How to Create a Simple Composite in Photoshop

today I'm going to show you how to create a simple composite in Photoshop hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE you can find me on phlearn dot-com where we make learning fun and in today's video we're gonna create a simple composite but it's also gonna be super cool using just a couple of tools in Photoshop we're gonna show you how to combine different images together using blend modes like screened we'll show you how to use smart objects and filters to make those images come together and last but not least we're gonna

show you how to add coloring and grain to bring everything together now don't forget you can download these sample images on florrum calm just follow the link right down below we got a great video let's jump into Photoshop here we are in Photoshop let's go ahead and open up our images we've got 4 images for this tutorial because it's compositing so let's go ahead and hit open it's gonna bring our images together I'm gonna hit ctrl or command - a couple of times on each one of these images just to make it a little bit

smaller so we can see we've got a couple tenths and some skies here I've got a jellyfish really cool image and we've got our background here so we're gonna start off with our jellyfish we don't need these other layers just yet so let's just keep it simple we'll do one at a time so we're gonna use my move tool take this jellyfish I'm gonna click and drag it from this document OOP right over to this one check that out so it's just on there now as a new layer let's in f4 fullscreen that's just gonna

hide the rest of this stuff I don't have to worry about it and I want to get this jellyfish looking like it's in the sky and we're gonna create a few of these now the first thing that I want to do real quick here is just add a layer mask because I want this to kind of you can see how it's just gonna end really abruptly here if I don't use a layer mask so let's go ahead and pop a layer mask on there I'm gonna paint black on my layer mask and that just hides

a layer so right here that thing there that was you know gonna be super visible alright I'm not worried about doing the like getting rid of the black background in this step I'm just hiding the stuff that like I really don't want to see that's a nice a nice little blend is gonna happen there the deal so that's pretty much it now if you want to you can go ahead and soften the edges of the layer that's never a bad idea it'll just make sure that you don't have any like hard edges where your composites

kind of like you know coming together sometimes you'll see those edges and that's a dead giveaway for a composite photo so you can see here see that little corner right down there oh let's just paint that away all right so just painting black on our layer mask that's how to hide part of your layer good deal so to get this to blend in my image a little bit better I need the black to disappear I just want the lights to be visible so we're gonna change our blend mode to do that let's change here from

normal we're gonna go down to screen blending mode and what screen blending mode does is it makes all the dark areas of your layer invisible and leaves just light areas so now I can go in here and do a little bit more fine-tuning on these little fibre things that we got going on there there we go and our jellyfish is starting to look good not perfect just yet but it's starting to look good so I'm gonna flip this upside down let's save ctrl or command T we're gonna right click and we're gonna go to flip

vertical there we go let's do another one right click and go to flip horizontal there all right and I want kind of like a big what a big one I want one big one this is gonna be kind of this start but we're gonna make a few of these so for now let's hit ctrl or command J that's just gonna make another one of these and we're just gonna shrink it down so let's hit ctrl or command T or our transform we're gonna shrink you on down a little bit we're gonna right click and go

to flip horizontal and then you know what I don't want it to look like it's the exact same thing so I'm gonna right click again and we're gonna go to warp and warp just to kind of allows me to like change the shape of this a little bit you know enough to where it's like probably gonna look like slightly different here so you can make it a little bit longer you could make it less long and do all kinds of fun stuff alrighty looks pretty good so we're just gonna leave that one right about there

I think it's kind of looks like weird glowing mushrooms coming out of the sky which I'm okay with let's make another copy of this original layer here so control like mange on that one I kind of like how it made it nice and bright I'm gonna save that mentally for later all right now we're gonna make this one nice and small so ctrl or command T this will be small this is gonna kind of become and you know up there right I'm gonna give it some depth you know we want some big close to the

sky here and then we want some small you know kind of small away so I'm gonna duplicate this guy again ctrl or command T and there we go I'll make this one nice and real small here you're gonna be up there I might even like fade that one away a little bit let's rotate it around make it even smaller at this point mostly I'm just like thinking about my composition here you know I'm not I'm not necessarily thinking about you know trying to get everything blending perfect or whatever I can do that in a little

bit mostly I just want I want everything to look cohesive alright let's go ahead and flip that horizontally we're gonna right click and warp this one as well so just like shrink it down a little bit okay so I want it to look like actually different from the others there we go and let's go ahead and just pull it on this way a little bit more alright good deal so this is the step where you know you can kind of take your time with it let's go ahead and make it a little bit smaller too

