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[♪ Music ♪] [The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost] Hi, welcome, my name's Julieanne Kost, and in today's episode of the Complete Picture, we're going to take a look at how you can use leading lines to draw a viewer's eye through your photograph. So, let's take a look at a few examples. I just wanted to point out that a leading line could be a straight line. So, it could be a straight line like in this image, which has a secondary benefit which is it's kind of giving a little bit more depth to the image. In this image here, we've got a leading line that is very curvy. So obviously, it doesn't have to be straight. Sometimes the leading lines will actually take you to your subject. So, they may move your eye around the image and take them to the subject, but there you've got to think about the balance between which is more important and what is the subject and what is the supporting leading line. Here in this image we can see that the lines are taking your eye around the image, so keeping a viewer's eye within the frame. This is another good example of that where you might get lost otherwise if there wasn't the motion around the center of the tree. And what happens when you don't have these lines that bring the viewer into the photograph is that their eyes tend to wander outside of it. Of course, this isn't limited to photography either. This is also used in painting and many of the arts. Here we have some leading lines that are very, very graphical and rather intense and here we have another leading line that goes back into the distance. But I will just mention that a lot of my images, I'm not using the leading lines to go to a specific subject. So, for example, in this image many of you would think why would you even photograph that bridge if there is not something dynamic, if there is not a subject, if there is not anything happening beyond that bridge. And the reason that I shoot images like this is for my compositing, because I know that at some point I might use that bridge, and I might put in my own subject. So, I'm just using the leading lines from the bridge and then I'm going to use that as a smaller part of an image that I'm going to composite. So, let me just show you some examples because I do feel that a lot of times when people composite images together, they kind of lose this idea of the leading lines, and I think it's pretty evident, for example, in this image. You can really see that we've got this nice arc across the top, but then if you go down on either side of the wings, you follow kind of this flow and the flow kind of takes you back to the bottom of the figure and brings you back up. Likewise if I were to travel down the figure, you then get these nice kind of-- it's like an encapsulating steam or motion that's bringing you back up to the wings, and it keeps your eye within the frame. In this next example you can see it's much more of an S shape, right, where you see these birds over here and you come over to the brighter area. So, remember, leading lines don't necessarily have to be a physical object. They can also be created using color, using tonality, lighter areas and darker areas. So, your eye might travel to the moon and then come down to this light area here, to the road. You can see that I want you to focus on these two little small kind of creatures back here, and then come forward down at the bottom here to these bigger creatures that also have, obviously, these brighter lights which your eyes are going to be attracted to. Here I'm using the leading lines of the water here to kind of push you back into the image, to the boat. You'll notice also that there's these nice soft lines that kind of mimic the shape of the boat. So, it's quite nice when an image has leading lines that support the shape of the main subject. I'm also using blur here to keep a viewer's eye inside the image. You can see all the way around here the image is blurred, but where I want the viewer to look, I've sharpened that up and the main subject here is sharp. Here again I've added some leading lines across the top, this reflection of the mountains, in order to keep your eye from just drifting up the top of the image. And finally, with this image you can see that the leading line obviously goes down along where the birds are resting, and then you can either go down to the bottom of the page where this solid black will keep you from moving off. It actually brings you over and back up, or if you come across the image and then end up on the right side, you might look up towards this one bird up here. So, leading lines can also help you balance an image. So, what we're going to do in this episode is we're going to create this image right here. It's a digital composite, and if we go back to grid view, you can see that I've actually used these images to create it. So, I'll tap the end key just to show these four images. So again, I would say that really none of these images--well, I guess this second one has some nice leading lines, but most of the images that I take that I'm going to use to composite don't necessarily have the leading lines in them to start with. I'm actually going to use multiple images or multiple color in order to create a composite image that then contains these leading lines to take you to the subject. The other reason I really like to use leading lines is to create a little bit of tension. You don't always have to have an image that's completely balanced. When images are off balance, the subject's off balance or the way that two objects in an image touch each other or don't touch each other, when that becomes off balance, you can get some nice tension in the image. So, to save some time, what I've done is I've opened up each one of these four images as a smart object into a single document into Photoshop. So, let's just switch over to there. Now, this isn't the image I'm going to start with. I love this