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Retouching and Photoshop Post-Production Workflow

Lesson 9 from: Commercial Portraiture

Joey L

Retouching and Photoshop Post-Production Workflow

Lesson 9 from: Commercial Portraiture

Joey L

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Lesson Info

9. Retouching and Photoshop Post-Production Workflow

Lesson Info

Retouching and Photoshop Post-Production Workflow

yesterday we kind of unleashed right we did four different shots in one day three individual models and then one group shot of them all together so that kind of reflects what might happen on a commercial job right so I'm given the shot list this is the list in which I have to deliver right so um this is a lesson which we set up for so next for me what might happen is the retouching stage okay so oftentimes I'm in control of my own retouching I would say ninety percent of the stuff on my website and stuff that I've retouched myself because I like to maintain a sort of integrity and I like to maintain a consistent look through everything that I do um recently I have been outsourcing some of my retouching too free it's up so in my own time but it was never that way from the beginning in the very beginning I was doing everything myself using very destructive work flows because I didn't really know photoshopped very well but now I've sort of mature and I'm sort of like you know learn from o...

thers and I have a very consistent workflow that I do with all my images and that's what I'm going to be teaching you today okay so uh you guys have a good view of this monitor here this monitor is a little bit crushed a little bit dark s you have to bear with me when we go through these and just imagine that my screen is looking like a little bit more gamma correct okay but techniques will be the same also you're getting from glare from the lights I recommend when you re touching to actually do it in the dark okay so then you get no glare is there anything on your screen so the first most important thing when I'm going through a shoot afterwards on the most important thing of what I'm doing after the photo shoot is a selection process right so this is going through images and choosing which of these ones will represent the entire shoot to me it's I'm sure you're the same it's incredibly a daunting task because you're flipping through things saying oh do I like her chin appear or her chin down here do I like this or do it like this and it can take me like weeks typically I do like to take a step back and give myself some time after the shoot so I'm not in love with every single image and I have some time to come in like with a fresh perspective but if that's not the case I'm gonna have to make some decisions right away okay so if you look at the screen here we're in capture one that is the software in which we were tethering to yesterday this is a software that usually I'm making my selections in and it's a software we're usually I'm comparing different photos and trying to choose the best one so today when yesterday was a one day shoot if I had days of like multiple multiple shooting and I had a lot of shots to compare what I would do is use a software instead called photo mechanic which is a really lightweight nice program toe organize and color tag things but because we only had one day of shooting with four different setups I could make my selections right in capture one okay so let's look through here what exactly went on yesterday I love seeing like the test shots and like the starting points because like this is where we kind of ended up right on this particular set up and like here's where we started it's like it's a bit of a mess but slowly we like progressed right so what that means is during my selection process I typically stop shooting when I get what I want right so when I'm making selections for things I often start at the end of the shoot at the back of the images and like work backwards from there to make some selections so we had this set up this was done really quick for for eric there just to like show him that the angle didn't matter but for this specific shot the ones I actually liked best were a little bit wider right where we thought the entire scene so I would flip through these and just and capture one I would use stars right to tag things so on my keyboard I have one two three four five and you see like below that thumb now those stars coming up so I would just kind of say like if I really like this picture be five stars if I wasn't sure about it and wanted to kind of compare them later could be like four stars later on if I was spending hours doing this I could sort things on ly by stars right so I'm only seeing my best selections s oh there is this set up and then we did this set up which was one of the ones that we had a kind of like work through right if we start let's see the very starting up there it is nice but eventually we turned it into there's my self portrait okay eventually we turned it into something that looks like this right with like the flare coming through the window I think this is going to be a really nice example to show you some of my retouching and color grading techniques then after that we kind of came back and did the ended the group shot so I'm going to be using the images from yesterday as an example for all the retouching that I'm doing eso you can see what actually happens from start to finish when I first started out photographing I was more photoshopped dependent and more photo shop heavy but now I'm getting a lot better with lighting I could do more effects and even color in camera so the effects I'm doing are actually pretty simple but they're very effective in getting the look that I want so let's go through this election process I would like to start today with using one of these images because I feel like it could really benefit from having like a kind of crunchy contrast and different color grading techniques so the thing that I'm looking for in selections first of all is the performance of the subject right so if I have a really nice expression I'd rather choose that like the one that's perfectly in focus on the one that's like you know perfectly lit in the past that used to be the opposite but nowadays I kind of like you know try to go like more performance based right so I know when we were shooting this we had a version like without the blocks behind her and then we kind of like went on poland what do we kind of like went on and then put the box there so I know like starting at the end it's going to probably be one of these later selections right so I just flipped through these tagging thing starting things like her post here looks nice and natural right we could like come here that one looks good to five stars I'll see we kind of like move the box in and out right actually prefer this because it's less less cluttered so I know like anything after this is probably going to be where my main selection is and I just kind of go go through all right let's say just for the sake of making this simple let's suppose like these two images were ones that I was trying to compare and I kind of thought that the pose of each of them I was on the same level then that's when I might compare sharpness right because for me if you have like similar poses or ones that you're kind of like torin between then I can choose one based on technical aspects so let's go through let's go here and let me see if I like had missed the focus on one or if anything is like slightly sharper than the other one in capture one I can use this little grit up here to select the multiple versions at once and I can just kind of like compare the two put them up and say ok since these faces are like more or less the same I'll go with a sharper one they look kind of the same this image at the top looks a little sharper so just for the sake of this tutorial I'll use this election in my lesson today okay now a lot of people are used to color grating in the rock conversion software a lot of people who shoot a lot of bulk images like a wedding photographer might choose to do the majority of their color grating in the raw I don't I actually do it later in photo shop and save in layers so that I can come back and re adjust things later manually now a lot of raw conversion softwares are getting smarter light room and capture one you could do layers you could do masks but you still don't quite have the same grasp on the images that you do in photo shop so you might remember yesterday when we were tethering we're putting looks on images a starting point I would actually remove those looks so we can start with a clean slate the goal of putting those looks on while we're shooting was the kind of grasp what was going on but at least we have that we knew how it looked now we can start again in a photo shop and have even more control okay so if this was my selection there's three kind of main variables that I really care about from the raw conversion software the rest can be done in photoshopped those three are exposure okay white balance and sharpness the rest of the stuff doesn't really matter to me those three other things that I'm thinking about right from the rock conversion software because you have to remember right now we're working with the native files were working with a different format before converting it to something else so we want to make sure that those three variables were taken care of before exporting into photoshopped so looking at this image I mean since we were tethered the hist a gram reads the way that I wanted teo I know it's a little bit blown out around this area but no surprise there's a sun flair it's actually adding to the image so technically this history graham looks like there's trouble but looking at the image like okay it's supposed to be that way right so I would say exposure actually wouldn't touch sometimes if I don't have the opportunity to be tethered to a laptop I might screw up the exposure and I have to like coming here and slide this slide a little bit since we shot raw it's okay to have a little bit of compensation right so we have of a total four whole stops that we can recover things but it's best to get things right in camera the other thing is is if I was coming in here and I had done color grating on the specific set up again I would just take it off so the exposure's good the white balance is also fine because if you remember we snuck in a great card halfway through we forgot to do it at the starting someone in the chat said hey no great card we weren't practicing what we preach so if we snuck one in so white balance is fine for now the other thing is sharpness okay so this is really important so what I do when I'm sharpening something is all zoom into one hundred percent of the image so I can see the real pixels right I can see was actually what I'm working with um the rule of thumb that I've used for sharpening is I know how my printer works and I know what the final output on webb's going to be so you kind of got to do it by eye yesterday I mentioned that all rah conversion software's aren't built the same I mentioned that