to do in this case, but I wanted to give you that option.

So I'm going to disable the Pattern Preview.

Another option that you have is that you can use Generative AI. So you could go into Filter, Other, and choose Offset. These controls are sticky, which kind of bothers me. It simply means that it keeps the last setting that you used. I would like it better if it was just zeroed out every time. And what this simply means is that you can push the image horizontally and then find the seam. There's the seam and I can press Okay and then maybe use Generative AI to sort of fix that seam and see if it it can improve it. Sometimes it works great, other times it doesn't. Oops. I completely missed the generative button there, but we'll click on Generative Fill and then I'll click on Generate, and then hopefully it can create a nice edge. And now we know that the sides of the image will match because we push the image so there is no seam, and we're just trying to remove the seam from here. And that did horrible. That didn't work. Let's see this one. That one's a little better, but not great. And okay. So none of these work great. I could generate again. I could try maybe cropping the image a little bit, but that's another technique that you can use and that I've used for other projects. But to be quite honest with you, the simplest technique here is just to take one tile and just repeat that one tile.

In my opinion, it works best.

So I can just simply make a selection, like so. I think this will work. I will go into the Crop tool. Make sure that Delete Crop Pixels is off. I don't want to delete anything in case I need to bring some back and I will press Okay. And I'm just going to go into my View settings here and then do the Pattern Preview just to see how it looks and it looks pretty good.

So Jesús just ran through like four different ways that we go through. We have this tool kit, and you first try the big one and if that doesn't work you're like, "Oh, okay. Maybe I can adjust it, maybe I can fill it, or in this case, I can just do a pattern." So we have this tool kit where we try one thing. If it doesn't work, we go to the second, we go to third, and we go to the fourth. And you want to have that kind of your-- And a lot of times, it's not like I'm doing this and then seeing which one works. In my mind, I can think, "Okay, this one will probably work because X, Y, and Z, or this one might be better because of this other reason." So I'm just giving you the options and hopefully when you learn the tools and the techniques, you can just think about which one will probably work best. Anyway, so I have my pattern here. I'm ready to go. All I need to do now is go into Edit, Define Pattern. You can give it whatever name you want. Kitchen is fine in this case. I can come back in here, and this is literally what I do. I just I just have a rectangle, a shape, and I can go into my back wall here and just add my pattern. The pattern that you create will always be the last one at the bottom right, and then adjust the scale. I don't know, 25, I don't know, 15. We'll call-- Well, actually, it's still too big. We'll say, I don't know, 10 for now. We'll call that good. There it is, 10. Clip it to a layer below, Ctrl, Alt, G, and that's essentially how I built the pattern on that wall. But right away, you can tell that this is a repeating pattern. There's no highlights. There's no shadows. We can, of course, start adding those.

So many ways to do that. It really depends on-- how you want to do it. We can just simply create a new layer on top of all this and paint with the brush tool. We can just paint the shadow, like so. Doesn't matter. Usually, I like to paint them by hand. But another technique that I like using is I like to break patterns like these, with another pattern just so that it breaks the illusion that it's a pattern. It just sort of fools the eye. One way of doing that, and I'll close this file just not to have so many files open, is by using the clouds pattern. Now this is very important. You can feel free to take a picture of that if you want. But basically, the clouds pattern and-- The clouds fields were in Photoshop, the algorithm is set so that it works to the power of 2. So if you create a canvas that is 2, 4, 8, 16, 128, so on and so forth in the width and height, and then apply the clouds pattern, it'll automatically make it seamless. There's no seam. So what does that mean? The document that I'm currently on is 1024x1024, so to the power of 2. And I'm just going to create a new layer. I'm going to go into Filter, Render, Clouds, and there it is, clouds. Now, actually, I just thought about another tip.

I'm going to create a new layer. If you create a new layer, go into Filter, Render, and this time hold the Alt key on Windows as the Option key on the Mac. As you do that, Render, Clouds, you'll get clouds with more contrast. It's not an inversion. Some people think it's an inversion. It's not. It's just more contrast. So here's the difference.

