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Post Production: Creating Captivating Images

This is absolutely my very favorite day and I'm going to go through and teach you a little bit about how I do my my artwork on the prince you know, kind of the limits that way do when we get ready to get images ready for a client from there we're going to talk specifically about some marketing concepts and ways that you can become more profitable we're going to actually review some material from our students and see what they're doing is a ce faras the pricing that they're charging for their images and such we're going to talk about album design we're going to go into a wedding photography and talk a bit about you know have the art of communicating with your subject how do you what do you offer a bride our groom? What do you give them when you create your packages or do you do packages things of that nature? And then this afternoon for a short while we'll do a few pictures of a bride and groom to just show you some concepts that you might want to put into a brochure that you create um ...

afterwards we've got so many other things lined up for you I've got these two amazing women coming in that are from a design studio and they're going to give you some very quick tips on things that you could do to soup up your studio or your home so that you can make it more friendly towards clients and I think it's going to be extremely beneficial. So there's a lot of material, we're going to go over today, so I can't wait to show you some of things like, oh my god, I was here at two o'clock this morning, and so I'm gonna be like, a little spinning top all day long today, so okay, so what we're going to dio is that we're going to talk about retouching, we're going to talk about adding textures and layered backgrounds and why you should want to do so. Now let me preface this by saying that you want to use textured and layered backgrounds and things of this nature, like you would salt and pepper don't do every single print that you have and do a layered background and things of that nature, because if you d'oh, it's gonna look awful and and it looks gimmicky, if you do that, so be very, very cautious. Well, when you're doing it, the great thing about adding a texture occasionally to a print is that you can give it a more fine art look, you can take it from just the realm of a normal photograph, something that a client might think that they can take. To being something that they can't get anywhere else, but with you, I love graphic authority for their textures and such, they just make beautiful textures, and they're not the cheesy ones. I'm very, very fussy and it's real important for me that my work not look datable, and then it not look cheesy, and I'll tell you, datable is really, really an important point because you don't want your images, you don't want people looking at your work going, oh, lord that's so last year, so be cautious of that. When you're designing an album, we're going to talk more about this later on, but when you're doing any kind of artwork and such, be careful that you don't cross that bridge of no return. I've been judging and been sharing a competition for many years, and I'll tell you there's about there's two things that will bring your scores down quicker than you can just shake a stick at number one is if you over retouch it, babies do not need their skin retouched. I mean, they may need to have a little is it cleaned up, but they don't need to look like plastic dolls. That's number one is over retouching images and the second one, the second reason that prince get scored down is that we show too much information. In other words, there's no, you can't find the magic in the picture. So think about those concepts when you're getting ready to do an album or when you're getting prints ready for your clients. Okay? Let's, go forward and here's an image that I was able to work a little bit in photo shop. I use light room and photoshopped to create artwork, not just one of the other. I find that that light room gets me started, it'll kind of pulled it'll give me a nice, clean slate to start with. I'll do my color correcting there, or I should say, my assistant, colin, does he's really good at color? I'm not all that great with color, and I found by the way, that there are some people that are better at recognizing onpoint color than others, and I'm not that good at michael could spot a whisper of magenta at two hundred yards and me, everything looks good to me because I just don't have that critical of a nice so I leave the color correcting to someone who knows what they're doing and let's talk for a moment about that aspect. Now we do our own color work quite often, but I will tell you, you don't have to do that. There are a variety of companies out there I know pwd color lab is one of them that will do your color worked for you and get your image is all ready to go so you don't have to feel like you need to do every single thing yourself, and I would tell you if you can delegate delegate to someone else to do the things said those kinds of things so that it allows you more freedom to be able to do what's really important to generate revenue for your studio because if you have somebody, if you're having to sit and do all that retouching not making any money, then you're gonna end up having to get a day job and so think about that