Adobe Tutorial

There is a wonderful addition amongst the rich set of features in PSE 9 - Layer masks. This was something which was missing in PSE 8. It is a wonderful tool which helps in achieving a lot of good results in different editing operations. This tool is specially helpful for people like me who arent that precise in selection tools like lasso,quick selection etc. However, are more comfortable with the paint brush and eraser.

In this tutorial, I will be using Layer Masks to move one object from one image and place it on other precisely without using any of the other selection tools in PSE like Lasso, quick selection etc.

I have the following two pictures : one is butterfly on a white flower and other is a lady bug on a pink leaf. Now I want to place the lady bug from the second picture on the flower leaf of the first picture, next to the butterfly.



1. I opened both the images in PSE 9 Editor.

2. Now I keep the image of butterfly in display in the editing workspace.





Select the Move tool from the tools bar and drag the ladybug image from the project bin below over to the butterfly image in the workspace.



3. Now as you see in the image below, the lady bug image comes over the butterfly image occupying a lot of space. Also you would notice that there is a new layer formed in the layers palette which is that of the lady bug image.


Just drag one of the corners of the lady bug image inwards to reduce its size.

Now one can rotate the image of the lady bug by dragging the corner of the image keeping Control key pressed and revolving it through the corners like this.



Click the commit green button when you think that the orientation is correct.

4. Now select the lady bug layer in the layers palette and go to Layer> Layer Mask> Reveal All.



As you do this you would see that there is one white mask that got created in layers palette.

5. Now select the Brush tool from the tools bar and black color selected as foreground color in the color swatch (as shown below). Now brush over the rest of the area of the lady bug layer leaving just the lady bug. This will remove the pink and green background of the ladybug in the layer.



As you click and drag the mouse with the paint brush you would notice that some black color gets painted in the white mask in the layers palette.  And you would see the pink leaf disappearing.

In case you mistakingly paint any unwanted area or some extra area, you can correct it by changing the foreground color in the color swatch to white and paint over that area again. So you can keep switching between black and white foreground colors in the color swatch to correct your selection.

Also for best results, zoom the image to 200-300% and reduce the brush size when you brushing around the corners of the lady bug to get precision.


Once you are done, select zoom tool and right click -Fit to screen.


6. Now select the move tool again and move the lady bug over the white flower and change its orientation as per your needs. You may transform it using Control+Shift+Alt and dragging the corners.

Here is my final result ;




Layer Masks can be used in several other workflows like selective editing in a picture or applying filters to some part of the image etc.

Hope you would find it useful too.

Here is my first attempt in creating flames :

1. Open a blank document with black background.

2. Create a new blank layer and paint the lower bottom area as white with brush tool as shown below



3. Now rotate it right by 90 from Image>Rotate > 90 Right.

5. Filter> Stylize> Wind . Repeat it thrice using Control+F to achieve the following result

Rotate it back by 90 Left from Image>Rotate > 90 Left.

6. Now create another blank layer and use hard  brush to paint the area with red, orange and yellow as shown in the figure below. Select topmost layer and go to Filter>Gaussian Blur. Set the radius to 8. Here is how it looks like after this step.



7.  And now change the blending mode of this layer to Overlay (from Blending modes dropdown in layer palette). The output looks as shown below :





8. Now select the layer below(with wind effect, 2nd layer from bottom) and select Smudge tool from the left toolbar and start smudging it from bottom through up. It looks like this :



9. Now select the gradient tool and click on Edit button on topbar to define three gradient colors as shown in figure. Move the color stops such that left most is yello, middle stop is at Orange and right most at Red.



10. Now select the topmost layer in the layer palette and strike the gradient from bottom to middle.



11. Now Control+click on  the middle layer(Wind layer) and go to Enhance> Adjust Color> Replace Color. Replace the white color with yellow by selecting respective colors from the color swatches in the dialog.



