Lights and reflections - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] To give you an idea of what Photoshop can do I've added some lighting effects. The beauty of animating in Photoshop is that anything that you can draw, you can pretty much animate, depending on how much time you want to sink into it. But there's some really nice effects going on here. The magic is now impacting the surface of the wall, the light's bouncing off of it, it's casting a shadow behind me, and it's actually casting illumination on my face as well. You can see it flickering on and off. These effects are surprisingly easy to achieve. So, let's have a look. Let me switch off some of these layers. And a quick note too, once I set up the exposure layers and I want to add these new effects layers, one of the first things I do is make a backup layer with empty placeholder layers that you can then duplicate for new effects. So when I was starting to add these secondary effects layers, I didn't have to build this from scratch. So we have our live action, and then I've got an adjustment layer to change the brightness or contrast of the character. We have our effects animation. So I've done some subtleties with easing into the anticipation here. When we ease into this, it's opacity 44. The next exposure is 55. I just manually did that just to like soften the transition from no magic into magic. What I wanted to add then was something that recognized the fact that this thing is bright. It should be casting reflections on the surface. It should be lighting up the room here. So the first thing that I did was add the effects light. It was a folder with a lot of layers for the different exposures. Most of them are not used. I would only use them when there was a need. So on the relevant frame, in this case 55, I just drew in a diffuse color area. So to see what we're looking at here, go to the folder, and I've set the folder blend mode to divide. If I go back to normal, it's just this color here. I just experimented. I do different colors, I try different blend modes until I find what I like. I know there are people out there who are scientific about this, who can tell you exactly why this color produces this effect. I like to be more experimental and play with it. Initially, I tried a yellow gradient, other times red. So, let me just get rid of that. Initially I thought it would be white. Let's go to the soft brush, maybe take the opacity down a little bit, drop that in, and then mess around with different blend modes. That didn't produce anything that excited me. As I shuttled through the different blend modes, it was just variants of white, so not fun at all. So let's try, for example, something orange might work. Again, go to the folder, and you can use the down arrow keys to shuttle through, and that kind of looks good. That's a possible candidate. Some of these look very interesting. The combination I came up with was divide mode and then a blue brush, and that gave this color. I'm sure there's different ways of gettin' the same effect, that's just what worked for me. So I just simply proceeded through and painted it in where appropriate. And here, you see how I've got a reflection layer, and if I, let me just delete all of that and I'll paint it in again. And using a soft brush with a lower opacity, take it down to about here. Doing that in one continuous movement, so it's the same opacity. Here can add the light. And because the brush is a opacity, the more I paint, I can have different hotspots on it. And I also wanted to have some light reflecting on me. So, it was no more effort than that. So that was it, that was the initial light layer done pretty rough. I mean it's crude, but it's effective. And let me switch off that folder. And then as usual, I kind of get greedy. I had a second light flare here. Let's play through. Pretty similar effect, but this time it's on top. It's another layer up. And the blend mode on this one is color dodge, which I love color dodge, it produces pretty wild effects. Now, to look at the actual color of the artwork that I was doing here, let's switch from color dodge to normal. And I think it was a basic yellow color. I think it was something like this. So when we switch, let me paint it here. So when we switch the folder to color dodge, you get that nice golden effect. So let me undo that. And the same process, use a soft brush and just shuttle through. Paint this wherever is required. And you see how beautiful that is. It's such a nice combination. So I'm just going through frame by frame. Let's say I need it here. That was it, that's the process. I won't muck this up anymore. Let's close off that folder. And the last thing I did was sparks, and in this case, the magic happens with a brush. Let me play through. You can see I've added this layer here. You'll see it better, if I switch off some of the others. So, it's a very cool brush. Let me go to the right layer. So B for brush. So if you right click, you'll open the brush panel, and it's FX flare. That's the brush that I used. So you want this to be white, and I simply added that over the relevant parcel I wanted to punctuate. So here, for example, if I wanted to really add stuff, and I gave it its own layer, of course, because it's just so overpowering that it could really overwhelm all the lovely hand drawn stuff. So I would use this well, fairly sparingly. You don't want to go too far with it, or it becomes an end in itself, but it certainly adds that sense of power. You get a real sense of energy from that. It can be hard to get sometimes from just the pure line stroke itself. So essentially, I'm adding layers on layers on layers to get the final effect that I want. So we have our live action layer, our adjustment layer, our effects animation hand drawn. We have our very easy reflected light. We have our brush with the high energy built into it, and then we have our reflected light on top of that. These are also, by the way, on different opacities. So we can bring these up, we can bring this one down, like, the adjustments that we can create are basically infinite. And I have a hue saturation adjustment layer on top, so if I ever wanted to make this a black and white movie, I can do that too. Again, make sure that's applied on frame one. So any time you're going to composite live action with animation, whether it's this kind of simple effect or it's something more complex, like an animated character interacting with you, this is the general process that you would want to use. My advice, again, start with a small scene, something in the two second range, three second maximum, and play with that. So if you have footage of your own that you want to try this with, start small and then scale up as you get better and better. I will say one more thing. When your scenes get longer, they'll get bigger. When they go over a certain amount, I think it's two gigabytes, you can't save them as a PSD file anymore, a Photoshop document. You have to save them as a PSB file, and that will allow you to save much longer animation scenes. They get enormous, PSB files can be huge, so they will allow you to do very big very, complex structures that you can't do in the classical PSD format. Now that we have this done, in the next movie, we'll get to rendering.