Lessons

Lesson Info

Sharpening, Album, and Action Building

there's all sorts of ways to handle online ordering. There are tons of companies out there that do this. And my thing is, I kind of talked about that earlier. My thing is, I want to sell this book of proofs, so I want them to take this book. Approves home. If I'm online doing online ordering, I feel like I get lower sales. Okay, so if at all possible, I try to avoid online ordering, Okay, I do see it coming, though, where it's going to have its place in the future. So I'm experimenting with a few things that may happen down the road but still ultimately face to face. It's the best, you know. It really is the best way I do have that option, and I usually make it available. If they requested. I do not promote it. I don't know if that's the answer people were looking for, but that's my way, Okay, we talked about proofs. I also talked about sharpening I Onley sharpening. That I do again, is what defaults inside of bridge that I have priests part of my preset and beyond that, there are some...

times I do believe it or not, missed the focus and in which case, I then have a sharpening action. Okay? And there's one little trick I want to show you that is in conjunction with sharpening that I do find myself using a lot that I think you will find beneficial. So let's say I may use this picture to show you Let's say I'm going to draw a line. It's so easy to demonstrate this with Ah, big black line over the image. So here I go. I'm a take and draw a big black line over the image and I go, Oh, don't going at that Black line is too black. I wish I could have drawn that black line a little less black. Okay, you can, um command shift. F brings up fade. You can absolutely fade anything In this case, we're going to fade that black line. The trick to fade is you run, fade After the thing that you wish you hadn't done, you could only fade The very last thing You did so watch when I could open up fade I reduce this and watch what happens to my black line. Did you catch that? My black line gets lighter the black line still there, But I'm fading it down. So you see that? So this is full black line. This is no black line. This is 50% 55% black line. This is Ah, 94% black line. That makes sense. OK, so how What? I don't get it, Kirk. What does that have to do with sharpening? Well, I have a sharpening action that I have already set up to. Where I hit command F nine and boom. I just ran sharp it. Okay? It runs, in my opinion, a little too much before after say, it's too much. Do you find it too heavy? It's really weird before after. And I haven't designed that way on purpose because every time I run the sharpening action, I then faded. Of course, it won't do that because I've fiddled with it. Harm to go, man. If nine then f faded. Now watch. I can take all of the sharpening away. Arkan, just have a little bit of the sharpening, or it can have a medium amount of the sharpening are gonna have 77% or 86% or what? Whatever percent of sharpening I want. That's how I adjust it. So I go to four on purpose and then I always back off a little bit. So that gives you two little speed tricks as port of your world that help at all. It's for his sharpening. It kind of was like four tricks and one, but okay, don't say I'm gonna scratch that off while I'm here already did. Oh, I'm feeling a question. I'm just feeling a sound effect for scratching. Okay, So high. Believe me, I got tons more to go. However, we're gonna say liquefied to the next segment and the high key someone asked about high keep let me show you with high key. Here's how it happens now. Of course, this is not a nice, seamless piece of white paper. Instead, it's a brick wall. But to do high key, there's all sorts of different things that can happen. But the way I typically start first after I try to photograph it as clean as possible, that's feel like I have to say that try to get it as clean as possible. Me and Pilo talked about that yesterday. Do you think if you would be used umbrellas as opposed to soft boxes. It would have been better. Yeah, I'm like, Yeah, Maybe so. Okay. We could have had much wider blowing of light, but my my concern was that I didn't want it to touch the subject. So if you have a big enough studio that you can get that subject way off the background and use umbrellas back there, Boom, you'll probably get an even better high key than I get. So But with what I had to work with, the first thing I'm gonna do to clean this image up as I go over to my Dodge tool at 100% in mid tone mode, protected tones unchecked. Get me a brush this big, okay? And I'm just gonna run, uh, ball around in here and just kind of take the whole thing lighter. Okay, So now right up against her. If I really want to take this thing white, White, white, white white. Bye bye. Bye bye. You got to be careful. But you can dodge in highlight mode and I'll show you why. If Onley thing is going to dodge now is the whites. It's looking for whites and highlight and dodging them. So I mean, I can die that thing out to 55. 55 to to 55 to 55. I mean, pure is the white the white is gonna be Now the problem with doing it this way, especially in this girl's in this girl. It's easy because of the fact that the clothing she has on is contrast enough with the background. Okay. And I could just take this literally, all the way around. It's kind of tedious and time consuming, but if you make a mistake like you rub too close to the leg, you get some of that. You see our imagine if she has white on like, these shoes are pretty white. See, when I get close, I start rubbing into that and oh, I just messed it all up, didn't. So that's usually that I'm all about the key when I'm photographing. So they have white clothing on a white cheerleader outfit. I'm gonna put him on a white background. So this little trick with the of dodging with in the highlight mode when they have a white cheerlead out all outfit on it just doesn't work, you see, so Yeah, that's a cool little trick that I just showed you, but it doesn't always work, but in essence, look how clean I had started to make the white up in here. In this particular situation, I could then make my brush bigger. And then I could be a little bit more sloppy out here. Ah, sloppy out here. And so you see that I could literally just get rid off every piece of brick there is. And get this to pure, pure, pure white pretty quick. So if she does have on that white cheerleader outfit, then what I have to do is I have to get real close. And I have to use a little brush. And you get real close like this and you get right up onto it. Then you make you brush a little bit bigger, and then you get a little bit more out. You make you brush a little bit bigger and you get a little bit more. You'll look You're watching my clock. I hate it. The clock is winning right now, you see? So these are images where the clock typically wins, and it happens. So the clock's going to get a Adeboye. And I was gonna be, you know, Kurt 41 So, anyway, that that does that help. Okay, it is a bit of a speed trick. It might be faster than what you're doing now, but it's still kind of time consuming. That was the point of it all. Save. I did want to show you this on this image. Next. Another little trick. So to slim her down a bit, double click the background. Turned it into a layer control T. And now you can get stupid. Don't get stupid, but just take her down a little bit, okay? And then apply. Go over to my full frame. One d x That's like a reverse grow. I showed you how to grow. That was a reverse Grow on and then flatten so down Does she watch This always cracked me up, does she? Look, We're right there, Teoh. No, she doesn't. Does she? You thinking Wait right about now. Your brain's going. Wait. Did he do anything? I thought I saw him do something. You watch, and then you. This happens a lot when I do this. Now suddenly watch how weird she gets. This is how she waas This is how she is all a day I met a tall are stretched drought on leeway You can kind of begin to tell I did something Is things that around See that eyeball no longer perfectly round watch? See, it's ob long se kind of seeing that I know it's very subtle and that's the point before, after now, some people might not like that. I'm okay with that, but she is going to love it, okay? And so that is a little slimming technique that you can You welcome, Teoh. You know, use that at home and take credit for it. I'm OK with that. Another thing while you're at it is someone on the Internet sent me a message yesterday as a cart. I was reading some of the stuff. It says something about used the perfect soft action. This is a very popular action on the pro form that I wrote several years ago. And I do this almost in fact, I do. I do this to every image. This is I do all this stuff that I want to get done. I'm fixing the eyes, you know, I'm going hopes I'm going in here, and I'm fixing the eyes. You know, I'm like a show Joe earlier, and I'm taken out this stuff, and I'm adding the little swoosh e thing to the eyes and all the stuff that I told you about. I do all that fancy stuff, Then I run the perfect off, so I'm gonna run the perfect off action for you. All right, Now, just to show you the entire sequence of steps when I run it, I have it pre programmed to run via my wacom tablet because my hand is always on the walking tablet and you're going to show you how stupid I am about speed is for me to lift my hand off the walk, um, tablet and to reach over and press F seven is entirely too long. Okay, I only want to reach from here to here, and I think the camera guy could catch that. I I only want to go while I'm retouching here over to here to start that action. So that's how stupid I am about speed. So when it runs, the first thing it does is it runs port. This portraiture action again, and the portraiture plug in pops open, and it pre selects a certain amount of area. And it stops at this point from a two to put Kirk input in my input. If you If you have portraiture and it does not look like this. If it looks like this, it's because you have the shadow mask set to white. Or if your portraiture looks like this, you have your shadow mask set to none. I have my shadow mask set to black, which means everywhere that you see black like in her eyes, a little bit in her hair on her dress is where it is not happening everywhere that you see skin is where it is happening. So then I take my little eyedropper and I click underneath the eye and I make sure it's happening on that skin, and I can roll it around like this in different areas and make sure see if I click in this area. It's happening less to the skin here. Or if I click here, it's happening mawr to the skin. I wanted to happen to the skin, so I'm looking for the most skin and then I click OK and it runs, and then it stops again and it opens up fade and allows me to add more soft or take away soft. I go to 40% the most, but in this case I'm a bump it up to in the 80% range to put even more softness on run. And now what it did is it ran an action called Spot orange, which is one of the actions that is in the action pack that you if you buy the course, you can. You get that action packed that spot orange ran, and it added a little bit of warmth. In fact, watch. This is the full spot orange. This is no spot orange, so you can decide how much warmth you want. Okay, Usually I'm around 20%. In this case, I'll pop it up just a little bit. Run it, then runs a action that I created a while back. Call snap. The purpose being to add snap so I can have lots of snap. I can have a new snap, okay, but in most cases it's around 20%. Then it opens up levels. Now this gives me an opportunity to talk about levels because it's one of those things that I think can really instantly Just this one trick. If you've come to this point and you're just logging in, Great, you are about to get a really cool trick that will instantly make your image is better. Hold down the old key before you do anything and touch the left side slider. When you do, the whole image goes white. When you start seeing the eyes right there, see the eyes. That means that you are starting to effect the eyes and we do not want to affect the eyes. We don't want to do anything to this images for trashing pixels that will mess up the face. So we back off that we just barely starting a mess with the eyes. Then we go to the right side slider while holding down the old key, and we slide to we see red in the skin. See? Right there we started see red in the skin. That means we're starting to affect the skin. We do not want to effect the skin because we don't want to trash pixels in the skin. So we stop right before we get there may be just a hair amount of red. Okay, That is a perfect levels adjustment. You're not trashing anything in the face or anything like that. Watch before. After before After. Come on after before. After it adds just a little bit of a little bit of power, A little bit of snap. And that's also kind of in conjunction with her. How do you make the images so saturated? This is one of those steps. Click OK, and action is not finished yet. It may think it just finished, but it did not. It made a snapshot in my history palette. Right before I ran the very last thing which was levels off the way it looked before Iran levels. So that, in case I did too much say to the hair, it put me on my history, my history brush so that I'm now painting before Iran levels so I can rub right here because this is too white right here down her arm. It was too white, and I can put it back, but I like what he did to the skin. Don't. Okay, so watch completely. Before that was that was before. This is completely afterward. You see a little bit of warmth is a limit of softness. A little bit of Schnapps, Little bit all warm. Paul. I got stuff. And okay. And And the stretch fix. Okay, so that and then to make it white, white, white, white, white, white. Have you seen some of my images? Open up, curves, commander. Control em, Open up curves and then you push it up, push it up, push, push bars, bars and then you lose the nose and then come back. Come back right there. Still got the nose on. And that makes it that white, white, white, white, white effect Watch before, after before. After school. Yes, ma'am. You know you're running that the action that you just ran. You need the imagen ICS, right? You gotta have portraiture from image, not image nomics yet I four is no mix right, But for the portraiture that you have the first run, you don't need it for that. Yes, you need you need for both. You would have to go by that. Yes, for my workflow system. The image, not economics. Portraiture is the only thing extra besides photo shop that you have. Okay, that's the only thing extra. There is no other purchasing and knowledge stuff. It's I tried to make it as clean and as simple as possible, and but there was no way around portraiture. Okay, every use in any process or you find yourself finding anyway to use the guardian bluer toe. Do the software in this king or no, you always use portraiture. I always use portraiture. However, there was a time when I did that Gaussian Blur trick. And in that action pack that is part of the download for buying the course. It has that action, and I called it the move. It was what I named it and where it does that blurb, Gaussian blur trick and the reason. The reason it's called the move, if you must know, is because I was watching a episode of Seinfeld and they made a comment about the move. Oh, that's the move. That's my move. And it was already gone. And I'm like the move. I'm like, That's what I'm doing right here. This is my move. And so I just called it the move. And so ever since then, you know, people get a big kick out of the fact that I had an action called the move. So that's the whole story. But it uses that Gaussian blur check technique prior to the existence of portraiture that does an OK job. Okay, it's not as good as portraiture. And if it was as good as portraiture, I wouldn't even be telling you about portraiture. I'm serious because you know why make you go buy something else? You know, that's what I'm not try. I wanted it to be that it's simple as possible, but it just works. I just good portraiture a couple months ago and you're going I don't know if you're going today over that, like a showing, at least some sad because I know that people sometimes they overdo that I did. I just showed you that you can faded back if you if they overdo it after you run it. But the important her, like it comes pre setting something specific. Do you tweak somehow that you like, like more this way here. I just showed you what I do. All I do is click the dot click my eye dropper underneath the eye. Whatever presenting that he had there. You okay with that? That's all I ever do. Okay, Just saw me do it. Okay, so that Waas high key, I would get a scratch off. Okay. I just want to give a shout out to Nancy, who says OMG adjusted the level thing on my favorite picture of my daughter. Amazing. I know. Nancy. Nancy, Thank Nancy, 23. Thank Nancy for bringing that up because I meant to say that I would like for you to go do it. Now go find an image that you're proud of. No way it's gonna make this image better. Do it and you're gonna get after you pick. You draw your jaw and your tongue off of your keyboard and put it back in your mouth and go. Wow, You're gonna feel just like Nancy. Absolutely. Because I like That's how I felt first time I saw