Locked lesson.
About this lesson
This tutorial shows you three great ways to composite images together: The Blend If function in the Layer Styles, the Select Color method and the Quick Selection Tool.
Exercise files
There are no related exercise files for this lesson, or we cannot provide them due to copyright issues.
Quick reference
Topic
Three different ways to composite images.
When to use
This tutorial shows you three great ways to composite images together: The Blend If function in the Layer Styles, the Select Color method and finally the Quick Selection Tool.
Instructions
Compositing via Blend If
- Place the two images as separate layers with the foreground subject image on top.
- Double click on the layer to bring up the Layer Styles
- Select blue in the Blend If tonal range
- Drag the right slider of the ‘This Layer’ to the left a little.
- Hold ALT and separate the slider to soften the blend
Compositing via Color Range Selection
- Place the two images as separate layers with the foreground subject image on top
- Under the Select menu choose the Color Range option
- Choose Sampled Colors
- In the preview window white is faded out of the image, while black is left as is
- Click on the blue of the sky
- To add to the selection, hold on your Shift key and click on the other colors that you want to include
- Click OK to accept selection
- Use Lasso tool to de-select from selection
- Hold down your ALT or Option key and click the Layer Mask button to mask selection out
Compositing with the Quick Selection Tool
- Place the two images as separate layers with the foreground subject image on top
- Select the Quick Selection tool from the toolbar
- Use the square bracket keys to adjust size of tool (like a brush)
- Brush in the spaces that you want selected out.
- To add to the selection, hold on your Shift key and click on the other colors that you want to include
- Click OK to accept selection
- Use Lasso tool to de-select from selection
- Hold down your ALT or Option key and click the Layer Mask button to mask selection out
Login to download
- 00:04 So, starting off with this video I'm going to show you three different methods
- 00:07 that you can use on your images to replace the sky.
- 00:10 So here I have an image of a sunflower, which I grabbed from Shutterstock.com.
- 00:15 And over here in this document, I have another image from Shutterstock
- 00:18 of a nice background, which we're going to use as a replacement of the
- 00:22 sky in this image. To start off, I'll grab this image here:
- 00:25 simply drag right on top of this document.
- 00:26 And if I need to, I can resize it: Command or
- 00:29 Control T.
- 00:30 I'll zoom out just a little bit, and simply resize it down so it fits my
- 00:35 document, so I'm not losing too much of the background.
- 00:38 Press Return or Enter to accept and if you want to fit the image to your workspace,
- 00:42 press Command or Control 0. So now that this image is in place, we want to move it
- 00:46 behind the original image.
- 00:48 In the Layers panel, I'll double click on this layer and name it
- 00:52 Sun Flower,
- 00:52 and I'll press OK to make it an editable layer.
- 00:56 When that's done, I can go ahead and grab the background layer
- 00:59 and simply drag it right behind that original layer. So at this point, you
- 01:03 should
- 01:03 only see the original layer, which will be your foreground subjects.
- 01:06 Now, for method #1, we're going to be using Blend If, which, if you’ve watched my
- 01:10 videos in the past, you know I love working with Blend If,
- 01:13 because there's so much you can do with it, in so many different situations.
- 01:17 And you can access Blend If by simply double-clicking on the layer in question,
- 01:21 which will bring up your layer styles dialogue box, and right at the bottom
- 01:24 you'll see your Blend If sliders.
- 01:26 Now as explained in past videos, there are two sliders.
- 01:29 There's one for this layer, which is the layer that you're currently on,
- 01:32 and one for the underlying layer. Now, as we do want to blend out the sky of the
- 01:36 layer we are currently on,
- 01:38 we'll be focusing on this layer. But by default, the tonal range is set to gray,
- 01:43 which we don't want, we want to blend up the grays the image.
- 01:46 We actually want to be focusing on the blues. So click on gray,
- 01:50 you have the option of working with red, green or blue.
- 01:53 In this case, because you want to blend up the sky, we're going to select blue.
- 01:57 And you'll notice that the sliders changed to reflect the color that we
- 02:00 just selected.