image. You know, a lot of images, they have emotional impact. I take images because they make me feel a certain way, so again, this is when I was in Iceland, and these little hills just came out of nowhere, and they were these crazy little hills that immediately made me think of a circus tent or of the Denver airport or the Shoreline Amphitheatre. And what they really are is when lava flows down over these wet marsh areas. The water underneath starts to boil, and it has to release the steam, and it comes up through the earth and it makes these kind of--they're not really cones, but it just releases the pressure there. So I thought even better. Here I've got this image that is all about the Earth's tension, and I'm going to add these manmade leading line tensions and add to that. So, here the only thing is they're not quite big enough, so I needed to resize them a little bit. So, we'll use Command or Control T to resize this layer right here. Now, it might take a second because remember, these are all smart objects, so they do take a little bit more time because Photoshop remembers all of the content in that layer. So, let's do a little Command zero or Control zero in Windows. What that does in Photoshop is that it zooms you out far enough so that you can actually see the whole bounding box and that way we can grab these anchor points. And watch this, look at this. I am not holding the shift key, I am just going to resize this, and I'm going to squish it. So, I am not maintaining the aspect ratio of this image. I'm making a composite image, I don't have to do that. By doing that, by smushing them a little bit, I'm also going to just accentuate the height of them a little bit more so they're not as flat. And I really like that, and another thing that you'll notice in this image is that we do have another leading line going across the bottom here, but it has a little bit of an arc. And so again, there's a little bit of tension because this side's a little bit thicker, and it doesn't appear that it's exactly balanced and I want that. I want this off balance a little bit. All right, now let's go grab those wires. So, here's the full image again. We'll just grab that layer by grabbing, and I'm going to click on it in the layers panel, and it's going to target the layer. We will do a free transform, and then we're going to not only rotate this but also we're going to pay very, very close attention to where the wires hook up with these little cones in the Earth because I don't want the wires to just go off the edge. I want the wires--well, I'm actually going to put one wire off the edge, and then I'm going to put one on the cone, and so then all of a sudden you realize if they were both on the cones then it would be more balanced. But I'm going to put one on a cone so it looks like it's going to be attached to that, but then I'm going to put one where it totally doesn't make sense so that it's going to make my image more off balance and add that tension. Okay, so Command zero will zoom out. And of course, you know if you put your cursor outside of the bounding box you get the little double-headed arrow so that we can rotate this. And I'll just hold down the shift key as well so that it'll snap into place, and then we can just make this a little bit smaller by just dragging these handles. Now, here's the problem. Probably it would be nice if I could see the background. So, let's go ahead and just hit Enter, Return, and now what I need to do before I make my final adjustments to where the placement of these wires goes is I need to change the blend mode on the layer. So, let's change this to multiply and then zoom in so we can see what we're doing. So, multiply made this a little bit too dark, but I'm not going to worry about that. A lot of times I don't worry about the final tonality of the image or the final colors of the image until I'm finished with compositing all of the different components together. All right, so let's go ahead, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag it down a little because I want this wire to appear like it's actually going to be hitting the cone, and I want this one to come all the way down to the very bottom corner of this image. Now, what I can do because I don't really like where it's hitting this cone. Wouldn't it be better if it hit this cone? Let's go back to this image, free transform, and we'll just stretch it out a little bit, and we'll make it hit exactly where I want it to. Now we're going to go ahead and add just a textural overlay to break up this background. So, let's click on the paper texture and make it visible, and let's change the blend mode to something like overlay or soft light. That's overlay, it seems like a little bit harsh to me. Maybe the soft light is going to be better. It's just going to give that nice texture, but I don't like the added color. So, in order to remove that color, I'll just double click on the smart object and because it's a smart object, it brings it right up into the Adobe camera raw dialog. We go right over here to the HSL gray scale and convert that to gray scale and click okay, and the great thing about this is if I change my mind and I decide to change it back, all I'll need to do is double click that smart object, and I'm not losing any quality or anything. All right, now, I also wanted to add a little bit of a texture that had a little bit of movement in it. And I wanted the movement to be vertical, to kind of draw your eye up and down, so I have this--it's actually a picture of a windshield, which I know sounds crazy but anytime I see any pattern or anything that I like, I like to photograph it. It's looking a little bit big, so let's just scale it down a little bit. I want the texture to be a little bit finer, so I'll bring in these corners here. I also want them to be a little bit thinner, and I think by making them thinner it makes it a little bit more directional. So, we'll go ahead and hit Enter or Return to apply