aspect. So with this particular image, this isn't one of my boudoir pictures, you'll notice that my subject is standing she's actually standing in front of just a blank wall in this wall is a matter of fact, I shot this image just using natural sunlight coming in from the window over on the right hand side at the time my walls were read, they were kind of a dark brick red and then in with one of the the, uh graphic authority textures, they have this really beautiful texture that you khun late, late over the background and basically it's like in photoshopped, you just have layers and you go through and you can put it and layer them and then you can in degrees of softness and opacity you can make them as as stark a cz bright or as subtle issued like them to be in her book I did very did just a couple I did this image only like this and then I did one other print in a with one of those textures and this is one of the other textures. This is that same young lady and I chose to just really create something that was just a bit more of a surprise. Another one of the graphic authority textures. This one I chose not to change the opacity. I kept it almost at full one hundred percent and the reason for that is I thought, you know, it just was a bit interesting and the texture kind of went with the goose ta that she had on and in this case I felt that it just gave the photograph a bit. It took it from being so boudoir ish to being just a little bit more of something that's a bit more fun and playful and so I try to interpret different images in a book for a client that way now here's something I believe that it's really, really important and that is all of this what kind of work is going to be done before a client ever sees the pictures because I don't want them looking at this this plane image a normal image and then afterwards seeing me ad that texture and going okay baby can add another texture because then do you see how it kind of starts taking what you've done to being a trick I don't want to see that is a trick I want them to think that I sat there hand drawing those little flowers on that okay I want them to think that because then they equate what they see in front of them with your skill and it takes skill to do this it's not done by accident so I want teo to keep that in their mind so it is really really important not to allow your clients to see you do your artwork and let me tell you a little really quick story about this on why you don't want to do this we had a client I want to tell you his name because hey became the client from hill this young man I photographed his wedding and before he even ordered his album him and his wife bought twelve thousand dollars worth of oil portrait I was thinking this is great he was a great client he'd come in and just pop in on the street go hey bam how are you and I it was like one of our little buddies right well I made the fatal mistake one day my little buddy comes in and I go hey come on I'm working on your wall portrait for you and I got to show you I learned this really cool new technique dum dum dum okay I mean stupid because what did I do? I let that man come and sit right next to me at the computer and I let him watch as I retouched one of his files let me tell you that went down in history as the day the world stood still because what happened? Okay all of us and he's sitting there and he goes you can give me more hair oh correct oh no the world and from that point on this young man became the client from hill and became the most of the biggest nightmare client I have ever had in my whole life. Now the worst part is you think I would have learned from that experience right? Well when he and his wife started breeding guess what guess who they came to do their family portrait and not only did I photographed the first child and the second but the third one too and every single time we had it was just an enormous horrible issue because he wanted every single picture from the first child to look exactly like the third the third child who looked exactly like the first color exactly matching and everything and it became an absolute nightmare so the moral of the story is, and I hope that this put the fear of god in you don't let your clients see you do artwork, do it before they see their images and then it's equated to your talent and your skill as a professional and not as some cheap trick that seems to be easy to do. I had another client one time that I would just signed a business card for and I had laid up all night long thinking about this business card for this young lady and I didn't get a chance to design it before she came into the studio so she can't comes into the studio and I said, come on back here and so I had to come back to the camera room again and she sat down and I said, okay, I'm going been laying awake thinking about your card and I designed her card literally in thirty seconds so then she's oh baby, I absolutely love this card it's been almost exactly what I was looking for. Great, I said then I did her an invoice and handed the invoice for five hundred dollars, which is what I charge for an hour's worth of retouching and she goes, what, five hundred dollars but baby only took you thirty seconds I said, yeah, but it took me three years to learn that thirty second trick so I know you get the point that I'm trying to make and so I hope that those two stories that they really help