Lessons

Lesson Info

Retouching

Let's talk a bit about retouching. I'll start off with some simple retouching and then make things just a little bit more complex, more difficult. This image was shot in Death Valley, and if you ever change your lens when you're in Death Valley in, it's windy, not suggested. Can you see all the little black ish specks in the sky? That's all dust from the sand dunes that air here that got into by camera. This is before cameras had the feature. Where can shake the sensor to do noise or not? Roy's dust reduction? So let's see about how can we get rid of things like, Can't like these little specks? We can either do it in camera or do it here. I want to concentrate on Photoshopped because we're not going to just use this for these specs on the left side of my screen and our tools. This is the spot healing brush. This spot healing brush just offers you a brush that you can change the size of the same way you change the size of any brush. In this case, I'm using the square bracket keys on my ...

keyboard. I get a brush that It's just a little bit larger than the thing I would like to get rid of, and I click on it and it looks at the surrounding image and figures out something that it thinks would be inappropriate area to copy from. And it puts it in there to cover up that problem. And so I can come over here right now and click on all sorts of these little specks and get rid of them. Hopefully, you don't have any images with the number of specks that, as in this one, because this is actually ridiculous. Can't think of too many of my images that have this man expects only one other time. And that's when I went to Russia and I couldn't bring any camera cleaning supplies, and I ended up with some terrible looking images. But nowadays, modern cameras, the every time you change your lens, it shakes the sensor to kind of discard any dust that's on it, and it makes it so you don't have anywhere near these problems, but that is the spot healing brush. The problem with the way I've used the spot healing brush thus far is that I'm working directly on the image itself, the original. And if I later on realized that one of those specs was really a person standing in the distance. And if I do this for a client in the clients is what happened? My cousin that was standing out there, you realize you re touched him out. If I apply it directly on this original, then I can easily undo it, especially if I've already saved and closed the image. So I'm gonna go to the file menu and choose Revert. Revert means bring me back to what The saved version of this picture looks like. I've never saved the changes that I've made, so that should bring you back to the original. So my specs will be back. If I want to do this in a nondestructive way in a way that's easily undoable, Then here's how I go about it. I go to the bottom of my layers panel. I click on the new layer icon so that now we have a new empty layer. Doesn't contain anything yet, but there it is. I might double click on it to change its name, and I'll call it retouch retouching. So I remember why it's there. Then I used the exact same tool I was just using. But here's the problem with default settings. There's a check box of the top. It's turned off called sample all layers, and when that's turned off, then this particular tool is Onley aware of one layer, the layer you're working on and it's absolutely on want aware. It's blind to all the other layers. It has no idea they even exist. And so if you're working on the layer that's empty, this tool won't do anything right now. It's only going to use the contents of this layer to work. If you turn on that check boxes called Sample all layers. Now it's aware of all the other layers, and it can copy from and use the information that's there. But whenever it makes a change, the change will be deposited on Lee on the layer That's active so I can come in here now and retouch out all these little specks. And by the way, you don't have to just click and let go. You can click and drag if you need Teoh, go over something that is not easily fitting within a circle, and I can retouch out all these. If you look in my layers panel, you'll see I'm working on an empty layer. That's where all this information is being deposited. And when I'm done, which I'm not gonna finish, the whole thing is there's way too many specks in it. I could turn off the eyeball in this layer to hide the retouching that I've done, and I'd see the original attorney back on, and I can see the end result of what I've done. Or I could turn off the layer that's at the bottom and see Onley where the retouching is, so I can see exactly where I've done it and then just turn on the layer that's underneath so I can see the to put together. So that was creating a brand new empty layer first and with the spot healing brush, a dis needed to turn on a check box that's called sample all layers. So any time I have simple stuff to get rid of, create a brand new empty layer. I just glanced to make sure sample all layers has turned on that setting a sticky meaning that when you turn on, you only do it once it'll remember that you had it turned on, and then I could paint over little things that I don't like in my photos in an attempt to get rid of them. Maybe I don't like the rust that's kind of dripping down here. You got to be careful right where it hits here. That's