Photoshop Tutorial for Beginners
Learn how to create a Photoshop Layer Mask from a Path so as to change the color of part of the image. Watch the tutorial and download the exercise file to practice
Click here or the image below to download the exercise file
Pen Tool Tutorial Captions
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Welcome to PEN TOOL Photoshop. In this tutorial, I’ll be pathing around the orange part of this
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car, and then converting it into a selection, and then applying that selection to a layer mask. The
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purpose of this is so we can change the color of this orange to some other color. Often what
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happens is you get briefed to change the color of something. And you can do it by using things
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like color range, or making a mask, or using just wanding and selections. But sometimes, it’s
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easier to give it to a junior staff member or just to have it pathed, and then you can work from
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that path. So, if you try to do a selection, you might pick up things like these little indicators, or
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you might pick up some of the orange, or it just might not work that well. So, sometimes it’s
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better to start with a good base, which will be the path, and then you can work from there. So, I’ll
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path around this object, the orange parts, just so you can see the process. And I’ll speed this
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footage up so it’s a bit quicker. And then, I’ll go through the next steps. I won’t go into the
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details of how to fix it up, because it won’t be perfect. The edge has a bit of a feather on it.
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That’s a more advanced area of Photoshop. But, you get the gist of the starting point, just doing
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the pathing and then you build on pathing to do more advanced things in Photoshop later.
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It’s a good habit. Just create a new path. Start pathing from there.
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So we’re pathing selected areas, actually right on the line.
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With areas like this where it bleeds up, try to cut it off and you have to fix that up later on.
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So this won’t be able to get the job done in one go with using a path, it’s just one part of the process.
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The better job you do pathing, the less you have to fix it up, the easier it will be when you make a selection.
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If you put a point in the wrong spot just undo it straight away
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The same logic as before. I can cut out these bits as I go.
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You can see they have a slight feather around them. So you know that color’s going to bleed and
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it’s not going to work well with the path. You’re going to have to feather this area separate to
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maybe some other areas. But it still is a good starting point.
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So, that was pathing the image. Now, I’ll check the path. Hold down command, click on the
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path, convert it to a selection, press Q Quick Mask. You can see where I’ve cut out all the
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orange parts, command I. So, looking for bits that I’ve missed.
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Once we’re done with that, I can press Q to release it again. Go up into Select, modify feather.
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Set my feather 1 pixel. Different feathers for different areas. I don’t want to apply this as a mask.
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I don’t want to cut the image out like this. What I want to do is create a layer folder (group), put the mask in
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the folder.
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What that means is whatever is inside this folder will affect images below. They’re masked by
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this overall mask that’s on the folder. Within that, there’s a number of things I could do. Make a
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solid color. You can see some of the areas there where it hasn’t quite worked. Go ahead
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and change that to color. There’s all sorts of ways you can do this. It really depends on the
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image. Another option I could do is Hue & saturation.
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You can change the color that way. Really depends on what color you’re coming from and to.
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Or it might be a combination.
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We might do this one. It looks a little bit flat, a little bit sepia tone. You might want to bring up
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the curve adjustment layer.
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Brighten the highlights, darken the three quarter tones
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These here, you see, have to be fixed up. And this is where you would use other options, for
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example.
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Select color range, click on the orange, and change this here to greyscale. It starts to show me the
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look of the selection.
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I was trying to select the orange parts, so hit okay.
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Press control or command, H. That will hide the selection. That’s under view, extras.
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Then with a brush, with a white brush, I’ve got a brush here, white, and it’s just a soft brush.
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Start to brush those areas back in. I’m just clicking.
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You can see the base starting point was pretty good.
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This is where I can do the fine tuning.
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You can see in this one here, it started to pick up some of the orange, some of the black.
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So I’d try a different process for that.
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So you see I’ve crossed over that and painted the light blue
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Over here it’s not too bad
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Even the color of the cast, that’s where you want to fix up for realism.
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There, you can see that started with a path. The path give you a really good base to start from,
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then you can do something like this to fill it in.
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Hold down option and click on the mask. You can see that’s what the mask looks like.
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So that was creating a path around a selective part of an image, converting that path into a
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selection, applying the selection to a folder as a mask, then inside that folder, placing in any
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variety of methods you would like to change the color of the object beneath. I used color range,
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but there’s other methods you could use outside of this tutorial to make selections to add to this mask.
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That was the original.
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That’s what we changed it to.
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I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.