you to see what I'm talking about and and I've made all the mistakes I made them all that you could make so that's why I feel like I can I could be the person to tell you so I can hopefully have you folks out in the audience and you folks in this room not make the same ones that I did ok this one of the other the techniques that we can employ besides artwork and photo shop is just paying attention and using what we have at our disposal this is one of the images I shot last night in are here in our studio with one of the models very little artwork has been done the only thing that I actually went in and did was I went in and just cleaned up she had some blemishes on her face when I went in and cleaned up the blemishes on her face the lighting is absolutely the way it wass and basically if you all remember from yesterday we had one of our studio strobes over in the corner and we had it streaming through one of my sticks one of my bushes and so that created a pattern on the wall well I had her stand close enough to that pattern that there was spillage coming from that modeling light of the photograph I mean of the the pro photo light and that way I could use that as a main light as well. Now this is a really great technique tto learn because you can do it so quickly it becomes very, very it's very easy do it just like that and literally in about a minute and a half and remember your time is very valuable you want to give them great mood and emotion and you want their images to scream in your behalf and that cannot happen unless you unless you are able to do some things and a human a very efficient way. So what I generally do when I'm taking pictures, I always leave myself a few images a few frames left on the card so that if something I turned my head this way and I see something I go, wait a minute, I'm not quite done and that happens to be quite often then at least I I know I have a place to go, so in addition this is this photograph is very much that same light pattern, but this one we had the main light is on the subject in a spotlight form and then we're using that same light pattern with where we put the bush and we had the light against the wall in the background on the on ly technique that I've employed on this one is this is just one of marcus spells black and white photo shop actions and in a moment I'm actually gonna demonstrate some of those techniques to you I mean they're literally they take that much time and when it comes to black and white preset specifically one of the reasons that I liked marcus bell's pre sets is that they actually look like real black and white film I'm a film girl I I grew up on regular riel films so I know what it's supposed to look like and I will tell you up until maybe just earlier this past year I didn't like pre sets it all and I never used my on ly used photoshopped actions because the black and white specifically looked flat they just there was no heart to them they had no soul and they just looked just faded and I just didn't care for them and they didn't look real because I know what the real stuff looks like and so when I discovered photoshopped actions on dh presets by marcus bell specifically that's what I want ok finally someone understands how to do a pre set in a way that works so when it comes to light room there are I'm going to get I'm gonna lay my foundation for the images that to get them ready for photo shop and I'm going to do my convert to black and white in light room I will do color corrections this is what I won't do, I don't retouch in light room, and the reason is for me personally, it just takes me a little bit more time to go through and do blemishes with that little circle told the little blemish tool that they have in light room in photo shop, I mean, I'm all over it, I can have that imagery touch in about thirty seconds. The kind of retouching I'm going to do for clients is I want to clean up the skin tones I want to know if there's any dark circles under the eyes, I'm going to clean up those eyes a little bit. I'm going to maybe just pop the eyes just a little bit with a couple of enhancing a little bit of enhancement, but that's about it, I'm not going to go crazy unless it's a mom if it's, for instance, if it's a wedding photograph in it's, the bride with her mother, I'm going to make that mom look like the best looking mom she can. I'm not going to make her look like she's, twenty five years old, I want her to see herself, but I want to see herself the way she thinks she looks, and I want her to see herself rested I do not believe in the concept that some folks have and some of the more of the photo journalistic photographers tend it they don't like photo shop, but all they don't like retouching this oh no, you shouldn't do that and I'm thinking to myself, you know, I'm sorry, but I'm a middle aged woman and if the barn needs painting, you painted okay and on top of that on top of that I think about it if we wanted to look like we really look, we wouldn't wear makeup or clothes for that matter, so get over yourself, you know, it's all right and trust me, we all know we looked way better in clothes than we do without them. So the moral of the story is, is that there's times when you need to do a little bit of retouching on, but this young lady absolutely some retouching was needed on the skin and especially because of the type of lighting that I chose to use on her. This