Samurai Poster (Part 1)

♫ fast music playing ♫ Ohaiyogozaimasu and welcome to this edition of the Russell Brown Show. I've gone Japanese in this version. Of course I'm going to demonstrate how to create this Samurai poster that you see here. Of course this is going to be a two-part series. I'm going to first start off in this tutorial discussing how to extract something from a green screen background as you see here, right here. Now there's a few techniques for doing this and of course green screen is the easy way to extract something from a background. It's not always this easy, but I've got some tips and techniques that will help show you how to make a really nice extraction. Now of course the images you're looking at now are of a good friend of mine Sugo Wata, in LA who just happened to show up and appear at my MAX Conference event this last week here. And he showed up and I put on a course where the students in class created Samurai posters. And I thought I would bring to you some of the tutorials that I did at my MAX 2009 Conference. Okay, let's get started. Let's target right here on this image. Here I'm in Adobe Bridge. The first thing I'm going to do, of course is open this up into Adobe Bridge. Double clicking on this raw image it appears here. I just want to show you some of the techniques that I start out with before I bring this into Photoshop to extract the mask. One of the things I like to do is right over here. Under my Hue and Saturation adjustments the HSL adjustments many times I'll go in and adjust the saturation of the greens. Notice here I've increased the saturation of the greens. That's almost like putting an additional green light on the background. What a great idea. I should patent that. A green light to enhance the green saturation in the background. So I bring up the saturations here of the green. So this is a little bit of processing to help out in the end results. You can also go into the Luminance and bring up your luminance a bit. Wow. That's great too. So a little bit of targeted adjustments. That's about all I'm going to do for right now because I can come back and work on this later. Because what I'm going to do now is use a great feature here inside of CS4 that allows me to export this as a smart object. Holding down the Shift key on the Mac and the PC check what happens over here where it says "Open Image" it says "Open Object." It's opening up a smart object. If I click on that now it opens up inside of Photoshop as a smart object. A smart object, of course is directly linked back to the original camera raw image. So I can mask this, but if I double-click on this image, right here I can go back into the camera raw settings. Amazing. Keep that in mind. The Shift key always lets you bring this in as a smart object. Okay, let's get started. One of the great new tools here and in fact great new panels in CS4 is the masking panel. Right here. Of course I'm clicking on the masking panel here but you can also go to the masking panel here from the Window menu and down to Masks. Right here. Now once in this panel you've got everything you need to mask this out. In the past you had to move around and find different tools in different locations. Check it out. Without even having to double-click on that layer to turn it into a layer with transparency. I can just click once on this icon and I've added a mask. As you can see over here. Then let's go quickly into Color Range because that's what really going to help us out in this project, Color Range. I'm going to select Gray Scale here for my color range on the left and I want to see the color image here on the right. I want to have Localized Color Clusters on. New feature in CS4. Great capabilities. The answer is, without this on bad results. With this on really great results. Okay, you got that. Now we click in the green once. I can click in the green here in this image to the right within the window or I can click over here within the gray scale. I prefer to work here in the gray scale. I hold down my Shift key and I can add to my selection. I'm clicking and dragging over the shades. Now you can see how it was nice that I opened up some of those colors. I made them lighter. There's a little bit of trouble down here. I just have to work with those lighting people. You can never trust someone who does lighting. You just can't trust them. They didn't quite light this lower section of the green down here. But I can go in here and open this up clicking on this. Now check this out. If I hold down the Shift key I get a plus sign. If I hold down the Option or Alt key I get a minus sign. So I can click on Shades if I go too far. So I can go through here and start to add and subtract the different shades that I want on my image. Then I can go over here and adjust my fuzziness. So here's my work flow. First I get a pretty good looking silhouette. Then I move my fuzziness all the way to the right. Now you can probably see now on your screen that I'm seeing the show through on my Samurai. I'm going to pull it back and here's my secret. I pull it back until the show through disappears. Because I want to have a nice, soft edge around the Samurai. I don't