12. Click Ok and here is the final output which I got.

1. Select Background layer in layers palette
2. Select the complete eye area ( including the white part ) using any selection tool (i used quick selection tool). Right click over the selected portion and say Layer via Copy. Name this layer in layers palette as Eyes by double clicking the layer in the palette.
3. Now select the background layer again and make a selection for the eye ball regions only. And right click and select Layer via Copy and name this layer as Eye ball.
4. Now Conrol+Click on the layer Eyes to show the eyes selected in the image. Click on Background layer and Select Inverse from right click on image area followed by Layer via Copy. Name this new layer as Blur. This constitutes the whole image except the eye region.
5. Now select the layer Blur and Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Modify the blur to something like 2.5 or lesser. This is done to rest of the image leaving eyes so that eyes are prominent in the image. Click Ok. You can later on modify the opacity of the layer making it more transparent if you want to decrease the blur effect. You can do that by selecting this layer in the layer palette and moving the opacity slider on right top of layers palette.
6. Now select the layer Eyes. Go to Enhance>Adjust Sharpness. Now make changes to the amount and radius. Click Ok. You can vary the sliders as per your needs and preview it side by side in image area or preview area in the dialog. Do not oversharpen as it makes the eyes look artificial.
7. Now select only the layer Eye ball and select Enhance >Unsharp mask.
I changed the amount to near 50% and radius to near 16. This details out the pattern inside the eye ball and brings more focus to the eye region.
8. You can now also increase the saturation of this layer by Enhance>Adjust color>Adjust Hue/Saturation. You can select the Grrens from the combo box if you obly want to saturate the Green of the eyes using the Saturation slider.
Click Ok.

Here are the initial and the final images :

Quick selection is a great tool for selecting objects in any image. It intelligently selects the object distinctly from the background by detecting the brightness, contrast and tonal changes along the objects and their backgrounds. It takes just a little mouse drag with in an object to select an background.

For example : for the image below I just dragged my mouse from point A to point B for selecting the whole apple instead of moving my mouse along the edges of the whole apple which we would require for other selection tools.


This is how my object was selected moving my mouse from point A to B (Please note I increased the brush size to 35 px from options bar after selecting the quick selection tool for making this selection) :



However in the above image, there is good contrast between the object to be selected and its background. So we did not need to train our quick selection tool. But for getting better results in minimum time when there is not much great color difference or contrast between our object and background, it is recommended that you train your quick selection tool.

So in an image like below, where there is not that great color contrast between yellow flower and its background, we would train our tool.

So if I move my quick selection tool from point A to B to select the yellow flower, here is what
I get as selected :


However I did not need this extra highlighted(green) part in my selection(as shown below) which was selected when I moved my mouse from point A to point B. But since there is a low contrast between the orange and the yellow here, this area too got selected.



So instead of selecting my flower in one go as shown above, I follow the steps below to get my needed selection :

1. Select a very small part of the yellow flower as shown after selecting Quick selection tool.


2. Now I will press Alt key and keeping it pressed, I click and drag my mouse over the area I did not want in the selection. So  I brush my mouse over the green highlighted region shown in the second last image.

I also notice that as soon as I click Alt key my mouse cursor changes from "+" to "-" as it tell what area not to select.

Once I am done with that I leave the Alt key back and again move my mouse from point A to B as I did earlier and here is how I get my desired selection :


So here I have trained my quick selection tool not to select what areas of contrast. So if I had the similar background around the whole flower, then I would just drag my mouse once along the boundaries of the flower to tell my tool about the low contrast areas which I do not want to select.

Also keep in mind that if you have a large and random objects to be selected then you should keep subtracting the wrong selections you make as you sweep and not to defer the subtraction task in the end. This trains my tool at every step of selection and tell it what "not" to selection as it goes ahead.


I hope you find this tutorial helpful!

Its so easy and cool to create reflections using PSE 9. It is one of the new guided edit features which is easy to follow with the instructions laid through the workflow. I am also following the steps described in the workflow to demonstrate the creation of a reflection :

1. Open any image in PSE 9 Editor that you want to create reflections of. I picked this image as when i clicked this one, I felt there was a lake missing the the silhouette.



2. Click on Guided Edit tab>Fun Edits> Reflections.

3. Click on the first button : Add Reflection. Here is the output you see after that :




4. Click on the Eye dropper tool and select one of the colors to be filled as background for the reflection. For this image I chose the mustard color as you can see from the color swatch by clicking on one of the areas with this color on the image. And as I click Fill background, I see an output as follows :


5. In the next step, you get an option to select either Floor, Glass or Water reflection. I chose Water Reflection for this particular image.

It will prompt for adding Ocean Ripple filter, followed by Motion blur to give some realistic effect.
I tried in 768 % of amount for Ocean ripple effect and 7 as distance in Motion blur.

6. Adjust the Reflection intensity as per your needs. I increased it from 80 to 90.



7. Click on Add Distortion. I clicked it twice to make my reflection shorter that the actual image.



Rest of the area after shortening of reflection gets filled by your foreground color in the color swatch(the background you selected for reflection earlier)

8. Now crop this extra area in the next step using the next button Crop.

9. Once cropped you can add gradient to give more realistic look to your image. here is my final output.


If you are not satisfied with the gradient applied with this button, you may go to full edit and select the top most layer, edit the gradient itself choosing gradient tool and selecting Edit button from top bar.

One more example of the reflection created using this feature :