capture one reads skin tone and sharpness very well on dh I find that the pre sets that are automatically applied and capture one are really good starting point and then I can kind of go in and tweet from there so you'll notice in capture one okay I went to the scharping menu on dh these variables are going to be the same for light room or any other thing it's just the auto presets in which apply are a little different so typically my rule of thumb is I like to just keep the radius and threshold the same all right as what capture one is sort of like auto reading to my eyes right now it looks like a good adjustment but what I might change is the amount right so if we like weirdo like way way over sharpen this what we would see is like the edge is starting to get a little chunky right so I just like for the example ripped the sharpening like away too high but we can see it start to like breaking apart here in the hair right that's not desirable because of starts artifact ing it looks cheap doesn't it so I want to push the sharpness as far as I can without getting that kind of chunky nous without getting like too much unnecessary texture that wasn't there to begin with so let me just play around with my eye here and I can kind of be like okay that's too much down here looks like a bit of a sweet spot let's say something around there the other thing that I want to make sure of is that I was focusing on her face when I was photographing right because that's the area that I'm sharpening now because if I had photo if I focused on something a little bit in front of her or a little bit behind her thin that area be like way over sharpened right now right so using this little navigator right we can kind of go down we could see like okay it looks like the sharpness was pretty much on the face I don't see any edges breaking up I dont see anything too jagged so to me this looks like a really good starting point uh to bring into photo shop actually I was wondering if we could back up just a tiny little step because you know how all of our people in the chat rooms love to talk about gear and they're really curious about the setup you actually you so do you use a tablet you know are you always on a high mac what are the tools to use before even going into photo shop when I'm retouching yeah so today it's funny because I'm working like a track pad its like the hardest thing toe were gone at home I have ah away calm or wack home whenever that is the correct way to say that tablet it's a sin teak so what that means is this screen is the area that I'm retouching right so I get the pen I can see what I'm doing right on the screen other retouching friends that I know who work on my stuff use a pen tablet that they could go on and trace the screen down below but for me I'm using this antique tablet to do the majority of self I'm doing very well thank you very much something that is that is that the only technical question that one well quite a few people have that you know some questions that they're like wait what it's used to set up and one corolla from the netherlands was really interested about the tablet questions so yeah and also mentioned that I'm I'm working on it I'm back at the new high back I had an old tower there's about five years old I just got to do I make that must feel really good feels a lot faster than good okay this might be kind of what you're what you're just about teo get into but from jerky and finland you mentioned something about picture being sharp enough how do you determine when the picture is sharp enough does it go by the media that the picture is going to be used in for example print media doesn't need a sharp images is bigger formats and posters and digital media that that type of thing well as I said for digital and for print what I like to do is sharpen to the point before we start getting jagged edges so it's sharp from the beginning but he raised an interesting point there because should you sharpen morpher web or should you sharpen more for print here is my personal rule great dumb which I'm going to go over more in depth later but I sharpen for the resolution of the picture okay so the sharpening that I'm putting on this image now I'm not going to change later unless I resize the image to a different file size so for example if I were saving this for web which I'll show you later and I resize the image that I'll put another sharpening mask or layer on it but for right now out of the rock conversion program since it's so high resolution I know it's going to be for print right there's no way I'm displaying this file like on the web I no that that uh medium is print so that's what I'm sharpening for now later on resized version it's going to have to be re re sharpened also for different prints size is all right so let's say this print good I don't know easily go to like twenty four by thirty six eyes something huge like that if I were to do something smaller like a fourteen by eleven out actually resize and sharpened for that specific size because again we're reducing the amount of pixels so the edges between them change so that's what I want to re sharpen okay great thank you as you were as I was ok so where was I lost my train of thought okay so the sharpness is good all right what I want to do now is export into photo shop ok so again we looked at our three variables which were exposure color color balance white balance color balance okay and sharpness those were the three things that we made sure we're good in our rock and version program and now we can take it on to the next step which is to open it in photo shop so in capture one I went to the output tab here and you can see my kind of choices here for going into photoshopped first of all we want to work in tiff because as a lot of us know if you export to j peg and save it multiple times that actually ruins the quality right actually deteriorates the more and more you save over and over a j peg so we want to work in a more like lossless quality so let's assign tiff we have the highest bit depth possible this was shot on the five d normally I'm working with my phase one camera so I know that that has a sixteen a sixteen bit depth on dh that just basically means how much information is stored in the highlights and how much information is stored in the shadows okay so since I'm going to be adding adjustments to this later and stretching things and doing curves I want to make sure that I have like the most toe work with possible for web later I can change that but that's after my adjustments are made okay so I want to work with like the largest file possible in the beginning you'll also notice that the I c c profile is adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight that's extremely important because on most dsr cars you can set it to s rgb or this color space adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight nice nanda is a much broader color space okay it holds so much more information so again since I'm going to be doing adjustments on these files I want to keep it to the native way that I shot it and as well keep it like that until I save for web okay so that's what that's going to be like the other thing you'll notice is the resolution is fixed to its highest three hundred pixels per inch the resolution is one hundred percent I have it set to automatically open in photo shop csx the other thing that I'll talk about briefly is how I store my files and how I actually organized things because some of you might be guilty of this but in the past my files were like complete disaster like I'm like just putting shoots naming them like whatever and then like my file names are like are like final resize underscored too final again underscored dot psd and it's like what what version is this right so lately with home issues I spent like a week just in a in a in a daze going through all my old shoots and organizing and re naming things once I did that had like this imaginary weighed off show there's taken away when things were properly organized and backed up it was like I had cleared out half my house right it's like I got rid of all my junk I felt a lot better so lately I've been organizing shoots in this way let me show you so when I press process on di export this into photo shop I'm gonna automatically set it to go inside of a full there okay so right now we're using jessie's computer so maybe we can pull up some embarrassing things on here but typically here's what I am the organizing system that I'm using okay so I will make a new folder for each new shoot and I will call it what it wass okay so this was like creative live photo shoot next thing I'll do is put the location okay so put like seattle okay and then the next thing that I do as well put the date what date was yesterday was the thirtieth april april thirtieth is that right okay april thirtieth okay and then I'll put two thousand thirteen so that's the folder that I will create within this folder I will have a few different sub folders right so what we just open this here so it's easier let me go into desktop okay so inside here I'll have a few different things going on the first thing I have is a capture folder right so if I had shot a lot of different compact flash cards I would actually download them and put them into this folder right from the beginning okay captures for all the raw files next thing I have is a folder called working folder this is what I'm going to actually export my tiffs out of the rock conversion program into and these are all the working versions of my photos the's there things that aren't final for just me playing around exporting things if I shot a panorama perhaps different plates things like that okay it's a messy folder but it's just to keep it away from the nice streamlined uh organization we're doing the next folder that I'll do is called final retouch is all right so inside that folder that's where I'm going to save my p s a d files so these are the things with the final layers intact all my final adjustments there only be one version of every final photo that I'm done so that if I need to come back to a file later and if I need to change things um then I can at least know it's in this folder and it's going to be saved a different file name from the working full they're okay the last thing that I'll add isa resize folder and that's because any final retouch is ideo I'm going to resize them in different ways so suppose I decide to put on my website suppose I decide to share on facebook I'm going to automate all my final files in different sizes so I can easily access him later I'm not sure if you're guilty of this but one thing I used to spend a lot of my time doing in the past is like trying to find my original files and like re sizing them like ten different times like for this blogger post for this calorie for facebook and it's like it's all giant mess so what I've been doing in the past is inside the resize folder is doing something like this and making a sub folder with the file size on the longest end so for facebook I know that the max resolution that they support is two thousand forty eight pixels so any picture that