 Hello everybody, welcome back to another Adobe Photoshop tutorial and AI tutorial. In this one, I am going to show you how to take characters like this beautiful little cute vibrant bulldog. It's a Pixar style bulldog. We're going to combine the bulldog with a dystopian landscape that looks like this, a very dark and bleak landscape to images that are on the exact opposite spectrum. And we're going to combine them and make it look believable like it belongs in a digital animation or a digital illustration. Like this, for example, we've got the bulldog here sitting on the rock and it's his coloring matches the background and vice versa. And yeah, and we're going to go through a lot of steps. We're going to look at some of the new neural filters in Photoshop. We're going to do some standard adjustment layers over here. And at the end of it, we're going to combine all these techniques and we're going to make a believable illustration. Also, we're going to use AI image generators to create the images. So we're going to create the background with mid journey or an AI image generator of your choice. And we're going to create the character or the cartoon, for example, with an AI image generator of your choice. In this case, I'm going to use mid journey. So join me, I'm going to show you step by step, every step of the way how to do this. All right, welcome back. So for this one, I'm going to be using mid journey as my AI image generator or AI art generator for you. You can use any of the ones you want to go with. If you want to use Dolly or stable diffusion, or I don't know, maybe you've already got your own example, or you already created a character. This is if I scroll back here, you'll see here, I created the bulldog in mid journey here. And we cut it out. And then we created the landscape in mid journey. So I'm going to do something similar. And we're going to start from scratch. So let's just get going. So the first one, I want to create my character. So I'm going to go forward slash imagine. And then I'm going to go Pixar French bulldog, because I'm original, comma, big eyes, comma, bright colors, hit enter. When I do that, this is the style of character that I'm going to kind of blend into the landscape. So I'm going to let this run. I'm going to come back when it's done, we'll probably get a good candidate and then we'll move on to the next component. All right, welcome back. So here are the four original candidates that we got. If I click on the image, you'll see at the top left, this is a nice looking bulldog, but his ears or her ears are cut off. So it doesn't quite work for me. This one's not too bad, looks pretty good. The bottom left one, it was, yeah, I don't know if that one's going to Mordor or something, Gollum's pet. That's a no good one. But the bottom right one is nice and cute and bright. And I really like this one because you can see it's third, it's back legs. So it's sitting, so it'll be easier to place against the landscape. So I'm going to go ahead and select this one. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to click on U4. And when you click on that, that means basically this is U1, U2, U3, U4. I selected the one I want and I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of this one. This is the one and I want it in high res. So I'm going to right click on this and this is going to be our character. So here we go, right click on it and then I'm just going to save this image. So I'm going to save it and I'm going to save it as French Frenchy. And we're going to put Frenchy in our pictures. I'm on a Mac. So this is going into my Finder. But if you have a PC, this will go into your Windows Explorer, for example, call that Frenchy.png. I'm going to click save. Now we're going to create the landscape or the background. Alright, so the next step is we're going to create the background. And because I want this to be a difficult composition, I don't want this to be easy. I want bright colors and dark, nasty colors. And we're going to combine it. And the reason why I'm doing it this way is because if you can combine these difficult to combine components, then you can pretty much combine anything. So if you can do this, you can do anything with your own drawings. It should be a walk in the park. So let's go forward slash imagine. And then I'm going to go dark, dystopian, if I could just spell right dystopian landscape, hellscape, mountains in the background. Enter something like that. I mean, I'm who knows what we're going to get. But I'm going to go ahead with this first. I'm going to run this, come back, we'll pick a landscape. Hopefully it's got some rocks and some flat parts. And then we're going to go ahead and start compositing. Alright, so it's taken a first crack at it for us. I'm going to click on the four candidates. And let's take a look. Okay, so they're all quite good. But if I look at the top left one, this one here has a kind of like an area where I could see me positioning the bulldog as this crazy happy Pixar pixelated, coloring bulldog comes sort of meandering down this cool path in the middle. So I'm going to select the first one. But again, you can select any of them, or you can select your own, of course, but I'm going to go with number one. I'm going to click on you one. And then once it's done, it goes very quick. So this should be very quick. I'm going to right click on this image. And I'm going to save that image. And then I'm going to call this landscape. And I'm going to put it into my pictures file. Now what we've got is we've got our cartoon character that we created our Pixar character, our bulldog. And we've got our landscape. Now we're going to go into Photoshop and start working some magic over there. Join me. Alright, so let's get working in Photoshop. Now I've got Photoshop open here, but I've got nothing loaded up here. So the first step is you go to your Finder on a Mac, your Windows Explorer on a PC, grab the landscape, make a note that it's 1456 by 816 pixels. So if you need to change that size, you can do that in Photoshop, but I'm going to go as is. So I'm just going to drag and drop that in right here on top. And it's going to open up the landscape. Beautiful. Okay, good. That's first step. I'm going to click on the little unlock just because it's a habit. And then next step is I'm going to go ahead and grab our cartoon or our character, which is our very bright and fancy looking French bulldog. I'm going to drag and drop him or her up here at the top as well. Presto. Now the next step and the very important step is we have to extract the bulldog or our character from