Skip to main content

Adjustment Brush and Auto Mask

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop 101

Ben Willmore

Adjustment Brush and Auto Mask

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop 101

Ben Willmore

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

7. Adjustment Brush and Auto Mask

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Adobe Bridge Basics

27:08
2

Sorting Images in Adobe Bridge

29:24
3

Processing Images in Adobe Camera Raw Part 1

29:42
4

Processing Images in Adobe Camera Raw Part 2

34:57
5

Image Processing Q&A

08:13
6

Contrast and Color

18:15
7

Adjustment Brush and Auto Mask

16:19

Lesson Info

Adjustment Brush and Auto Mask

Doesn't look very good let's see if we can make it look better first, would you agree that the whole image needs to be darker any time is the whole image you grab the slot exposure yeah, he got it and you bring it down and tell the vast majority of the image looks the way you want there might be one area that's blatantly getting too dark is long is not the vast majority were trying to get the vast majority, so I'm gonna bring it down until I think the vast majority starting to look ok and for me I'm thinking right about there because in my brain I'm thinking I have a slider that controls the dark stuff shadows so I know I can get to those dark things, so I did that then I'm going to say shadows because that's the dark part of the picture I think is a little too dark there where the ice burgers so I'm praying that out and that's interesting, but when I shot this it was like at sunset and can you see a hint of yellow coming out over here and you see a hint of the reflection here but it d...