I say for that is there and if I need to resend it again to somebody of that size I don't have to go in and like resize it that's a waste of time and for my web I know supports images one thousand two hundred pixels long so I'll just have these different folders if something comes up and I need to do something that is a different size I'll just make a new folder for that file size the last folder I know I said resize what last one but sometimes I have cool behind the scenes so another thing that I'll do as I will make a behind the scenes folder and that is just to put anything in there which is kind of like might have relevance later for a blogger post something that I can write about okay something I can put on my thing I keep them hot behind the scene separate just so I can easily access it okay so that would be kind of my file structure for how I'm working now the other thing that a lot of people ask me about is how do I share files with clients right after the photo shoot is done that's another thing where this file structure comes in really handy because it's negotiating the contract sometimes they won't need all the raw files for themselves that they haven't in house re toucher sometimes I give them a selection all right of the resize right files from the shoot and and then once they choose their selections from that that will provide the final retouch is right and I might flatten it before sending them but this file structure comes in really handy because I don't have to go in and organize and find things again I could just I'll blow this folder to drop pots and share it with him or dragon on my ftp password protected and share the link with them so that's where all this stuff kind of comes in handy so knowing that the output location what I'm going to do is from capture one directly s o I don't have to change it later and drag around files I know that my output folder is going to be the working folder right so that means the tiff that is exported from here automatically gets placed in that folder I don't have to drive it later saves one step the other thing is I process this and it's set to automatically open in photo shop so it's doing two things putting it in the folder and also opening in photo shop because I know I'm ready to work with it now do you have kind of like a working copy or a working place that you get those files to if you have several variations you want to give too inclined to choose from like how much editing they actually do to those images or is it a process and then you go back and then do some final work to one final image so are are you talking about having different variations of color grading no so assuming that like in this situation you have like two options right but let's say you want to give a client I don't like ten or twenty different options proof gallery yeah exactly ok yeah so if I'm not in control of the final selection right and I want to compare with my client is a great question by the way what I will do is export the entire shoot as lo rez j pegs something where we can go in and zoom the face and see the sharpness but nothing that's like full resolution right so she's easier to share so we can see like where the sharpness is falling but mainly just makes it easy to flip through so I'll export an entire resize gallery and the resize folder that's just the entire shoot what I might do from there myself it's just take away like any misfires anything that I know I don't want to see like on a billboard and things that are just like like things they're going to waste people's time flipping through from that main folder I can share that with them to make selections I might come into their office sit with them and make selections if I can't do that what I will do is make another folder called joey's favourites okay and I'll go through just like I did and capture one and say like this pose is slightly better in this pose and narrow it down and I send that folder at the same time as all the j pegs so yes they can see everything but they can also see my choices and I might write them a little email explaining why this one is superior than this one at the end of the day it's going to be their decision but more times than not if I make the joey's favourites folder they'll follow what I say and it makes it simple for them because I've already gone through the entire shoot and what stage are those files actually out like how much photo shop where have you actually done teo every single one of those images like are they going to choose one and then you're going to do the final work so those remember that when when we were shooting we're applying color settings on them right so that so that proof galler has no photoshopping on it right it might have some custard custard in my handsome custom color settings from when I was tethering to capture one but I'm not going in and re touching those files because sometimes there's thousands right and people are aware that you know sometimes there something's to be done later what I might do is if it is a relief because if it is image that requires something to get a certain look across I might re touch one example and say this is how the final image could look but most times if you get a write in camera you don't have to do that stuff any other questions from inside here thanks I was just wanting since we're talking about storage in away what's your backup process do you have like multiple drives or to keep the stuff off site okay so I used to use a drove oh but it's a mess it's horrible on creative live it's horrible if you search for drove bo on twitter you can find all this ones that are crashing and people complaining about it all right um problem with drove bo is it's one array where you have multiple drives in right his dual redundancy so if one of these fails the other hard drives keep it safe that's fine what is two drives fail you lose everything you can recover it yes but in that array think about recovering sixteen terabytes you need another sixteen terabytes to recover it if you can even get there it's a very scary thing the option to fix that would be to buy to draw bows and keep them in different places but why here's what I do I'm very old school it makes a great footstool right if you uh break it and want to use it still drove it makes a great footstool that's what is good for I'm harsh I know because I'm not spending my anybody and my dribble has failed so many times they've great tech support but it's to make up for a very mediocre product okay anyway off the harsh train moving on to your question what do I use so I mentioned rubble all the hard drives fail at the same time so instead of very old school in my backup I learned a great system from a guy named tyler ginter the production company that mentioned variable he used to be in the control entire combat camera for the u s military with his platoon it's like he knows what he's doing so his system that I use now is actually very old school where we get to toasters is a slang name is to put external drives in all right so I have two copies of the same drive when I call hard drive one local one this hard drive one off site I will use a program called chrono sink to sink the drives together so they're a clone of one another I'll keep one in a fireproof safe somewhere off site and I'll keep the local one beside the computer right so if one fails still have the other somewhere else that's way better than putting all your drives together now you might say well how do you know where your files are you have hard drive one how do you know a shoot is on hard drive nine or eight how do you know where it is used another program called this catalog maker which I can scan the drives and it just keeps the final name structure if I'm looking for killing lincoln shoot I couldn't go on that program typing killing lincoln will say oh it's on hard drive eight get it put it in the toaster and I can access it if one of those drives fails is very easy to recover right because if a drive fails it's usually in the moving parts stop but all the data is there so that makes me sleep at night unless where's offsite burned down burglar broken gone to the fireproof safe while the building was burning and took it with him my files are going to be okay you are getting to the key points that everybody really wants to know by answering those questions yeah it could be an entirely different workshop on protecting your files um it is it is a very important thing for photographers to do because at the end of the day we can ensure our gear we can buy another camera but can you get those images back that you created that impossible you could never recreate those moments so that's why I'm so paranoid about images because it's my entire life absolutely morning or smart a little bit of both also all right a couple other people have just wonderful questions coming in from the internet vural from the netherlands has another question and so does luckett take power from prague what do you do with the raw files that are rejected or you're not going and to use and do you ever delete those I never delete files from a shoot because hard drive space is is just so cheap right so it's so easy tio store things and it's so easy to just like raw files and I'm going to take up that much drives get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper so one thing I will say as I mentioned that I have hard drive one hard drive two three four five what I'll do is on ly by the amount of hard drives that I actually need for that time because the way things the way things move hard drives become cheaper and cheaper every year so I don't want to buy twenty drives in one year and only use five of them instead what I'll do is like by the five that I need and as I need more hard drives will keep buying them so the answer is I don't believe anything in case I ever need a file again I try to keep things really good what I might do lead is like a working version of a retouch that I'm never going to use again just you know house keep all my delete that but never the original files all right and in your file structure where do you put those rejects those rejected images working full it's still in the working folder yeah because I'll do different versions of retouching in that and I know some of them I have a different folder for final retouch is so I can clear like earlier versions of that file right maybe one more before we keep going just stepping back a bit but from still does stills in ontario canada how important is tagging your photos and the metadata information in commercial photography do you have any specific tips further tips around that yeah so what she's talking about is a lot of photographers tagged their name and their work in the meta data so that is the data which is does not show up on top of the image it's kind of like hidden behind the scenes and for me it's important just to like in capture one you can set things to say who the photographer was with the date of the shoot wass that's important but I'm not really doing anything more complex than that instead what I like to do is just organize things by the