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Lens Profile Corrections

Lesson 9 from: Adobe Photoshop 101

Ben Willmore

Lens Profile Corrections

Lesson 9 from: Adobe Photoshop 101

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

9. Lens Profile Corrections

Next Lesson: HDR Pro Part 1

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

Lens Profile Corrections

Out of those how many of the things that were needed to go from the before the after, haven't we talked about? So I'm going to just choose a few of these selectively and show you a few of the issues that we haven't gone through yet. That's the after I got a crab before one thing I should mention that I failed to do so do with earlier is there's, a keyboard shortcut where when you're in bridge, it will send you to photo shop without opening a picture. It just means hopes I didn't mean to go to bridge, take me back to photo shop or if you're in photoshopped, it sends you to bridge just think it sends you to the other, whichever one you're in, it sends you to the other one, and that is shift command o on a mac, that would be shift control o in windows, always for open. So when you're in photoshopped thinking about opening a file in the normal keyboard shortcut for openers commando, that would give you the open dialog box, which is not that useful because you don't get great looking previe...

ws in it. So you're just adding the shift key to the standard keyboard shortcut that's available for most applications that is commando for open you're standing shift, so shift commando I mean photoshopped sent me over the bridge refunding bridge when o man, I didn't need something from bridge type it again. I'm back to photo shop it's just one that's nice to know about. All right, so here we have an image that's crooked, and I might have also tilted my camera slightly and so let's see how we can fix some of those? Well, first off in the tools up here we have the crop tool right next to the crop tool is something that's supposed to look like? A bubble level might be the kind of little tiny bubble level you'd set on the top of a grandfather's clock and level it well if you click on that now, you can move your mouse and top of your image camera, click on something that should be horizontal. I'm clicking here the left side of the top of that building and then dragged to the right side and get this line that you're creating tow line up with that top edge and we let go, it will become horizontal. At least the cropping rectangle will be rotated until it's that way you're only going to see the end result when you switch out of this tool in over like the hand tool, well, what was still in the cropping rectangle in this case, I'm gonna crop out in you, just distractions. So in the top, you see the windows that are up there, they're black for the most part, dramatically darker than their surroundings, my eye's going to be pulled to those, especially if they're at the edge of your frame. Anything in the edge of the frame that's a distinctly different brightness, your eye's going to be pulled there. It's especially true in the corners. If you ever have anything diagonal, stand in your corners or I can't help but look so I try to crop it out here. There's just a slight detail on the edge. Some little badge that's on the wall crop out. I wish I could crop out that video camera, but I did have to cut into the building and I don't want to. But do you see this dark edge coming down there? Where it's like the edge of the building? I gotta pull that in and at the bottom. There's nothing of interest down here. This is what I would call dead space, and if it's dead space, I don't want a lot of it unless that's really part of the purpose of the photo is a primarily dead space with one little interesting part, but I'll pull it up and get rid of there's a little hatch down there. Pulling like that now when I move away to the hand tool we got that straightened out. Now there are other methods we can use this with because with that all it was doing was rotating the picture and what I had done was went to the tools up here the top it was this tool here that's the one that's supposed to look like a level that's got a little bubble of air in it that could see but that's not all that sophisticated all it's doing is rotating so I'm going to clear my cropping elk over here to the crop to a click and hold down on it's a clear crop and let's look at a different method we could use on the right side of my screen where we have all these sliders remember there's all these tabs and so far we've only looked at the basic tab there's a whole bunch of stuff in here it's really like a whole program it's it's robust what they have this icon here is supposed to look like the glass elements that make up the inside of your lens you ever seen a lens sawed in half and you can see the glass elements inside that's what that's supposed to look like a lens sawed in half if I click on it that's the lens corrections tab and there's a check box under there called enable lens profile corrections that's a good check box and turn on what happens is your lenses well cause straight lines and your image to become bent lines? They'll either bend in towards the middle of frame or they'll bend out towards the outside of the frame, depending on what kind of lends you have and that's known as pin cushion or barrel distortion. And if I turn on this check box if the lens I'm using is a common one look it's made by nikon cannon sony, one of the common brands, then adobe is tested most of those lenses, and what they did is they just pointed the lens that grid and they saw, how did the grid get distorted? Didn't bend inward on the edges are outward and by how much? And they created a profile. All that means is a text file that describes how that particular lens distorts things, and so they tried to come out with this profile that's simply described, how does your lens bend things? How extreme does that do it then by train this on it tries to correct for it. So I turned that on, you'll see a slight change in the image it's mainly trying to straighten things that were slightly crooked, and it tells me here what brand a camera it read from the meta data, the text attached to my file, what lens it thought it used, and then that it had a profiler description of how that lens distorts things, so just plopped that in there, if these were not filled in, I could manually click on it and say, well, you don't recognise what lens I have, so I'm going to tell you it was a cannon, and I'm going to tell you it was this particular cannon lens, and then it can use the associated profile, even though it couldn't read it out of the file somehow to figure it out, but only common lenses will be in there. One of the other things it does is it corrects for what's called vignette ing vignette ing is where your lens can't deliver is much light to the corners of the frame, as it can to the middle, where the corners or edges as you get towards those corners, are darker than the center of the frame, and so turn on that check box will brighten up the corners of your images to make them the same brightness is the center of your image. If that's a problem your lens has, sometimes I actually like the fact that the corners of my image, or darker than the middle, because it keeps somebody's attention towards the middle of the frame, and so there is a slider here called vignette ing. And when it's in the middle it's set one hundred percent, which means give one hundred percent of what adobe thinks is needed to correct for the problem with your lens if I bring it down, usually I would notice that the corners of my image get a little bit darker, but it depends on how bad your lenses sometimes it won't be all that dramatic about it change if you look in the bottom of this image when I bring it down, you see the bottom corners getting a bit darker, that means that's what my lens gave me and I put this back to the middle that's a corrected version now when they created those profiles, they only tested one lens of that exact model and you might have a lens that was made ten years later it's the same model of lens but it's ten years later and it might have changed since they created that, so you could push this even further into the positive, which means go more than what it thinks it needs to overcorrect for. You shouldn't usually need to do that, but if you notice that one of your lenses seems toe not get compensated for enough, the other thing is you could turn the distortion slider down to zero and that means don't correct for distortion I like that the lines of my image are bending outward or inward when would you want that? Well, if you have an image that was shot with a fish islands, a fish eye lens makes it so any horizontal lines as they get closer towards the edge of the frame, they bend more and more out. And when you turn on that check box at the top, it will straighten out a fish islands where there is no distortion. And you might have wanted that distortion because you like the look of it. That's. Why most people buy a fish islands, and if that's the case, you could turn on that check box and then turn the distortion slaughter all the way down and it would say only correct for the darkening of the corners. Don't correct for the bending. The lens puts it so just say no that's what that is so, in general that's not a bad thing to turn on. And if you happen to not like it when it brightens up the corners, just turn down the vignette ing slider to prevent that now there are other tabs underneath here for color in manual let's, take a look at those under the color tab. There is a check box here called remove chromatic aberration that's. Another problem with lenses. What happened with lenses? Have you ever seen white light being sent through a prism? And when it comes out the other side of the prison you get like a spectrum of color coming out divides it in different colors. Most people have seen that at some point don't like a science show on tv or something. Well, when you send light through the various elements glass elements in your lens a similar thing happens just to a lesser extent and so instead of getting the white light to be focused exactly where it is in some areas it separates a bit and you'll start to see it and some of your images I'm not sure how obvious it is here, but I'm going to zoom up and I'm gonna look he usually closer to the edges of the frame, we'll see it more you're going to see it as a color halo around the edges of things where there would be high contrast. Look, if you had a rod iron fence there's a black fence on I blue sky, the difference in brightness between those two would be tremendous and right around the edge you would see something now here is much more subtle in this particular image, but right here I can see a reddish magenta ish kind of glowy thing and right here I can see a greenish one if I turn on this check box let's see if they go away yeah, now if just in case you can't see it can you see it now? This little reddish thing? Unfortunate? I don't know how to turn this on when you're still zoomed up, but now if I zoom up, you don't see it there that's a check box that wouldn't be a bad thing to have turn on and pretty much every image, because when we do not want to get rid of those little colored halos, I never see that as being a positive think of my image is so removed chromatic aberration. If you've ever noticed little reddish, greenish or purplish halos around the edges of crisp objects, then that's the checkbox, right, they're designed to get rid of them. The stuff down below is, if you have further problems where even after train that on you, khun see purple were green ah, halo still left over. You could play with these not something we're going to get into in a one on one class, though, but just see her. Where then the next tab over is called manual and that's, where we khun try to correct for the fact that I've tilted this a little bit there's, an area in here called upright and upright, has a total of four choices, the fifth choice, and the far left means has turned off it's like a no symbol, the a stands for auto meaning it will figure out what to do without you having to really make any decision on it, but let's see what it does when I click on the letter a you see, I just tried to straighten the building and it's not going to just rotate the building if this is a building where I've tilted up in order to get it in the top of the building looks smaller than the bottom it's going straight in the eye, the building so the sides, instead of being tilted, we're going to go straight up like that. If it if it's possible, then we have some other choices because auto doesn't always do a good job. And so the other choices that are here, the one to the right of that will look on lee at horizontal sze in the building, and it will try to get them to be straight, and it won't care if the verticals air going in as it goes towards the top. But it's going to make sure the top on the bottom of your building thiss level because if you have a skyscraper, sometimes you want it to look like a really tall building. You want the top to look a lot smarter the bottom to exaggerate the height, but you want the top and bottom of the building to b level you want it to be killed off kilter so you could use that the one next to that is going to make sure only that verticals are corrected for it that they end up being straight on that's useful if you shot something at an angle but not shooting up of a kind of angle but off to the side and you want it you want it to look like you shot it from off to the side so that whatever is furthest away is smaller and all that but you want the vertical lines that air there to