it. Yes, indeed. Okay, I will say that. When? Why not? OK, so that was a bunch of things I wanted to make sure I want to make sure I'm covering all the things we wanted to talk about today. I talked about how I use actions and how I used photo shop and all that good stuff. The one thing we have not done just yet is build an action before we build it. Though I wanted to show you this technique to make a Nalbandian like this. This is my out. This is an album, and in this album you know you it does things like this. Customers just love this. They love, love, love, love, love this kind of an album. But of course it looks. If it looks super complicated, DeLay an album like this out. It can be, but I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. Let's go over. First of all, we need to make an album page, so we're gonna go file new and let's say we're not gonna make this out. I don't know. We're gonna make a 10 but 20 album are 10 10 10 inch by 10 inch to side. It's what it's going to 10 inch by 20 inch. A lot of people use that size album, So just for the sake of conversation with inches haIf 10 inches. 250 rgb white. Okay, there it ISS we only thing we're going to do is going to drop this right there attending, so we know it's left and right, And we're gonna go file save as, and we're gonna drop that into the fixed right here. We're gonna call it album safe, Okay, lose. And we're only gonna make one page. But you'll see what I mean when I say you can make multiple pages. All right, So here's our album page and lay out our album. Let's say if we we want to have this group photo on this page and we won't have these two pictures of her and all three pictures So we're gonna have this group photo and then these three pictures of her on this page. Okay? Now, the next page was going to start right here. So we've got these. Four page four images are going to go inside this page. This page is gonna have this image, this image, this image. Okay, And then we continue all the way through the entire set of customer stuff. We lay it out like that and we're looking album than the images that go isn't go in an album page than the images that go in and so on, so forth. Then you highlight that album page along with those images. And when you get Dr Brown's image processor Pro. It's gonna come with this neat thing called Dr Brown Stack O Matic. It gets loaded on here and you click Dr Brown Stack O Matic and it's going to say Create layers, not auto align. Normal mask. No, just click. OK, Dr Brown takes over, opens it up, drops it in, opens it up, drops it in, opens it up, drops it in, opens it up, drops it in now. You could do that manually if you want, you know, But why do it manually when you got that little thing working for you? So notice my layers palette have all laid out. So I take I'm gonna hide everything but the group photo control T control zero. Shows me the edges. Hold down my shift key. Size that and place it about where I want it. Right there on the crack. Okay, then I'm gonna take this image. Um, ago, Control. T control zero shift move, and we're gonna put this one. How about we put it right there? Let's give a little cock like that right there. Love that. OK, then we're gonna open up this one. Control t control zero. Hold on my shift key. We'll put this one about right there. Yes, OK. And then the last one. Control T control zero. Shift, move. Give it a little tip and we'll put it about right there. Okay, that's pretty close. Good. All right. So there's our basic page layout. Now. We got to kind of make it pretty. We've already preset are our star. Um, styles. Where are they? Hello, Styles. FX. Here we go. So these air styles, these all kinds of styles that you can get him on Internet. There's a bunch of them that come with photo shop. You don't even realize it. You can load him up. You know, you get styles for free all over the planet. But what a style will do is it does whatever you're seeing. So, like, watch when I click this one. Notice it took and turned this whole image into this streaky thing. I don't want that, obviously, but what I would want all the images that have a little bit of a bevel and maybe a little bit of a shadow, like, say, that boot or make it one a heavy one. So I'm getting at So just like that, I have just like that and just that fast created Page one and two save. Then go to the next one. Quick boom, boom. And you just kind of size. I thought Mom tipped up folks I size. Did you do that 10 times? You got yourself an album. Cool. All right, so I wanted to show you that that's how I make these albums. All right. Gonna close that. I promised you we was making an action. So we're gonna take something. We do a lot. Let's say you don't want to throw something at me. Something simple, not complicated. Just for the principle of it all. We're gonna open an image. We're gonna turn it to the right. How's that? Okay. So what if we could go file open? We're gonna already have an image open. We already have the image open. There we go. Let's let's do it like that. We already have the image open. But for whatever reason, we want to turn the image to the right. We could simply go image rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Okay, But how many steps to take yet to go? Image rotate 90 degrees clockwise it was three clicks to get to this point. OK, let's undo that. Go over to our actions palette, and we're going to create a new set. Actions. Think of folders. They're not folders, their sets. There's this cavey workflow set the image problem process of pro set. The 57 proof said on and on and within their or all these are now all the actions within a set. Okay, so we're first going to do is when I create a new set Click this low arrow new set. We're gonna call the set creativelive Do they get mad when you spell it wrong? Okay, I got So now we have