file structure that I said there are great mated that attack niks that you can use in which if someone gets her image and uploads it to facebook at automatically puts in the image description who who took it but for me I'm not ever shooting in bulk right so that might be better for a wedding photographer who is purposely giving their clients j pegs so that they do share them with your friends and that helps their business but for me it's it's not so important so what about in your personal work you're not tagging things like africa and you know these types of ethiopia are themes or anything like that no instead what I'm doing is sorting it by folder and I shoot great thank you okay so let's move on then basically I opened up this image here in photo shop from capture one and you know it's a tiff file right it's going to go in the working folder for the sake of speeding things up I'm going to re save it as a psd in our final retouch is full there so let me do that real quick reason why I'm using a psd instead of a tiff very simple if you have a layered file ps needs air a little smaller right I can't export directly to appear city from capture one it has to be in a tiff but at least we're going from a lossless format to a lossless format the other quick and easy thing is I know all my final retouch is our ps dee's so if I need to see everything that ever retouched I could just do a search on the mac for dot psd there's everything final write the other thing that I'll do is just change the file name from the working folder as well just amend this and I'll just write in like retouched something like that so I know again yes it's a psd but also anything with the underscore retouch is going to be a final version so I'll just save that so any changes I do gonna be safe okay so the first thing looking at this image I need to do adjustments overall for the entire thing is very unlikely that I'm working on selective adjustments inside the image I'm not doing so much of that anymore I just mostly do things for overall lately I found like I mentioned finding free time and outsourcing skin retouching and harry touching not to say that I can't do it it's just I don't have time for it anymore so what I'm going to be teaching is just sort of like doing the overall image and that's kind of the files that preparing for a re touching as I for my re toucher is I do like to give them layered files toe work for with my color grade on it so that I still am in control of how the images turn out so the first thing when I look at this image it could it could use a little contrast and it could use a little bit of color grading so I'm going to use adjustment layers to do that so over here in photo shop we have the layers menu ok we're starting with the background layer if we go down here we see this little like circle that's half filled that's the adjustment layers so if we click that that we can see curves right what I'm actually going to do is they're going to make two of these okay and I'll tell you why in a moment let's make to curves you'll see in the layers box okay two different ones popped up cars one curves to this is it's because I have gotten really organized in my old age as things move on right I've started get a little more organized so the first curve I'm get a call contrast the second curve I'm gonna call color what I'm going to do on these two curves you can do the same thing toe one but I like to keep them separate so I could tell ago them on and off and see what each one is doing to me it's like a more organized way of working so the first thing I'm going to just is contrast right so opening up this contrast box here in the in the in the curve were given the grass now I worked a little bit with us yesterday quick recap is that this area represents the tonal range of the entire image okay so around here we actually have the highlights down here we actually have the shadows and this line shows us how we can manipulate and bend the tonal range to achieve contrast or any look that we want so in orderto work curves we put points on this line and we just change what's going on with it right so if we want to do something that as contrast to an image we first think what is contrast it is when the highlights are brighter and the shadows are darker so we'll have to do two things increase the highlights and darhk in the shadows gives us contrast so I have two points on my curve line I could drag the highlights up see there they are right the window's getting brighter so is her face ok and I could get the shadows down in deeper okay and it's becoming more contrast this is called an s curve because it makes the s shape with those two points if I were to do the opposite thing with this curve if I were to bring the shadows up and the highlights down then we get like the opposite we get like a flat image right so the reason why curves are nice is because we're not pulling apart the different pixels were actually bending them toward one another right so as certain highlights rise areas that air close in tone with it come up with it and it's not a very destructive work flow so a lot of times people just add contrast they can't get the degree of control that you get with a curve you'll also notice that we're working with an rgb image see here it is rgb when you adjust all the colors at the same time that affects the exposure and the tones if I were to go into these other individual channels lighter red green and blue that's how I called a grade and that's what I'm actually going to put on this second curve here okay so for this all I'm worried about his car a dress so no riel rule of thumb I'm just going to use my eyes and find a place which looks good for the highlights so let's say somewhere around there and then on this area the line I'll just use my eyes and just sort of see what looks good for the shadows so something I think to my eye at this very moment in time that looks good since we're working in an adjustment layer if I like and go to sleep and wake up with fresh eyes and go oh no that looks horrible it's like two bright I do that all the time so I can always come back to this adjustment layer click the box and like change it because most times I'm like photo showed me at four in the morning like what the hell did I do last night so I can come back right so that adjusted the tonal range for the image the next thing we want to do is color so just as we did for the other curved lines in rgb we can go into the individual color channels right now again I went over these yesterday quick recap is if we wanted to make this more blue could increase the blue curve if we wanted to make it more yellow pull it down same goes for green and red add green subtracted and get more mogens it's home for the red at red go down get this like kind of greenie sayin look right so using that kind of mix and match and give this image any look that I want ever right because we can mix and match colors let's suppose we wanted to make this feel even more warm what is warmth it is a little bit of red a little bit of yellow so we could mix those two colors together so we could be like okay let's add a little bit of blue pull that curve down a little bit of red and then just to turn that on and off see we've added like we've made it look warmer if we wanted to do the first thing we wanted to make it colder pull that thing down it's like more science going to the yellows or so I go into the blue pull that up and now we made the image like colder so we can kind of control any area of the entire color spectrum now you remember we made s curves on the tonal range you can also do this in the individual colors right so you can add multiple points so let's say for this we wanted the highlights yellow and we wanted to keep the shadows blue what we could do is drag this sucker down right there and then drag another point up and I'm going to do like a really really nasty color grade but just to show you what's going on here is like see how we can control things individually I have a very subtle approach some people might like this I don't so with that said let's do something like really subtle with us I think the colors kind of looked nice natural but let's suppose we want her skin like a little warmer could be very subtle bring that up something like that looks good to me to me see it's just like a little tiny s and we could do the same thing in the red it's maybe like a little little red in the highlights and then bring it down here because it gets a bit too lost so it's extremely subtle but I think it has a lot to the image hears me turning it on and off that's what I would do for the color curve now the next thing that I would do in terms of color grading the image is I'd like to dispatch a rate things okay I like the look of this sort of like muted color palette you'll see in most of my work it's what I had these like muted tones and there's actually an interesting technique that I used to get those effects you'll notice when we're tethered in to capture one we could turn the saturation down it was just one option actually since we're shooting color images we have a variety of different black and white looks that we can make this entire image of black and white turn it down and bleed some of the color through it so we have the tonal range of a very country contrast in black and white image but it's still in color a lot of people out ask me how I get that effect in my images on I will show you how it's not that it's not that complex we go down here to the adjustments layers and we do a thing called channel mixer okay so I added the contract the channel mixer layer what I'm going to do is call this one tones okay so you see I'm naming my layers so I know what I'm doing later and I can come back to it after a sleepless night so we shot this image in color which basically means that we have access to any kind of different black and white channel and black and white filter let's suppose we're back in the day of shooting black and white film or even shooting with a digital camera to a black and white setting if you had a very very thick color filled there like a really really thick blue and you held that in front of the lens and shot black and white so you didn't see the color you'd actually see a different tonal range than if you had a red filter and put it in front of the camera because the light is filtering through that color on but actually looks different in black and white so in photo shop we can actually see those presets what they look like so just so you can see I'm going to go to monochrome here and I'm going to change the preset to represent a blue filter ok look what happens we have like a really thick tonal range okay it's very contrast e when you compare this to the red filter it's actually the opposite so the skin is like really smooth right it looks completely different then the blue channel so what that means is even if you're doing a black and white retouch you could get a variety of different versions just from black and white just using the channel mixer so the different presets are there is blue right there is green typically blue is