Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating the Teeth Whitening Action

let's get started creating an action. We have our actions palette open at the moment and down at the bottom of the actions Pallet. We have a few options down here. We have the option to create a new action which looks just like the ad new layer icon so we can go ahead and create that action, which is going to bring us up a, um, action little dialog box right here. So the first action we're gonna create is called whiten teeth, and we want to save this action in creative Live. All right. One of the other things that I wanted to mention and touch on is that they make this really easy for you guys. When in order to incorporate the actions into your workflow moving forward. What they've done is they've said you know what would make actions even better? What if we had a key right on the keyboard that could allow them to immediately run that action? They wouldn't have to go to the actions palette, scroll through the actions, try and find which one it waas and then select that and then play it...

at the bottom. We've got our function keys at the top of our keyboard. Let's make them usable in photo shop. So what they've said is, if you want to add ah, hot key to creating an action, you're more than welcome to do that. All right. And the even cooler thing about these hot keys is that you have the option to not only house one action for each of these hot keys, but you actually have the option to house four different actions on each one of your function keys at the top of your keyboard. So the way that you would do that is you would hold your FN Key function plus F one. To get one action, you would hold your F N key plus F one plus shift. To get a second action. You would hold F one plus your F plus your function key, plus command or control to get 1/3 action. Or if you want to smash the left side of your keyboard, you can just put down the function key F one plus Shift plus plus command. That's a lot of actions on one key, right? So So here's the thing like I would probably have a list going on right here on a little piece of paper. I'd printed out tape it to the side of my computer and be like, what actually thinks that so like, But But the really nice thing is, that is that you have a direct key on your keyboard for whatever is your most valuable action for you. You you have a key that you can tap on your keyboard and immediately run it. We've got a question. Can you assign that function later? Yes, you can. And can I also ask, does that affect your computer usage outside of light room? Or, um, that's a very good question. There is a and this is I'm glad you brought this up. There is a so on on Max. I know where it is, but I don't know where it is on PCs. So if you go to your system preferences. Oh gosh, I had this in my other notes. There is a There's an option, and I'll have to find it. It's an option in the computer preferences. It's not an option within Photoshopped. Uh, it's an option in the computer preferences that says whether or not you need to hold the function key while you hit the F one F two F three key as well. So if if, for some reason it's not working while you're holding the function key and the F one key, just try hitting the F one key on its own. And then if either of those don't work, I would research, you know, function keys, um, and and the settings for the function keys. Can you show us later how to assign those function keys after the actions? Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, cool. So the Onley last thing that we want to do here is we may I'm I'm a very visual person. When it comes to my photo shop, I'm super dyslexic. Hence why? I went into photos and, like, was a pre med major for, like, a hot second in college and then was like, whoa! Way too. Ready words. I'm doing photos. So So we've got our color here. Now, when you're in button mode, which I will touch on later, you have the option to actually highlight each one of your actions with the different color. So for this will just you yellow because we're whitening teeth and making them not yellow, OK, And then, um And then I'll show you where that shows up in in just a moment. So we've got our record button here. Usually would say OK, but for this example, it says record. That's kind of telling us that anything that we dio who I'm gonna unclip shift and unclipped command. Um, anything that we do after we hit record is going to be recorded by Photoshopped. Okay, so at that point, you turn off the television, you stop talking on the phone, use dot multi tasking, And there have been many times when I have been teaching on actions and I'm, like, trying to teach and then trying to demo and trying to teach that. Then I create in action and it doesn't work. So give me a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that I actually do know what I'm talking about. Okay, so we're gonna hit record. So if you look down here at the bottom of our actions palette, you can see that our record button, our little record button, is now red, Which means from here on out, photo shop is is taking notes on what you are doing. Okay, so we're going to do whiten teeth. We're gonna add function plus F one. You can see that the F one has shown up right here on our white teeth action. So that means that if we hit F one or function plus F one in the future, it's going to run that way in certain menu item layer. Okay, so the first thing that I want to do is create a selective color adjustment layer, and then I want to create a color balance layer as well, So will come down to the bottom. And remember, I said, I want to make sure that each one of these layers is actually named correctly. And so I want you to watch what happens up here in my layers palette as I as I name these. So we've got color balance of whitened teeth. One. Okay. Did you see that? Look at the note that was just created to the layer named the layer whitened teeth. One. Okay, so it's taking notes. Then I'm going to click and select on the selective color layer as well. And I'm going to name this whiten teeth. Teeth. Teesh. Too terrible, Speller. Okay, so we've got our two layers here. Now let's go ahead and modify some of those. Let's go to our color balance layer, and I want to think about color theory for just a moment. So a lot of people, when they're starting out in Photoshopped think whitening teeth is actually just brightening teeth but that contend to look somewhat artificial sometimes. And I think that's one of the top tell tale signs of over. Retouching is teeth that