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Building a Portrait Q&A

I kind of mentioned about green screen and saying that one of the advantages of green screen is I wouldn't use it day to day. But if I'm trying to speed up the process, I got to take 25. You know, athletes that are all gonna end up in some big composite image than in that case, something like that, or lots of kind of a production environment. Green screen has the environment. Now I'll give myself a small plug on a There's a website called you to me that has all sorts of classes, and I have a free class on green screen because it was sponsored by Westcott talks about the hardest part of a green screen. Photography is taking the photo, getting it set up. So it talks about where to put the green screen, the lighting and everything else. But here's the reason why you would might consider doing green screen. It's the Onley kind of extraction in Photoshop you can automate because the problem with anything else in Photoshop is how would you record like use the quick selection tool here? I mea...

n, you could record that, but every photograph is going to be totally different. So that was always one of the problems that was there. No way to automate the process of taking someone off a background. But if you have green screen, you can. But I'm still gonna do it in a way that I'm gonna have the end result be a mask. So in case it's not perfect, I can still tweak it. So I'm not going to bother recording the action. But all they would do is go new actions, start recording. And this is what I would record and let me add Always. I always do. Before we recorded action, make sure you have a photo open. You don't want to record that step. I already have a green screen photo open. I start recording and I choose Change the mode to L. A B color and then in the channels panel. See, clearly there's these various channels, and one day I was looking at that when I went to a channel that's weird the way L. A. B mode works. It describes color using this weird grayscale thing, but I looked more closely at and I said, Well, it's almost like a very vague kind of mask already because there's like dark and light. And I thought that might have some potential. This next step is crucial for this to work, you take the A channel and you duplicate it. If you did not do that, you would break your photograph because the next step you're gonna alter the channel completely. So if you altered the A channel, the photograph would look horrible. So then we're gonna go, Phil, use black in overlay. Remember, we talked about overlay way overlay mode Works is, for example, black will only So I always do it wrong the first time White the first time. Sorry about that. What white will do is it won't really work too much on this part. But on the lighter part, it will. So you see, when I do that, how See how most of a turn white. But there's still enough gray Now if I do fill again this time black overlay, maybe do that twice. 81 more white. Basically, I just made a mask, so I didn't. And this is all because I'm not painting anything. I'm just saying fill, fill, fill All those come be recorded as a step in action because it's not relative to anything. I'm not saying click here. I'm saying Phil and then the final couple of steps would be Load this as a selection. Come back here and I would also change the mode back to RGB. Take any selection tool and go refine edge, make a layer mask. So when you think about it, all those steps could be part of an action, because nothing in there was me clicking somewhere or painting somewhere. So I have an action that does that right up to the point of refined edge, and it pauses there. So if I had 30 photographs of people shot on green screen, I play the action. It would do all the steps right up to refine edge. Then I would refine edge, click OK, and the rest of the action would play up with person with a layer mask. I would say if I did 30 people, five would not have worked great, but it's still better than the altar of me doing it all from scratch because I have that mass there. The other ones I'm like, that's That's pretty good. The first time I ever tried it as an action. I was all excited and and I did a series of people and never about three or four that I was like, What? What's wrong with this? And I realized that had green eyes. So there were little holes where there I should have been because this action just says, I'll find anything green. And obviously it doesn't work if they're wearing green. So if you ever go do green screen photography, make sure that the team you're photographing doesn't have green in their uniforms. That would be bad because they have people with holes in them, so it wouldn't work very well. But I want to show that because I remembered mentioned in passing that I'm not in any way suggesting we should do everything on a green screen because it has its own inherent issues, but one of its advantages. The only way I've been able to figure out that I could automate extraction every other method is still fairly quick through the methods we talked about earlier today but still requires manual effort here. I could record that action and play it on ah folder full of images of the Lakota go. While most of those look great. This one needs a little tweak and then throw the background in and off to the races. So I want to throw that out there because occurred to me when I saw that image that that was something that could be useful because it is kind of a combination of is a bit of automation, But it also gets the creativity going where you can now slip a new background and try different things. Cool. Ready for a couple more questions? Surely fantastic. So Sam Cox asks. It's a freestyle question, Dave. Can you recommend techniques for reverse engineering or deconstructing creative images? Is a way of figuring out how it was done. Well, that's that's a really