the most contrast c and as you go toward red things get softer so this all comes down to personal preference and what you like uh in your own taste your own eyes k for me what I love doing is mitch mixing the blue filter and the green filter so you'll see something interesting is happening here when the blue filter selected we see one hundred percent down below blue and we see zero percent on the green and red if we were to mix and match thes we can they just have to equal one hundred percent okay because if you don't equal one hundred percent then it adjust the exposure of the image and we don't want to touch that we just wanna give it this life's kind of tonal range so a lot of people ask me how to do this on my like africa stuff because it looks like really contrast it has those kind of like muted tones the balance that I'm doing on those image is eighty percent blue and twenty percent green that's like the magical formula there it is it's not that complex so now we have a black and white image which is a very thick and tonal range right it's very contrast inside of edgy but we put a little bit of green in right we got a twenty percent green so at least the skin still smooth right so what I can do with this channel mixer layer is affect how much it we can affect the opacity which is to say how much is being applied to the color image below it so right here in the layers menu you'll see the opacity as is that one hundred percent so if we want to bleed some color back into it and just be a matter of changing this opacity slider so there's a zero one hundred percent is black and white typically I'm doing something around like thirty to forty percent right so she was going on here we're getting this nice kind of tonal range which looks like a black and white image but now we're in color this is like a really nice look for getting a kind of like filmic organic quality because look what happens if I go to like thirty percent all right let's say thirty percent and I talk about this on and off this is like what the dis saturation is doing it's kind of like pulling all the tones together on dit looks to me like really nice to the eye it's a nice kind of like laid back relax color versus being like this which like kind of like poppy into punchy for me it's subtle and when you look at it you might not know it's going on it might just be inside your head but settle things were good so this's the way that I like tio great images um something really interesting that will do that you can play around with is if we wanted to see how this black and white was changing even on thirty percent since we're working on an adjustment layer we could totally do that so we have like my magical formula here which is eighty percent blue twenty percent green we want to see how that red filter would change the image in color it can even do that so see how like with the red like the skin tones kind of look washed out right but with the blue filter is like a little too dark even if we like when crazy and drag the red and green down and like dragged us up we get like some really kind of like crazy looking weird effects and we could control each channel see how we're like doing that even with the color preview but again rule of thumb that I like to use is eighty percent blue and twenty percent green and that kind of gives me the best tone arrange it might differ depending on the image but I'd say ninety percent of the time that's what I'm using a quick save with the layers intact before we go on just in case um and the new photo shop see essex will save in the background if this is color grated and I don't want to go any further I have the psd file saved what I want to do now is make a version for the web right so we're going to have to be several changes but I'm always going to keep this psd safe so I can always go back I don't like to resize and great the the resized version makes no sense now that we have are kind of like lossless file now we can save this for web so let's pretend like we're gonna put this on facebook I'm very active in social media if people out there in the internet want to go to my facebook joey l photographer so facebook dot com slash joey l photographer I love sharing my work I've been growing and followers it's been drawing a lot of eyes to what I do but the problem is facebook has a re sizing engine and a compression engine right a compression engine so when I resized for facebook I've kind of found an interesting strategy that I use so facebook does not compress it and I can kind of sneak it past what it does like artifact ing and making my images look bad here's what I do so this is a sixteen but file first thing is I know for most browsers and the web can only hold eight bits so goto image mode and change it tio eight bits okay oh the other thing is the j peg is not going to save my layers so I could go toe layer flatten image now I have an action made for for this where I could just automatically do it too how it worked but for the sake of this tutorial do thing each things that by step so I have all the layers flattened the next thing that I want to do is I want to change the color space right so to do that go to edit convert to profile and you remember that our source face here is dobie rgb nineteen ninety eight that's what we're doing all of our adjustments on because it's a much broader color space but now I can change it toe rgb because that's what most internet browsers support there are some browsers that can read adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight colors but how do you know that someone's gonna have that specific browser when they're looking at your website you don't know for sure so just to be safe let's put it in s rgb two point one okay so I'm doing that the next thing that I'm doing is I have to change the size of the resolution for facebook right so to do that I go to image image size and I know by rule of thumb that it is two thousand forty eight on the longest side I find that keeping it in facebook's native size does less to compress it because you can kind of sneak by their engines if you give something too big is going to go like oh it only has to be this size and you're not in control of what it does so it might add weird artifact ing if you do things too small if someone looks at it with a larger monitor it's gonna look confined to the screen so this is the largest file size of facebook supports so I'm going to put the with two thousand forty eight pixels keep everything the same now a lot of people go no you need to change the resolution to seventy two d p I that's actually a printing thing on web it makes no difference don't believe me google any forum and see extra dream nerd fest happening arguing about this I just leave it at three hundred because it doesn't make I wanted to swear it doesn't make all of a difference all right but go back to the image size and we notice here that by cubic automatic is automatically selected what this means is if if I were to resize this and scale the image down photo shop is gonna automatically put scharping filter on top of it it's great but I am a control freak and I want to be in control of how much sharpening gets put on it so I noticed that photoshopped comes with his default setting but sometimes I get like artifact ing around the edges right does anyone read resize their images like what how did I get so sharp it's annoying so what I do is under by cubic automatic I'm going to change that to bye cubic smoother although it says best for enlargement it's actually best for what I do sharpening later they'll listen to it by cubic smoother okay that's what I'm going to use so I'm going to hit okay photo shop is re sizing our large file to something more web savvy and what we can do is see the actual pixels and we can see we have this like nice smooth non sharp inversion toe work from if I had done this with by cubic automatic there might be like some like nasty edges around here let's do it just for the sake of looking to see if it's going to do that on this particular image so don't do this and you're really workflow but let's save by cubic automatic see it's like kind of nasty like around here it did a good job sharpening it but what if I didn't want that sharpness there and I just wanted it on the face on ly I don't want to use that in other examples which we have like a lot of like hares blowing or like a giant beard which could get a lot of like highlighted edges that is going to look like completely nasty so go back yeah it's by cubic smoother we're going to do two thousand forty eight pixels for facebook and then re size but now since we did a smoother way of reducing the size I can sharpen things myself individually so how do you do that hopefully in future versions of photo shop they'll make an adjustment layer for something called on sharp mask right now it's not there so we're gonna have to go old school and we're going to duplicate this background where and I have another version of our image on top of the other one when I want to do is sharpen this background layer and I'm going to actually paint away areas of sharpness that I don't want to use so looking at this image if we wanted to draw focus is just to the faith even for web but we didn't necessarily want to focus like down here on the hands or on the leg we find it like too distracting I can actually sharpen this entire layer I put a mask on it and then just paint in where I want sharpened some people ask me why don't you just use the sharp ing tool as a brush she's taking a phase like uh not me the problem with that is it doesn't give you a lot of tools and a lot of different degrees of sharpening it just kind of like one base setting right so what I'm going to do instead of office background layer are you going to felt their sharpen and then on sharp mask this gives me the most degree of control when sharpening you see I was retouching on this computer later my kind of like go to variables are already saved which is a threshold of three levels a radius of point seven and the amount of one hundred percent right now it's one hundred to so what does all this mean the radius is how many's pixels it is selecting so right now it's a very fine selection it's point seven if you were to increase this you would get like really kind of like chunky selection like chunky colors right we want that to be very fine so we have like a nice fine sharpness to the image that some point seven just like we didn't capture one I'm going to change the amount slider so let's see zero is down there up here is thies things getting sharp for this I'm probably going to wantto on lee sharp in the face and maybe like a little bit of the hand area so I'm only looking at that you can see kind of like around here we're getting like a weird like we're nasty edges but I'm don't worry about that because I know I'm going to paint it out later so let me look with my eyes and let's go with like something like around one hundred percent ah sharpness radius of point seven threshold of three and then we hit okay so looking at the layer menu we have way have the non sharpened version below