is a very hard this is a fairly harsh light source you can tell because see how sharp the shadow is under the nose are by the nose it's a pretty clean, sharp, crisp light source and when that happens and when you skin that light across the face like that, if you have any blemishes over here, guess what they're going to show up like a beacon in the night so you want to be able to do some retouching so I went in and I cleaned up the skin tones a little bit on dh then that way I could have a nice smooth face in addition to that I went in and did just a little bit of enhancing to her eyes and then after I've done that work that's when I will convert it to black and white I'm going to do that last why would I do that last if you decide exactly see and if you because if you convert it first, then you know you're kind of stuck with that unless you and then you have to repeat your work so I try to do things I'm learning thanks to my dear colin over there to do things the right way and michael is always getting on my case because I like to just I'm a very black and white person if I want it black and white I want it black and white and I know that that's the way I want it done and that's the way I want a client to see it he on the other hand, is much more of the business man okay, as you can see when it comes to little babies like we had yesterday there's not a lot of work that has to be done on that face so let's not get too crazy this is just again this is just a light room preset and all I did with her actually I don't think I I think she had like a little crust around her nose and so I just cleaned up a little bit of the crust around her nose but I want you to take a look at those eyes, okay, I got to tell you that is a nikon file and I'm not I'm not trying to be too sell ni cons but I'm here to tell you this is a new experience for me to see eyes that tack sharp I mean, I bet you I could see myself in those eyes if I got really close and to me the eyes have to be sharp that's really, really important um one of the other in fact, this one I didn't even retouch it all I got a little carried away with it you can tell there's a little scratch right by her nose so when I give it to the client this little mom I'll definitely go in and do a little bit of retouching under around the that get to get her that little blemish. This, by the way, is one of the infra red presets in light room that marcus bell house and I think it's actually quite nice and one of the things I like about this I'm in for it your bonnets black and white. Infrared action is my very favorite. This is a close second, and the reason I like this one is because it's a little bit softer on the skin, it's just a little bit softer. And I liked the fact that it it takes those skin tones, especially for for lighter skin, and it just makes them just kind of just go kind of really soft and milky. It's very quite beautiful. And when I do, if I do a a siri's of images, this is the one thing they all need to match. So I would all do them all in a serious together like that. Do we have any questions before I move on? Any questions? Okay, we have a question, bambi. Okay, cool way. Always have questions. Um, let's, see, just trying to figure out where to start because we get too far down the line. But could you just mention again, uh, back from when you were showing us your textures? Uh, where? Where you get your tech? Oh, great. My textures come from graphic authority, graphic authority. Think it's, graphic authority, dot com and they have a plethora of textures. They literally have every kind of texture you can even imagine, I mean, they have they have they have some crazy stuff that would be great for like high school seniors, they have some things that are really souped up in a hard core I'm going to show you a few of their textures in a moment, but they make a really great variety have lots of different collections. The portrait collection is one of my personal favorite collections that they have and just remember that when you use their textures, you can use them in varying degrees so you don't have to use some hard court, you know, a full bleed. In fact, when you're using any kind of texture and stuff just pull back and just before you're happy with it, pull back just a little bit more, and I think you'll find that that it really works great. Another question, yeah, cloud nine imagery is wondering, how long do you usually spend editing one image? And how long do you tell clients that will take before their prints are ready in general? Boy, those are good questions love it generally, it takes me about maybe thirty seconds to a minute on a regular on normal image to do the editing. Yeah, I'm really fast. I mean, I know what I'm doing, this isn't my first rodeo, so I know when I first looked at the image, I assess what needs to be done. And then I'll go in a very methodical way to get what that what needs to be done on that image on dh then what was the second part of your question on dh how long you tell clients it will take until they're ready? We generally like to tell clients it's going to be about two weeks. We do not allow client, we don't let them we don't we would not even dream of let him sit around and wait for us to do our work. I would not want to do that, I think that's important that they have a period of time toe wait, you see, when a client is waiting, it creates anticipation