you can kind of take your time and figure out about where you want to put all these things there we go I wonder maybe even smaller cuz this is actually just like composition right there we go I'm just hitting ctrl or command T and kind of rotating these around nothing super crazy fancy going on there good deal I feel like that's actually a decent place to start all of these to start my composite now at this point we're gonna notice a few things one the jellyfish are in the trees not behind the trees too you

can see all the stars things like that right behind the jellyfish and three if I look at these stars you can see they have a little bit of a motion blur on them and that's because this is a long exposure image it's taken at night so I want to duplicate that long exposure and I want everything to blend together a little bit better so what we're gonna do to start with is I'm gonna take all my jellyfish layers so Boop we're gonna go ahead and shift-click all of those layers now I'm gonna right click and

I'm gonna go to convert to smart object okay so it's gonna take away any kind of blending mode that you had on those individual layers not a big deal I'll just change it back again so we'll just go from normal down the screen again but what's not there we go screen what's nice about this all being a smart object is I can treat all these jellyfishes one but if I wanted to move them no big deal you could just double click right here on the layer for your smart object and you can move them around

and then you can just hit ctrl or command s to save and in this case I'm not going to it would update automatically which is super cool so everything actually looks pretty good now let's go ahead and focus on getting these jellyfish behind the trees so we're gonna make the layer invisible well click on our background I'm gonna go to select color range we're gonna click right here on the trees now in this case we're gonna bring our fuzziness down a little bit there we go and that's looking pretty good basically I just need to

make sure that the trees are selected in this case they're light and my background is dark so that actually looks pretty good I'm gonna hit OK which is going to basically turn all this light area into a selection hit OK there now we're gonna turn back our jellyfish we're gonna turn the back on and because I already have a selection active all I have to do is click on my layer mask icon and my selection is gonna load into the layer mask now it's the opposite of what we want no big deal just click on

your layer mask and hit ctrl or command I to invert now I'm going to hold alt or option and click on that layer mask because I just want to edit it a little bit basically I'm going to grab my lasso tool and just make a selection right around here OOP very easy go to edit down to fill and we're gonna fill that with white so we'll just choose white here hit okay there we go and then I'm gonna hit B for the brush tool we're gonna change our blend mode from normal to overlay and I'm

gonna paint with white right over here too and you're gonna see how because I'm in overlay blending mode it's gonna take these light areas and just make them even lighter but it's kind of kind of leave the dark areas alone so I'm using this you can see another patch here I'm using this to kind of take care of any of those like patchy areas but it's gonna kind of leave my tree line alone all righty just make sure you change your brush back to normal when you're done so we have a really nice layer mask

of the trees let's hold alt or option and click on that layer mask pretty cool huh now if I want to like hit this unlock button I can unlock my layer in my layer mask now I can just move my layer around and check this out everything's gonna be behind these trees so you can even make a look at animation like there we go that's a lot of fun now the next thing I want to do is I want to make it look like they've got a little bit of a motion blur applied to them

so on my layer we're gonna go to filter blur and down to motion blur there we go now I want to kind of match the angle the same kind of angle as what's going out in the stars that was a bit of a too much of a motion blur so we'll just add like maybe around 10 pixels let's hit OK there now because it's a smart object I can just turn this motion blur off and on at any time if I need you there we go I think that just helps it kind of look more

like this guy itself alrighty now we got one more cool thing that I want to do and this is actually gonna be with a duplicate of my background layer let's hit ctrl or command J on the background layer I want to kind of make these stars that are behind the jellyfish look like they're being kind of like warped like if you were to look through a glass of water it kind of warps what's behind it I wouldn't do that with these stars so what we're gonna do is we have our background copy here I'm gonna

go to filter we're gonna go down to liquify okay so running a lick 5 now here my few options I just want to make sure I show backdrop all right and all layer sounds good I want this to be in front of what I've been doing and then I can kind of like change what I've got going on here all right so the tool that we're gonna be using is gonna be the bloat tool which just like pushes things outwards so if I don't show backdrops you can see if I just click here and kind

of bloat it out that's that's kind of the idea right we're just gonna kind of push things out now because we have show backdrop open I can actually see what I'm doing a little bit more and we're just gonna kind of like push these out just to make it look like a little bit of a you know a little bit of a graphic type of fact is happening there we go you can't just like see straight through there alright we'll hit okay so just a nice little fun effect that I think just makes it look

a little bit like you know these are kind of warping the effect now it doesn't look perfect just yet but we're gonna work on that a little bit well the next thing that I want to do is add a little bit more of a light effect I want to kind of make it look like there's a galaxy inside of each one of these jellyfish so for that we're gonna go ahead and exit out of our fullscreen view and I want to bring in this image so let's use our move tool we're gonna click and drag

from one image to another hit f4 fullscreen look at that already looking cool now all this image we're gonna change our blend mode from normal down to screen again and I want this to kind of be in the middle of each of these jellyfish looking pretty good but the lights are just a little bit too light in this so I'm gonna hit ctrl or command L for our levels just make it a tiny bit dark cool it just makes the general background disappear a little bit more now in this case I'm not super interested in

like this photo as a whole let's hit ctrl or command T we're just gonna shrink this down just a little bit there we go and really all I want is like this Central Milky Way part of this photo so let's just pop it back into a normal blending mode and put it on top so we can see what we're doing so I'm gonna click on my layer mask icon alright and we're just gonna be black on the layer mask cuz I I just don't really need the whole image to be visible I'm just kind of

want this like Milky Way are you here and I definitely don't want this little tree line to be visible so I'm gonna just layer mask that out there alright and we'll make a soft large brush to kind of like fade it out from there alright so I want this like Milky Way effect to like look like it's coming from the jellyfish just like move it around and make sure you don't you know gotta look for those corners like you know or any of my corners visible if they are just paintable see wait look at that

visible corner just paint it away black on the layer mask okay well that looks pretty good now let's change this form a normal to a screen blend mode I'm gonna hit ctrl or command T and we're just gonna start by rotating this around there we are and we're just gonna use our move tool to kind of like put this inside of the little jellyfish there we go now obviously you can kind of like do any type of effect you really want here I'm just kind of kind of here we go let it kind of fade

in there a little bit something like that and you know what let's maybe make it a little bit larger cool this kind of makes it look like there's you know like a light source coming from inside of the jellyfish and also it just adds another fun little color in there too now let's just duplicate that controller command T to duplicate it we'll just make it nice and small and we're just gonna put this in a few of the other jellyfish here so they're each getting their own like lighting effect it's kind of trippy looking image

here I feel like I should do like a parental advisory do not yeah like I like this little old things in there alright parental advisory this image does now in no way endorsed the use of psychedelics or anything else it's like natural here we go let's right-click and/or fit it like I feel like whoo right now that's looking pretty cool so we have all those little effects hold our little Milky Way galaxies in there I think we're looking great now I want to give it a little bit of scale and a little bit of perspective

and we're gonna do that by adding like a tenth into the foreground plus it's gonna give it another color which in my opinion is just gonna help everything kind of like even out a little bit more so that's it shift command f4 just sorry shift F to get out of fullscreen and we're gonna be bringing this image in so we'll just use our move tool and click and drag from one to another hit f4 fullscreen alrighty now this layer we can do the same thing like we've been doing we're just change it from normal down

to screen blend mode good deal and I'm gonna hit ctrl or command T we're just gonna scale this on down alright not too small figure out about where we want it I'm gonna go just a little bit bigger start with there we go and let's hold alt or option we're gonna click on our layer mask and that just makes an all black layer mask perfect and then we can kind of paint white on our layer mask wherever we want visible so we'll just get like a little bit of this kind of foreground in there you

know wherever we want all right let's do mount here looking pretty good it's just a little bit too large right now so I'm just gonna make this a little smaller and kind of put this in there and a foreground there actually I kind of liked it that large maybe we'll make it even larger all right that's looking pretty good there now the color is decent it's a little bit on the yellow side I want it to be a little bit more Orange II so let's just click on our layer alright we're gonna make a nother

layer right above it let's go to a hue/saturation adjustment layer go ahead and clip that by clicking on this layer or that by clicking on the clipping mask icon rather and then I'm gonna just shift my color here to her a little bit more Orange II something like that looks pretty great now at this point we're a little disorganized so let's go ahead and group those two layers we're gonna shift-click the two of those group them together we'll just call this camp alrighty here we have let's go ahead and these are all of our galaxy

