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Adding lights & casting shadows using Photoshop 3D

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Course info

107 lessons / 16 hours 21 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Course Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan and I am an Adobe Certified Instructor for Photoshop  - this is the Advanced Photoshop course.

This course is not for people new to Photoshop. This is for people who already know the fundamentals. It is for people who have their own ways of doing things but believe there really is a better, faster way to work. 

We will start by learning the best selection techniques available. I promise, by the end of the first section what took you 30mins to mask will now take you 30 seconds. 

What am I going to get from this course?
  • 13+ Hours of content!
  • 10+ Interactive exercises
  • 68 downloadable resources
  • You'll learn the best selection and masking techniques
  • You'll know how to fix images that look 'hard to fix'
  • You'll master advanced levels and curves tricks, specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colors
  • You'll learn how to enlarge images without distortion and what to do when things go wrong
  • You'll know how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images
  • My favourite: You'll master the ability to distort, bend and reshape images
  • Lets look at how current trending styles are super easy to duplicate
  • You will become a type nerd. We'll use font pairing in Typekit. We'll also use Photoshop's ability to guess fonts
  • Your Artboards skill will be mastered
  • A master of retouching, you will become!
  • You'll learn to edit videos in Photoshop, who'd have thought?
  • We'll also create awesome cinemagraphs, AKA: Moving pictures!
  • You'll learn to master 3D in Photoshop!
  • You'll learn lots about professional, reusable mockups, techniques and shortcuts!

Here's some of the things we'll be doing in this course:
We will correct 'hard to fix' images and learn what to do with blurry images. We will master Advanced Levels & Curves tricks and will work specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colours. 

You will learn how to enlarge images without distorting them and also, what to do when things go wrong. 

We will learn how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images. My personal favourite section will show you how to distort, bend & reshape images.

We will look at how current trending visual styles are easily created, duotones, glitches and orange/teal colour grading.

We get 'type nerdy' and use font pairing in Typekit. We will use Photoshop to identify the fonts used in an image and learn how to work with hidden glyphs & ligatures as well as variable & open type fonts.

You will master artboards while you are learning how to make easily updatable multiple sized social media & ad banner graphics. 

There is a big section on advanced retouching techniques, advanced healing, advanced cloning & patching. 

You will learn how to edit videos in Photoshop. We will also animate static images creating parallax videos plus the very cool cinemagraphs sometimes called 'living pictures' - great for social media. 

You will learn to master 3D in photoshop. We will finish off the course with professional, reusable mockup techniques & shortcuts. 

This course has a strong focus on workflow. We use real world, practical projects and show you the professional techniques and shortcuts which will save you hours using Photoshop. Throughout the course I have many class exercises for you to use in order to practice your skills. 

Who am I? 
As well as being an Officially Certified Expert by Adobe, I’m photoshop guru and user with 18 years Photoshop experience. I make tutorial videos directly for Adobe and will again this year be presenting a seminar on  Photoshop at Adobe’s 20 thousand attendee strong Max Conference.  

If you can’t remember the last time you sat down and went through the updates in Photoshop, let this course be your one stop professional development and upgrade path.   

Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your Photoshop mind. Sign up now!

Course duration 13 hours 45 mins + your study.



Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi there, this video we're going to look at lights in 3D. There are four kinds of lights. We'll work out how they affect our objects and how they cast shadows. We'll show you how to move them around to get kind of more dramatic effects. That's already dramatic, but you get what I mean. Let's jump in now and work out how they work in Photoshop. 


Working with lights, now by default you're given a light. It's here under 'Environment', it's just a default light. Just to give things shadows so they can be seen. So you've got one light to start with. What we're going to do is look at adding our own kind of purposeful lights. You do it by, on your 3D layer here, down here, this little light bulb, let's look at Infinite Light. Think of the Infinite Light as the Sun. You can't really move it physically, you can change the angle by grabbing this little ball thing at the end here. You can kind of decide where it's going to be cast. You can see the shadows affecting it in the background there. So I'm going to go straight up and try and cut. You can see the shadow being cast on the background. A little hard to see. I'm going to hit 'Render' to give you a quick view. 


You can see here, it's kind of light from the top, it's kind of casting shadows on itself here and on to the background. So Infinite Light is a perfect one, think of it as sunlight. It's just kind of a good fill light, and that may be all you need. What you might find though is - I'm going to hit 'Esc', stop rendering. - is that you've now got two lights. You've got the environmental light, which is kind of like an ambient light, plus you've got the Sun. So they're both working together. Let's say you don't want the environmental light, because you just want this really strong sunlight. So here in 'Environment', just turn this one here, turn IBL 'off'. Now we've only got this Infinite Sun. It makes, I guess a little not clearer, but it's just one directional sunlight. Now when I render, it really looks like we've just got a single bulb. It's not super strong, but in the shadows it's super dark, whereas an ambient light bounces around and kind of fills lots of holes. 


Things you can do to adjust the infinite light, so with it selected down here, you can decide on how soft the shadows are, or whether it has shadows at all, you might not want them at all. So we've got shadows, softness is really low, but watch this, if I crank it up it will get more feathered and more feathered rather than being a really kind of harsh strong thick shadow. Click 'Render' as well to show it. You can see now, it is kind of a fluffy shadow. 'Esc', you can also play around with the intensity. How bright this thing is, and how, maybe not bright it is. Easy one. Color just means it's going to tint the color. Say you want a kind of a weird yellow tint not a weird yellow tint, but you know what I mean. 


You just want kind of daylight flavor to it, or you can go something a bit more indoorsy. More like fluorescent lighting, kind of some sort of blue. Let's look at some of the other lighting types. You got two other ones, Spot and Point do a very similar thing. Infinite Light's like the Sun. Point Light, let's turn that one 'on'. I'm going to turn 'off' the Infinite Sun. Think of a Point Light as carrying around a bulb, physically carrying it around, and moving around the room, whereas Infinite Light just comes from everywhere in one direction. The bulb is actually something you can find. So with it selected we can actually move it around. Now for me, I can see it, it's down here. You might have to zoom out. You should be able to see it, and what we can do now is-- it's a little hard to move this thing around. 


What you might do is look at it from the top. Maybe we can go up to our 'Views', 'Current View', and go to 'Top'. This might be the easier way to look at it. So I've got my Point Light selected and I want to move it. Use 'Move', click the red one. Get this closer, you can see I'm actually right in front of the text now. So now if we go back to 'Current View', and actually go down, actually there's an easier way, you can click on 'Rad Option 2' there. Can you see, I've moved this bulb, really close to the artwork. So it's kind of like carrying a little lamp around. And it's going out all directions. Pretty cool, kind of moody, spooky. Z moves it away, and close. And you've got your X and Y to kind of move it up and down. I'm going to zoom a little bit. To zoom out go to your Top View and see if you can make it happen. So that's a Point Light. 


A Spotlight's kind of similar, except it's directional. Does the same sort of thing. It's like you physically carrying a spotlight around. I'll hit 'Esc'. That's pretty cool. I'm going to turn that one off. We have no lights. I'm going to add the last one, which is a Spotlight. This is even harder to use if you've never used 3D. I'm going to zoom out. I click on 'Current View', I'm going to click on this first option, and I'm going to see if I can find-- there he is there. If I click on my 'Spotlight', you can see, it's casting this way, it's only just getting a bit of this. And it can be fun to you. 


Let's again get it into a kind of a spot where we know what's happening with it. So we're going to go to 'Current View', let's go to 'Top' to see where it is. Zoom out. There's my little light there. I'm going to grab my 'Move' option. I'm going to click on my 'Spotlight'. It's shining kind of through and past my object, which is cool. What I want to do is I want to try and move it, move it this way. I need to rotate it around so I'm going to use the 'Rotation' option. I'm going to move it so it's facing there. Closer. Bit further away. So that's looking at it from the top, where you know, it's kind of at least from the top down, we can see it pointing at my object. Go back to 'Current View' and let's use the-- let's look at it from the right hand side. 


So it's kind of coming down and towards it, and that's fine. Spotlight. I might bring it down this way. Closer in, and say I want to rotate it. Make sure you've got the rotation, and click and drag it. It's a little bit hard, left and right, not up and down. So I've got a spotlight pointing at my text and my background. Let's have a little look. Let's go back to my 'Rad Option 2'. Click on my 'Spotlight'. You can see mine here, it's actually pointing kind of just up in to the left. So I could play a fun game of trying to rotate it, and clicking, dragging, and rotating it around. I'm going to use the 'Rotate 3D Object', and try and drag it around to point it at my graphic. And it's kind of working. 


So it's very directional. And we have to do a lot of switching between different views to try and work it out. The other thing you can do is you've got the Hotspot and the Cone of Light. So basically how focused this is. Oops, wrong option. It's these two little dots here, so I can expand this out. So what's happening is, inside the circle is full brightness from this light. You can adjust the intensity of that center chunk, then you've got the fall-off, which is anywhere between this hotspot and the outside of the cone. So there's no light outside of this, watch this, if I took you in very narrow, and then this in very narrow, you can see, the light is only affecting within that little range there, so I'm going to expand it out. 


Again this will depend on what you want to do. If you want a really narrow kind of searchlight, you can adjust the hotspot end cone over here. It's a little hard to work now on the graphic. Hit 'Render'. You can see there, had a kind of a weird square going on. Was just temporarily while it was, just working. In my case I want the cone to be a lot bigger. I want the shadows to have a bit more softness. I'm going to play around with the rotation of it, so 'Spotlight' selected, the 'Orbit' option, and just going to kind of wiggle it around until I get it how I want. Hit 'Render'. So that is a half render, but that is the difference between a spotlight. You point it around and it's super fun, and not difficult, yes, it's difficult. It's hard to get in pointing in the right direction. 


Point Light is quite easy. Just got to make sure you zoom out and actually find it on the map. You might have to play around with the different views. Just to figure out where it is in the world, and I can see mine there. It's my little Point Light, move it to where I want it to be. Up, down, left, right. I can adjust how bright it is, how fluffy the shadows are, or whether it had shadows at all. Or you can use the Infinite Light, which is more like, you just play around with the directions hitting things. All cast from the same angle. I'll go to my 'Rad Option 2', zoom in. Just a nice simple light. Or you might turn that off and use just the Environment Light. Or it's just kind of a generic fill, things refract and bounce around, and fill things. There's a bit of contrast, and there's shadow's cast, but it's a bit more like real life. Or you can turn them all on. Have them all battling for supremacy, and all kind of over saturating each other. If we render that, wow, that's bright. All lights working together as one. 


So that's going to be it for lights. Let's get into the last video where we look at rendering for our final production.

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