not be at odd angles so that could be useful or the last one corrects for both horizontal and verticals so that means get those verticals and horizontal is to be straight and on some images that look really weird eso you really got to try it out start with otto and if you don't like it then force it into one of the other ah settings below that you have a bunch of slaughters if you want to manually do things if I want to make this look like a skyscraper so it's really dole you know then you could do it manually here not something you have to use all of it all the time but on occasion it's just nice that it's there you feel wanted to tweak it a little bit like if I had a skyscraper and I don't want to completely get rid of the distortion going towards the top but I want a lesson it a little bit could do it there. So anyway, that is something that was used on that particular image to go from one that was kind of off kilter a little bit too when they felt more straight another one where that was used is this one if you look at this particular one, I believe there's a parked car sitting right where I want to stand if I was going to shoot this more straight on and so I'm going again go to the lens corrections tab remember that this one here supposed to look like a lens sliced down the middle where you could see the individual pieces of glass it's made out of and in there I'm gonna hit the letter a and it tried to line things up. I can try the others see how it could look weird on some of them if it completely tries to straighten things out. But if I had to crop this were all we had was this little plaque and didn't have the other elements in there, it might be semi usable, so in this case I'm just gonna start off with maybe auto now when it did that, you noticed how there's um checkerboard showing up that's your showing you where the edge of your picture ends and due to the correction that it did that's the shape your picture ended up turning up now we have to crop it. So I just grabbed the crop tool, click and drag on my image, and I'm just going to bring this in to get rid of the checkerboard stuff and get rid of anything that's a distraction like down here is a little element near the bottom. I'll bring it up just beyond it on the left side, there's a door over there and other things I'll try to bring it in to get rid of those distractions, there's even a shadow underneath that box where I could see a little detail in the edge, I'll bring it up just to get rid of that I always try to clean up the edges as much as possible. Maybe they're then I could switch to my hand tool. And so there's my kind of cleaned up uh, cropping of the image and let's see here, so just kind of rotated a bit, but I clicked cancel so we can keep the original so you can compare this with this to this and you say I did more extreme cropping on this one because this wasn't really I try teo, concentrate on what's interesting and if there's something that caused my eye to pick up my camera and I try to shoot it I try to isolate that as much as I can and so I'll do a lot more cropping than some people will but that gets it more down too just what I wanted and then once I get it cropped like that it's a matter of thinking about what's distracting the image can I retouch it out? Can I crop it out? Can I darken it? Can I make it less colorful or less detailed? And in this case this sign right here was so blatant that I didn't like the picture so I darken the heck out of it you barely see it down there that's most likely the adjustment brush I used the adjustment brush you see I just switched the adjustment rushing cielo circles each one of those circles indicates the separate adjustment and so if I come down to the one that is near the sign, if you just hover over it without clicking it will highlight what part of the picture was affected if you click on it, you're actually editing it then and over here you'll see what was done the highlights were brought down to darken them, the exposure was brought down to darken them, it was less colorful clarity is being applied to the rest of the image make it pop make this not pop so that type of stuff was done. If I hadn't done that, I'll just hit the delete key, it'll get rid of that adjustment, you can see how bright that used to be, then these little lamps they're up here. If I mouse over this one you see each lamp is highlighted, click on it, you can see a kind of adjustment and making I'm making it warmer more towards yellow. I'm making the highlights brighter, meaning brighten up so it's a little more light in there and add clarity clarity means make it pop and if I were to get rid of that by hitting the delete key watched those two lamps at the top hello, dolly looked because I thought they were interesting elements over here you see an area highlighted a click on it that's bringing my highlights down in my saturation down mean dark and the bright stuff and make it less colorful if I hit delete to get rid of it. Watch the upper left corner it's a very subtle thing. They're hard to see another spot there also bringing the highlights down. I'll hit delete you see that bright spot just trying to get my attention away over here, it's a whole area now if you saw that little bar, but it was ariel left, this is also bringing the highlights down it might have been something I cropped out where I had done it before doing the cropping so you can't see much of it down here at the bottom same thing highlights and clarity and you see, it was just a little area down there where my attention was being drawn so hopefully that gives you some idea for how I'm using camera to, uh work on isolated areas and also how I correct for those kinds of distortion do we have any questions about that before we move on? Um rick stroh baba and one other person wanted to know with cropping especially extreme cropping don't you lessen the size you can enlarge the photo for printing compared to framing the shot you want in the camera? Initially yes and that's part of the reason why the camera I shoot with is twenty two or twenty four megapixels instead of sixteen that's one of the things that are higher megapixel camera gives you is the ability to crop higher megapixels means you have more pixels megapixel just means millions of pixels so if you were to take the width and multiplied by the height in pixels you'd get how many pixels you have total and if you have a million you have a one mega pixel image kind of thing it just means how much stuff you got the higher that iss the larger print you can make because he got more information or the more you can crop into it. And one reason why I like to have a relatively high resolution camera. S o. I have that flexibility.

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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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