where it might mess up. But paint over the whole thing. It temporarily puts black over it just so you can see where you've painted, and then it tries to fix it. And if it messes up just trying area again two or three times and see, it'll come up with a slightly different result each time. And I can get rid off little things that I don't like. The time that this tool is usually gonna mess up is when you're trying to get rid of something that bumps into the edge of your document. It doesn't always do a good job when that's the case. Let's see what happens if I try to get rid of this darker area in the corner by painting over the whole thing. It did OK, but to me this still looks a little bit dark on the edge, choose, undo. And that's because when you use this spot healing brush, it always tries to blend them with its surroundings. And when you get to the edge of the document, there's nothing beyond it for to blend into. So it remembers what used to be on the edge. We used to be on the edges darker than the rest of this image, and so it's kind to try to blend them with that. That dark stuff I could cheat. I don't usually cheat like this, but I could just show you that it's blending in with what's on the edge. Here. I'll use my paint brush tool and with the paint brush tool. One thing I haven't had a chance to mention is if you want to grab a color out of your picture to paint with, you can hold on the option key and click that grabs a picture right out. Ah, color right out of your picture. I'm just gonna paint stuff on the edge, so now it's gonna blend them with that color, and I'll go back to my spot healing brush, and now it will give me a different result. Want to get out there when that might look more appropriate, because what it sees on the edge of the picture is no longer the old stuff and trying to get rid of. It's something closer in tone to what I wanted to have in there. But let me show you a different tool to use a tool that's more effective when working on the edge of your photo. So here I want to get rid of the leaf, the stuff on the left side, the green. If I try to use the spot healing brush, which is a tool used thus far, I'll paint over this and just be careful not to hit that monkey's head. And when I let go, remember, it blends in with what used to be on the edge of the document, so the end result not so good. Choose. Undo. What I could do is an alternative is used my lasso tool and just select the area that needs to be retouched out, trying to go too far beyond only right there. I need to be overly careful, cause I don't want to retouch out any part of that monkey. And then, instead of using my spot healing brush use. This is an alternative. Any time you need to work right up against the edge of your document, it's edit. Phil Content aware. Weird edit, fill, content aware. But when you use that, it will always also retouched things out. It works in general, just like the other tool, although it works much better when on the edge of the document, you see how it's able to get rid of that. So I might in this image switch between a couple tools, I'd use the spot healing brush for things that don't bump into the edge of the document like these little holes that I don't like here. I want to get rid of him. I just click on. Maybe there's little, Ah, little bright things over here that I don't really like. It is paint on him, and it gets rid of them for me, figuring it out on its own. And it's on Lee, where it bumps into the edge of my document that I switched to content aware fill. We'll do it on one other image. I took this image knowing that that thing was in the upper right corner of my document. In knowing that as long as I kept it relatively clean, where didn't bump into other objects that I could probably retouch it out. First, let's try our spot healing brush. And just so you remember why we can't use it so much when it bumps into the edge of our document, it's only right there. I have to be careful, so I don't retouch out the tip of that temple part. But I don't think it's gonna look very good. And it's all because it's trying to blend in with its surroundings on the on the edge of the document. There's nothing beyond the edge for to blend into. So it remembers what used to be there, and it's blending them with these colors that used to be there. So instead of grand mind lasso tool Oops, I clicked on the title bar at the top of my document. Like just outside of the document, you drag to the top edge of the screen to get back in. Gonna be inside my document. It's only right here that I need to be careful so I don't cut off the top of that piece of the temple. Something like that go to the, uh, edit menus Choose Phil content aware much better job. Sometimes you have to touch it up, like right here. I can see the tiniest bit of ah difference a little darker over there. I did it again. Grab the edge of my picture. You go. Just selected a second time, Phil content aware. And it'll smooth it out again. And that I think, if you ever get it, where you simply cannot get something to look smooth in this case, I'll use my spot healing brush. Try it out. But if, regardless of what I do, I cannot get it to be smooth. This is one time when working on what's known as a 16 bit image would help you when you're in the camera. Raw dialog box If you happen to have a raw file at the very bottom of your screen, is a