Just more contrast, and that's really what I wanted. But anyway, both are the same in terms of what I said about the power of 2. So if you go into View and then choose Pattern Preview-- and zoom out, you'll see that there is no seam because the algorithm works by generating these fractals and images that are in the power of 2. That's just how it works. That's how the math works. So then I know that if I create a canvas of that size and then apply this filter and then convert it into a pattern, it will be seamless. And that's what I'm going to do to sort of break the illusion that the other pattern is a pattern. So Edit, Define Pattern. I'll just call it, I guess, clouds. Press Okay. I don't need it anymore, so I can close it and I can come into this image and then just create another pattern. There it is. Select the one I just made and I can change the blending mode to something else, maybe multiply, and then just reduce the opacity. So now these are more like stains on the wall, something like that, just so that it creates the illusion that it's not just the same thing creating-- repeating over and over again. And in a real project, I might add three or four more, just to add that depth. But the point is that it's not just one pattern, there's one pattern on top of another on top of another until you get a room that looks like this. And I think I-- Oh, yeah. And I have one more thing I wanted to show you really, really quick and I know this one took a little longer than expected, but super quick. There's another super cool way of using patterns in Photoshop. I don't see a lot of people using them. If you go into Window and choose Materials, you'll get these materials. - This is really cool. - Yeah. Super cool. You'll get these materials, and I'm just finding this one right here, the ash wood. When you click on that, it's essentially a pattern. Right? But it has so many more features in a regular pattern, wood color variations, and you can adjust that. There's custom presets that you can make or you can select one of the premade ones that come with Photoshop. You select it, it gives you those options. Also way down here under Transform, I can rotate this thing. So I'll just maybe set it to 90 degrees and it will rotate in just a second. There it is. We'll call that good. I should have changed the scale, but since we're-- If I'm taking too long, I'm just going to-- Hurry up, Jesús. We will just assume it's the right scale. So I'm going to convert it into a smart object so that I can work with it non-destructively. Oh, I should have shown you a tip. So if you're ever on a layer and you press Ctrl T and you can't see the transformation handles, press Ctrl 0, that's Command 0 on the Mac, and Photoshop will zoom out so that you see all four or eight transformation handles, not four, eight. Then what I'm going to do now is just simply place this into my scene now. Just again, a regular old school Photoshop compositing technique, just distort everything until it matches. And I don't need that thing so I'll move it to the side. How many times have you guys looked for wood floor, wood paneling, carpet, stucco? Can you imagine? The materials alone and the smart object is absolutely genius. Yeah. So and it gives you complete flexibility. Right, I can always double-click on that smart object. I can click on it's really a parametric filter is what it is. That's what it's labeled under here. - Parametric filter is fancy talk. - It's fancy talk. And you have a mirror filter, parametric filters. There they are. For a different class.

But anyway, so you can come in here and add more knots and adjust the fibers, whatever you want to do to that particular texture. When you're done, save it. And of course, that will update on the working document. But I know it seems super simple, but this is really it. It's just when you're working at that high level, it's almost like being a professional athlete. You're really good at doing the basics. It's not that you know these fancy keyboard shortcuts and fancy tricks that you guys don't know. It's not that. It's just the basics but done very well. - Yeah. Do you want to switch us, honey? - Switch you. So, in fact, so I want to talk about the new Substance 3D Viewer, but I want to talk about some job context. So everything Jesús just said about the room, I think what you have to do is think of it as just boxes. Instead of, like, "Oh, I've got to get the lighting." No. No. Go back to just planes, figure it out, and you build it on top. So imagine in this room if we had to extend that floor. We would get a pattern of that tile, that 1970s style tile or the stucco wall. So just think about it this way. So I want to talk to you about exploring options and understanding which tool to use, when and how. So let's say for this, Substance 3D Viewer in Photoshop, which is brand new as of today. You are going to absolutely love it. In our jobs, let's say the client said, "Hey, can you add a laundry basket?" Well, you can use Substance 3D Viewer to create a laundry basket. Jesús is going to talk about this in just a few minutes. Not necessarily a laundry basket, but you get the idea. Or the playing card that Jesús did in the Generative Workspace. Well, what if you do it in Substance 3D Viewer so that you have flexibility? What do I mean by that? I mean you've really got to know the tool at hand. So which tool is the right job? Substance 3D is versatile. When you use it, you can rotate, scale. Right? You can change the materials as long as you did not use a text to image generation. Okay? It is OBJ supported. That means you can get OBJ files, 3D objects from Adobe Stock and put them in there. Okay? Adobe Stock. And you can actually type in text image generation. I want to be 1,000% clear. If you use text image generation, you cannot change the materials currently. Okay? That's really important. Well, why wouldn't you just use Generative Fill? They're emphasizing my point there. Okay. Generative Fill is faster on-- I'm sorry. I'm yelling. I don't mean to yell at you. Generative Fill is faster onboarding. That means you do not have to understand any kind of 3D software in any way, shape, or form.