and what I don't want is that that's seven eleven you know, fast quickie, you know, in and out kind of thing. I don't want the twenty four hour mentality of the costco kind of thing. So this also goes really hand in hand with my brand and what I try to do you know anything that if you buy a beautiful handmade scarf or you have somebody that knits you a beautiful shawl that's not something you can just get really quick, you have to be patient. And so we like our clients to wait, you know, a week to two weeks we don't want him to go to long so two weeks is a good time frame so between a week and two weeks and collin's really good at keeping us on track yes. Do you have your sale session scheduled when you have the actual photo session scheduled? We have them when they come in for their photo shoot michael generally well, at that time scheduled their premier to come back in and they come right here to our studio and they look sit down on our catches you saw yesterday and then he'll go through the sales presentation with, um and it's a great when they come in for the session is a really good time to get them nailed down for coming back in because you generally have all the players you have the dads and the moms for family portrait or the people that are going to be responsible. And so we want to be able to make that and schedule that appointment right at that time. It's just easier, you know, so why you've got him get? Because otherwise people are so busy these days, they just don't have that much time, okay? Let's move on a little bit, yeah, thing to fall for that um and I think part of the question to was not only when do they get to see the pictures. When do they get their prints? And my kind of adam that is, do you have them come in to get their prints? Do you ever ship prince? How do you get them? Great question. Well, first of all, they generally wait about six weeks to get their pictures. We again, we're not. We tell them six weeks. Sometimes they're ready in four weeks. We do a lot of our printing in house. So again, this is not a process that we want to do, like in a week. We don't want to turn around them that fast. We want them to have some anticipation. Michael, did you want to add anything to that or no way? Okay, so we took care of it. Okay? He just wanted to get seen on tv. What can we say? So so I did that answer your question. How do you, like deliver the way that they come in to pick them up or we'll ship them out to them? Depending on the client. We've got a number of clients that are out of the bay area. So of course we'll you know, we'll ship whatever they need. And we charge shipping for those that want something shipped to them and, you know, they recognize that this is our profession, the business just like any other business, and so, you know, if they're if it's a real big order and there's somebody we can sometimes we even deliver we haven't we have a couple of clients that are that are very, very good clients, and they never come in to pick up, we always deliver them personally. So if I had a client that ordered a big wall piece like the one that you saw in the back of the wall over there, that would be something that we would hand deliver and hand hang for them so s so it's really about we try to be as as a cz particulars we can about giving them good customer service, some of our clients, you know, they don't have a problem coming out here, and so we'll do that, but we're pretty easy the way and, uh, just to follow that up, why are photography when you deliver your prince? Is there any special packaging that you do or do you just put it in a normal envelope when you give it to him? Is it in any sort of special boxes or anything like that? Yes, it is in boxes in fact, we box each print we as I showed you yesterday we have we met all of our photographs so even if it's a four by six print it's mounted on a eleven by fourteen or eight by ten matt an eight ply matt and it's a hinge man we get our maths from ready bad there in santa rosa, california and way like the hinge mats because it has a flat piece on the bottom or completely flats mike and any one of our mats but it's hinged on the it's got a hard piece on the bottom and then has the actual mount on the top and then they fold together and so it's a great way to give a client their images. In addition to that we also showed you guys yesterday we have that little gold seal that we provide. We've put it a little card, we put a little card that says, you know, this is a you know, unauthentic cantrell portrait design, print it's got our beautiful seal on it so that when they get it in our beautiful brown boxes thank you, but this is what our mats looked like, so they're hinged. And so this is the way all of our clients received their prince and I got to tell you there's so much to be said about the way you package your products you cannot charge a substantial amount for something if you're just going to hand him a piece of paper because in their mind they go, what do you mean? I just paid twenty five hundred dollars or three thousand dollars for this and they're thinking in their mind costco I could get that there but you see, when you hand him something beautifully matted and even maybe hand signed by yourself maybe on the back is your beautiful off certificate of authenticity with your seal that it's taped to the back these air archival mats then it validates the