line of text that you can click on. If you do, you can tell it to open the images 16 bits. Also, when we created a brand new document, I don't know if you remember or not, but it was this choice right here. This means have more brightness levels in your picture than you usually need. It can sometimes help you get a smoother looking and results. I know that you'll be able to doom or if you work with raw files instead of J Peg files or TIFF files. If you're a graphic designer, you might not have access to raw files because whoever gives your photos, it might be a stock photo company. They don't usually give you raw files to give you tips or J pains. If you have a photographer, though, and you can talk them into giving you their raw files. You can get more out of those pictures when it comes to adjustments. But for photographers, giving you the other raw files is similar to giving you their their negatives like their original negatives. It's all the information the camera originally captured, and a lot of photographers don't feel comfortable giving them to clients. Uh, but if you could get a hold of original raw files, you can do a lot more when it comes to adjustments. I'm gonna open a raw file here, and I'm just gonna make sure I have default settings and I can show you how much I can get out of it. The advantages of using raw files are that you can get mawr shadow detail out of your picture. You can get MAWR highlight detail out of your picture by adjusting these sliders, called highlights and Shadows. You can brighten your image to UM or extreme level without it falling apart, where it starts looking bad. You can also perform or extreme color correction with that little eyedropper tool. Or there's two sliders here, temperature and tint. They also can help with color correction. If you have an image that's way off when it comes to to the color with the raw file, you will be able to do more with it before it starts falling apart of looking bad. So if it's possible to get a hold of raw files conveniently, without being too much of a pain to whoever it is that are giving you the images, it's convenient because if the image is really need adjustment, you can do more. We have general questions about adjustments, a question from ah, from bull feathers when adjusting white balance in a CR. Would you ever choose the blown out highlights in the upper right hand corner when it comes to adjusting white balance, which is the little eyedropper that's in camera on the upper left. There is one area that you won't be able to to work with, and that is that something is blown out, meaning there's no detail. So if there's something like a light bulb in your picture and it's been rendered a solid white, there's no information in there. There's no color for it to pick up, because what happens is when you click on an area that should be a shade of gray. It's looking at what color is contaminating that area. If it's supposed to be a shade of gray looks is they're blue in their yellow in there, whatever measures, how strong it is, and then it makes your image less of that color, less blue or yellow or whatever color showing up in their intel. That area is truly rendered as neutral, meaning gray well. If you click on an area that's blown out, it has no detail whatsoever. It's solid white. There's nothing in there to refer to measure, and so if you attempt to do that, you will find that it actually beeps at you and will say sorry can't do that. We need an area that is darker than that. So let me see if I can find an image that might be that way. I'm assuming this sky in this image would be an example. If I go to Kameron, I used the eyedropper and I try to click on the sky where I think it might be blown out to solid white. Oh, it's actually working. But if I confined an area that's bright enough, Um, I think on one of these I had something with a light bulb. Just don't remember which one. It waas. Maybe in this one in the background, you see the areas through these holes. They look solid white by Use it on a solid white area, it will say, heads too bright. I can't do it in what that means is there's absolutely no information, no data in there for it to analyze. And so it can't work. You do need to pick an area just the tiniest bit darker than solid white. Other questions? Yes, sir. When do you choose to do your color correction in a CR, as opposed to in photo shop? If it's a raw file, I always do it in camera period. It will do a higher quality and result if it's a normal image. It depends on when I notice it. If I notice it before I open picture. If I glanced at the picture, Enbridge, let's say and I got this looks bad because the color is off. I'll also do it on camera. But if I've already opened the image fully and in the photo shop and I'm already starting to play with all the features and photo shop, then I might choose instead to go with something like that. Automatic adjustment and levels just goes convenient to get Teoh in that type of thing, but usually camera would be a preference. It could do a better job. Great. So Mr Photo has been begging Mr. Photo, Mr Voto has been begging, wanting to know how can you make just one color pop out friends like selective colors? That's something you can show. I wouldn't actually use something like selective color that adjustment. To do that, I would use hue and saturation, but I might have to use it