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Finishing Touches

Lesson 8 from: Adobe® Photoshop® for Beginners

Lesa Snider

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Lesson Info

8. Finishing Touches

Lesson Info

Finishing Touches

So let's take a look at some of my hands down favorite techniques that we can do in photo shops. Now we're talking about finishing touches. Partial color effects, quick color tents. We've already seen how to do a black and white. There are several raise to do it that is merely one of them. Just to recap, open an image. Click the half black, half white. Circle the bottom of the layers. Paint on cheese, black and white. Adjust the ciders as you drive the sliders, the left. Wherever that a color appears in, the image gets darker if you drag the slider to the right. Wherever that color appears in, the image gets lighter. Pretty self explanatory. There. Just look at the colors and the slider. We had a question earlier in the day about how to make an adjustment layer effect on Lee the layer underneath it. Let's say this was a collage, and you didn't want whatever adjustment layer it was to trickle down all the other layers. The trick for that is this little button right here. So if you just ...

point your mouse to push up, tells you what it does, this particular adjustment affects all layers underneath it, if you don't it Teoh affect on Lee. One layer beneath it. Give it a click, and it clips that are groups it to that layer. So that was an answer to a question that was asked earlier. So now we've got a nice black and white. But what if we want to add a color tint to it? It's on My favorite things to do now is this little tent button check box. Give it a click. Photoshopped ads the most popular tent today, which is a C P A. Which is really graphic designers. Fancy shmancy way saying Brown, I'm graphic center, so I can say that. So here we have a brown tint. You're not stuck with brown to change the color, tend to anything else. Just give that little color swatch a single click and you'll open the color picker skated out of the way, so you see the image once again. But say I wanted to add a blue color tint. Will I need to tell photo shot What range of colors using this rainbow bar. So click somewhere in the blues and then, with this box over here, I can tell Photoshopped how lighter, how dark I want that tend to be so you can create something that almost looks like a black and white but with a hint of color just really quite beautiful. So that is just as easy as it could be again. Black and my adjustment layer. Turn on the tent check box. If you like brown great roll with it. If you don't give that color swatches, click choose another range of colors and until photoshopped highlighter how dark you want it to be, Click OK, and then at that point you can even drop the opacity of the of the black you want 10. So now you get a completely different effect, so that's a super easy one that will take you far. One of my other favorite color techniques creative color techniques, is a partial black and white, so it uses the exact same adjustment layer of black and white adjustment layer. But we're going to use the layer mass that tags along with it to hide the black and white from parts of the image. You can also think of this layer masking business as you're cutting a hole through that layer so that what's underneath it shows through that hole. That's another way. Think about it. So let's go ahead and turn that layer off so you're seeing the original image. Now let's change it to black and white, so click the half black, half white circle. She's black and white. Adjust the sliders. If you'd like close at the property panels, you can see what the heck you're doing. Zoom in with a layer mask active, and it is. It will be unless you click somewhere else. Grab any tool that you can use to either paint with black. Or we could easily create a selection of these flowers and then fill the selection with black with a mask active. That would work, too. Another way to do this technique. Aside from using the regular paintbrush set to paint with black Sea as we paint, the original color shows through, and you can see my brush strokes updated over there in the layer mask with this baby's breath that's going to get a bit tedious and time consuming. So what you could do we'll delete, that is, you could start out with the quick selection tool, create a selection I don't spend much time on it because you guys get what I'm doing here, create a selection and then add the adjustment layer. And when you do it that way, Photoshopped feels in the mask automatically, sometimes the reverse of what you want. No biggie. Double click the mask, click the invert button, and then, if the quick selection tool didn't get your partial color technique, perfect this click to activate the mask. Now go in with the brush tool set to paint with black to conceal white to reveal. So, for example, we would want to fix this area of her arm, so I don't want to switch toe white to reveal the black and white on those areas. And yes, if I were doing this for real, I'd zoom way in and I'd use a T nine c brush to make it perfect. But that is the basic technique. So if you start out with the selection and then add the adjustment layer, Photoshopped feels in the mask for you If you don't depending upon