and the sharp inversion on top hard to see from back there but as I talk going on and off we see a little bit of sharpness what I want to do is on this back home layer is create something called a layer mask so that's this little button down here okay kind of looks like a square with with circle in it we click that and a little white dialogue box opens here now anything I paint with a black brush on this white layer mask is going to show below the un sharpened image okay so real quick if I get the brush which is black okay just for the sake of this tutorial I'll do one hundred percent if I paint down here I'm actually getting rid of the sharpness I'm controlling were my eyes fall okay I could do that or I could actually invert this to be black so there's no sharpness on it and then I can paint in where the sharpness is so really quick shortcut as I hit on the mac command and I and it just toggles that adjustment layer to black so now with the white brush I could just say I want only the face sharp so I just paint there and I'm kind of like painting and sharpness so I've almost made my own sharpen tool brush with my own custom settings if this was an adjustment layer it be great because you could change the amount of sharpness later so photoshopped please do that in the future um now what I can do is go through here and I can choose like the different hands and all the stuff like that and I could just kind of choose like where I'm sharpening so there is that once I'm kind of happy with it and I have the attention kind of where it needs to be looking at this I'm saying like okay the boxes like nothing's too distracting here and I think too distracting here I say that's a good level of sharpness I'm gonna flatten it by going toe layer fine image again and this is looking pretty good for web right I'm going to do my final step just to save it in a different folder what I can do to have aa degree of control has got a file safer web and let's see what's going on here in this box okay it's like gift is selected that's a mess we want to go to j paige right smooth over to the face um so we see that we're going in tow rgb here all these settings look good we want to make sure in bed color profile is checked okay because that makes sure that we haven't rgb file and s s rgb files so most browsers can read the colors the same between computers the only thing we want to really adjust here is the quality so what I've noticed again we're doing this for facebook what I've noticed kind of like a sweet spot is seventy percent quality because it doesn't make the file size is large enough that facebook has to kick in his engine and it doesn't make them small enough that facebook doesn't do anything to them right and kind of like if you start with a really really compressed file as it is facebook will actually compress it more they like own you want manuel when we make it more crappy for you right so kind of like a sweet spot I've made a demo account that I have no friends with and I just sort of like uploaded like this is seventy percent this is eighty and I've noticed the least amount of change with around seventy seventy five percent also looking at this image seventy progress and it's not really changing the quality that much like the difference between one hundred percent and seventy percent actually isn't that bad but if we look down here and we see the file size okay three hundred thirty nine k versus like the whole megabyte that's like a huge difference okay so I'm going to go down in just seventy percent looking at the menu trying to see if everything else looks good I think it does for now so I can't save and what I can do is going to that folder and go to resized and you'll notice that the retouched has safes from the same file structure I'm going to amend it again and put two thousand forty eight and then I'm going to save it in that folder that sub folder and then that is the file that upload to facebook I won't do it now because I'm going to embarrass myself by logging into my facebook and you'll see all the horrible messages I have them and that I have written but yeah that's basically work full I think this might be a good time to maybe take some questions because that's a lot to wrap your head around I think so joey but I've never seen such a thorough kind of walkthrough of doing it that way for to get it exactly how you want to see it for people to see it on facebook so thank you again I'm a control freak I like to be in control of every step because why are we spending thousands of dollars to get a sharp lines when we blow it later right when we completely ruin inequality that well especially if that's your marketing vehicle one shape way shape or another we have facebook so let's start in our in studio audience we have questions let's get the mic out so I guess I'm lazy because ali resize them but I never actually saved them for web so I'm wondering like if you were side by side like what's the advantage of actually saving it for the web and how are you how does it look better as opposed to just saving it as a j peg like re sizing it and then the only difference is safer webs gives you a greater degree of control of compression so for example when we had save as you can still keep the color profile and they're not nothing really changes but you only have like a scale of one to twelve right so you can choose like to compress that likes a level nine it's good in my equal about seventy percent but we don't get the degree of control that we do it's safer web it's ah it's more or less the same thing you just have to make sure that you're embedding the color profiling but to me like you say you're lazy it doesn't really it's not really that much of an extra step especially if you record an action and have a safer web action like I do I'm not usually like going through each step clicking I just play the action and put her on so you could spend one night just recording that put a little personal message in a test stop and say you are cool all right and then it goes on to ever do that yes I loved him well I have a question but I was going to say if you duplicate the background and you make it a smart object you can change the amount of sharpness is one work around lou of ah adjustment layer yeah no definitely you can do that the only reason I did not convert it to a smart object it was just to make it more about workflow converting the web less than like what I would like it's an entirely different can of worms there's a million ways to do it um if it was an adjustment layer you could do that but yes a smart object you could change later wise guy sorry I didn't mean to get two points for making me look and I saw you like going like object on my police joelle creative life gets you're on but you're absolutely right doesn't want to be that guy don't want to be that guy you just became that guy but it is okay I agree way could have done a smart dog the channel mixer versus black from white adjustment layer and moving those sliders were nothing like what's the comparison because I know you used to teach the black and white sliders oh you didn't using the black and white versus a channel mixer so this interesting because I find that black and white is a little destructive because you're pulling different tones and it's not quite as cohesive around the whole image so remember I talked about like the curve as you've been the highlights upwards the similar tones go with it in black and white versus channel mixer if you're targeting on ly blue what happens to like the science and the green that leads into that so for example if you have a sky right and you have like a really dark blue up top and it fades down toe like below in black and white if you stretched the top you had noticed like you know how you get banding in a sky that's why nowadays I'm staying away from black and white and just doing channel mixer conversions it's a little more it's a little bit more smooth and we get away from artifact ing and bad so this image is saved for web I can close it right it's already saved this's the earlier version when I was doing the next example that I'm going to show you actually comes from this set up and the reason why I like to show it is because it's a nice way of using two different conversions of the same raw file to kind of play with light and kind of paint with light so I'm not going to take too much time with my selection process here instead I'll just get right to the right to the effect let's see let's give this an example but first let's make sure it's sharp so why did I choose this selection versus this selection I noticed like her mouth slightly open so she looks more relaxed so I'm just going to use this for the sake of it if I would have come back and I go oh no that's not my selection I could always go back to the raw files so this one's also started let's put that at five star so we can find it later again the three things that I'm worried about in rock conversion exposure white mounds and sharpness looking at this face here um I think it's sharp enough actually with capture ones based settings if I slid that a little further I think we'd go on get some like banding and like nasty edges it's going to take it back more like its original setting um color balance is fine because we had a great card in exposure is something very interesting because exposure is great on the skin right now okay like everything looks good this monitor is kind of like flat right now but on my computer and what people are seeing tuning in is like on the skin it looks like really great but let's suppose we wanted to selectively brighton one area of the image people they're obvious choice might be doing like oh throw in an hd are filter okay but what happens with that is it makes automatic adjustments for you and we want to be complete control of the image so I used a technique that I like to call manual hdr which is to say making two different versions to different exports of the same raw file oh and then painting in certain areas of it okay so looking at this we're like this looks good on the skin so I could make a conversion of this but what I might do is also make a different conversion where I don't care about the skin and I'm just thinking about like the lighter areas so maybe this is an area where khun like paint in some detail down below on the bench maybe enhanced the glow of the light behind her so I'm gonna make two separate conversions of the same image and layer them on top of each other and reveal lighter versions below so uh normally for my work flow what I do is like I turn off all the settings right that I was tethered to all the color curves rights to try to like work with like the bass raw image so that can do things later those were all off sharpness we already adjusted color balance is totally fine so I'm going to export that tiff I can see it's already pointing to my working folder which is good so going to process that and then I'm going to change the exposure to make the exact same file to a lighter version and is captured one going to crash yes it is it is eric had a question just a minute ago so back to eric