are very, very bright. So instead of what instead of that, I want to think about the opposite color of yellow on a color wheel, and that's like the blue colors a little bit. So what I'd rather do is just actually come into my actually my highlights section of my color balance adjustment layer. And I want to go ahead and move that so that it's a little bit further away from read a little bit closer to science and then also a little bit bluer and less yellow. OK, so that's my first modification. Alright, then I'll click on my whiten teeth to layer, which is going to be a selective color layer, and I want to choose from my colors. Drop down. I want to choose the yellows in the image. So what I'm trying to tell photo shop in this selective color layer is hey, Photoshopped, what you think is yellow. I want you to do these things to the colors in the photo that you think or yellow. I want you to actually subtract yellow from anything that you think is yellow in the image. Okay, And then let's just add a little bit of science as well. All right? And then, because teeth can either register as yellow in Photoshop or can register as white in photo shop, I'd like to kind of tweak my whites as well. So I'll come to my colors, fly out menu and choose whites. And then I'll come down to the yellows and I'll say, Subtract that yellow out of those whites, okay? And you can see these teeth without doing any bright ning without doing a curves adjustment that would brighten the teeth or anything like that. They're already looking pretty darn white, but so was the rest of my image. And so that's a problem. So the next thing that I want to do is create a group because, you know, there are some people that would think, OK, we've got our to whiten teeth layers. Now we need to invert both of those masks, and then we'll paint in the areas over the teeth. Well, that's fine, but that's not working smarter, Not harder, right? You're That means you would be doing the work on two different on two different adjustment layers, and you would be doubling the amount of work that you need to do. Well, like I said, I'm lazy when it comes to photo shop. Okay, so what I'd rather do is I'd rather put them in a group. So I'm gonna hit the add layer group icon at the bottom of my layers palette, and I'm going to choose, uh, the name and I'm going to name it whiten teeth, and you can see that my group name is whitened teeth. And then my, um my internal layers are whiten teeth one and whiten teeth, too. If I were to name the group and this adjustment layer whiten teeth and this adjustment layer whiten teeth, that would probably screw up Photoshopped, right? Because they would be like the note would be select whitened teeth. And then but there are three whitened teeth to select. I mean, you're just gonna screw up photo shop if you do it that way. So everything needs to have its own name. But we need to get these two layers into this group without clicking and dragging. Okay, so we're going to select. We can click and then command or control, plus our bracket keys and in dent, each one of these layers into the folder. OK? Did you guys see how I did that? You can see that they're now inside the folder because they have just indented themselves. Okay, Now we want to hide this effect from the entire image. And the way that we could do that is selecting our group and then holding down option or Ault as we click the add layer mask button. And then immediately, I don't know if you saw over here, but all of that blue tone just disappeared from the image because it's all being hidden by this black mask. Okay, great. We have one last step for this action. If you were working on an image that has a bunch of different, um, that has a bunch of different layers. And you want to make sure that the that the action that you create isn't you don't want to go searching back through your entire layers palette defined this folder that we're creating. We wanted to just automatically go to the top of our layers palette so that we can immediately access it and paint in our white teeth. So the way to do that, if you were working in regular photo shop and you weren't creating an action, the way to do that would be to go to layer up here at the top and then choose a range. No, it's great out. So that means we're not gonna be able to access it this way. All right, So if it's great out here, my second option is to come into my little fly out menu from my actions palette and then choose insert menu item. And then this little box comes up That says, which menu item would you like to insert into your action? Well, thank you, Photoshopped. Yeah, I want to do What did I say? What was a layer arranged and all of a sudden it's now not great out So now we can use it because we're telling the action that we want to include a menu item and we want to choose to bring this to the front of our of our, um, layers palette, so that will bring it to the top of our layers palette. So we'll go ahead and press OK, all right, And now we're done. Let's go ahead and press stop and we are done with our action. So let's see how many steps is 123456789 says about 20 different steps, all to create a whitened teeth action, which nobody would ever want to do that by hand. Every single time they they want a white teeth in the image. They want to be able to just click one button and have it be done. Okay, let's go ahead and, um, and actually paint. Let's, Here's the moment of truth. We're going to delete all the work that we just did. We've got our background layer here. We've got our white teeth layer here. I'm going to click on our white teeth action that we just created, and I'm going to press play alright, for some reason, this did not. Oh, don't you love Photoshopped? This did not go ahead and be indented into our folder. Technical difficulty. I wasn't I wasn't being bad to you. Promise? All right, well, this is something I wasn't planning on teaching you, but I will go ahead and teach you that. Now, this is editing on action. All right, so we've got our action that we just created that didn't work. Okay, so what we're going to do now is we're going to keep going. All right? So we've got her action. We have everything. We don't want to get rid of anything that we did. We just want to make sure that it does what we want it to dio. So let's go ahead. Let's click on the last step that we have done, and then we're going to click back on record, and then we're going to make sure that we click and select the right layer and then commander control plus bracket keys. See, this is what happens when I talk too much, and we indented it back into the folder where it belongs. And all of a sudden it's not visible here. Let's Go ahead and press stop Now. Let's see what happens. Whiten teeth too. I'm sorry. Whitened teeth press play and there we go. Now take the photo shop. God's all right. Now, all of the work that we did has now been hidden behind this black mask of the group. All right, you see that? So got our teeth over here. We're going to click on our whiten teeth. Black mask of our group. Use the B for Teoh Access the brush tool. We're going to make sure we're painting with 100% opacity. 