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Essential Adobe Photoshop Adjustments

Lesson 16 from: Adobe Photoshop 101

Ben Willmore

Essential Adobe Photoshop Adjustments

Lesson 16 from: Adobe Photoshop 101

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

16. Essential Adobe Photoshop Adjustments

Next Lesson: Flat vs Layers

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

Essential Adobe Photoshop Adjustments

Mentioned with this if I ever show you an adjustment and I applied for my entire picture and the picture look bad to begin with I should be making that change in camera if I ever do it here I need to use something to demonstrate how the adjustments work in photo shop but if it's the entire image that has an issue and it needs the picture just looks bad it should be done in camera I only go into photoshopping do things when it's something either camera can't do or would be inconvenient to do in camera so let's see what kind of changes we can make adjustments weaken dio what is nice about working in photo shop is that you can't work in that is that uh we don't have the limitations of camera camera has to be able to save all the changes that we make as text attached to the picture it's called metadata photoshopped doesn't when I open something in photo shop I'm going to have to say this is a jpeg file a tiff file or a photoshopped file format image one of those things and I'm not limited ...

by just saving in his tax and therefore I'm not limited in overall and so if we go over here to our image menu we choose adjustments we got a whole bunch of adjustments most of these adjustments duplicate a lot of the things we could do in came a raw but often will do it in a slightly different way when they present you with a different interface sometimes that's because we can do things in a much more advanced way here and other times, it's just because it's the old way of doing stuff before camera existed in anytime adobe changes something that's already existing they get yelled at because somebody's used to using whatever the old thing wass and you, if you mess with it, they're going to be pissed. They are if you're used to using something ten hours a day, suddenly you know, use it would be best to write so there's a lot of legacy in here stuff that feels old because it is, uh but it's still useful and stuff so let's, look at a few of the things we can do, and then the main time I come in here and use this is when I'm not going to apply to the entire picture. Instead, I'm gonna apply to an isolated area and that's when it becomes fun and that's what we'll start doing tomorrow so let's take a look first brightness and contrast simple one brightness slider that's a lot like the exposure slider in camera just makes the entire image brighter or darker if you ever have anybody tell you not to use this, they're used to a really old version of photo shop they're an old school photo shop for ten years ago brightness and contrast was a terrible adjustment that's why we have this check box called use legacy that should say gold school you know that means used the old kind there it was terrible. It was like you could make an image look terrible regardless of what direction you move this and when you turn off that so it's the modern version it looks fine when you move it this way it looks fine when you move it that way you know it's uh so if you ever hear anybody say that it's usually them used to an old version they never noticed that they change this but brightest in contrast is very similar to the exposure in contrast, lighters we haven't camera, so I'm not gonna spend too much time with it. Other adjustments that we have in here that are useful our levels you see a bar chart that's similar to the bar chart we've seen camera it tells you the same information where black is on the left white is on the right. So this tells me that we have a good amount of white in this image that tall that is, um and allows us to do various things with it. This though, is this slider here is like the black slider in camera this slider here is like the white slider in camera but we have them in camera so we don't really need to do it here uh, so they'd be useful to have that but boy it's much more useful to have this combined with the previous adjustment we had called uh brightness contrast where they're just sitting right above each other it's such a more efficient way of working in here we're gonna also gonna find other adjustments. One is called human saturation, which is quite nice and with human saturation will weaken do is we can tell it to work on a particular color from this menu let's say we want to work on lee on the areas in this picture that are blue so we choose blues and then we can adjust one of these three things about it. We can adjust the lightness and brighten up the blues or dark in the blues and it doesn't affect the other colors in the image or we can make the blues more colorful or make the blues less colorful even go black and white or we can change the hew hew is just a fancy word it just means what color something is. So if I change the hue of blue, it means it will no longer be blue it will be green or blue or yellow or I said blue in there uh, our other colors we can shift it around you might think well, that's cool well that's a camera we just get to that tab you want to see how that's done in camera? I'll just open an image in camera remember that all these little tabs that are over