You can use a reference image. Do you remember on the shirt I used a reference image? On the girls' pants, I used a reference image? So you can do that for the laundry basket in this case. However, it's less versatile. I can't rotate it? How in Generative Fill would you say tilt it 3 degrees backwards? You cannot. So I'm trying to give you some ideas of context. How do you use, which one? And they have pros and cons, each of them.

All right, what else were we going to show you here? - Substance 3D Viewer. - Substance 3D Viewer. So let's talk about this. This is, for me, the most exciting thing that's coming out here at MAX this year. This is going to 100% change my life. - Yeah. - It's my life frame. Yeah. I agree. I think this is my favorite new feature in Photoshop, and it's really a new product. I'm calling it in Photoshop because they're calling it Substance 3D Viewer Plugin, but it's a app. So how does this work? We're back at that CSI: Las Vegas poster. And if you remember in the final poster that we did before, we did it with an image. But now I'm going to show you a new workflow, a new way of thinking about it that I wish would have been available when we created the poster. At that time, we had to use a Stock photo, distorted almost like I did the playing card and just place it in the background. But now with this new feature, you can use 3D objects as Lisa was mentioning. Before I actually show the demo, I just want to quickly point something out. If you go into stock.adobe.com, there's a 3D option where you can type in something like I'm just going to put cup and just see what comes up. So you're going to get a 3D cup, I'm sure. A bunch of 3D cups. These are all one credit from Adobe Stock. But if you want to get some free 3D assets, what you need to do is click on Free.

I'll use the same search term cup, but then right here under Asset type, choose 3D. And now we have these 3D objects that are free that you can license and use them in your projects. So that's what I did. I downloaded some chips from-- Adobe Stock. So here, let me just go back to that particular folder. So I downloaded my poker chip Adobe Stock 3D Asset. What you need to do is you can select the OBJ and simply drag it in and place it in your working document. What Photoshop will do now is convert that 3D object into a smart object. That's all it is. Just a smart object. So what's the brand new super cool feature? Well, when you double-click on that smart object, what Photoshop will do is bring up the new Substance 3D Viewer. It will use your composite, in this case just one layer, but your composite as the background. And now you can use this 3D asset and place it anywhere you want. And my computer's being a little weird right now. There we go. I can move around. I can move the chip. By the way, notice the bounding box? The bounding box will not let me move my chip over there. So all you need to do is just make your bounding box larger and now you can place the chip wherever you want. You can rotate it, do all kinds of things with it. Whoops. Again, having some issues there, but there you go. Rotating the chip, and now I can place it into position. Can you imagine, you guys? I mean, this is crackers. It's insane. So you can move it down. Another cool thing that you can do, and it's already doing it just because I was practicing it earlier and I realized that it's another sticky option. So the sticky option is this one here. It's got a background image. So you can actually choose a background image to light the scene. Here it is as well. Actually, this time, it's not sticky.

The light that it uses, you can use one of the preloaded lights in Photoshop. You can just click on these lights, see how the lighting changes on the on the chip. You can increase the brightness. You can rotate that light to better match your scene, or better yet, you can click on Select custom lighting, and for some reason, it's not letting me click on there.

That is super weird. Let me try that again. The demo gods. You know how they are. Yeah. Demo gods. Usually, it allows you to click on there. I want to demonstrate something. So Generative Fill, what would you have done? You have typed in poker chip. Right? But on this, the onboarding's a little longer. Definitely worth the longer onboarding, but just to find out your skill level or your employee's skill level, who you're asking to do what. Yeah. All right. So I found out what the issue was. For some reason, when you hover over the icon, the tooltip comes over the icon and you can't click on it. So if that happens to you, just move the browse or the window around. You can then click on this and then you can look for any images in your computer. I have some JPEGs here. I have some JPEGs here. But by default, this is looking for HDR images, which is really what you should use if you're doing 3D, but you don't have to. You can use a JPEG. - So I just-- - We're getting very tight on time. We're getting very tight on time. Got it. I'm just going to go into All Files here. And you can see now that we have this light, it's just the same image as the background. When I choose that, it's going to use that image to light the scene, so it color matches it for me. I don't have to do that in Photoshop. Same options as before, make it brighter, rotate it, do whatever I want, rotate the lights to get the highlights wherever I want it. When I'm done, all I need to do is click on to Photoshop, and then this little green box comes up. It sends it to Photoshop, and then I can continue working with it. Notice how we have a depth of field here, so I need to match that, Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and I can blur the chip to match the background. - And, yeah, this is-- - Can you do one thing for me? Can you pull up the Substance 3D panel again? Sure. I just want to show them where the text to image generator box is. Absolutely. We're not going to actually show it to you, but I just want to show you where it is. Right down here where it says Generate, when you click on that, you have a Text to 3D, you have 3D models to image, you have a whole bunch of different options. That's where you would type in chip there and it will generate something, but you cannot change the materials. Right. Will you flip me over so I can show them something. - Flip you over. Yep. - Awesome. So let's review some options we have when we're working. You've got a job. Apocalypto poster number 75 is coming out. You need an element. You can take your own image and adjust it or you can do Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock does have PNG images that are already masked out. Or you can do what he just showed you briefly, the text to image. So I happen to type in two Mayan temples just for the heck of it. Also, from Substance 3D, you can also save it transparent to the clipboard and drop it in something, or you can actually import a model from Adobe Stock. So four different ways to get the same job, which is going to work for you guys. Okay, now Adobe Stock, as Jesús says, has a ton of goods for you, an absolute ton. You're going to be amazed. There's also third-party vendors where you can get some stuff. So I just have to cover a few things quickly. I'm sorry for the rush. Please collaborate. When you're collaborating, you can use Library Stock. So in libraries, you can actually share catalogs with coworkers. So with Jesús, I said, "Hey. Diane Salazar. It's a job for us. I've already built a library. Here you go. You can use it." So that's a real handy thing. With Adobe Stock, you can collaborate and share. So he lives in Kansas City. I live in Truckee, California. I can invite him to the searches I've already done. So we're saving so much time collaborating, and then I just send him a link. I mean, holy guacamole, please build your files clean. Do not have bloated files. Delete those unused AI generations because they clog your machine up.

You have to do the survey. Ladies and gentlemen, please do the survey. You can earn a Chromebook. Every day, somebody gets a Chromebook. Every single day. If I'm not mistaken, you have to do your rating within the first hour of leaving the class. Please, if we sucked, say so. If we were great, say so. We love you to bits and pieces. Please come and find us, text us, do whatever. And one last thing, I have to jet to another class. So if you have questions and you see me around, stop me and ask them. But Lisa will stay and answer questions. I have another class to teach, so I got to run. Yeah. So we have four minutes, so you go away. - Thank you very much for coming. - Thanks, everybody. Enjoy MAX. It's going to be awesome. Yay.

[Music]

In-Person On-Demand Session

Advanced Photoshop Techniques from Two Hollywood Insiders - S6305

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ON DEMAND

Closed captions in English will be added in early November.

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Speakers

  • Lisa Carney

    Lisa Carney

    Photographer, Retoucher, Photoshop and Lightroom Educator, Adobe Community Expert

  • Jesús Ramirez

    Jesús Ramirez

    Graphic Artist, Finisher, Educator, Adobe Community Expert, Photoshop Training Channel

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About the Session

Dive deep into the world of professional design with two Hollywood Insiders. Join Jesus Ramirez and Lisa Carney, seasoned artists and collaborators, as they pull back the curtain on their collaborative process for crafting iconic movie and TV posters. Discover their expert strategies for leveraging Photoshop and the Creative Cloud ecosystem to meet demanding deadlines without compromising on creativity. This session is your gateway to mastering the art of efficient, high-stakes design work.   

You’ll learn:

  • How they leverage the Creative Cloud ecosystem to meet their clients’ needs
  • Real-world retouching tricks to quickly achieve pro-level results
  • How to craft immersive backgrounds
  • How they leverage generative AI features to streamline their workflows
  • The importance of file management and layer organization in a collaborative environment

Technical Level: Advanced

Category: How To, Collaborating with Your Team

Track: Graphic Design and Illustration

Audience: Art/Creative Director, Graphic Designer

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.


By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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