Next-Level Techniques in Photoshop

[Music] [Paul Trani] What's up, everyone? Paul Trani here, Principal Director Evangelist at Adobe. And this is Next-Level Techniques and Exciting New Features in Photoshop. So these are all of those pro tips that I've been using over the years, and new features as well. So the plan is you will be fully up to date and you'll have the pro tips. Starting with customizing and power shortcuts, so customizing Photoshop. We'll get into selecting and removing, cleaning up images. Then we'll get into creating and manipulating content. So actually creating in Photoshop, which is pretty wild. And then we'll get into color adjustments, making content match, so overall color adjustments, and then fine-tuning specific color adjustments. So that's the plan. We're starting it out in Photoshop. Want to note that there is Photoshop on iPad and on the web as well. We're using the desktop just some quick big things for shortcuts what I use all of the time is, yeah, I customize keyboard shortcuts mainly for navigating my files, I personally like arranging everything, tiling them all, and then consolidating them all back to tabs, and then you can match zoom in location. Just so you're aware, so we could tile everything, find the image that you want, maybe you just want to view everything easier that match zoom in location, and then we also have jumping into that specific file. So I just use shortcut keys for navigating around, it's super easy. Anyways, I'm going to find and go with this file. It has about 80 layers. Okay, we could see that right down here, the number of layers, and I even want to get into my Layers panel because the Layers panel is probably the most important panel in Photoshop if you ask me. So first off, I can't really tell what's what. What is Layer 18? I have no idea. I must have been really busy trying to get this done. I didn't name my layers and I want to be able to see what that looks like. So we're going to Layers panel. Go to Panel Options. Open that up, and we can see right in here. What do we want to do? Not Entire Document, but we want Layer Bounds. So just what is in that layer, that one flower, just reveal it. And then I'll turn off some of these things. Don't keep adding copy to things. We also have Show layer mask badges. That's brand new as well. I usually turn that off, and what that is, if you can see over here, it's this little icon. So I just turn that off. I just try to clean this up as much as possible. So that's the magic we want to see. We'll click OK. Oh, fancy that. We can actually see the honeywine-flower. This is probably some shading that I was doing, right? I still might not know where that is. Where is it? Well, I can Option-click. Holding down the Option key and clicking will jump directly to that layer. So that's what's happening. Option and click on the flower. Oh, there's the flower. What about this velour-flower? Clicking there. So I'm bouncing around this document just by holding down the Option key. Another thing you could do is you could do Option-- Maybe we'll do it on this one right here. Option-click on the eyeball, and that turns off everything and just reveals what I'm working on here what's on that layer. So that's how I will bounce around things. Here's another thing you can do. So I have my selection tool right here. A lot of times you'll have Auto-Select, maybe you have it turned on, maybe you don't. I usually have that turned off and I use the Command key to toggle it. So what that enables me to do is just Command key, click, and now notice how I've selected that layer. So Command key, click, I'm bouncing around that Layers panel. Command key, click will do the Auto-Select toggle. Also, just so you're aware, a lot of new controls are here, so you could show the transform controls for certain layers if you want to. So notice how that gives me the transform controls here. I'm not a huge fan of that just because it gets in the way of my designing. So I have that turned off, but then there are additional settings right in here. So you could show layer bounds on hover or show hover bounds from layers. So I'll show you what these two mean, right? Now as we roll over, look it's happening. It gets highlighted in blue. Hopefully, you can see that. Highlighted, highlighting, showing me the layer bounds and also, look what's happening to the Layer panel. As I roll over with things, it starts to dance around in my Layer panel. I'll just usually have those turned off just to not distract from the designing. Some file tips and tricks. I'll right-click on a file, and you could just Reveal in Finder where this particular file is. It's like, "Oh, that's where it is, Paul. Why don't you keep track of your files?" Another pro tip in here. So check this out. Let's say if I want to make two different versions of this. Let's duplicate this because maybe I want to have the master document. I want to protect it. Just add T there. So that just made it a template file. So now watch what happens when I open this up in Photoshop. It opens it up as an untitled file. So it's never going to overwrite this PSDT. Definitely protects files. Let's go back to this one. Another huge thing about cleaning