on a level that is more advanced than what we've done. Um, for instance, in this image, the yellow in this flower is so similar to the yellow, the dark green in the background, dark green is really darkish, yellowish green, and it might be hard to separate. The two don't know if we'll have enough time to get into the detail they truly want, but I'll give them a hint. I would create a hue and saturation adjustment layer. Then I would move my mouse onto the image, assuming that the hand icon is pushed in in click on the color I was thinking of. So here I'm clicking on the yellows. When I do that, watch what happens down here and click on the yellows of this. Do you see these little bars? That's what actually isolates. The color I clicked on is these bars control that, but do you see how wide those bars our expanded? It's going to Onley not only affect the yellows, it's also going to get into the greens as well. There's dark areas, and lighter is what's the difference with light Area is where it's going to get the full force of the adjustment. The dark area is where it's gonna fade out to affect the image less and less and less, and I can actually grab these and move them. They don't usually show up by default. You have to grab that little hand tool and click on your picture. That's when those show up. So I could come in here now and say, I don't wanna work on the greens and I can pull this over until I don't think greens are included. I might leave a little bit of a gap here, meaning give me a soft transition into the greens and I might bring this over to say, not the oranges stuff. Onley concentrated my yellowish stuff, and if I'm able to adjust those enough to precisely target what's in my picture, then I could come over here in a just you see the color of the flowers changing. I can choose whatever color I want him to be in the backgrounds, not changing, so I could come over here now and say I want to brighten those yellows a bit. I want to make them more colorful, and I want to make them a little bit less green. I'll turn off the eyeball down at the bottom so you can see before and after. Let's zoom up so you can see it a little better. And so turn this off before they kind of blend in with the background a little bit, kind of dull looking compared to after where they seem to jump up a little bit from the background if that seems to be doing it for you. But the key is being able to precisely move these little things. And you can also move them using these little eye droppers. The plus eyedropper would expand them to say also include other colors. I'd click within the picture, right click here, click over there. And if I clicked on something that wasn't already included in here, this would expand. I can use the one with the minus sign to make them skinnier. I can say get rid of the background click here. And if that background color was within this bar, it would skinny him up. So, for instance, if this was way out here like this and I grab the one of the minus sign and clicked out here, you see it, Pull it in to say don't include that color, so you would have to get good at hue and saturation if you want to get good at that kind of stuff. I had an entire I think one day class might have been three days. I don't even remember that was all about mastering color and mastering adjustments. And so if you really want to get into it, look at my back catalogue and you can get a lot more detail on any other questions. Good. All right, now I want to say one more thing in. Then, after we're done with this, one more thing. We could have a little bit of time to talk about troubleshooting and just general questions and in other things, open an image and what I want to do with this image. In fact, I didn't know this image had some stuff done to it already. Let me throw away what's in here. Take me a moment. I'll flatten the image, meaning that there's nothing weird with it. It's as if I just opened it and there was nothing fancy to begin with. I want to give this Ah, more creative look, and one method for doing that is to go to the filter menu and apply filter the problem is when you apply a filter to an image, it's usually applied permanently to layer you're working on. But there's a way to get it to apply in a fashion that is easily undoable, and you can easily change the settings later, it will be applied in a way that's very similar to adding a layer style. Do you member drop shadow stroke those kinds of things where it's just kind of attached to the layer. What you have to do is first go down here and choose convert for smart filters. Some images will already have that, uh, done, but you can find out by looking at the layer. If it's got this little icon in the corner of it, it's already been done in your fine. You can just apply the filter. If that icons not in the corner yet, then you'd want to go to the filter menu and choose convert for smart filters. It's great out. You probably glance over there and find the icons already there. Then you can apply a filter. I'm gonna apply a filter called oil paint. It's pretty cool filter. Actually, Here's oil paint, and I'm gonna just this until I like the look of the yellow areas in the picture, and this is my wife, Karen. I'm not concerned at the way she looks because after that we're going to remove it from her so I can come up here and just finding these sliders and see what I