oesn't feel like it, so if you look at the sliders over here, you see where yellow is I'm going to see what happens if I push us away from blue and towards yellow now we lose it in some of the iceberg as the expert was nice being blue but but we're starting to get oh not that far boo out there let's move the other one um I'm not sure but let's just see that's weird oh I'm starting like that I know if you do or not now I want the color to come out more and we have two sliders for that one of them works mohr on melo colors which means the stuff up here that's somewhat mellow compared to over here where it's so easy to overdo that and that would be vibrance now you can overdo it then I would say over done photos um sell well in but photographers will complain about if you sell your pictures two photographers then listen to photographers if you don't sell your pictures to photographers, listen to clients people to buy your pictures and something by ridiculous looking stuff I don't want to see if I get the sky little darker let's bring down our highlights see if we can do that only a little bit, but we can you miss your the blue in the iceberg that we could bring it back though I'll show you ah, and then I'm gonna bring up clarity to get a little of the details of pop so what I have right now is I'm liking what's going on with the warmth what I'm not liking is the iceberg and that's because everything we've done affects the entire picture in general the on ly way we've been able to isolate something up until now is based on brightness we pretty much had a shadows and a highlight slider in the isolated bright and dark stuff well there are ways to isolate areas in your picture in other ways we can even paint on the image and do it so I'll just give you a hint of this what we could do it more in another session and that is at the top you know all those tools across the top so far we've only used these things presuming in and out who is that thing which was for clicking on things that should be a shade of gray should have no color really in saying make them so and it really when you use that eyedropper it affects the entire picture it just says based on this area we're going to measure what's wrong with the picture here where they're supposed to be no color therefore what color is showing up that's what we have too much of uh anyway we used to crop tools we haven't used two of those uh this is for level in your picture and then um we haven't used this guy we're here let's try it that's the adjustment brush the adjustment brush when you choose it changes what you see on the right side it changes it, so we have a limited set of slaughters. We don't have a cz many sliders, as we had when we were adjusting the entire picture, but this allows me to paint on my picture a particular adjustment. First I load up my brush by moving these sliders. I'm just going to guess what I want, because right now, if I paint, nothing will happen because all these sliders air zeroed out and I'm asking for no change, but when I move one of these sliders, nothing happens to my picture because I haven't painted it in yet. But if I move this this way to say go away from yellow in towards blue, then when I paint it's going to shift things towards blew away from yellow, and if I paint on my iceberg, hopefully I'll get that. So now I'm in a click over here on my iceberg, click and start painting, and since the reflection right below, it is just like the iceberg, the iceberg becomes more blue shit in the reflection become our blue, I'll paint down here. Now I'll tell you more about how to paint with this, because right now I'm being generic about it in a moment, but for now I'm just trying to get some of it onto my iceberg, and then we confined tune what we're putting in by moving the sliders now that we can see where it's happening and so I can move this little temperature slider it's like, look, we got a blue iceberg and I can come in here and say, well, may bring out more in the shadows there's only so much in yet but it could try maybe I say, since we brought down the highlights everywhere else let's bring him up in the iceberg, see if it does that help the highlights come out just a little let's just try contrast. Who knows? Just move it, see if it helps. Okay, but now I'm starting to get a blue iceberg within the that sunset, right? So this is the adjustment brush you get to it at the top of your screen right there. You guess at what kind of adjustment you need, knowing that you can always change it after you paint so you just move a slider so just so you'll see something at the moment you click and drag so usually overdo it so you can easily see it once you've painted on your picture than you confined to know what it is and move all sorts of sliders hack I moved a bunch of them here let's see if the tenth slider helps like that and so let's just look a little bit about that brush did you notice that I had a brush like this? I clicked here, but it got no over spray under the sky even though I let that brush the circle of the brush overlapped the sky well, usually I would being lazy, so but if you look at my brush you see across here in the middle that's because there's a setting that's automatically turned on when you first have photoshopped installed, but we'll remember what you used last so yours might not be on by default and that is one called auto mask in auto mask. What it does is when I paint with this brush, it looks at the color that's underneath that cross hair in the middle of my brush and says on ly get the paint on that colored stuff and if the color dramatically changes its something else, stop adding beyond that. So what this long is that cross there was touching the iceberg it knew not to go beyond the iceberg and hit the sky because it was automatically trying to constrain where the paint was going to whatever looks similar to what's underneath the cross there had I let that cross there ever touch the sky, it would have suddenly gone on to the sky in affected the checkbox I'm talking about is at the bottom of these sliders right down here bottom asked if that was turned off then when you paint, you just paint meaning if I get on the sky, you see it's affecting the sky, even if I didn't get the cross here on the sky, if I just got part of the brush up there, it would have been getting over spray into that it's only because the checkbox called auto mask mr non, that it limited it to that and I to be very careful to not allow the cross here to touch anything but iceberg. And it only worked on this image, because not much else in the picture looked like the iceberg. If there was something in the background that looked like the iceberg and color, it would have been affected had I got over brown so that's auto mask. Now the bottom there's a check box here called mask if I turned on it will show me what part of the image is being affected so I can see did I get the whole iceberg to that get areas I didn't want to get? Uh, and so I got some areas out here it might not have wanted get some areas out here I might not have wanted to get, and there are choices up here there's a choice called new that means created new adjustment, meaning I'm done with this one I need to adjust a different area so I'm not going to that the default is ad, which means if I let go and click again, just keep thinking about this adjustment adding into more and more areas, but then there's a choice called a race, and that means let's take it away. So now I could choose a race, and I'll get it over there and say get it off of that stuff. And if auto mask is turned on, it will try not to get over spray beyond what looks like a zoo underneath the cross hair. Yes, usually I'd be zoomed up, but I'm being lazy right now because we have a limited amount of time. You come up here and say, I can see just a hint of green covering the water I'll see if I can get it off of there. Yeah, that kind of thing, but that's a check box called mask to let you actually see the area that you are affecting and there's a little thing next to it. If you clicked on that, you get a color picker where he'd change the color that's used for the overlay because if this was green grass, green overlay might not be useful s so you could change it, turn off the mass check box, that overlay goes away. This little pin that's here represents the adjustment cause you can have more than one on your picture, and so you might see more than one of those sometimes, and the one with the black dot in the middle is the one you're actively working on the other one's would just have no don and there's a check box here called overlay, and that means should those pin show up, they might still be there is just we're gonna hide them because they're distracting that's what overlays? So there are all sorts of things we could do with the adjustment brush, and we can spend more time with that later, so there are a limited amount of sliders here. Not everyone that we had for the main image is available here, but you can see how if you get one particular area where you really don't like it, pink paint on it. So in the picture with the horses and like to blue, I could spend on the horses, just shift them, not forced the entire picture to be done, uh, or if I needed to bring up the shadows on ly in the horses and it didn't look good on the rest of the picture adjustment brushes where I go to for that. Questions? Uh, yeah let's see, we've got some fab fab one and five having one other person also want to know what if I want to change the clarity just on the grass and not on the horses and this is exactly how you do it you just painted in. Yeah, and what what's really nice is that, um you can also let's say you up the clarity on the entire picture tow plus twenty everything's popping plus twenty if you go to the adjustment brush and set its clarity setting to negative twenty all you're doing is removing the plus twenty that is on the entire picture from wherever you paint because plus trainee minus twenty equals zero makes us so if there's some anything they've got over done in a particular area just set the adjustment rust toe a negative number that is the same as what I was being applied to the whole image and you're pretty much on doing so in this particular image. For instance, I might not have liked shifting it way over to blue where the sky is, so I grab my adjustment brush remember double clicking on these sliders resets them, zeros them out so anything I didn't want to change I could and I'm going to say let's not take the fact let's move it this way with sky's make sure oughta mask is on yes I might have bumped the mountain there. I'm trying not to let the cross here hit the the mountain and I might have bumped in one spot. If so, I should have chosen undoing. We do that because I'm usually more careful in this really quick do you have to undo in that moment? Or can you go back? You could choose a race and then go back and paint over the area that you didn't mean to do it, but if I chose undo right now, it would undo the entire paint stroke that I did because I never let go of the mouse button when you let go that's a step you could undo kind of thing buddy fight noticed it afterwards with one little chunk that needed to be undone. I simply choose a race and erase it off of that area. So now since I've isolated the sky, I can see what is the best white balance for the sky. Oh, I actually like it way over here. Uh like that, maybe I want more contrast in my sky, okay, that kind of stuff, but you've got to be careful in this case, we haven't zoomed up real close to be absolutely certain you do need to do that if it's going to be reproduced large, just trying to get you the overall feeling for this tool ben, how do you decide on which settings to change exposure? Contrast highlight shadows looking a specific picture set of trial and error we need to play with these settings what do you have a general approach that you take? Well in general, I try to fix the biggest problem first, and if I can't figure out what it is because sometimes you just look at a picture like this one I just look at I'm like, I don't know, it just doesn't look good that's what's wrong with it and there's not a look better slider, you know, we'll just try to break it down, knowing the more you know about how the different sliders affect your image, the easier it becomes because I look at this image and I go, yeah, I don't like it, but what's the biggest problem, what is the problem that if I didn't fix it? It's a throwaway picture to me in this particular case, it's the dark stuff is so dark you can't see what's there, so that means shadow says the first thing I do that's the biggest problem for me. Okay now that's fixed. Now look at it as if it's a new picture you've never seen before what's the biggest problem, you know, looks dull just yeah, well, maybe it's the color they're not much of it right? So okay, that might be the next thing I'm going to dio but I go for the biggest problem for us. I bring up the color now, it's colorful what's the biggest problem. It's blue well, what's the next thing I do let's fix the blue then I look at what's the biggest problem and sometimes the answer is I don't know. And so I'm just going to go try some stuff, you know, contrast. I'm going always try bumping it up. Bring it down. Well, I actually like a little lever. Uh, highlights may want to darken among you know there's just start playing after awhile but mainly effect do the biggest problems first. And if it's just a picture also, don't forget to look up at the bar chart if there's he see the huge gap on the right, whites will fix that now. It's starting to look a little bit more like a normal picture. There's a gap on the left. I mean, we're starring starting with this kid in here so far, so biggest problem first, then really of damage? Biggest problem until you get down and you either run out of problems, patients were time that's when you're done

