How to put images inside a bottle using Photoshop

Course contents
SECTION: 11
Smart Objects 9:03
SECTION: 16
Artboards 20:14

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Course info

93 lessons / 12 hours 20 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Course Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan Scott. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) for Photoshop. 

In this course I will teach you everything you need to know about getting started with Photoshop.  

This course is for beginners. You do not need any previous knowledge of Photoshop, photography or design. We will start right at the beginning and work our way through step by step. 

You will learn the Photoshop 'secret sauce' whereby we will magically enhance our background and when necessary completely remove people from images.

By the end of this course you'll posess super skills! 
  • Learn the skills to mask anything… including the dreaded hair. 
  • Using your amazing new masking skills, you will be able to clearcut images.
  • You will learn how to make type interactive. 
  • Together we will look at popular current visual styles and learn the tools and tricks necessary to recreate them. 
  • There is a fun section where you will learn how to distort, transform and manipulate images
  • We will create our own graphics using simple techniques from scratch. 
  • I will teach you to retouch photographs like a professional.. 
  • Finally - any good Photoshop user should know how to put an island inside a bottle! 

There are exercise files available to download so that you can follow along with me in the videos. There are lots of assignments I will set so that you can practice the skills you have learned. 

If you have never opened Photoshop before or you have already opened Photoshop and are struggling with the basics, follow me and together we will learn how to make beautiful images using Photoshop.

Course duration 8 hours 35 mins + your study.

Get the completed files here.


Awarded the Best Photoshop Course by Learnopoly in 2023

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

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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

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

First up, let's open up the files that we're going to be using. Let's go to 'File', 'Open'. In your 'Exercise Files', under '10 Blending Modes' we'll open up all these ones that say Bottle Island. So there's 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The 4th one's by Tim Marshall; thanks, Tim. We're going to start with this glass bottle here. We're going to put in '02', so we're going to grab this island and stick it in. We're going to use the Quick Selection Tool. In terms of the brush, something about 50. 50 is always a good number. Click, hold, and drag across our island. It's up to you whether you want the sand or not. 
In terms of how hard core we're going with this, we're not going very hard core at all. All these selections around here, we could use the Select and Mask, but in this particular case, like the first one, the thing you saw at the beginning there, it's quite forgiving with Layer Masks. So we could double back and fix up the layer if you find we got a little too fast here. I'm going to grab the sand , just because. I'll get a really small paintbrush and go into these corners. I'll get the editor to speed this bit up. 
So got my selection, if I wanted to do better what I could do is I could go to my Layer Mask button here. Then go to Select and Mask, and try and work it out a bit better. Looks pretty good, and because it's the blue showing through the trees it's going to look fine because we've got a blue sky to go behind it anyway. So with our Move Tool, click, hold, drag, drag, drag to 'Bottle 01', and down here. It's the wrong size, so to be fancy we're going to right click 'Layer 01' and say, you need to be a Smart Object. Then I'm going to use my Transform Tool, using 'Command T', or 'Control T' on a PC. I'm going to get it till it fits in here. Hit 'return'. So there's my Island. 
Next bit is the sky. I'm just going to close down Island 02, not so good, just to make things tidy along the top here. So we're going to use Bottle Island 03. We used this image earlier on in a different project. So what we're going to do is grab the 'Move Tool'. Click, hold, drag. The first tab, holding down, and let go. I'm going to kind of drag it up and have it just behind the island there. Now what you'll notice is I'm missing a chunk here, just not quite big enough. If I could just transform, I'm pretty sure nobody would know that I stretched a little bit, but what I'm going to do is -- I'm going to show you-- we're going to double back on some of the skills we've learned so far just to compound those. 
So I want a bit more sky. So remember, I can use the Crop Tool, it's quite a cool way of doing that. The Crop Tool, make sure that along here, Content Aware is turned on. I'm just going to drag a little bit that way and a little bit that way. Then hit 'return', and hope Photoshop doesn't make a mess of the sky. It's pretty good with clouds. It's pretty good, I think that's pretty awesome. Nice work, Photoshop. It's kind of weird down here. I'm happy with it. So back to my Move Tool, click, hold drag, back into here. What I might do is, that first layer here I'm going to just click on the trash can. So this guy now is in the reasonable right place. Just using my arrow keys just to tap it around. 
So now what I need to do is mask it inside the bottle. Like I do in lots of things, we need to mask all sorts of stuff inside the bottle. So what we're going to do is create a Selection and reuse it a few times. It's a bit of a new skill. First up, be on the Background Layer, let's grab our Quick Selection Tool. I'm going to turn Auto Enhance off only because I need to be really rough in this case and it slows down my computer while I'm recording. Brush size, I'm going to increase up. I'm using my square brackets next to my P key. I'm grabbing everything, I don't want the lid. I'm going to get close to the lid, so I want the lid to shine through, right? I just want select the glass parts of this bottle. 
Trying to get it all. It's hard to know sometimes if you got at all. A nice little trick is, you can just click on this gently. See this little icon here, it's called Quick Mask. We're not going to use Quick Mask, it's just an oldest technique for doing masking, but what's really cool is it's quite obvious where I haven't selected. Don't double click it fast, it loads up the settings. Just toggle it once, gentle. Just the nice way of going, I've missed you. Toggle it once again, on. I feel I can see two more parts. That's good enough for me. If you see some bits that are missing, you could spend a lot more time here, and you should. 
So I got the bottle selected, but I want to use this a couple of times because we're going to use this to trim the sky, but we're also going to use it to trim the water. So there's a cooler option here, it says, 'Select', 'Save Selection'. I'm going to give this a name, I'm going to call this 'Bottle Selection'. Just means, later on whenever needed I can go back to 'Selection', and say actually load that selection I made earlier. So I've got it up once, I'm going to click on my Sky Layer. I'm going to actually start naming layers in here to help you guys. Just to make it easier to follow, so there's the sky, and this is the island. The background is going to be named 'Bottle'. Awesome! 
So Sky Layer selected, got my selection, I'm going to click on 'Layer Mask'. You can see, it's a bit rough along the top there. I'm not worried because we're going to use our Blending Modes. Now with Blending Modes we've got two things over here, we've got the Mask and we've got the actual image itself. So a Blending Mode on this is different from a Blending Mode on my actual image, and that's what I want. I want my sky selected because that's what I want to blend underneath with my bottle. I was going to kind of work away through, and Dissolve may work. Darken's pretty cool, you can start to see that kind of nice interaction with glass. Blending Modes are perfect for glass, anything that's transparent. 
You just kind of work your way through until you're, "I quite like that Linear Burn." I'm just toggling down now. If you've forgotten the shortcut, you probably have because that's a tough one. If you are sick of doing this, clickety click. So what you can do is click on one of them, make sure you're on your Move Tool, hold down your 'Shift' key, then tap the '+' key on your keyboard. You can see, it just keeps toggling through. I'm going to use Linear Burn because I like it and I practiced already. I've got it written right here, use Linear Burn. It will depend on your sky and the bottle. 
Next bit is the water. I'm going to close down my clouds, bye bye, don't save. In here there's my water, I'm going to grab Rectangle Marquee Tool, I'm just going to grab, I don't want the whole thing, I just want a chunk of it. I don't want all this stuff at the top. I grab my 'Move Tool', drag it across. In there, and it's not quite big enough. Now this is where I'm going to cheat. I should go and use the Content Aware cropping like we did with the sky. It's going to be so forgiving, nobody's going to notice it went that big. I share that secret with you, you should properly go back and do it but just a little bit of a transform that size, nobody's going to notice. 
