Subtitles of the Movie

Alright, let me give you a practical example of where you might use your clipping groups. I mean, you're probably already thinking hey, I could use this to help me create collages or neat photo effects and things like this. You're absolutely correct. This is just one idea that I'm going to bounce off you. I'm going to go and open up two files. So I'll double click on my gray background into the Project Files. And we have two files in here that I'm after: Texture 1 and Texture 2. Go ahead and grab those guys. And you know, by the way, I gave you an extra texture in there too if you want to experiment with that guy, Texture 3. But it's Texture 1 and 2 that I'm after. Go ahead and pop those guys open and let's see here. The Texture 2 is just a photograph I took of kind of a neat, gnarly-looking concrete wall. I thought it was kind of neat looking, kind of a neat texture so I took that photograph and then Texture 1 is our good, old-fashioned statue, this photo here again but what I've done here with this photo is I took the liberty of getting rid of that background, remember that drab sky and essentially what I want to do is I want to overlay this texture, this concrete on top of the statue. I want to make the statue look a little bit more old, a little bit perhaps kind of crumbling apart, this sort of thing. So here's what I'm going to do. As always, back to the Application Bar and I'll go Float All in Windows. I'm going to start off by dragging my texture into the statue, just click and drag that guy over, something like this and then as always, I'll get rid of this guy and then I'll go back to the Application Bar and choose Consolidate All. Now, the trick by the way for really pulling this off is to have nice, big images. So again, when I shoot something with my digital camera, at least in terms of pixels, I have a massive image to work with. Sometimes you drag an image over into another image and it's tiny so you need some nice, big images to work with. All I'm going to do here is I'm going to set up my clipping group to get started. I'm going to hold down Option or Alt and bring my cursor between the two layers inside my Layers Palette. So obviously Layer 1 is the texture and Statue is the Statue and of course with Alt or Option held down I'll click and again, what that does is that maps the top layer to the bottom layer, to the pixels on the bottom layer. OK, of course you can see my texture has now mapped to the contour of my statue but I've lost a lot of the detail in the statue. We'll get to that in just a second. Before that though what I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of the checkerboard pattern here. I'm finding that kind of distracting so what I'm going to do is over inside the Layers Palette I'm going to go and create a brand-new blank layer and I'll drag this guy below the statue and I'll simply fill him with white so if you want here, hit the D Key on your keyboard and then hold down Control or Command here on the Mac and hit Delete just to fill that layer with white and you might want to rename him. I'll call this White Background, something like that if you want. OK, now back to our clipping group, back to our statue. I'm going to go back to Layer 1. We should probably rename this guy as well. I'll just call this Texture. Perfect. And what I want to do is I want to try and fade back this texture a little bit. It's a little too heavy, it's a little too harsh. Obviously because it's just sort of showing us the normal default texture. Well, don't forget. What I can do is I have my Opacity Slider so I can actually reduce down the opacity of my texture but as I do so, I really start to lose a lot of the texture if I drop the opacity too far. So that's really no good. I'll crank my opacity back up. Instead I think what I'll do is I'll apply a blending mode. Remember our blending modes. So I'll drop down my blending modes and this is where we get to start experimenting and playing and this is where the real sort of the fun of Photoshop comes in and I go alright, what's going to look good? I have a sense, I have a feeling that overlay is going to give us a decent result. I choose Overlay, my opacity is at a hundred percent and look at my statue. It looks awesome. I'll just zoom in a little bit. Look at that. It looks almost like there's sort of moss growing on it and it really kind of decrepit and decaying; pretty cool. Alright, so you could of course grab your opacity and drop it down just a little bit if you want to reduce that effect. Again, this is where the, the real fun of Photoshop comes in. It's the experimenting and the playing and the fiddling around. Maybe I could try a different blending mode, perhaps Hard Light or maybe Difference is going to give me something pretty crazy, something like that or, you know, perhaps maybe up into darker color. You can really have fun with this and play around until you get something that really looks cool. But you know, I'm really quite partial to my Overlay and perhaps I'll drop my opacity down just a little bit, maybe down into the seventies somewhere in here. I think that looks fantastic. So there you go. That's sort of a practical example of where you might use clipping groups and again, it's always fun to throw in other options there. I could use my Free Transform if I wanted to transform the texture, move them around. I've get my blending modes and I've got my opacity as well and you know, if I really wanted to, I could throw in some layer styles and some other effects as well.