that transformation. And let's just zoom in there a little bit, and then we'll try some different blend modes. Again, we can use the keyboard shortcut if we want to, the Shift + or - to go down through these different blend modes. I'm pretty sure, though, I'm going to end up with something like the overlay or maybe the soft light. So, I like the soft light, but actually, there seems to be kind of the opposite of what I want. It seems to be getting a little bit too dark. So, let's see what would happen if we inverted this layer, and I can do that really quickly by just using an adjustment layer. We have an invert adjustment layer, but the thing I need to make sure of is that I've got this icon clicked right here because this is going to clip the adjustment layer so that it only affects this photograph of this dirty windshield. So, I will click on invert and there, I like that much better. It just kind of brightened it up. What it did is it just made all the blacks white and the white black, and just gave me a much better looking image. Okay, now it's still a little bit too dark, and in fact, if we looked at our histogram, we would notice that there are no bright values. There's really no values on the right hand side of the histogram, and that happens a lot when you're using these blend modes because a lot of the blend modes tend to make things darker. So, what I'm going to do is on my adjustments panel, I'm going to add another adjustment layer, making sure that it is not clipped because I want this adjustment to affect all of my layers. So, I'm going to add a curves adjustment, and we can see that if we move this white triangle over, we can get our image a lot brighter. Look at this histogram. See what I mean by there were no values on the right hand side? But I want to make sure that I'm not clipping any values either, so I'll hold down the Option or the Alt key as I drag this slider, and I just drag it until I start seeing values being clipped in this kind of mask that it's presenting to me. So, I'll just back off until none of them are clipped, because I don't want anything to be pure white, and we'll just set our curve there. All right, but did you notice when I made this change that the entire image, the colors, became more saturated. And that's very typical, and that will happen when you add a large change to a curve's adjustment layer. But, we can limit the adjustment so that it only affects the gray scale values by changing the blend mode of the curve's adjustment layer to luminosity. You can see some of that added saturation went away. I also want to add a little bit of my own color into this image, and I'm going to do that with a gradient layer. So, we'll go here to a new fill layer and select gradient, and I'm going to set the mode to color because this is a soft image. It's very unlike the image of the ice. I'm not sure if you watched that episode, but I actually added color and hard light to really boost the color and give it some vibrancy. Here I just want like a nice color wash on top of it, so I'll leave the mode to color, click okay, and then we can just choose from one of these presaved gradients that I've created, or we could go in and create our own. I'm going to go ahead and select this one, but there's two things wrong with it. One, I don't want the gradient going from top to bottom, so I'm going to change the angle a little bit so it's going more from one side to the bottom, more directional. And the other thing I really need to do is just decrease the opacity of it because I don't want that solid gradient. What I want is a combination of the original colors plus this gradient that's kind of doing this nice cross fade across my image. Now, only one last thing that I would do is I would add an edge to this image. I just need to darken down those edges. I can do it on this curve's adjustment layer, however, I also have two actions that I've created that will add a quick edge for me, and they're a little bit different in how they work and also the shape that they create. So, if I wasn't sure which one I wanted, all I need to do to add my edge is click on this action which is going to add the edge to like 5%. And that's very important when you're recording actions. If you're going to run the actions on different size images you want to make sure that you are set to percentage as opposed to inches or centimeters or pixels so that it will be variable based on the size of the image. So, I'm going to add a 5% edge here. I'm just going to simply click the play button, and it will run through that action, and you can see this is a very nice, soft edge affect, and what it's done on our layers panel is it's created a layer and it has created a nice, soft edge and placed the opacity to 50%. If I don't like that one we can return back to my actions panel, and we can try out this second kind of rendition or this second version of it. Again, I'll just hit play, and we can see now that this one is not as soft. It's a little bit heavier. It also has kind of double the affect in the actual edge areas here in the corners, and it's a little bit squarer than the first one. So, it's just a different preference. I guess the whole point of showing you that is really just if you're doing the same thing, like if you are always darkening down the edges of your image, again, to keep your eye within the frame, then you might want to think of creating an action to do that because anytime that I'm doing the same thing like more than twice a day, I'll try to create an action because I really want to spend my time thinking about what I'm doing visually and creatively and the story that I'm trying to tell as opposed to running through the same seven steps that I always run through. Excellent, that wraps up this episode on how to use leading lines to move a viewer's eye around your photograph. My name's Julieanne Kost. I hope you'll join me again next time on the Complete Picture. [♪ Music ♪] [Adobe TV Productions]