want to lose some of the detail in his hair. I want to have good quality and having this too far to the left is going to give you jaggies. It's going to have stair stepping. Too far to the right and you see through him. There's this just-right point right there. And then...That looks great. We can click OK. So we've got our first start to this. Oh my gosh, goodness. This always happens. I always make the mask backwards and I have to go through all sorts of trouble to solve this, but wait. Right here. The Invert button is waiting for us. Just click on the Invert button right here in the masks panel and poof, you've solved the problem. Let's go in here and do some adjustments to this. I'm going to target my mask and let's move to the next adjustment which is the Mask Edge. If I mask my edge like this I can go through and I can contract and expand on my mask down here. In fact, let's turn on this preview right here. Just like this. I'm selecting this preview and notice I have different ways of previewing this. I can preview this against transparency against this quick mask against black against white or I can view the mask itself right here. In this case I'm going to view this against transparency, like this. And I'm going to select the Command H on the Macintosh or the Control H on the PC to hide that selection. And then I'm going to zoom in a bit, right in here. Now my mask is looking a little bit transparent here. Could I have made a mistake? Let's increase the contrast a bit. That's better. I'm increasing the contrast because my mask was a little bit transparent there and that helped fill in the transparency. Um, I have all these controls for adjusting the mask and the mask is fairly abrupt right now and you can see my hair really doesn't look like good quality hair. Maybe the jacket here and the sword are looking okay but the hair is not looking to the best of quality. So I'm going to show you a tip and technique here for adjusting this. And it all has to do with Radius. So Radius is the secret to success with anything that has hair, its fuzzy it has to do with Samurai, polar bears cute puppies, hair blowing in the breeze you use Radius. If you're strictly dealing with something that has hard edges don't adjust your radius at all. But Radius is all about getting the fine detail to return. Now if I'm lucky, and I'm normally lucky if I increase my radius here and bring this value up I should start to see some detail come back here in the hair. Let's wait for it. It processing and thinking. There it is! See this value over here? Let's continue moving the Radius up. I'm going to move the Radius up and it's intelligently looking at the edges of the hair. And combining this.. Let's take it a little bit farther. There's a point, though, at which your hair will start to look good and you might get some fuzziness around the edges of the hard edges of your subject. But let's bring the Radius up let's adjust the Contract and Expand let's see if we can get a little bit more hair to appear here. Notice I'm selecting the Expand to expand the search radius a bit right down here. I don't think I want any feathering and I don't want any smoothing. What I think I want is a little bit of contrast. Let's try...That's the wrong way. A little bit of contrast to the right. Ah, some of the detail is starting to appear with a little bit more contrast. I'm getting a little bit more finer detail to the hair here. As I can see here. Let's do a little bit of an expand just to expand this a bit more. Ah, even better. So I'm starting to pull in some of the details around the hair. But, you know, I'm starting to now see some of this green fringe this green spill coming in. Let's solve that next and finish this all up. So once again, just to review make your adjustments here to your mask. Radius for detail with hair. Click OK. And to finish this all off I want to get rid of the deadly green fringe. And that's going to be done with yet one more tool here. Right here, this is my Adjustments panel tool here in CS4. I can target nondestructive adjustments. Check it out. I'm going to click on Hue and Saturation I'm going to zoom right in here to the offending problem of our hair. This green fringe right here. I'm going to use this new tool right here that allows me to target my adjustments directly here in Photoshop. Clicking on this tool Targeted Adjustments I can go right in here and I can click on the offending green. Then if I move to the left the green disappears. If I move to the right I saturate it. To the left I desaturate. And I can click on the different green values and start to desaturate that along the edge. Just like that. That's incredible, by the way. (whispering) This is cool! Targeted green spill removal. Wait, there's a little bit more green. I can target that. Double-click on our Hand tool to finish this all off. Great. We've got a great start to our silhouette our mask of our Samurai warrior. And in the next episode of the Russell Brown Show I'm going to take this and apply some lighting effects to this as we combine this with a poster. There it is. Green Screen Extraction. Here, from the Russell Brown Show. ♫ fast music playing ♫