what the item is, it's often times faster, just a hand, reveal or hand hide the black and white with the regular brush tool. So that's a fabulous, fabulous technique to have in your bag of tricks. I'm gonna share with you a dark edge vignette, which is another fabulous thing to do, especially to set off portrait. So I'm previewing the dark edge of in yet on three different images here, two of the King. It's in different forms. So here's the before there's the After I call that the Olin Mills Effects and Texas. I was trotted around the only Mills portrait studios my entire child life, and that's what they would do. They would add that soft edge vignette. So I'm gonna go ahead and throw away what I did. Go back to square one. So let's say we've opened a photo. We're gonna add that dark edge vignette with a filter, and you can run filters non destructively, which is really great. To do it. Try up to the filter menu. Choose convert for smart filters. Say OK now trot back up to the filter menu and choose lens correction. This filter is designed to remove the edge of a netting the dark edges that you can get when you use cheaper lenses. But designers are real quick to figure out that the same told that led to your movie. Let's you add it and it looks pretty cool on portrait. So once the style of box opens, click the custom tab back here. Don't worry about all those other settings. Find the vignette section. It's kind in the middle. Take the amount Slider dragged all the way to the left and that's it. That's really all there is to it. Show you that again on another photo again, I will undo what I've done here is our color tent. Okay, so there's the original image. The reason I'm clicking Rast arises because I'd already converted it for smart filters. I'm trying to show you what you would do. So click on the image layer filter convert for smart filters, and if your image was made up of multiple layers, just activate all of them before you choose. Convert for smart filters. They don't show again on that message. Now we're all set to go to run that filter non destructively. So when you do it this way, filter stack up kind of like layer styles, so it means you can delete it just the filter. If you don't like it. So trot back up to the filter menu. Choose lens correction. Click the custom tab, trot down to the vignette section, drive the amount slider all the way left. Call it done. Pretty amazing, huh? Then when you add a black and white adjustment layer with a tent turned on to that, we get this beautiful vintage look, which is another nice technique for you. The students in the chat room Lee Sarge's are absolutely loving. How you're showing things twice okay away. They've been raving about that, so it's nice to see it once. Then it really sinks in that second time. Thank you. So as you can see, a dark edge Vignette works great for product shots. T. So here's the before. Boring. There's the actor, the exact same technique. So that's a great one to have in your back pocket. Nominated to more, which were real fast. We're gonna look at how to create the oil painting we see back here that was taken in Palestine Hill with a wonderful 300 millimeter cannon. L. Siri's lens. Thank you. Lends protego dot com. It was heavy, though. Oh, Thor, was it heavy to haul around. Not too bad, Not bad. And you know, too bad that I wouldn't do it, but it was tough. So because this image was taken from so far off in the color wasn't that great? I was really hunting around for some interesting creative effect to use. So what I came up with was annoyed Paint filter. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete these other layers just to show you this one part of it. Okay, So here's our before. Yeah, Now he's a dirty these air, like 3000 year old wounds we're looking at for real. This stuff is 3000 years old. Can't even wrap your brain around that 3000 years old, Palantine Hill. So what do we do? I'm gonna go ahead and throw this filter away. Revert back to what? You might see photos of your own. So run the filter. Non destructively trot up to the filter menu. Choose convert for smart filters. If your image is comprised of many layers, activate him all first. Before you choose that command. Now try back it to the filter menu and choose old paint. Yes, Filter was new in CS six, and that's basically it. Then tweak thes little splatters to your liking. Depending upon the kind of painting that you want to create and that is it, click OK and you're finished. It doesn't get any easier than that. Okay, so again, activate the layers that you want to effect. Convert for smart filters. Go back it to the filter menu. Choose oil paint, filter oil paint, adjust the sliders to your liking and click. OK if you were doing this on a portrait, somebody that had a head faces like really creepy when you run this filter on them. But you get an automatic filter mask when you use smart filters, so this is just a layer mask, but it will only hide the filter. So if I use a regular paintbrush tool set to paint with black, go up and brush size, change my foreground color chip to black. Wherever I paint, I hide the effects of that filter. So when I do this on Portrait's, I hide it from the face just a little where I hide it completely. And then I double click the mask itself, and I dropped that density slide or so that I'm hiding a little bit of the paint strokes, but not all of them. This keeps the face from looking creepy. This is a great technique to save an image that you just can't correct the color on. If it just never really looks that good, do a creative color effect. Drop the color out of it. Do a partial color effect. Do a tent doing all pain. So now let's talk about sharpening my favorite way to sharpen. We find a good image, an image that is comprised of many layers. This is also a table Lee. I was trying to get creative with lemon tree in the blurry foreground and the the tower in the background. So what we've got here, I'll delete that layer. Is the original image like that? I added a levels adjustment layer that we've looked at earlier. I added a brightness and contrast layer to further try to tweak the lighting. Now I'm ready to sharpen it. What layer two I sharpen the layer is comprised. This documents, comprised of many layers when I want to do, is create another new layer out of all those layers that I can sharpen a couple of ways to do that. The simplest way is to create what's called a stamped copy, and you do that with the world's most awful keyboard shortcut shift command option. Okay, shift command Option E or shift control Ault E on a PC. And what do we have here is we have another new layer that has all of this other layer content smashed together. It's called stamping. Now what we're gonna do is use my favorite method of sharpening its full proof. It's easy. You've got one setting toe. Look at that's it. So now that we've created a new layer for sharpening and I would double click it and name it sharpening that way, you know what the heck's going on? Tried it to the filter menu. Go down the other again. You are thinking, but what about bitte? Bitte, bitte MIT, MIT. Zip it Other high pass. You've got one setting the mess with and you get this awesome preview of exactly what edges in your image you're going to be sharpened. Sharpening simply has Photoshopped look for areas of high contrast in your image, where light pixels meat, dark pixels, the actor sharpening simply makes the light pixels a little lighter, the dark pixels a little darker. That is it. If you sharpen too much, you make the light pixel so light and the dark pixel so dart that you look like you get a gap in between them. Well, this is full proof, high pass sharpening method. Don't ever go above four unless you're doing a really seriously over sharpening effect. So four under, I say four for landscape shots 1 to 2 for portrait soft things so forced kind of the maximum click. OK, you're saying, Well, that looks really great. Lease. It's all grey. Remember those blend modes we talked about earlier? How they change the way color blends with her, knocks out where they overlap other layers. This one you're just gonna have to memorize. Click that blend. No pop up menu trot down to overlay. So think of it as overlaying the sharpening. The's 1st 3 woodwork overlay gives you medium sharpening. Soft light gives you soft. Sharpening hard light gives you stronger sharpening. I tend to go for early. That's it. I'll zoom in so you can see appreciate the sharpening effects. Anytime you're messing with sharpening, you really want to view the image at 100% zoom level, and you can see that zoom level at the bottom left of your document as well as and in the tab at the top. So here's our before Here's our after What if it's too much sharpening before after drop the opacity. What If you want to hide the sharpening from parts of the image at a layer mask, paint with black in the areas that you don't wanna be sharpened? It's absolutely foolproof sharpening. Let's look at that one more time and then we'll take questions and we will. Absolutely. And at four o'clock, I'm so happy. OK, so delete the layer we made for sharpening. So we've got a layer comprised, a document comprised of many layers. If it's just comprised of one layer, just duplicate that one layer, but you're they're not gonna be this one there. They're gonna be a bunch of layers. So the world's most difficult keyboard shortcut to memorize. But the keys were all next to each other on a Mac or a PC keyboard. So shift option command mm. On a Mac for shift. Ault control E. On a PC when you do that photo shops Gonna look at all the layers and your layers panel is gonna create a brand new layer that contains everything on those other layers. Now we're gonna try up to the filter menu, go right past the sharpened category. I know it feels weird. Go down to other high pass inter four or less for for landscapes, 1 to 2. For soft things. You can even do decimal points. So notice how this preview is changing. Do you see the edges in the preview here? Those air, the edges that are gonna be sharpened. So if I don't want very much sharpening at all, I could go way down. This particular filter even accepts, you know, there. Oh, point decimals, which is nice, but we'll say 3.8. Whatever. Four on this one. Click. OK, now change the blend mode. Pop up menu toe overlay for medium sharpening soft light for less sharpening hard light for more sharpening. So she's overlay. If it's a little bit too much, drop the opacity and don't forget to double click that layer and name it sharpening so you know what the heck's going on on that file? Questions so cool. So go ahead. First Eyes. They're a difference