it is a different question but so let's say you had four of like this shot just different looks from her when you get in the photo shop are you going to you know always manipulate each of those different uh mass differently are you goingto like maybe save an action for one because you know it'll apply to all four photos if I'm doing this this technique which I'm going to teach or or the scharping thing so I missed that that part of the questions I just after you get it into photo shop so let's say you have this photo same but you had four consecutive shots that you're going to take in the photo shop are you going to go in and not regard to sharpening but just once you're in there you know you're going to do work on one and you know that that work well played all of them yeah so what I might do in that case is making action but remember with with with an action you can insert us certain stopping points right so let's say I did make an action to at least set up those layers so I wanted to so let's suppose that um I wanted to make and on action with different stopping points right what I could do is when I do generate that curve layer that adjustment layer and a stop and I can play with the tones and hit okay and then it continues from there so what the action is doing is building all the adjustments and things that I am working with but it's not doing the individual contrast because that's going to change on image to image if they're all from the same set the default settings would apply and and just look at it and say like okay that's great if not all of insert the stops does that answer your question it does cool so let's so that so let's resume what what we're doing here again what we're going to do is okay we're going to open up two different versions in capture one I'm going to clear this batch here and just do it from scratch so let's see what's going on here let's make sure everything is still good okay sixteen bit one hundred percent quality saving it to the working folder it's gonna automatically open and photoshopped let's make sure this is going good now I'm going to make a conversion where we lighten this image up but I'm not really worried about her skin in this example right so I'm going to drag this exposure slider and I'm just thinking about like maybe this background maybe like some details on this couch that I want to selectively lightened like maybe the boots is all draw from the original raw file okay for reason why I won't in photo shop just like dodging bring this is because we're dodging and burning something which has already been converted from the raw file we're pulling and bending pixels it's a destructive path so if we want to draw from the original raw file we could get a lot more detail and a lot more things that are gonna hold more detail more shadow and highlights so let's making conversion of the same image which is around here and let's open that in photo shop as well so we have these two files kind of like sitting together here it is okay opening photo shop so looking in photo shop we have this version which is the darker version and then we have this version which is our lighter version so what I'm going to do now is determine which of these images do we want to use the most of and I'll drag that on top of the one we want to use less of so looking at this I no like this is the image where I want most of the things from so I will dragon on top of the lighter version create a layer mask so I can paint and reveal below so we're sort of like setting up our own custom tools to paint with light okay so getting this image I can use the move tool I can do this always shortcuts also copy paste move over over here but just for the sake of the lesson let's move it over so you can be a complete amateur and do amateur hour and use the move to like this and like try to find it and place it on top uh not gonna happen instead what you can do is hold shift get the move to a dragon on top on photoshopped automatically places it where should go so just as we did when we were sharpening we can create a layer mask on this top layer there it is down below okay it makes this nice little like white square here and anything that I paint on there with a black brush is gonna expose that lighter layer below right so look at us there it is so we're kind of like painting with light now we set up like a custom brush which we could do anything so typically when I'm doing this kind of like painting with light technique I want to use like a nice feathered edge right cause I don't want to see like where my brushstrokes are so in the painting box here in the paintbrush box I'm going to turn the hardness down to like zero percent and get like a pretty large brush again I could do this with like short caused but just so people can follow along is like now instead of that leg line I could like paint and have like you know some nice feathered edges so they can also just the opacity I'm going to put it down to like say like fifteen percent right just have really subtle brushstrokes and anything that I paint is going to reveal that lighter layer below so let's pretend like we wanted to increase the intensity of this lamp right and we want to pretend like there's more light coming from here I just got this brush and kind of like painted in right and see how I'm kind of like lightning all the shadows but it's not it's not as destructive as dodging and burning because we're not bending pixels withdrawing from the original raw file the best case scenario would be getting in camera okay because then you're not doing any adjustments as we increase exposure of the raw file it does too great qualities to some extent be bested thrown the bt dish in that area but we can't go back in time so this is the best option for right now so if I wanted to increase the glow of that lamp I could just kind of like pain away be very careful with my brush strokes with the white brush if I went too far it hit x or changed down here to go back to oh so I was paying on black press to switch the white brush you could hit x and we could like fill in the area that we've already adjusted so this is much better than like my old way of using like erasure tool like complete amateur hour like that old dvd you have that's a mess all right what years that from two thousand two thousand six do you wantto do want do you want to show it actually now it's embarrassing just yeah don't show it he has one of my first tutorial dvds of all time oh and he's going to show up like like like like this hand written I was like how old was how little what I be in two thousand six if I'm twenty three now for two thousand thirteen I was young enough to not know that that looks like crap okay so again this area kind of fell in shadow here kind of pain away right kind of like selectively brining areas too much went on the hand we could we could go here let's say I wanted to get like really in depth in close detail and I wanted to kind of like see this couch how it we actually have a lot of detail but below we could go in and get a really fine tune selection decrease the hardness decrease the brush size right we could kind of like go in and paint this area of the couch on li toe add a sense of highlights to it this technique also works really nice on ah hair because you can add body to it and you can kind of like add highlights to it so we're just kind of like imagine we're painting with light even this hair here if we want to add a little highlight to it look at that there it is it's like we set up our own custom brush which makes everything look better same thing for the boots if we wanted to really work in these highlights in here could just go in and use like the same layer mask so what I would do if I was approaching spending time in this image I would just be working on that layer mass talking back and forth between the black and white brush moving things adjusting things and kind of give this like very nice painterly effect which doesn't look too doctored because again you're drawing from the original native file great joy well you are nailing it right on time here it's about time to go to break but could we just ask a couple of questions because I think we're kind of closing out this section the segment before we go the first one is you showed us again thank you so much in depth about howto save for facebook and how you work for facebook do you follow that same process for your portfolio online on your website or is there a soul in slightly different well my website is not putting any compression on it but what it is doing is is being viewed by people who might have a slower connection that ideo so even for my website I am saving at at seventy percent quality andi I am going in and doing the background layer copy smart object or not all right and I'm sharpening things every single thing on my website I'm doing that for all right first photographer who shoots maurin bulk it's going to be very difficult to do that but because I'm displaying you know only sixty sixty two images I think on my web portfolio I want to go in and make sure that they're experienced the way I intended them to be so I'm going in and doing that to every picture do you care how about watermark in the images why don't you and what's your thoughts on that so I think there's a lot of photography professions and specialists who should watermark their images for example wedding photographers it's great for their business because you can trace it back to who the photographer was because a lot of brides will share online and share you know the wedding and they get hired from it that way for me I don't want a mark images when you put them online because I know if I was looking through the frame taking a photo and I saw there was like my name in the bottom I'm like oh frame it out so I don't want my images to be viewed like that because I feel like it actually distracts from the composition so to go through all this process of making like an on an image and then for me to like throw my name on top is just something that personally I don't want to do so it doesn't bother me when people steal my images on the internet depends there's some like nice yoga facebook page that loves to steal like my holy man india siri's because we're like it's a tranquil thing and they write like a poem on top of my image in green comic sans find that bothers me a little bit right cause I'm like why is this here but you have to remember when you put things on the internet you're sharing it with the entire world so that's gonna happen the thing that I'm lucky about is that I have a lot of eyes that follow my work okay I have a lot of twitter followers so if someone did steal my image and was being used for profit right so stolen to be used in a movie trailer which has happened to me before stealing interviews as a background in another image which has happened to me before then I care but because they were so connected I'm going to find out about it so if they steal it as long as it doesn't devalue me as a photographer then I'm going to like I'm going to come after them but I don't want to mark things on my website

Ratings and Reviews

mc
 

Are you keen to learn about creating painterly portraits - as much in-camera as possible? Then you likely get how important lighting is. What you may not realise is how little a role photoshop plays in creating such effects: what such JoeyL like portraits seems to mean is: - thinking about portraits - what they are - how light creates them - how therefore to see and manage light "if you can use one light you can use many" - how to tune the image to create the output in your vision. Within this there are thoughts about photography as a business, workflows and data management. It's all remarkably accessible, too. Joey's teaching approach is calm and effective: he has mastered the art of the recap to make sure everyone is on the same page " first we did this; then we did.. then we did..." THe pragmatics of the course - the lighting/shooting sessions - are sensible progressions from one light (including using a flashlight and a foil lined cardboard box) to a multi-light set up. Intrigingly the lenses are limited no. of primes in the dlsr sections; the medium format is well motivated too, and clearly not a limiting factor for creating the desired image look. This course should get bonus marks for going above and beyond expectations on two counts: the portfolio section for people looking for work is v.well done in that a) it exists at all and b) Joey is not just highlighting his own work, but showing the work of others to allow him to explore options in presentation. Fantastic. The discussions of workflow- including data back up strategies - and image processing including print and web - are also sufficiently detailed and rational to be able to test out quickly. Delighted to see this work being done in PS v6 for those who haven't leapt to CC versions yet. It's also rewarding and inspiring to hear Joey say "i don't have a studio" Likewise, though Joey does work with a crew, it's clear they're working as a team and for very specfici purposes - all of which get costed into a budget. There's a lot of questions about the experience of shooting for a client - about the air of calm one has to maintain even if freaking out - to get through these points. It's all very real. WHile joey is clearly very confident about what he does, he's not arrogant, and the confidence is earned and reassuring. IT's clear he's an alpha kinda guy, a little competetive, and working for him (preferring folks who don't sleep - oh dear) may be different than attending a class - but this IS a class and his manner and way of teaching/organising/presenting work extremely well. Because the course is so complete, going not just from a to z but -z to +z it seems, these next bits are small beer: There's a rather surprising section with CL founder Chass Jarvis - but many CL courses have guest teachers bring in guests to add perspective. Here the section mainly demonstrates how gracious Joey is as an interviewer. And because all the other bases are covered it's no loss to have this business discussion of de-bunkings about how to get into this game. In other sections we see Joey as a patient guy too - answering quesitons it seems several times that had been answered previously in the course - while not everyone has tuned in for the whole thing, it's undrestandable why live questions weren't better filtered to highlight new questions - but Joey calmly will indicate as discussed before...and then give the answer. Never get the sense he's irritated by the repetition. While we hear his father as a strong critique his folks must be well pleased with how Joey's doing. This course has no extra materials - and that's ok: the links to the portfolios and software used are all in the discussions. Joey's blog also goes through a lot of discussions about gear lists. So head to his blog for supplementary detail. Overall it's hard to find a more complete course in CL on a complete portrait photography workflow. Scott Robert Lim's somewhat more frenetic but incredibly detailed 10k wedding photography and Joel Grimes Strobe workshops are also v.good in this end to end regard. But this one goes a bit beyond these perhaps in terms of vibe/cohesion (that may be unfair - it's just a feel thing between the three). Some folks label courses as "something for everyone" - i don't know if that's the case or if this case largely appeals to keen beginners who are exploring lighting and thinking about business thoughts, or if more experienced/pro photographers will be gripped by each moment, but my suspicion is that even for experienced portrait'ists it will be engaging at the very least to see how a fellow pro manages a shoot. Excellent excellent offer. With the guarentee, this is a no risk, slam dunk if commercial portrait photography (or painterly /cinematic and maybe earthy portraits) are for you. Thanks CL for bringing this together.

duane hodge
 

This guy is amazing, so easy to listen to, great personality and style; very engaging, worth every penny and more. Joey L. sparked my creativity and tied up some lose ends and misunderstandings I had concerning lighting. Creative live has some great courses but this is one of my favorites, thank you Joey I hope you continue on in your success and I love the end of the class when you said what is the worst thing that could happen if you fail. Great point of view, very encouraging, AWESOME ATTITUDE!!!

Vinh Huynh
 

I think this is a great class. You can definitely tell Joey L is a master of his craft because of his simple explanations. He's concise in the way he teaches, demonstrates, etc. The most important thing is his workflow or process he uses while setting up the shot, how he builds, etc - it's essentially a "checklist" of how he likes to do things. Something newer photographers need to know. He did forget a couple of the models' name here n' there, but I'm sure he met them shortly before filming for the day started, lol. This is something you should not do, but he apologizes and openly admits. There are times a couple questions are asked and he has no shame in admitting that he's just "openly thinking of what would happen," but does not know for sure because he shoots in a specific style. For someone his age (younger) who has penetrated this tough industry, you can definitely tell why he's successful - very mature with a great knowledge base. You can definitely tell he sees lighting differently from how an advanced amateur or even semi-professional photographer does... even in the introduction he talks about how important lighting and the quality of that light is. For those who are more advance, there might not be as many nuggets and pearls. There isn't any information on how he got into the industry, how he grew his business etc - with exception to how he feels you should display your portfolio in both web and print format. Overall, I think someone who's looking to get into commercial photography would benefit from this workshop. However, someone who's already getting paid and just looking to advance his or her own career probably already has the skillset that Joey L teaches and is best spending time just studying light. A little about me... I'm primarily a natural light portrait photographer specializing with families, kids, pets, etc. I'd consider myself an advanced amateur and I found this workshop beneficial. I hope that helps!!

Student Work

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