this up is right up here using this Layers panel. If I want to see all of the smart objects, filter for smart objects. Click here, all my smart objects. Use this to navigate around your file. I'll use this sometimes to make it so you could, say, find objects that are linked because you might need to package this up or just double-check. Just make sure things aren't broken. I will search by Smart Objects. I'll see which ones are connected via cloud, and then any issues you have right in here, just select that, and you could easily find that. So filtering that content out is absolutely huge. All right. Cool. Let's move on to some other fun things we can do. Because honestly, I already have this design done, where did this stuff come from? Obviously, I'm like using lots of images, I'm cutting them out. So I'd start with maybe the Object Selection Tool. So with that selected, I can roll over any one of these birds that I might want to use. Click and now I have it selected, but basically, I would just click and make that a layer mask, okay? So now I'm able to just position it accordingly. There's more you can do there. What I'll end up doing a lot, in fact, let's do get into more of these selections. Let's get into something like this. This is a case, and again, I'm going to use keyboard shortcut, bam, to reveal the Contextual Task Bar. Okay, so right in here, rather than using these tools off the side, you could literally jump in and select subject, or maybe you don't want to do that. Maybe your whole goal is to remove the background. Well, we have that right in here. Click Remove Background. So it removes the background, adds that layer mask. I could use a brush and clean this up because we know we'd want to, missed a spot right there. That's fine. I can clean that up all I want. But even within the same experience right here, for this Contextual Task Bar, I can select Generate Background. So I want a beach with reflective water, right? So that's what I'm trying, just taking him off of this barren landscape, and putting him on a beach because that's kind of looks like where he should be, and yes, I do need to clean up that image more. And boom, there we are. He is on the beach. In fact, we have three different versions. Click through any one of these. I love how it adds the reflection right down here. Looks really good. And let's say for instance, I like this version. We can see off to the side, we get the variations and I could try more prompts and different things but right in here, Enhance detail. This is important. Taking this one that I like, clicking that button to have an enhanced detail version since it is a background which is pretty large. Enhance that detail and you're looking good. All right, so we cut out this astronaut, but I want to get into something even more specific and just something more difficult but these are really the one-click wonders and this is a brand new feature. Right in here, this case where I'd love to go on a vacation and maybe I don't want to show all these people, right? And it's a lot of stamping out. I would encourage you to use the Remove Tool, and I can start to paint each one of these because like, "Okay, I might need to remove this guy right here so I'll paint and then it'll automatically remove him." So there he is removed, but that's how it works. I can come in, paint, have it remove automatically, but this is still going to be a lot of work to jump in and do all of this stuff for these people. Brand new Find distractions right in here, find all the people in this scene go through find the people see how it highlighted everyone in pink. And what do I do at that point? Just hit that little checkbox at the top. So that is distraction removal for people. I'm sure they're nice people, but again, I want the beach to myself in this case, and it will do that. But, there we have it. Within one-click, we've gone from here to here. Get a load of that. Look at this. Amazing. All right. I'm going to do one more of these as well for you. Here's an image with a ton of wires. This would be a pain as well. We'll jump in here. We'll Find distraction. Instead of using this people, we'll do wires and cables. One-click removal. And look at how intense that is. That's like a lot of work. And look at that. Your before and then your after. Look at that, just thoroughly impressed with that just this is magic. Distraction removal absolutely huge. What you can do? So let's get back into this. Right, we've removed content, we've used the Removal Tool. We could use Generative Fill to remove content. If I want to remove, I could just hit Generate and it'll just remove it, or you could type something in there. When it comes to Generative Fill, there's also Generative Expand. So I'm going to do this really fast because I want more of the sky so we'll go to Generative Expand when I have Crop Tool selected. So we'll just extend it up, we'll just hit Enter. There we are one, two, three. Awesome. Looks great. Let's go ahead and add some text in here because I want this to be Mexico because that's where I'd like to go. Pro tips right in here. What if I want to make this look like it's in the clouds, right? How would you do that? I don't know.

This is how I would do it, and this is how you should do it. We'll go into the layer options. I'm going to double-click right here. Boom. Right in here, we're going to use Blend if for the underlying layer. Not the layer I'm on, the underlying layer. So watch what happens if I pull the black in. It's actually going to start to remove the darker areas, right? See, that's what's happening there. So what I want to do is I want to grab this lighter area and pull it this way. But more importantly, we'll want to split this by hitting the Option key and click. And now, we've split this. So let me zoom back out. Now we have this amongst the clouds as I adjust this. It's in the clouds and I still see that it's legible and I just think that looks like super cool, okay? And then from there you just throw Gradient Overlay, there we go, something like that, you get the idea, just something more eye-catching for this particular layout. One more thing. I want to point out that we have updated the font experience. So if we go in here to we have lots of options. If you go into more fonts, here's a bunch of fonts that you can get. In fact, I love how there's all of these tags right in here. So we could go with luxury. And not only that, as we see as we roll over, we can see all those different fonts. So the whole overall experience is just, like, absolutely amazing, when it comes to fonts because this is really what I need. We'll go a little bit thicker so it's easier to read. You get the idea. All right, do you one more real fast. This situation right here, still using the Crop Tool. We'll extend this up. We'll make sure this is set to Generative Expand I'll hit that checkbox. And here we have some extended variations right up here which is cool. I actually wanted to point it out as well that this happens to be a video. Hey, what's up, everyone? Paul from Adobe here to talk about Adobe's terms and-- So I essentially took a horizontal video, I have extended it, and now I have a vertical video for TikTok or whatever platform all in Photoshop. So Generative Expand on a video, put that in your back pocket, and use it. Now I want to get into some more pro tips. Things that I use all of the time that I think you should just know about. Just cool tips. So basically, what I want to do is I might want to change this to black and white. So these are the flowers. If I just want to turn those flowers back and white, hold down the Option key, we've just made a clipping mask, okay? So now that's just affecting those flowers, but I want it to affect all of the flowers. So I've seen too many people jump in here and duplicate this, Command-J, excuse me, to jump it, move this down-- And you end up with three black and white layers or whatever. That's not efficient. There's two ways to do this. Take these layers, group them. Bam. They're now in a layer group, and you can have your adjustment layer on the outside and then you clip it. Okay, so that's going to affect everything inside of there. So let's take a look. Now that it's affecting all of the flowers, or an even better pro tip for you is I put this in here because I want everything to be nice and clean because we should have our flowers, background right in there. Now what is this doing? Well, it's actually changing everything behind it. So let me just show you-- Let's just show you that this background, so this background's now purple. This black and white affects everything underneath it. So what do you need to do? Go to this layer group or this folder, and we'll change the blend mode. Nobody knows what normal is. Well, this is what normal is. Normal means it won't pass through to all the layers beneath. So if we change this to normal, it's self-contained within the folder, only affecting the things in that folder. So as I drop in my butterfly in there, drop it in there, it's going to affect the butterfly, it's going to affect the swallow, it's going to affect this butterfly right here. You get the idea. So that's just an organization thing that I find out that's hugely helpful. Let's get into this. Let me do a quick pro tip because I just think this is really fun to work with. I could go into the snake, which I think is just super cool, and I'll change everything to black and white. And I'm just going to duplicate this snake. So here's a second snake, and what I'm going to do for this one is I'm going to double-click, and I'm just-- I want this RGB look. So I'm going to turn off the G, the green, and the blue channels, and what we get is we get this just red channel for this object. And as I bring it back over, where it interacts, it will actually reveal the blue as well. So I just like this look. I just think it's going to be my new style. Not really. And I'll use a shortcut Puppet Pin just to offset this some more, but now we just get this really cool look for this snake. So anyways, fun pro tips just design wise. Here's the final one where you could really see those channels coming through, and you can see this little icon shows that those are the channels that are turned on and being manipulated accordingly. Now that I'm working with Adjustment layers, I want to work on this image and we'll just do some overall adjustments and then really start to refine it. Because what we could basically have in here if we open up our Adjustments panel, we have our single adjustments right in here, and then we have a bunch of Adjustment Presets. So I can come in here and just start rolling over each one of these to see how these Adjustment Presets will look on my image. Okay, so what is happening here? Well, this is actually just a bunch of adjustment layers added to my design. So I can click Blue Mood. What does that do? It adds it right over here, photo filter and a brightness and contrast filter. So this is an easy way to learn. If I happen to tweak any of this, maybe I want to make more of a warm toned version. All right, so we'll switch it up, do something like that, so it's actually yellow. I now have this new version that then I can turn around and make. So right in here, we can add this, and this is Yellow Pop, right? And saving that as my own Adjustment Preset. So now I have Yellow Pop, and then I have these other ones. I have Yellow Pop, we roll over it. I have my Contrast Pop of color, and then I have my contrast explosion. So Adjustment Presets, easy-to-use when using your own Adjustment Layers. Now I want to get into one more thing when it comes to dealing with color, and that's specific color adjustments on specific areas. So I'm going to use this image now because it really is flat, and I could do an overall adjustment.