the background. We just want the dog. We don't want all the bright pinky pastel stuff in the back. Fortunately, in Photoshop 2023 and recent versions, even previous recent versions, it's gotten a lot easier. Go to the left side here, grab one of your selection tools. I'm just going to take quick selection tool. And when you do that up at the top, you should see select subject. Now I'm going to click on this down arrow here, and I'm going to make sure that it's selected on cloud. Once I've done that, I'm going to just click on select subject and watch what happens. Presto. We've gone ahead and basically selected the subject perfectly. If it is not correct, you can always go in here and grab the quick selection tool and then add in the part that you want to add in. I could do this for example if I wanted this little purple in the front, but I don't. So I'm going to go ahead and it's perfect as is. The next step is you just want to go up to the top right here again and click select and mask. Boom. This has done an incredible job as is. You can make some adjustments here. I'm going to go ahead and just turn the radius up to one. I'm going to put smart radius on. I'm going to smooth it at two. Feather of 0.3 pixels. And this is just my personal preference. This is not required. And I'm going to shift the edge in a little bit just because I find it gives you a little bit of a better delineation around the edges. So anyways, that's my style here. I'm now just going to go ahead and click on okay. And then Presto. We've made some adjustments. The last step, just click on this little mask here at the bottom. It says add layer mask. When you do that, the background is gone. And now we have isolated our image or isolated our cartoon. Okay, excellent. Now with that, I'm going to go ahead and save this. So I'm going to go file and then I'm going to go save as. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I want to basically just keep a copy of it. And I'm going to call this Frenchy to dot PNG. And the reason why again is a, I want to copy and be this saved version doesn't have the background. So I don't have to go through that step just in case. So let's go back to the landscape here. You'll see we've got our landscape. If I go back to Frenchy to or whatever you've got, I can just click on his face, making sure I've got the moves tool selected or her face. I don't know if it's a boy or girl. And then I'm just going to move it. I'm going to hover over the top one here, the first one. And then I'm just going to drag and drop it right on here. And I mean, they could not be further apart if you tried. I mean, these are completely opposite colors. Now, let's get to work cracking down on making the match. All right. So here we go. We've got our character here. And the first thing I'm going to note is I'm just going to move it around. I'm just moving him or her around. And you'll see here that the path is kind of coming from right at the back to the left in the front. And the character or our cartoon is sort of facing the wrong way in my opinion. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to edit. And then I'm going to go to transform. And then I'm going to flip him or her horizontal. And when I do that, you'll see here now that they're kind of facing the right way in my opinion, so that when we place them, it's going to look like they're kind of coming in the right direction when we place them in the front here. So that's step one. Okay, the next step is obviously this character is way too large for the screen here or for our composition. So I'm just pulling on one of the corners and I'm going to greatly reduce the size. And then I'm going to place them somewhere like let's maybe say they're kind they've made their walk all the way through. So I'm going to place them right at the foreground. And in the background, we're going to go ahead now and start blurring it out and switching up the coloring. So here we go. All right, welcome back. So the first thing I did is I turned off the top layer here. So I just want to turn this off because I actually want to work on the bottom layer first. I want to put a blur into the background. There's a few ways to do it. But I'm going to show you how to do it with a new technique calling that uses a neural filter part in me. So I've selected the background layer. I'm going to go up to filter. And then you'll see here neural filters right below convert for smart filters, neural filters. When you do that, you get a whole bunch of options. But the one we're looking for is down here at the bottom, it's still in beta, but you can use it. So turn that on and you'll see here that depth blur. I've gone ahead and turned on depth blur. And look at that it's created a blur, but it's a bit too much if you ask me. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and dial down the blur to about 20. And then let's take a look here. So the background is blurry and the foreground is actually quite sharp. So that looks pretty good to me. I'm going to go ahead and click on okay. And then we'll move on to the next step. All right, welcome back. So you'll see here, we added in a subtle blur here, which just makes it look a little bit more believable. Now the next step is I'm going to select the top layer. And on the top layer, I'm going to add another neural filter. I'm going to go to filter and we're going to go to neural filters. And this one is another new one that you'll love. Definitely like to try out. And it's called harmonization. When you hover over it, it says harmonize the color and luminosity of one layer to another layer to make a flawless composite. That's a little bit of an over promise, but it does work. So I'm going to click the toggle button on it and watch this. Nothing happens right out of the box, but you can go over here to reference image, I'm going to select a layer and then I'm going to select our landscape layer. And when you do that, look at that, it's added in a bit of a, a little bit of a match to the background. Again, it's not perfect. We're going to go ahead and make some adjustments. But you can also see that you can make adjustments here, although it takes a little while for it to follow or for it to show up. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. I'm going to click on okay. And then we're going to start working with some other filters. All right, welcome back. So here we go. So now we've got our bulldog. He's sort of sitting or she's sitting on the path in the foreground. Background is a little bit blurred, but they don't match. They've got a similar color look, but obviously this is too bright and it's just looks kind of pastelish where the back is bleak and dark. So what are we going to do? I'm just going to click on deselect here. So I've got the top layer selected and I'm going to start making adjustment layers. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this little create new fill or adjustment layer at the bottom right. And the first one I'm going to make is a curves adjustment. So I'm going to go ahead and create curves. And when I do that, you'll get this little curve here. You'll get the straight line actually. It's like a little graph. Nothing happens out of the box. But before I go any further, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that I've got the top layer here, the curves layer selected. I'm going to hold down the alt key on a Mac, the part of me, the option key on a Mac, the alt key on a PC. And I'm going to hover my hand so that I create a clipping mask. So right between the two layers. And when I do that, now if I make any adjustments to this little curve here, it's only going to impact the layer below. It won't impact the landscape. So watch, if I pull this down, gone. But the landscape or the background is still the same. So you see what's happening here? So what I'm going to do now is I just want to kind of start edging in, etching in some of the coloring that I want. So I'm pulling down. This is the shadows, the mid-tones, and then this is the highlights up top here. So I'm going to pull, I think the highlights are a little bit too bright in most cases. So I'm going to pull that down a little here. And it starts to look a little wobbly pretty quick here. I'm going to pull this one to right about there. And then maybe this one, I'm going to pull it down to maybe somewhere around here. And again this is all just sort of going by eye. Like you can, whatever you're looking for, you'll know better than I do. I'm just pulling it to give it that sort of, sort of match look. Okay, so something like that. Again this is not perfect. It's not meant to be perfect. We're going to make some more changes. Now I'm going to create a new fill or adjustment layer. So the same button. And this one, I am going to go ahead and create a brightness and contrast one. So what I want to do is I'm going to pull the brightness down a little bit. Again you'll see that this is impacting the whole thing. So let me delete that actually. I'm going to do it again and do it the right way. I'm going to click on the brightness and contrast. I'm going to create that layer. And then before I touch any buttons, I'm going to hold down the Alt key on a PC, Option on a Mac, and I'm going to clip it again. And this time when I pull the brightness down, it only impacts the little doggies. So I can make it brighter or darker depending on what I'm going for. I can also increase the contrast or decrease the contrast. This is starting to look, we're getting closer. We're not quite there, but we're getting closer. So there we go. So now we've got the bulldog in the foreground. Not bad. We've matched the colors a little bit. We've got to do a little more adjustment. So I'm going to go ahead and create another adjustment layer. Sorry, but this is the way it works. And I'm going to go ahead and create a Vibrance adjustment layer. I'm going to go ahead and hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC, and I'm also going to go ahead and clip it. And on this one, on the Vibrance layer, I'm going to change around the saturation to a little lower. So the background image looks quite desaturated. It's black and white with a little bit of red in it, but it's not overly saturated. It's also not overly vibrant. It's not a dark, I mean, it's not a bright and happy picture. It's bleak and it ain't pretty. So there we go. I'm pulling down these two here. And now if I look at this, the bulldog is starting to match pretty good. We're almost there. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to create one more layer. And this one, it's going to be a Curves layer. Again, I know you're probably getting tired of all these layers. This should be the last one. I'm going to hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC, and I'm also going to clip that to the other layers. And this one, instead of going and pulling down the brightness or working on the RGB curve, which is red, green, blue, I'm just going to work on the red curve to start. Watch this. I'm going to just start pulling down this. And what's happening here is I'm pulling the red out of the image. So I'm just basically making him a little bit greener, but hopefully not too green. So something like that, we've got a little bit of the red out, and the red of his ears is starting to match the background. I think there's a bit too much green in this. So I'm going to go and switch over to the green curve. And I can now start adjusting the green curve so I can pull it down or I can pull it up. So in this case, I'm pulling it down a little bit. And let's pull the highlights down a bit. Let's see how let's see how crazy this gets. Okay, let's see. Maybe that's not doing a whole heck of a lot. Let's pull this down here. A bit too green. Okay, something like that. Okay, fair enough. And finally, I'm going to do one more curve. I'm going to go, I'm going to do one more adjustment layer just to really dial this in. I think it's now a little bit too dark, although it matches pretty good. Maybe I want to make it a little brighter. So might as well show you the technique. I'm going to go ahead, go on to click on new adjustment fill layer. I'm going to create a levels adjustment. And this one, I'm just going to go ahead, I'm going to hit alt or option and clip it. So I'm clipping this one as well. And then I'm just going to look at some, some ideas here. So let's see. Maybe I'm going to brighten it up a little bit and pull this to the left a little bit. And something like that. What do you think? Is that too bright? I don't know. That's probably right around where I want it before it starts to look unbelievable. But there you go. This is how we've kind of, oh, maybe that is too bright actually. Let's go ahead and pull that back a bit. Something like that. But there you go. This is how you do a fancy composite combining a background image with a character and making them look like they belong in the same image. And we did it with a Pixar bright Pixar tongue out bulldog and a bleak dystopian hellscape landscape background. We combine these two and it looks believable. You can probably combine anything and it should work. That's all there is to it. Thanks for watching.