price that they've paid for the product and I think that's really, really important so that's a great question thank you so much, my friend. We're gonna move on okay great! One more question right there I'm sorry do you decide on the size of the mat or do you discuss that with the client? No, we don't discuss that with them. If it's a four by six print, we generally put it in an eight by ten matt if it's an eight by ten of course we've put in a love by fourteen met we don't give them a choice on that we just do it. We feel that that's really important one of the things that I think is really important for us as photographers to do is to be a bit proactive and not give clients so many choices because one of the problems that you have when you do that is that when you give people too many choices and they're busy people, they cannot make a decision think about yourself as an artist and if you are working with the staff of people or you have like, if you're trying to get our work done and your husband comes in and he's asking you twenty five questions about choices, well, do you like this color or do you want this? We're gonna paint the walls? Do you like these? Think about how hard that would be when you're trying to focus in on something else because you're really busy. So you really want to think about that when it's with clients don't give them so many choices and I'm gonna talk to you more about we review packaging and pricing a swell with this photograph? This is one that I took of our gentleman with his little boy the other day, and I chose to interpret it a bit and so I added a texture screen on top, and then I took in light room and I added one of the light room presets to just take it from being such a literal photograph, especially for images where people are kind of walking out of the scene or something these generally we don't we don't make them so super literal because we want them to feel it and the more that those kind of pictures because you can't see their faces, it's, it's really important to be able to do that and make them in keeping with that with this kind of a photograph again, this was very, very harsh. Strong light for this young lady. You met her yesterday. She was one of our models. In addition, teo, the the softening of the skin or the removing of the blemish blemish is I went in and used craig's actions. My favorite action that craig has is the one for reaching the beauty bar. And I will tell you this I use every single day because it helps it's got a a palette in there for working on the eyes that is really phenomenal. And in addition to that, it also has something for smoothing skin. So it's a it's a one two step that makes it very, very quick and easy to be able to do so, and especially if you want to use harsh light because there are times when you can create drama great drama by adding some some of that beautiful, the dramatic lighting, but you don't want to minimize. You want to screw up the skin tones, um, one of the other textures that are one sees me one of the other light room techniques like this is one of the light room presets and I love this this is a shot that I did in our elevator of the family that you met yesterday that blue cast you see, what I try to do is interpret images and the way that it tells a good story for them. In other words, if you make this too literal and you color corrected for perfect skin tones it's not in keeping with the mood so to keep it within the mood that I chose for this image I chose we by the way we used way have a fog machine and we fogged up the elevator so we could give it that really kind of cool mystery I added a blue town which is one of those that I found in light room this well okay, so this is just another black and white one that we did and ah brown town and this is actually just a straight print. We're going to stop here for a second now on a mission to show you some really quick technique I love you. Thank you. I have to say this is this is one of my favorite pictures that I shot during the weekend, what you see behind the young lady that is just the light coming through the window I have a fascination with reflects route with reflections or or light patterns that fall in a room I just absolutely love them and I find myself migrating to them whether it be something that is artificial that we use for their studio stroh's toe add you could get a cool technique like this if you put your strobes outside and let them come through the window so let me see if I can get into photo shop now and I'll show you a couple of real quick techniques this photograph was one of my favorite images and this is I think a great example of sometimes imperfection works in this case the little girl's not even looking in the camera but look at the energy that is happening with this family I absolutely love it with grampa seated right there he looks really relaxed he looks great his daughter looks absolutely adorable and I'm nuts about the rial expressions with these children so quite often when I'm taking photographs even though this you know the child's not looking in the camera some people like oh they might edit that out well I don't think that that's necessarily always the right way to do it because I feel that there's so much energy here however I do think that some of the energy might get lost because it's in a color so the first thing I might dio is I might convert it to