a set. Notice I'm a click. The arrow right here. Nothing inside this folder. See it opening and closing. No, nothing in there. So now, inside of the creative live set, we're going to create a new action. The action is gonna be rotate, right. And the set. It's inside of the creative life set. We're going to assign a function key. How about F five right there to this and we click record right now it's recording now everything you do at this point, it's going to record your your sequence of events now. So you gonna go image damage? Rotate 90 degree clockwise. It just recorded that for you. Let's say at this point, that's all you wanted to do. Go back to your action. Noticed a little red dot That's like the record button on your VCR. Now you hit. Stop. Let me share with you how important Stop is. Imagine you don't hit. Stop in the day goes and you work all the files and you re touch everything and get here the next morning. And the next morning you realize, Oh, my goodness, I've been recording everything I've done and everything you've done is now recorded. You don't get to use that action for a whole year. But next year all you have to do, is it play? And every day of your whole day of work is I'm kidding. That doesn't work like that would be wonderful if we would know if, but it will jacket will record everything you do. And it's just stuff you ain't never gonna want. So don't forget about Stop. Okay, so we hit. Stop, But notice here. We're going to break the action apart here It is There is the folder Creative Live folder. Here's Yes. And then here is the action right here. It's called Rotate. Right. Okay. And then here is the first step within the action, which is rotate first document and notice. It's been assigned in F key right here at five. So take our hello action image. In fact, let's just get rid of this at this image. No, don't say we're gonna open up this image now, and we simply press f five and it rotated it. Right. One step, not three steps. You follow the concept. Okay? I'm undo that. But I'm gonna show you a few more things inside the actions palette. Right. These check boxes sees check marks. It says this will toggle the state of all commands in this action. It is not. It is not undoable, so I click. Ok, I unchecked everything in that folder. So if you accidentally come along here and tick tick one of these checked boxes, you are completely turning off every action in your entire folder. It could be devastating. Yes. Okay. Noticed. I have this one, which is red. That means some of the steps in this particular action have been turned off. So that's just a little warning for me that not everything is working in this set. Okay, I could turn them all back on again, but I can't just click control Z to undo what I just did. That's what That warning Waas. If I just wanted to turn off one aspect of it, I can just click one check box. If I wanted to say, Hey, Kirk, Are you sure? Are you sure you want to do what you just told me to dio? You can click this little box and this little grey thing comes up. Watch what happens now? When I pressed F five, it says rotate canvas 90 degrees. I could say no 45 I could like Okay, And now it just goes 45. You see, that's how that could become in handy if you want to stop and put in your own command, Follow so far. So those are some of the different elements within an action to help you to make that action work. So now that you understand, so daunting is this is this palette for people that they just never open it. They buy actions. They stick them in here, and then they They're scared to touch anything. Because I just don't want to mess up my actions. Now. You know what all the different elements are, okay? And how to actually physically, right? One. The last thing is, what if we wanted to share this creative live action with somebody? Okay, Well, if I wrote another action, it would be and put it inside the creative life older. How could have a collection of actions within that folder, But to save on action, you can't just save an action. You have to save the entire set of actions. So you highlight creative life, click the little down arrow and you go save action. And then what you do is it's called the creative live action, and we're gonna go ahead and just put that inside the creativelive dropbox right now so that they can add it to right there where they bonus actions there. They can add this save to the action pack that is available for download. How's that? That's pretty great deal. That's some pretty awesome workflow. Yeah, and I like the fact that you taught people how to build the action so they won't freak out If they do go away. I saw someone in the chat room. Their computer just deleted all of their actually today. So curry, But you will be able to rebuild them at least. Kirk. And you just reconfirm that you use H H lab for all your printing for printing all your albums. Is that right? There was some confusion there. They just find a clear goal. Okay. And then one other person was asking tool and tweed photo wondering about using layers in photo shop while you're actually making adjustments to the image. How do you feel about layers? I don't have a problem with layers, but every time you make a new layer, you are, in fact, taking away from the resource is that photo shop uses. And I'm okay with that. But I know exactly what I'm doing. I know exactly where I'm going. If I need to undo something, I undo it via the history palette. So I don't use layers. I should say I don't use layers. I rarely use layers. Okay, so But if I understand why people do layers, a lot of photo shop instructors teach you want to do layers because you might want to undo something. My thought processes Learn to do it, do it the right way and you never have to undo anything. So don't use a layer. Don't eat up Photoshopped Resource is