here well, there's this one right here that's called the sl tab and in here we can adjust the luminescence, which means the brightness of all these colors these air the same colors that you would find under the pop up menu that was inhuman saturation and photo shop where I told him work on the blues here it just gives me a bunch of sliders and I'd come over here and say let's, make the blues darker let's make the greens brighter maybe the yellows brighter I can't go to saturation and say let's make the blues less colorful maybe black and white you know it's the same kind of thing in here, it's just a slightly different interface is actually a better interface because I don't have to go to a pop up menu uh to see what color I'm working on. So anyway, we have a similar functionality, but the one in photoshopped can actually go further and we'll see that when we get a little bit deeper into it so with these adjustments it's going to be a lot of repetition between this and camera but using a different interface old interface with these more modern with camera and it's a matter of deciding when is it worth going to these the main time it's worth it is when you use something known as an adjustment layer an adjustment layer will allow you to work on isolated areas of your picture you'll be able to do it very precisely and you'll be able to apply any of those particular adjustments and we're going to get into adjustment layers tomorrow for now let me open an image that has some and I'll give you an idea of what they're capable of this image has had a bunch of adjustments done and if I turn them off in my layers panel and just show you the bottom layer that's our original picture then above the original picture we have a bunch of changes on top of it the first layer will talk about layers tomorrow is actually a retouching layer it's just getting rid of a small speck near the bottom of the picture you see just below the shadow of the log was a little speck and its removal is in this layer then we have a bunch of adjustment layers this one here if I turn on by train on its eyeball is adding contrast to the water not the whole picture just the water at the bottom then we have another one that's enhancing just log then we got another one it's a handsome just the sky and these air just built up one on top of another making changes to build up this image in produce its and result but unlike in camera, we're not limited in the way these replied with camera the adjustment brushes overly limited in how you can apply it getting it too wrapped tightly around tree branches for instance not the easiest thing to do it's not that it's easy in photo shop but it's possible it's more workable, more versatile but this is going to start looking a little bit more complicated these air layers though we're going to get into layers and depth tomorrow the main thing you need to nose in the case of adjustment layers or anything else it's always a ziff you're standing at the top of that stack of things that were shown in the layers palin and you're looking down and whatever's on top is doing something to your view of what's below it if it's an adjustment layer it's like a pair of sunglasses it's changing how bright were something else is about what's underneath? If on the other hand it's a layer that contains a picture it's obscuring your view of anything that's below that just like a piece of paper here can obscure my view of my keyboard if it's sitting on top of it? Yeah, but it's always if you're standing at the top looking down so tomorrow we're going to do is we're going to start working with layers, and we're going to start creating all sorts of things you'll learn how if you want to create little promo ce imagine that the gray bar that's in here at a picture in it where you created just married promo or a layout like this for each one of those square to be a different photo, another just married one where you'd have different images, this kind of stuff we can easily do this put text on our images, we can't do that in camera, we can't do that in light room, we need photo shopped for that you want to put a picture in that kind of frame can't do it in light room can't do it in camera, and so we'll start getting into that kind of stuff, and it all has to do with learning layers. So is compositing the same as layering to do compositing? You use layers? It doesn't mean that they're the same thing because a layer doesn't have to involve more than one picture uh, so when you're doing compositing, you're using layers.

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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.

Cecily
 

I had several "lightbulb" moments with this class, after many years of photography and when you think you know it all, you don't :) Ben Willmore is an excellent tutor, with his many years of experience teaching PS, he obviously knows the types of things a lot of us struggle to understand. I learnt a lot about Bridge, and have since implemented these things into my everyday workflow, so much easier to sort out what I want to keep etc.. Thanks so much Ben and Creative Live. Thanks also to Ben's wife for her amazing work creating the Guide etc. Even though being in Australia, I pay more for the courses (the conversion rate, the aussie dollar is low at the moment) it's very worth it to me. I have paid more for courses here, and learnt next to nothing. Thanks again.

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