black and white over in my pre set pal as you see right over here if you look at this little preview window you'll see is I scroll down you can see the different black and white says they come up and I think they're very nice I like it for this particular photograph I would want a black and white effect that has a little bit of the vignette into it says you see I scroll through this was really bright oh it doesn't happen on your screen there oh yeah you could see it good so this one's very bright but I think I would want something that was just a bit nice and dark with a nice a nice pretty vignette and here is what the after image would look like is this can you see what I did to change it? Basically all I did was go in and remove the two light sockets for me as I said, I usually do my editing my any artwork in photo shop so let's take that image and photo shop now and I'll show you what I would do. I try to just do a little quick assessment and where I'm going to do it is going to be in light room so let me just bring up my screen and its command plus sign teo to zoom in a little bit and I'll go in now and I'll just use thie the patch tool just going and really quickly grab it very, very quickly here and just cloning from a similar area that's gone I'll get rid of this one right here lips that when I didn't quite grab it correctly sorry my tablets not working exactly the way it's supposed to but hey that's ok that's my story and I'm sticking to it okay so it's gone now too so very very quickly you could see how fast I was able to edit that particular file so I'll go command saved to save that particular image now you notice that I've chosen teo I did my color work first before I before I converted it to black and white because I don't want to have to re do it again if they decide that they want that image as a as a black as a color photograph or black and white so that way I have both okay I'm gonna take this one and with this particular image of this little girl this is I've got it in photo shop now and I'm just going to pull it really close to see what's going on with her face as you can see she has just a few little boo boos on her face in this case I'm going to use the little spot healing brush I find that that works that works just fine I'll go in and she's got a couple little tiny scratches her cheek right here right about there and maybe a few of those little those little areas around her nose that need cleaning up and again it's very, very quick I'm not going to get too crazy because you know, I want to just make it as clean as I can get without a lot of effort, eyes or tax chart, so I surely don't have to do anything with that command save and I'm ready to roll on that image as well. Ok, now I'm going to pull up a couple of photographs for you to look at that are that I've already done some artwork on and I want you to see what they look like sea where they're at here okay, here we go this photograph I'm going to pull this one up into photo shop because I want to show you something I love this part of the picture, I think it's absolutely beautiful obviously I'd want to get rid of that on dh then I also thought this one was really cute these would make a great siri's together tell me that's not really, really cute. So there's a couple of ways to get rid of this hand right here and I'm going to pull both of these into photo shop, so let me I'm going to click on those enter though put those into photo shop and let's open those up they should be opening now, okay, here they go okay, now, so we have this picture here. What I want to do basically is I really want this background, this neutral background here. So I'm going to take this picture. I'm gonna actually make a copy. There's a lot of different ways. By the way that you can do this, you don't have to do it the way I'm showing you there's a variety of different ways to do it. This is just one way that I found was really super easy this morning when I retouch this file. So with this photograph, I'm going to just make a copy of it, duplicate it, got it and let me grab that other picture it's behind the window. Here. Hang on a second. Let me just grab that and consolidate my tabs. And so here I've got my file right here and now take and by holding down the shift key, I want to take this one and drag it on top. So now both of those both of those photographs are here. There's the one underneath, which is different photograph altogether, but it's a copy. Remember that? So it doesn't matter. And now I'm just gonna grab this tool right here I love layer masking I use later, masking literally every single day. I'm going to go into grab a paintbrush now I want a soft edge on that brush. Ah, fairly large brush and basically on to do it one hundred percent of passing. I'm just going, teo, once I've turned this little ah, little guy on black right here I'm just gonna paint it away just painted away very quickly. And as you can see now I have my photograph. I have got gotten rid that ugly hand. Aziz said there's lots of different ways to do it, but I found for this particular image it's super fast to do that. So now I'm ready to go. I could do anything I wanted to as far and now I've got the image cleaned up and I would just maybe converted to black and white, so I'll save that file it's done and we're ready to go. Hey, one other thing I would like to show you before we move on is I'm just going