there we go and here we have our jellyfish it looks fantastic so I'm pretty happy with this composite as of yet a couple of things though I just want to bring the colors together a little bit more and one of my favorite ways to do that is by using a gradient map so let's go ahead and grab a new adjustment layer this is gonna be on the top of everything so a gradient map on the top of everything we're gonna click here on our gradient editor and I'm just gonna start by creating my own little

gradient so let's the on the left is gonna be black we're gonna start with the right side is gonna be pure white here and what that does is just basically takes the darks in your image and maps them to the left and the lights in your image and maps them to the right so right up here let's make that like a yellowy color there we go like a bright yellow okay that looks pretty cool over here we're gonna shift this a little bit more towards like a teal go a little bit darker there we are

and let's click over here we'll make this like a like a dark kind of blueish there we go I'd be a little bit lighter alright and that actually looks pretty good we're gonna hit OK there now obviously this is like a pretty strong effect it's on our entire photograph so you can see it does bring the colors together however it's like a little bit too much so my suggestion would be just to lower your opacity a little bit so let's take that opacity slider we'll just bring it down a little bit and this kind of

gives you the best of both worlds so you still get some of the coloring that brings everything together in the end but you still get some of the original color of the image too all right bring that opacity down a little bit more and in this case I'm just gonna paint over like this tent a little bit just paint black over this layer mask that's just gonna let some of the original color a little more of that color show it kind of show through this looks pretty cool now I'm gonna take my levels real quick

we're gonna go to our blue Channel there we go let's bring up some output levels in here it's gonna put some Blues into my shadows and you can see it here okay and it's gonna do it over top my entire image and then some yellows into my highlights all right not too too much with this but again it's just gonna bring everything together alrighty we're almost done the last step is to have a little bit of grain and we do this because we have like you know this image and you know our jellies and the

basically just a bunch of different composite images and they don't look like they were all taken like with the same camera at the same time and by throwing just a little bit of grain over top of everything it kind of like like puts it together it's easy to do too so we're gonna create a new layer on top of everything alrighty well let's go to edit down to fill we're gonna fill this with 50% gray ok we'll go to filter down to noise I'm gonna go to add noise let's just crank it up nice amount

of noise there and we're gonna change our layer blend mode from normal to soft light so come on down here to soft light and here you can see there's our noise kind of over top of everything there we go and when you zoom out it doesn't look like so harsh but it does have the effect of just kind of like bringing everything together you can see here in the campfire if it's too much noise no big just change your opacity lower that a little bit and you're good to go alright well there we have our

fun composite image so cool it really didn't take that long let's just go back through it one more time so everything invisible we started off with our jellyfish and those are just it's a smart object with screen blending mode and we used a layer mask to make it look like it's behind the trees we added a motion blur and that's what helps it make it look like it's got the same kind of shift as the stars in the sky it just helps it make it look more realistic then I wanted to make it look like

the stars are kind of like warping I'm the jellyfish so we just did a duplicate of our background layer and ran a liquify effect which just kind of warped them back there I think it's fun now you lost a little bit of definition here but no bigs because we're just gonna add our galaxies right back over top of that which gives it a cool effect and kind of makes it pretty trippy but I'm totally into it then we just added our camp and we didn't do any like crazy fancy layer masking here this was a

lot of this was just done with screen blending modes which i think it's great and we pulled everything together with a little bit of a gradient map for colors some levels adjustments on the shadows and highlights and then added some noise and that really just kind of makes it look like you can see just all looks like it's one photograph now of course at this level of zoom in it's way too much noise but when you're further zoomed out it looks nice well there we have it didn't take long and we made a super fun

composite in Photoshop thank you so much I hope you enjoyed this video if you want to get more just like this one hit that subscribe by Khan because we release free tutorials literally every single week and if you want to be notified click the little ding ding ding bell right there on the bottom don't forget you can download these exact images on phlearn comm follow the link right down below so you can follow along with this tutorial talking with my hands a lot I'm really getting in there thanks so much i'll phlearn you later bye

everyone what do you mean talk with your hands more I don't think I possibly could do that is it a way of capturing interest into whatever I'm saying because I'm talking about the Photoshop and I got to literally do whatever I can to make it more interesting reveal for you to watch what