Hey it’s Clayton Jenkins and today we’re going to head back to the Photoshop tutorials and we’re going to be covering the basics, I’ve got all kinds of e-mails and messages on YouTube and comments asking some pretty fundamental questions, I have one person asked me what a layer was it the other day and they just couldn’t believe they’re even trying to follow my tutorial, if they didn’t understand the concept of layers, so let’s get started.
You’ll see no right hand corner of your screen somewhere down in here, maybe , just kind of circling it, the HD option, I’m kind of getting tired of assuming and panning on all the videos so you might want to do that just in case I didn’t do fit this one, I probably will. Anyways, okay so you have Photoshop open which you can obtain a free copy of an Adobe.com, I’ll post the link in the side bar just to make it quicker and once you get uploaded, your 30 day trials in full swing, we can start. Now most people have no prior experience getting here and they just don’t even know where to start. They don’t know what they can do with it, they don’t even know what’s going on; so let’s open up a picture, close open, up, okay, this is of me and my buddies on a vacation, it’s a pretty neat shot but when I originally edited, I think I bumped up the contrast, you might, so I’m stopping on up this. Anyways, now that we’ll be doing that anyways, so as you’ll see if you come down here to the layers panel, and if you don’t see that go to view, or not view, window, layers or hit F7, this should work for all versions of Photoshop so if you don’t have CS4 or the one that was like mine don’t worry about it. So we have this pictures our background, that’s me, this is one of my best friends and this is also a good friend of mine, anyways, as you can see in the layer’s panel we have one layer and it’ll just appear as a single item and that is the photo and if you’ll see if I toggle it on and off, it comes and goes. The checkered background just means there is nothing there, this is a plain canvass if you’re to save this, it would be nothing. So when I enable a layer it appears, okay so let’s say I wanted to replace the sky or something, I guess this is the best way I can help you guys understand layers; let me go grab a picture of the sky somewhere, okay this looks good, I’m going to copy it, want to come back to Photoshop and paste it, alright, and as you can see it’s kind of a rain on top of it, if I come back down to my layers, you’ll see it pops back up. Now it’s very important you remember as you’re doing projects to name your layers, so I’m going to do that right now by double clicking, then name this one Sky, alright, the bottom one Friends, cause, yeah, we’re friends. Alright, so as you can see if I select Sky, I can do it around where I want; it’s pretty powerful tool layers are because it all gives me the option to layer things on top of each other and go search things. As you can tell layers on the top, well, show over layers on the bottom, it’s just like if you were, oh what do they call that, scrap looking, this is like a picture on top of maybe the background picture, I don’t know, but if I were to move this below just by dragging it, you wouldn’t see it, but if I were to turn off the friends layer, you wouldn’t see it. So you can move layers around and that’s how they work. So let’s just replace the sky, I’m going to do this as simple as I can so I’m going to come to the Friends layer cause I’m going to want us like a friends layer, I want to move it on top because we really don’t want to delete too much of this and so maybe we could just delete, you know, some of the sky right here, and I’ll shelve through to this sky, right, so let’s just grab this rectangular Marquee tool and all it does is select an area, okay, now let’s hit delete and what we’re doing is we’re deleting a part of this layer, and as you can tell it shows down to the layer below but that doesn’t look very good because no sky, I mean really looks like that. I guess if it was modern art you could leave it, oh I hope no one watching this video does modern art because, anyways, so it’s like this look a little bit better, I’m going to hit Alt Control Delete which will sensually undo things, you might want to write that down, that’ll be your best friend, and then hit, come back to my Marquee tool or not my Marquee tool, I’m going to go down to my Polygonal Lasso tool. If it’s just a Lasso tool this is probably how this should come up, you click on it and hold and then go down to the Polygonal lasso tool. Now I’m just going to end up cutting mu buddy out, sorry buddy, now I’m just going to loosely, you know, select an area of the sky that I want to replace, I’d just kind of go around a little bit, come back, cause I don’t want to leave him in. So I’m selecting an area such as this and I want to hit delete, and as you can see it replaces the sky but again it doesn’t look very good and the sky isn’t big enough, so let’s fix that and I’ll hit Alt Control C, just to kind of bring it back, I’m going to turn off my top layer and then I’m going to turn to make this bigger and there’s several ways you can do that, but I just like or I’m just going to suggest you having the Polygonal Lasso tool out, right click, go to free transform and then hold Shift and drag out, and by holding Shift you’re just making sure it scales proportionally so that you don’t get, basically when you scale unproportionally it can lose quite a bit the quality. So we made it larger and as you can see it will definitely be big enough. So let’s go back up to our friends layer, let’s turn it our feather up, and what the feather does of the selection is it kind of softens the edges a little bit. We’ll try 4, and that’ll just, you know, make it look a little bit better, I’m going to hit Control Plus to zoom in, it’s like I can get a little bit better, look closer, and I’m just kind of get along here and get a closer selection, and you know the best way to actually learn Photoshop is just to do it, I mean really you just got to mess around and you’ll, no matter what anyone tells you, you will never learn Photoshop completely, there will always be things that you won’t know how to do, I’ve been doing it for a few years now and I’m not even close. So, anyways I can hit Control Minus to kind of zoom me out, it’s next to the zero key click it if you don’t find them and I’m going to zoom in a little bit again, let me go ahead and hit delete, oh, it’s looking better, as you can see our feather that we put on there softened it up quite a bit. There are better methods of selecting which I will cover in further tutorials but, you know what, I think this is a good starting point from any of you. I’ll post these pictures in the side bar and you’re free to use them, my gift to you. And now we’ll continue in some of these beginner tutorials on later this week and I’ll maybe even post them one after this is downloading. So I hope you’ve learned a little bit today about Photoshop and if you think this could be enough to get you on your way, I guess the next one, the next video will better cover all the tools, I guess this was just to get you get excited about being able to do it but when it comes out of it you really need to understand all of these tools here, here and all the layer and channeled path concepts, but anyways, I think you should be able to do it, if you have problems just put a comment down below and I’m sure someone else or I will be able to help you out. Anyways, thanks, see you in a bit, I’m not seeing you in a bit, just subscribe, you know, bye.