- 02:01 Now on each end of the slider you have a handle. On the left you have your shadows,
- 02:06 and the right you have your highlights. Each handle is made up of two sides,
- 02:10 which can be split to create more gradual transitions. You'll notice if I grab
- 02:14 the highlights slider and drag it to the left,
- 02:16 the blues in the layer start to disappear, but it's a very harsh result.
- 02:20 You probably want a more gradual, softer result.
- 02:23 So, I'll put the slider back to the right and this time, with my
- 02:26 ALT or Option key held down, Option on the Mac, ALT on Windows,
- 02:30 I'm going to grab the left side of this slider and drag it to the left.
- 02:34 And this time, the result is a lot more gradual than it was before,
- 02:38 and I can keep going until the blues in this image are almost gone.
- 02:41 Now, once the slider is split up, you may want to go back and grab that
- 02:45 right half and drag it little bit to the left. That will get rid of some of the
- 02:49 blues in your image.
- 02:50 And you continue tweaking these sliders until you have a nice result.
- 02:54 And if you turn off preview, and turn it back on, you can see that the original sky is
- 02:59 almost completely replaced.
- 03:00 Now, there is a tiny little bit of an outline around the sunflower,
- 03:04 which is hard to see, but if you zoom in you definitely can see it,
- 03:07 Continuing to tweak the blend if sliders will probably get rid of that
- 03:11 outline,
- 03:12 but in some cases, your result will not be 100% perfect.
- 03:15 The Blend If sliders, when they work, they work fantastically,
- 03:18 but they don't give you as much control as our next method, so I can go ahead
- 03:22 and press cancel.
- 03:23 This next method will allow us to select the specific colors that we want
- 03:27 to remove from this layer,
- 03:28 and that's going to be done using color range. So up at the top,
- 03:32 under the Select menu, you can choose the Color Range option.
- 03:35 I'll move this window over to the right, and there's a few ways the color range
- 03:39 can work. Depending on your image, you can choose a specific color from this
- 03:42 drop-down,
- 03:43 but you'll notice if I select blues or I select cyan,
- 03:47 the result isn't nearly what you're looking for. Basically, in this window at
- 03:51 the bottom, the preview window,
- 03:52 you're looking for pure white and pure black. White is going to be your
- 03:55 selection and black is going to be left alone.
- 03:58 So in this case, looking at the sky in the background in the preview window,
- 04:02 it's a little bit grey, which means our selections can be somewhat transparent.
- 04:06 That's definitely not what we want. So instead, under the Select drop-down we're
- 04:10 going to choose ‘Sampled Colors’,
- 04:11 which will allow us to select specific colors that we want included in the
- 04:15 selection.
- 04:16 So, I'll start by clicking on the blue of the sky, just like this,
- 04:19 and you'll notice that Photoshop is taking those blues and turning them into a
- 04:23 selection - or what will be a selection.
- 04:25 As you can see in the preview window, all the solid white is going be in nice
- 04:29 sharp selections, but you're also noticing that down here, the bottom left to the
- 04:33 preview window,
- 04:34 those areas and those colors were not selected because they weren't exactly
- 04:37 like the color that we sampled initially.
- 04:40 So in that case, color range allows you to add to your selection.
- 04:44 And you can do that by either selecting this icon over here to the right,
- 04:47 or you can simply hold on your Shift key and click on the other colors that you want
- 04:51 selected.
- 04:52 You'll notice that Photoshop has updated the preview to reflect that change.
- 04:56 And I can continue going around this image and selecting colors that were not
- 05:00 selected initially.
- 05:02 So now if you take a look at the preview window, you’re given a solid white sky,
- 05:05 and the rest of it is, for the most part, black. But like you can see in the middle
- 05:09 of the sunflower and a little bit in the field,
- 05:12 some of that area has also been selected, so I'll go ahead and press OK,
- 05:15 which will create an initial selection. And what we can do now is actually subtract
- 05:19 from the selection
- 05:20 to get rid of the areas in the middle of the sunflower that were also included.