100% flow and let's go in. Now, this is the portion that's important to, um that that needs the human eye for okay. This is why I didn't include any free hand painting into the action because that kind of stuff is going to be different on every single image. And so if it works on one image, that kind of action is not gonna work on anything else. So we are painting with Let's see, I think we're painting with white. All right, let's try. There we go painting with white on a black mask. All right, so I painted the teeth So that's all that I want to be be responsible for doing. I want to be responsible for my brain, saying That's where the teeth are in this image. I don't want my brain and to be responsible for these steps, right, because Photoshopped can do it for me. Okay, so of course, this is way too bright. Okay? Those air like Cem, some some neon teeth. So what we can do? The reason why I like to go overboard when creating inaction is so that I wanted toe work on a multiple of different images. I wanted to work on a guy who's got who needs 70% reduction in the yellow on his teeth, and I wanted to work on a girl that needs 30% reduction on on her teeth. But the only way to do that is to have an action that really goes overboard. And then the last step, which you need the human eye for, is going to be coming down to the opacity slider of your layers palette down here and then just clicking and dragging toe where you think looks realistic. OK, that you're responsible for Okay, So 50% the kind that looks good. Okay, so we took the time to create a good, nice action. Um, and we ran into a few problems, but we still got an action that worked to write because we went back and we edited it and redid some steps because I was blabbing my mouth too much. But what's nice is we have this lovely action that we connect that we can then use no matter who comes in in the future. So let me show you an example of that. So we created this action. That's awesome. Yes, it did take us a lot of time to create it on the front end. But now, look at the time that you're going to save when your next client comes in. All right? Your next client comes in and says, You know what? I didn't have a chance. Toe by crest, White strips. Is there any way you could take care of a little bit of the yellowing in my teeth? You know, you always want to make sure that it's a request from the client. Okay, that's coming in. You don't want to take too many liberties as a re toucher after the fact going too far with the retouching, cause that's gonna make your clients feel that. So we've got our action here, and we've got our hot key. So what happens when I hit function key plus F one on my keyboard immediately? I mean, like, you didn't even have time to time me. It's all made for me. So I am. So I just saved five minutes. Okay, I've used this action now on this image, even though I created it on a different image. And now I'm able to use it on a completely different client, and I'm going to save that time. So that's the first time saving example that I can teach you guys. Whoa! Over whitened deaths. I know, but each person is different, and we want this action to work on everybody. So that looks good now a little bit more. All right, Cool. So that's gonna be our first, um, example of time saving for action. There's one other thing I just wanted to show you really quickly. Um, the button mode, because somehow I I lost out on that. Um, if we click over into button mode, you can see my white teeth action down here at the bottom and you can see this yellow and you can see your little F one. Uh, your little hockey right there. The while button mode is really nice, and it's visually pleasing. You can't create actions, you can't edit actions and you can't delete actions in button mode. So just keeping that. If you want to keep it there for most of the for most of the time, that's fine. But if you ever want to actually work on creating actions, that's going to be something that you would want to get out of. But mode. So we were talking a little bit earlier about maybe being able to edit the hot keys that Anak Shin has. And to do that, you simply just double click the action and that will bring up your action options dialog box. And you can then go and say, OK, never mind. Um, I don't use this white teeth action anymore. I'd like to have that valuable real estate of that of that function here of that hot key to be used on something else so you would go in and you would take that act that away and Then immediately, your F one hot key goes away. So just double clicking, double clicking on the action, not the name. And then you can add that back. Okay? Can you batch process? You can't. So you Yeah. So the way you would do that I don't have time to dive into that completely today. But let me show you how to do that. You have your file menu up here and where is automate? Oh, they're just just can't read. That's okay. See, I told you I was really bad with words, So file automate batch. And that's how you would take a folder of, ah, 100 images and you would batch process and you would say file on May batch he would say, For all of the, um, you want to play, what do we want to play? We want to play creative live are white teeth action. And what folder? We want to choose all of the images in this folder. Let's say Okay, let's go ahead and choose all of the images in that folder. So it went ahead and it's did that. And then you compress OK, and it will run that action through each one of, um, the images within the folder. Thank you so much. And is it possible to run more than one of those actions at the same time? In order to run that, you would have to create an action that says Play whitened teeth Action and then play Shark pixel portrait in a pinch action so you would create an action that has multiple actions in it. That's a really good question. Um, and then, yeah, stay tuned with the portrait in a pinch at the end, because that's kind of what I did for that.