like. The scale will control. Big strokes are in things, but I'm only looking at the background thinking What would make it look nice and painterly? It's experimental, little bit here, a little shine in there. Not too much, though. All right, I'll click. OK, but that's the oil paint filter, and then when you look here, you will find the way it's applied. It says oil pain down here, which is the filter we've applied. If I turn off the eyeball, we'll see what it looks like without the filter being applied. Turn it back on. You see the end result of it. You probably noticed that more in the top of the photograph here. If I turn this off and on, I can also double click on the word oil paint in my layers panel, and it would bring me back to the filter so I could change the studies that I use so I can experiment as much as I want without being concerned with it being permanent. But then you notice here it says Smart filters in Right next to it is this big rectangle that looks awfully like a mask. It is a mask, and the only thing is, it's not active. If you look in the layers panel doesn't this little corner marks tech term in what's active and it's up here on the image. I just need to click down here to make the mask active. And now I can come in. And if I paint with my paintbrush and I paint with black, I'm gonna be removing the filter from the image in bringing back the original image like that. And so it could be really nice. Let's say I want to turn off the look of this filter temporarily so I could turn off the eyeball, either next to the word oil paint or next to the word smart filter. Either one. And maybe I use something like the quick selection tool. Shouldn't that possibly be able to select this object? Karen here, just trying to try not to paint on the background. Otherwise, it'll start selecting that area close. I'll get her fingers later, either a smaller brush and paint on them or some other technique. Anyway, I get that selection. I'm gonna turn the oil paint, filter back on by train on its eyeball in the layers panel, and I'll click on the mask that's attached to it. And I'll simply tell Photo shop a. Fill that mask. It's only gonna fill it where selected right now. Fill it in. What color ends up hiding things in a mask. Black death. So it's gonna hide the filter in those areas. I don't need my selection anymore, so I'll go over here and choose De Select. And I'm not sure why. This is showing up like this on the side. That's odd. Oftentimes, if something like that happens, it hasn't do with your video card acting up. And if you zoom up on your image or do something else, it'll go away. But in this case, I'm not certain why. It's odd to me. Uh, that's unexpected to me. I don't know if I'm gonna have time to troubleshoot it. I could troubleshoot it, but I think the problem is that if I spend the time to troubleshoot, it is gonna take away time from what I wanted to talk about. Ah, One other thing I'm having an issue with is this mask, which is supposed to limit where my filter showing up seems to have completely removed the filter because I don't see it anywhere. So let me just try a few things going to double click on the filter to see if it shows up and it does look OK. See if this update OK, update. So sometimes we were about to Segway into trouble shooting and photo shop just starts acting up, and sometimes it's of no fault of your own that it acts up. And I think that was in my case just now. But other times it is your fault and you gotta be able to look through things. So now her fingers is where it was messed up. I'll just grab my paintbrush tool, make sure I'm painting with black, and I just need to make sure in my layers panel when I look over there, the mask is active, so that's where the paint goes. Come over here, just paint her fingers in so oftentimes they'll end up using filters and Photoshopped to put some sort of creative effect on my image. And then there'll be a part of my image that I want to have either look normal like this, where Karen looks normal or I wanted to only partially affect that area. I can always click on this mask and with this whole thing, I think now come in with my paintbrush. Enough. I paint with white white means bring the effect in. It would bring the effect back. I could always paint with the opacity turn now, if it's 100 100% it means bring back 100% of the effect and you see it all over. But what if I brought it down to 50% now? It means bring back 50% of the effect. When I paint, I'll just paint across your face. You can see a hint of it, but it's not all the way coming back, so I might decide to come in here and make it so where her body is. It's a 50% strength, might not make it stand out all that much, but I can see it on her skin in other areas so you can find tune that keep her face clear. So it's just an idea when it comes to oftentimes applying filters. If you do, it is what's called a smart filter, which you can only do is if you already gone up to the filter menu and chosen convert for smart filters, then it's going to appear in this special way in your layers panel, where it's kind of an accessory attached to the layer containing on this mask will allow you to limit where it shows up wherever you paint with black, it'll completely take it away, and if you lower the opacity in your brush, you don't have to take it all the way away. You can take it part way.