Image Editing in Photoshop

OK. So to begin this project, I’m going to open a photograph of a seashell that I took a while back in Photoshop. And so here is the seashell. I will click on that. It’s coming through Camera Raw here. I’m just going to open it directly into Photoshop.

And at this point, I want to make an initial selection of the entire shell. So to do so, I’m going to go Select Subject, which should pick up the outer edge of the seashell. There it goes.

Then I’m going to remove the center section here by going to the Quick Select tool and choosing the Subtract from Selection Mode. With a small brush– you see the little circle and the minus sign in there, it means it’s going to subtract from this selection– so I’ll drag around and select the center section.

Then I’m going to mask it out by going to the Add a Layer Mask Button here. There we go. This will be our shell, our seashell.

And the next thing I want to do is to create sort of a golden center image to this. So I’m going to go and choose my Ellipse tool which is underneath the Rectangle Tool and all of those. And I’m going to select a sort of golden color here, like so, for the center. And so this Ellipse tool is in the Shape Mode right now. And I’m going to fill it with this color.

So if I just Click and Drag Out an ellipse over this central area, It will make an ellipse there and the Properties Panel pops up for that. I don’t need that right now, so I’ll close that out. And I’ll drag this below my seashell layer so we can see it through the center of the seashell.

The next thing I want to do is to make this seashell shell a little bit brighter inside here, because I’m going to want to be able to use the texture that’s in there to map onto a sphere in 3D in After Effects. So to do that I’m going to go to the Create A Curves Layer. In this Curves Layer, I will clip to the layer below so that it only affects the seashell. And then I’m going to raise my middle tones up quite a bit here to brighten up that image like so.

Then the next step is I’d like to have some additional background on here as well as to darken down this area here which got a little bright. So I’m going to go to my Curves Layer first, take the Brush tool and a fairly large brush. And I’m going to paint over that area on the layer mask of the Curves Layer with black because black will conceal that part of the effect on that layer. So now I’ve got that down to the tone that I want.

I’m going to also add a background layer so that the entire image is rectangular so it will fit on a sphere better. So I’m going to go and Create A New Layer here. This will be my background layer.

And I’m going to get my color for the layer by clicking on the Foreground Swatch and putting my mouse into the image here. And I’ll pick one of these darker brown colors from this– sort of an orangey brown color– from the image itself.

And then I will move this layer to the background underneath all the others. Then I’m going to go Edit, Fill With The Foreground Color, which is the brown, say OK. Now I have the brown on the background.

The last step is I’d like to get a little bit more color into the lighter portion of the seashell. So I will duplicate this layer by Option Dragging it right above the seashell layer. So I get this kind of an effect. And what I want to do is change the Blend Mode to Overlay. You can see how that affects the entire image there.

And then what I’m going to do is I am going to Option Drag the Layer Mask from the Curves Layer down to this. I’m just going to invert this simply by doing Command-I. When I clicked on that layer, you see it inverts the mask so that now white is revealing this effect and black is concealing this effect.

So all I need to do if I need to modify the mask further– there’s a little bit of overhang here where it’s a little dark– I would paint with black on the mask here. It will take away that effect in that area. And I’m left with some tone in that whole side there.

So at this point, I’m ready to save this. So I’m going to do File and I’ll call it Save As and I’ll do a seashell.tff Without The Layers and put it into my Death Star Project, which I’m going to be creating very soon here. But there’s a folder where I can put that.

So I uncheck this. I’ll save it there. Seashell copy.tff, is fine. And I’ll say OK. And now you’re ready to import it into Cinema 4D Lite.