Here's my Move Tool to kind of drag-- I like the bubbles, someone kind of peeps at the bubbles in there. Now I want to use the same Mask Edit for the sky. This is where this awesome thing comes in. 'Select', 'Load Selection'. Which one? I want from where it says 'Channel', say 'Bottle Selection', that's the one I want. Thank you very much. Now I can hit 'Layer Mask'. Now I'm on my Move Tool and I'm playing with the Blending Modes. Just kind of toggling through to see which one I like. I know exactly which one I like because I've got it written down. I'm going to start with Multiply. The thing is, it's going to be like the under island, like you saw at the beginning there. So I might have to change as we go along. 
Multiply looks average now but I feel like it looks better later on when we get our under island bit in. But know, if you've picked different water it's going to be a different Blending Mode. So we've done him, thank you very much. And the last one, 'Island 05'. I just went through stock library sites and tried to find something that looked like the underneath of an island. Looks pretty good. Well, I've tested it, and it works pretty well. I'm using my Quick Selection Tool. I'm getting really rough with this because who knows what this is, like it doesn't have to be perfect. It's going underwater. Looks good to me. I love it because it's got this kind of, like this colored, where it's against the waterline, that's going to look cool. 
So same thing, make a selection, 'Layer Mask', grab my 'Move Tool'. Drag it in over here. I have to scale it, so before I scale it I'm going to right click it and say, you are a Smart Object, my friend. I'm going to double click him, we're going to call him 'Lower Island'. Not sure what to call that. You can give this guy the name 'Water'. So Lower Island, let's rotate you and scale you. I'm using 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC. You can see I'm holding 'Shift' while I'm dragging the edges here. Far out it was rotation, and click on this dot here to get Transform. Bit further out, rotation, right on the dots, Transform. You really need that Cool! Awesome! 
Then it comes down to the Blending Mode again. So back to my 'Move Tool', and just cycle through until you find something you like. That looks cool. That's not even what I had in my little list here. This off light's going to work. So we could be there, I'm going to share with you one more little trick. I find that when you're dealing with glass you can often get the darks and shadows working well with the Blending Mode. Or you can get that kind of highlights from the glass working well. But never on the same Blending Modes. 
What I find cool is this last layer here, we're going to right click it and duplicate it. This is going to be 'Bottle Highlights'. All I'm going to do is drag it to the top. I'm going to move this up so you can see in my layers. So I've got the bottle at the bottom, he's kind of filling in the back there, and I've got this guy I'm adding to the top. What happens is I can use the Blending Mode on this to try and find something that's going to help with the highlights. I think, let's turn it off and on. I'm on Darken, that's not doing anything, right? Another Multiply is not what I want. I want to find something that's kind of helping with the lights. Doing nothing. Let's find one. 
Too much, too much. It's kind of cool, Overlay. Probably a little bit-- I might use Overlay and just lower down the Opacity. Soft Light, similar, but don't have to lower the Opacity down. You can see it's changed the water quite a bit. You can cycle through, I know that Soft Light works for me in this case. Brings just some of the highlights back in the glass here. Now it's looking good. I should have spent a little bit more time on my Mask when I said, "Don't worry about it." I lied. There's quite a clear contrast between these two. 
Now that could be it for us. If you’re happy with that, we're done. It's reasonably complex, we've thrown in a few of the tricks we've learned throughout this course. Got masking, we learned how to save a selection using Blending Modes, which you're using more and more, right? Let's do kind of two last little things that you might use to tidy it up that I really want to do, I hope it doesn't get too advanced 
Next one is, we've got this kind of Bottles Highlight layer and it's doing some cool stuff, but it doesn't just have to be one on the top and one on the bottom. Often, depending on the image I'll make a couple on the top here and mix Blending Modes. There's no absolute rule how many you should have and what they should be but I'm going to duplicate this one and we're going to put in the darker tones again which I'll call the 'Shadows'. On the top here I'm going to cycle back through it again just to find something that has Fills-- I feel like that soft light kind of lightened it up too much. That back over the top again. I think gives it a bit more fullness. 
So you can kind of see that's how he had it when we started. It looks quite obvious now, it's quite weak with the highlights. I added this one here as a Soft Light, and I kind of filled it out but a little bit too much. Then I put another one on top, back to being, it's this Multiply. It just kind of fills it in again. It gives that a little bit more substance, and the edges a bit more substance, and hide some of my bad selections. The last little touch-ups are going to be the Dodge and Burn Tool. Pretty much just going to use the Burn Tool to darken edges. 
So with a Burn Tool I'm going to work on the sky first. So I've got the Sky Layer selected. If you converted it to a Smart Object, like I said, because that's really good, you need to right click it and say, 'Rasterize Layer' but our sky doesn't have a Smart Object. I'm going to grab my Burn Tool. It's this guy here, under Dodge, grab 'Burn'. Now up here, I'm going to make sure it's on highlights because I want to try and darken the highlights, which is the sky here. Exposure is probably a little high on 100% but it will give you an example of what I want to do. You probably do yours, and build those up a little slower. 
Change the brush size, got a really big brush. 800, I'm just making sure it's got a nice fluffy edge but the Hardness down at the 0. I'm just trying to do that, trying to darken those edges so it's not so crisp on the edge. Same with the water, kind of go and darken the edges up. Now because these aren't particularly highlights I'm going to try the Mid Tones or Shadows to darken the edges. And Mid Tones work. I want the depths to be a little darker down the bottom here as well. Looks quite cool. Darker, anyway. That is going to be it, probably needs a Lens Flare. You're more than welcome to add a Lens Flare to your version. 
What we'll do in the next video though is we'll set a proper class exercise. So work your way through this one. Actually, last thing before I go. The island here is really sharp, and that's fine, but with the Island Layer selected I'm going to play with a Blending Mode of this as well. Just, I don't know, I feel like it needs to be blending with the background a little better. Yes, last little bit. Maybe super high contrast, like Linear Light. I like that, Multiply, it will depend on your island and how good your selections are. I think that looks kind of cool. Before. After. It's so subjective. That is going to be the end of putting an island in a bottle. Really loved making this course. It's not often I get to put stuff in a bottle. I'll see you in the next video.

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