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Files
Course Guide

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Ben, thanks again for this course. I have taken and purchased quite a few of your courses to date. I keep thinking I will only watch to make sure I am on the right track and you always bring more to the table than the last course. Your teaching methods are the best, sorry to all the other instructors from Creative Live, but you are very easy to understand and you speak in layman's terms so we all can understand. I am following your instructions and working along with your files and it is the best! It is hard to keep up with you even when I watch you on one computer and work with the same files on another computer, to do what you are doing...impossible but I gain so much by trying. You provide so much info on each topic, it is amazing. Thanks to Karen for the PDFs, she does a fantastic job and also, for her templates/layout documents. Thanks again and to anyone who thinks this is too much money for all the videos, the exercise files and the instruction PDF, I am sorry to say but you are mistaken.

John Taylor
 

Like all of the Creative Live courses, excellent training. Ben does a great job of explaining the entry part of Photoshop. A lot of things cleared up in my head and i like his easy pace into this complex program. Thanks Ben.

Dawn Butler
 

Ben, A note of thanks for a fabulous 3 day tutorial on Photoshop. I am new to CreativeLive site and just happen to stumble across your Photoshop 101 class online, wow I'm I glad I did. I've wanted to learn to navigate Photoshop for sometime but found myself becoming more and more confused and frustrated watching video instruction and reading various articles online. You have simplified the learning process by making the class material clear and concise; after 3 days I came away with a great foundation to build on in the future. Thank you!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES