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Retouching Essentials In Adobe Camera Raw

and now we're going to slide into talking about retouching essentials. And I mentioned essentials because we'll have a different session that is on advanced retouching, but we need to start somewhere. So let's start with the essentials. Let's head over to photo show and also to bridge, and the first thing I'm gonna talk about is the limited retouching we have available in Adobe Camera Raw. One of the things that camera is great for is if you ever have censored dust specks, where if I open an image like here, I'll double click on a raw file, and I can see this blurry kind of blob up near the top. There usually look like round, just shadowy objects. That's where a speck of dust has fallen onto your camera sensor, and it's usually in the same spot on each image. What what's really nice when using K Murat is, you could open multiple images. If you simply select multiple images and then Jews opening camera, they would usually appears thumbnails down the left side, and then you can choose se...

lect all over on the left side as well to select all of them. And if I retouch out a single sensor dust spot from one of the images. It would automatically apply that same change toe all the other images that are selected and therefore, if that sensor dust back got added when you changed lenses, then you could take all the pictures you took after changing lenses, select them all. Go in there and do one little retouched to get rid of a sensor. Dust back and suddenly you removed it from all of those pictures. Now, I don't have images set up to demo that, but I wanted to mention it because it's one of the big advantages of using, uh, came a raw here. But let's get into the limited retouching that we have here in camera because remember that everything that happens in camera we had a separate session about camera. We described that it saved in what's known as metadata. That means it saved is only text, just like your image includes the shutter speed camera, serial number and camera model. Something was shot with Well, that's also how it stores any changes we make in camera raw, and so it's limited in what it could do simply because that's how things are saved. It's ah, you're limited on what you could save in text. So here, I'm gonna go in camera rod to the top of my screen, where I have all the tools in there. I'm gonna find a paint brush tool that has some blobs around it. That's the spot removal tool. And with that tool active, I can change my brush size over on the right side here and how soft the edges on my brush below that, I can also change those settings using my keyboard. If I use the square looking bracket keys that are found right above the returner inter key on your keyboard, you could make the brush larger or make the brush smaller. And if you hold down the shift key when you do the same thing, you could change how soft the edge of the brushes. Now, when I'm getting rid of sensor dust specks, I usually use a hard edge brush and I get a brush that is just the little list bit larger than the sensor dust back. We needed to be large enough where the edge of the brush will be. Touching the surroundings and not making contact with the sensor dust spot. Then you click your mouse button, and it's going to choose an area from the surroundings to copy from. And then you'll end up seeing a red dash circle for the area retouching and a green dashed one to indicate where it chose to copy from. And so I see one other sensor dust spot right here. I'll move my cursor on top of it. Click, and you can see that it automatically chooses where you'd like to copy from Well on occasion, it will copy from an area that would be inappropriate. And so you congrats that green circle in drag it wherever you like. And so if it happened to copy a little bit of the balloon and therefore you see some detail of the balloon, there, you could manually move it. Or an alternative is if you go on your keyboard to the forward slash key. That's the one that's right next to the shift key, at least on a Mac keyboard, and also has a question mark on it. If you press that it will force it to go to a different location to copy from and you compress that as many times as you want. So if it messes up in copies from some detail, that's inappropriate. Just press that key enough times that it chooses from inappropriate area. When I'm getting rid of things like sensor dust spots on the right side of my screen, there's a choice where I can choose between cloning and healing, and you should know that I usually use the setting called Hell. We'll talk a lot about the difference between these two when we get into Photoshopped, But in general, cloning means just make a blatant copy from one area. Implement somewhere else without doing any extra work to make it. Make sure that it matches that area. Healing, on the other hand, will copy from another area. But when it applies it, it makes sure that it matches both the brightness and the color of whatever is right around the edge of where you applied it. And therefore it's only healing that's going to make sure it matches both the brightness and color of the surroundings. If I ever set this to clone, that's when I need to be careful with the feathering setting that's here, because if something doesn't precisely match the brightness or color of where I put it. I'm going to need it to blend them with the surroundings. Otherwise, we'll see an exact circle of where have applied it. But as long as I leave it set to hell, I can work with a hard edge brush. Then, if I go below these sliders, you're gonna find a choice called visualized Spots in turning that on will change the appearance of your picture to make it so it'll be easier to find any sensor dust spots, but you will need to adjust a slider that's found here to get it so you can see them most the time. I have to have it near the high side, and now I start to see little circles appearing in my image that don't look natural to the image. So we'll go to this one and just click another. That's where we had other sensor dust spots that is, hadn't noticed yet. He and actually a few other hints of them here. Once I've gotten all of those done, I might adjust the Visualize spot slider a little bit, just to see if any other show up with a slightly lower setting and there might be one hidden night there, and then I can turn off its check box and you see these overlays. If you want to see a clean version of your image without those little circles on your image, then there's a check box near the bottom called show overlay. And if I turn that off, you'll see it without those circles. If you turn it back on, then you'll see them, and if you need to adjust any of them, you can click on it. And on Lee, after clicking on it, will you see its source? And you could either hit that Ford slash key to force it to pick a different area to coffee from or you can manually drag to, ah, appropriate location. So that's what I'm gonna do for sensor dust specks. Now let's click done and move onto a different image where we don't just have dust spots. Here's another raw file. If I double click on it in this case, we have a church in Iceland. I'm gonna go to the same retouching two off the top of my screen and I'll turn on first visualize spots, and I can see some smaller spots and this one. So I get a smaller brush, but one at least the tiniest bit larger than the spots, because it needs to be touching the surroundings. Whatever is on the outer edge of that circle is what it's gonna try to match when it comes to color and, um, brightness. So first I'll get rid of those sensor dust spots going for the small ones to begin with. And then I'll change my brush size if I need to tackle some larger ones. And I did all of those with setting called healing. Then I'll turn off the visualize spots check box and I'll zoom up on my picture and I notice and you consume up. By the way, in the lower left, there's little plus and minus where you can use standard keyboard shortcuts. Same kind of ones you would use in Photoshopped. But here there's a little electrical box on the side of the building that I'd like to remove and let's see if it could do an OK job. With that, I will get a larger brush, so I'm closer to the size of that. And instead of just clicking and letting go, which you can do is click in the before you leko drag to define an area if you need one larger than your brush size and thats useful if you don't need a big round spot. So then I let go, and it's hard to tell if it did a good job or not because of the, uh, shapes that are drawn. So I'll turn off show overlay in the lower right, and I can see it's off a little bit. So here I can see that the line is not continuous. I'll hit the Ford Slash key to force it to pick for a different spot. Do that multiple times and I noticed, is just doing a terrible job, almost always here. And so that's when I would come over here in manually move this so I'll turn on show overlaying so I can see this little better. And then you just start repositioning this and tell the vertical line that's their looks more continuous. Then turn off show overlay, and I think that's looking a little bit better. Then on occasion, you'll need to switch to the choice called Clone. The Maine Time you'll need to do that is when something is bumping into the edge of another object and you don't want whatever change it is you're putting in to match the color of that object. For instance, if I want to get rid of this small little area, this thing, if I wanted to stop getting rid of it right where this white trim ends, well, then I would be working right up to the edge of this bluer area and unfortunately, would start to try to blend in with the blue. So on occasion, you'll need to set this to clone when you don't need it to match. But in this case, I probably can still get rid of that. If I just come in here and just stop right on the edge, it doesn't look quite right. So hit the slash key again and again, see if it gets an okay Line up right there is not too bad

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