to show you a couple of the the images that I shot yesterday and saw how simple some of these presets are that air in that are in light room. Kevin cambodia has some amazing presets that I really like, like, for instance, this is called sixties film. For this little girl when you have a child or somebody who's got really funky colors sometimes some of these presets can be quite a nice addition they can really enhance the look like this like this black and white hollywood that's actually quite beautiful isn't it doesn't really create a completely different look and here's the sixties look very, very beautiful so we could do a variety of things with that one on dh then one other image that I wanted to show you iss maybe um this right here as you can see there's a few areas around this photograph that need a little more you can obviously going and crop it first really, really quickly, but the one thing that's really I think important for me is I want to expose I want to create an open I want to expose it a little bit more I want to actually almost overexpose it because this image because the nature of the photograph itself is very cartoonish. I don't necessarily want the photograph to be perfect skin tones and I want that bit of white on her her dressed are the pink on addressed to pop out a little bit with her hair, but I don't want it to overpower the scene so that's basically all I would do and then I would just go in and then bring in crop it in just a little bit and we're ready to roll on that picture. It's it's pretty much done. So as you can see, we can create a variety of different looks in light room. I wish I had more time, but unfortunately, I don't. And now I want to show you just some other images will see let me just get rid of light room here. We just minimize this window and, uh, got here, okay, and let me go out of this, okay, great. And let me just find my little tool palette here and let's go back to keynote, and now I'm just gonna go through, and I'm gonna show you some of the other things that I might do with images, and then we're going to switch gears completely, and we're going to talk about something really exciting and let's go to play. Okay, so, again, let's. Just recap what we've talked about a little bit. When it comes to retouching, keep it short and simple. Take an overview of the image. Get an overview of what you're doing, what you want to do obviously go through the first thing you want to do is remove any blemishes light sockets on the wall if you have a choice, you know, obviously I don't have a put on a place we're going to actually photograph. This is the part about my suit that drives me crazy. We have light sockets all over here, so we want to actually cover some of them up because we are always having to retouch some out of a scene. When it comes to creating photographs. I tried to create images that are going to go in marketing material. That's. What this programme is about geared about specifically is about becoming profitable as a studio. And so because of that, your time is extremely valuable and so we want to be able to do things that are very cost effective and that are very quick to be able to get the job done. The fastest way to do that, to begin with is to take the images and create them properly. You know, obviously properly exposed photographs and then create some images that are really interesting. They can be a bit controversial, but you want them to be really interesting. Most importantly of all, sometimes that means I want images that are very, very dramatic, especially for young people. I find, like this young lady is a little high school girl. I know that if I could screen some images for her that are going to be very dramatic, that it's going to be able to get me noticed especially with that young crowd and today's young people are very interested in having something that gives them their own personal voice and so I really think that's a vital thing and that also means when it comes to creating things for for the hair salons as I mentioned my way of marketing to the hair salons I want to create a variety of pictures for them some of them are going to be pretty wacky this was this was actually a mistake this was not a mistake but it was the hairdresser literally ran up in front of me say, baby, I've got to put this on her head and I was like, what are you kidding me she's wearing a ball gown we don't that doesn't go but maybe that's the point is that it didn't go and that sometimes that real strong contrast of you know oh my goodness what is this or what is that? It shakes up your brain a little bit and I think that can be good and very positive so at times when mistakes happen or things happen that you you didn't have any control over let it happen because you can tell you what every time I've had a roadblock or something that it was a surprise to me maybe it was I was trying to make something and working to perfectly and then something happened that push me in a different direction. It took me to a place of really creativity, so embrace those things and embrace your mistakes. Because, first of all, your mistakes on the best thing that could happen to you. Number one. If you make a mistake, it stop for a moment to catch your breath. And it is, after all, just a mistake. It's, a learning tool, so use that as a stepping stone. Don't beat yourself up and beat yourself to death over it.