sharpening for Web files because they're a different sharpening for Web files. That's a really awesome question, and I'm glad that you asked it when you re signs a file for the Web. If you've got an image like this, which is pretty big, that's only 33%. If I sharpened it now and then, I made it really, really small to go on the Web. The act of changing the dimensions so vastly like that will soften the image, so you would need to add or another round of sharpening after you've resized it for the Web. So if I know an image is going for the Web, I would save my master file of the image really big like this. Save it is a PSD, and then after I've resized it, I would apply my sharpening Then, so sharpening for the Web small image you're gonna need to use less sharpening because the more pixels there are the higher amount of sharpening you need Teoh cause something that you can actually see. So since Web images air usually really small, you would use greatly reduced values. So if this image were small going to the Web. You could probably get by with less than one sharpening. But you do need to sharpen it after you've made it small. Or else you're gonna have to apply another round after you've downsized it for the Web. Great question. So, Lisa was the sharpening questions. Come in. I have a question here from yo when I use the lens correction for vignette ing on a cropped image and crop parts not deleted, it applies the darkening on already crop parts of the image. Yeah, yeah, that's drag one fix for it. One fix for that would be too. Turn on the delete cropped pixels option and really, really crop it so that it, you know, with the delete crop pixels option turned off. You don't really ever crop, so that's what confuses filter. So that's one option is to turn off the delete crop pixels to make it really delete those edges and then do all that. Another option would be to do the same thing using a fill layer so you could choose the half black, half white circle in the state of choosing sought solid color for filet or choose Grady in, and you can have a black to transparent Grady int. And if you change it to radial in turn on reverse, it kind of does the same thing. You could play with it that way, so that's another option for adding a darkened edge. Been yet. But that is a problem with the lens correction filter. If your image really is bigger than your viewing area, that's where the vignette goes up. Another fix for that might be to create a stamped layer and try it that way and see if, if that makes the filter behave a little bit differently. Cool. Maui Photo would like to know. How well does the background a waste eraser work on backgrounds? They're not uniform. It works really well. You would not want to change the that many from contiguous to discontinuous the limits menu side. Leave it well, it is Japan's. You're gonna have to experiment with it, but you might leave on this multiple sample continuous option. So leave it set to that first little icon, their sample continuous because that's gonna make photo shop. Keep checking the color as you're painting around, so give it a shot with that it. It really just depends on the image. I know that's kind of a lame answer, but it just depends on how much contrast you've got. If you've got a fair amount of contrasts between the item you're trying to dally and its background, then the background eraser does a good job, especially on hair and fur. But if your background is not uniform, believe this, Icahn said. To sample continuously. If it is uniformed, then change it to sample once and then experiment. If you've got hair for you, gonna want this menu set toe discontinuous, and you probably have to do a lot of sampling of the foreground color as you paint around. So an experiment with the tolerant setting Teoh the picking this level. So I'm sorry if that's a bit of a lame answer, but it's so different. It varies. Image by image

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Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This is the first video of Lesa's I've used. My only complaint is that I didn't find her earlier. Absolutely love this video. Lesa's teaching style is clear, concise, consistent and entertaining. Currently I am using CS4 but have still learned so much. I plan to purchase other videos when this one has been committed to memory. Again it is amazing! Well worth the price.

a Creativelive Student
 

Definitely worth the price. Lesa's teaching style is very consistent and clear. She doesn't waste time chit-chatting and that keep my attention. Its great to have the exercise material. I'm on my second round through the videos and exercises. Practice is really key. Photoshop does more for me now than just beep at me. Based upon Lesa's topics I can now see examples and have a much better idea of how to achieve the same results.

a Creativelive Student
 

Definitely worth the price. Lesa's teaching style is very consistent and clear. She doesn't waste time chit-chatting and that keep my attention. Its great to have the exercise material. I'm on my second round through the videos and exercises. Practice is really key. Photoshop does more for me now than just beep at me. Based upon Lesa's topics I can now see examples and have a much better idea of how to achieve the same results.

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