Maybe what I want to do is if I want to have some light painted, shining down in here, I might have a brush, right? And then maybe you'll paint right in here, and then you'll change this to, say, Overlay, and that gives me my light, but I don't have any control. It's either off or on. I just don't have a lot of control doing that. So I'm going to just go ahead and delete that, and I'm going to go right over here to my Adjustment Brush Tool. So check this out. This is the one I'm going to use, and watch what happens when I start painting, right? I'm actually painting with light. In my Layers panel, you can see that it actually has created this brightness contrast layer. So now, look, I can actually control how bright it is, how much contrast there is in here, and it honestly just gives me a lot more control, and this is exactly what I want. I could still paint, and as I'm painting, I'm actually just painting on that layer with white, as you can see. In fact, if we Option-click, you could see what I'm painting there. So that's just a way where I can add a splash of color, or splash of brightness in this scene adjustment, brushes will just give you more control.

Now what I've been doing this whole time is really just cleaning up images, and using images that I already have. But Photoshop can actually create images. So check this out. This is really cool. This is in the Photoshop Beta, which you can get right in here, Beta, Photoshop Beta. And I want to show you this because how could you get to this point? What if you just have a blank canvas, right? So this might be the case. It might look something like this. How can I create content? Yeah, we could create one off images but I want to introduce you to, if we go to Edit, this Generative Workspace. So this is similar to what-- It's similar to having Firefly running within Photoshop. And here it is. Yours won't look like this. Mine, I've already generated things, but this is what I want to show you. So right in here, we can generate a bouquet of exotic, colorful flowers on a white background, right? And then I could hit Generate.

And there's also a Fast mode, just easily quickly enabling you to create lots of content. So notice how it gives me two rows of these exotic flowers. How nice is that, right? So good. I can go ahead and add that to my current document or any new document, okay? But I want to go beyond that because check this out. I love what we have going on down here. First off, I can have a reference image and use that reference as a composition or a style, which is huge. But I also like using variables. So we can add a variable right in here. I'll click and we're going to replace colorful with magenta, teal, yellow, what other color? Probably want an orange, why not? Right, so I've dropped in four different colors, and maybe we want just one exotic...

flower on a white background. But we're going to have an exotic flower with those four different colors of it. So click Generate. This basically enables you to create a ton of flowers at once, or a ton of really anything at once. And there they are, beautiful flowers that I can use in my composition. So that looks good. And from there, I can check the ones that I want, and then add them to the file that I'm working on. So there it is. This magenta flower, and it keeps the prompt, which is just so cool. From there, I can use Object Selection Tool to mask it out, and really mask out all of those, and bring those into my composition like I'm doing right now. Now I really wish I had more time to talk about things. In fact, I'm going to do one more thing if I could. This is bonus material because I think this is absolutely amazing. This is also in the Photoshop beta. We're going to go to Filter. We're going to go to Parametric Filters because that's what I want. I want to just apply a filter for this. And under Parametric Filters, these are filters that others can create. So right in here, I can do that Chromatic Aberation which is basically what I was doing earlier. Well, that's now a Parametric Filter that I can use. I can click on it. Oh, looks cool. Awesome. I want to go beyond that because also one of my favorites is this one. So it's called embroidery in Photoshop because I want this look like it is embroidery. Clicking on that, and now, we have that filter and all of these properties off to the side. So if I want to decrease the stitch density, basically, make it give it more stitching or smaller, tighter stitching, I can do that as well. So all these parameters are set up by the developer who made this, and really, this is, it's 3D material file just so you know. So this one is not available just yet, but I hope it is soon so that's all the more reason to follow me on socials.

All right, so we've really gone over a lot in 30 minutes, customized, Photoshop, so the Layers panel, selecting and removing, creating, manipulating, some color adjustments, I could talk about this stuff for days but hopefully got a lot out of this in under 30 minutes. My name is Paul Trani. Feel free to follow me on the socials and we can keep the conversation going. Thank you so much for watching.

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Next-Level Techniques in Photoshop - OS321

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Speakers

  • Paul Trani

    Paul Trani

    Principal Director, Creative Cloud Evangelism, Adobe

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About the Session

If you want to know the latest and easiest ways to create compelling designs that are on brand, this Photoshop session is for you. Let Adobe Evangelist Paul Trani show you how to use a combination of tried-and-true and brand-new features to take your Photoshop techniques to the next level while keeping your designs on brand.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Master top tips, tricks, and shortcuts the pros use
  • Effectively blend images for seamless compositions
  • Manage fonts, colors, and assets so your content is always on brand
  • Export and collaborate easier than ever

Technical Level: General Audience

Category: How To

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.


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