- 05:24 So from the left hand side, in my Tools bar, I'll grab the regular Lasso tool,
- 05:29 and with my ALT or Option held down to subtract from the selection,
- 05:32 I'm simply going to drag out a lasso around the middle of the sunflower,
- 05:36 and that will subtract any bits that were initially included in the selection made
- 05:40 by color range.
- 05:41 And I can do the same thing at the bottom, in the field. Again, hold in ALT
- 05:44 or Option
- 05:45 and simply drag right around, just like this.
- 05:48 I'll select the whole entire sunflower field, go up here and around,
- 05:52 and all the areas that were once selected are no longer selected.
- 05:55 And at this point, our layer is now ready to be masked out.
- 05:59 Currently, we have our sky selected, which is the area that we want to hide.
- 06:03 So, going over here to our Layers panel, right at the bottom we have our add
- 06:06 layer mask icon.
- 06:07 You know, if we were to simply hit this without holding down any key,s
- 06:10 it would get rid the sunflowers and keep the sky, which is exactly what we don't
- 06:15 want to do. To undo, press Command or Control Z,
- 06:17 and this time, before you hit that layer mask icon hold down your ALT or Option,
- 06:21 key
- 06:22 and then click on the layer mask icon. It will now hide the sky
- 06:26 and keep everything else in the foreground. Now this time, if you look
- 06:29 very closely, we still have a little bit of an outline around the sunflower,
- 06:33 but because we're using a layer mask, we have more flexibility.
- 06:37 Over in the Properties panel, we have the mask edge feature.
- 06:41 If we open it up and turn the view to layers,
- 06:45 what we can do is take the shift edge slider inside and drag it to the left a
- 06:48 little bit,
- 06:49 which will get rid of the outline completely, leaving us with a much more
- 06:53 attractive result.
- 06:54 So that's method number 2: using color range and masking
- 06:58 to get rid the sky in the background. Now for number 3, I'm going to hop over
- 07:02 to this image here, which I shot at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre here in Colorado.
- 07:06 And just like I did before, I'll grab this image background and drag
- 07:09 it onto this document and press Command or Control T to transform it.
- 07:13 I'll make it a little bit smaller, just like that,
- 07:16 and hit Return or Enter to accept the changes. There we go.
- 07:20 Click Command or Control 0 to zoom back in and, as you learned earlier, double click on the
- 07:24 layer in the Layers panel
- 07:25 to turn it into an editable layer, and drag that image right behind the original,
- 07:29 just like that.
- 07:30 Method number three uses the selection method, which can be found in your Tools
- 07:33 bar.
- 07:34 For this example, I am using the quick selection tool. This tool works
- 07:38 very similar to a brush tool.
- 07:39 We can enlarge it using your right square bracket, or make a smaller
- 07:43 with the left square bracket key.
- 07:44 And all you have to do is brush over top of the area that you want to turn into a
- 07:48 selection.
- 07:48 But you first want to make sure you're on the right layer. Right now, I have the
- 07:51 background layer selected.
- 07:53 I want to select my original layer and then just brush
- 07:56 over top of the sky, just like this, and Photoshop is taking a note
- 08:00 of the colors you're brushing on top of, and also looking for any key lines and
- 08:04 shapes that might be visible in the image.
- 08:06 This creates a nice, accurate selection. So I simply brush over top of the sky.
- 08:10 I was able to very quickly turn it into a selection, and what's nice about this
- 08:14 method
- 08:14 is that the sky, unlike the previous methods, doesn't have to be
- 08:18 perfectly blue. We have a mixture of blues and whites and yellows
- 08:21 in the sky, and by simply brushing on top of it, Photoshop was able to make that
- 08:26 selection.
- 08:26 And now the selection has been made, just like in our last method, you hold down
- 08:30 ALT or Option and click on the ‘add layer mask’ button. Photoshop is going to mask the sky,
- 08:35 leaving your foreground subjects and the new sky in the background.
- 08:38 Now of course, the colors are completely off in this composition.
- 08:41 But the focus of this video was only to mask the sky in your original image,
- 08:45 leaving you with your new sky in the background.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.