interesting thought. I mean, I think almost everyone I've ever met has some variation on an inspiration folder where you see things you like and you take that image and bookmark it or put it in a folder. I think that's half the battle is getting seeing things that you like that style. The challenge, I suppose, is someone who's really good at doing something in photo shop. It's almost impossible to figure out how they did it. Like I look at Brooke shadings work, and I know she uses Photoshopped, but I looking at it, I can't say Was that this technique or that technique? It was just That's cool. But I unless I saw her layers panel, it could go OK. But like, for example, she did something recently where came with the exact image? But there was like a funnel of black smoke and the people that were helping or said, How can we create smoke that's black just well, don't I'll just use white smoke and inverted Al Qaeda when that's thinking like photo shop instead of trying to somehow magically generate black smoke was like, Well, a smoke machine could make white smoke and then we'll just flip it around and it will look black. So the answer that question. I mean, I don't think there's any easy way, but the more you do it, the more you can kind of look at something and at least be inspired to go that, you know, generates a thought process once you know what Photoshopped capable of. Like if you see another photograph where things were flying around that look almost unnatural, having seen what we did today that will remind you well, they probably did that by building it in pieces. And then, for at least from that respect, you can start kind of freaking out how it was done at least a little bit. Before you go off the symmetry, I just wonder as How would you go about now getting rid of the green reflection on her hair? Right? Well, there's there's two parts of it. When I was, if I was recording the action, then again at that refine edge step, it would have paused. So I would have done some work in there, including maybe decontaminate edge. But if you remember the other, we're doing the compositing. One of the finishing touches was the way of trying to cull arise that green fringe where you go around you, paint with the same color and then change the blend mode. So that would be especially for just a little bits and pieces that if you looked at her whole jackets of gosh, I can just like to me, I'm seeing green in there. Then that would be more at a hue saturation adjustment layer look like these show you this part. People forget about this part of hue. Saturation is actually quite important. It's whenever you open hue saturation. It always looks like this and it says Master. But you can also say what I really want to do is green. So let's take the green and lower the saturation of the green. Then I can go in and decide so that that way, if there is any just kind of overall bits of green, you can kind of take that out a little bit. So hue saturation is very powerful when you not only use it overall, but start using individual colors and say, I want to deal with just the green parts of this image. Okay, I'm gonna question from diverse. Can you met? You mentioned a work around for burn and dodge with smart objects can explain it. Please certainly. Okay, so let's This isn't a smart obvious what will certainly make it one, as we talked about with other tools, There's lots of other tools where you can add a new layer. And then there's some control that says, like current and below are all layers or some variation like that. So healing, spot healing, cloning all those kind of things. And now the new past. You'll have that. The problem is, if you go to the Dodge and burn tools, there isn't one. So, unfortunately, there is not that same functionality of saying dodge and burn using a separate layer. So the work around that most people have done for a long time, and this doesn't change The fact is we talked about the other day. It's not a live effect, so that if you change the underlying came a raw file that that still could potentially shift a little bit. In fact, in this case, it'll it should be okay on the new layer I'm gonna fill, and I'm just gonna tell it normal. But Phil, with 50% gray so initially were covering up our photograph. Then we change the blend mode of this to the to the most well, using their soft light or hard, like either one of those is like, says anything that's grey. Don't show it. So we basically added a great layer. But because we're in soft light mode, we're not seeing any of the gray. And then that what throws people off is you don't use the Dodge and burn tools anymore. Use the paintbrush. What you do is you take your brush, do it big so you can see I would usually lower the opacity down fairly dramatically, so it's not too obvious too quickly. Normally, I'd probably use like 20 to 30% and a little higher. Today's you can see. So now, as I'm painting with Black Sea, it's actually burning to the equivalent of burning if I swap and paint with white is to an equivalent of dodging. So what we're doing is if I change the blend mode back to normal for a second, you can see that I'm actually just painting with different shades of white and black, which is the equivalent of dodging and burning. If you compared side by side. It's not absolutely identical, but it's very, very close. And this is certainly the Onley or the simplest way to be able to keep the underlying layer smart and get the effect that you want by. Um, sorry one A soft light. Um, so it's not as edit herbal, because now, if I want change, mine had to go back and paint over. Something was already painted, but it's better than the alternative of having to rasa rise a smart object. Cool, that's fantastic. Before I let me just have one more point. Let's clarify for the purpose of demonstration. I used a higher brush opacity so you could see it. Normally I go quite low, like 20 or 30 and that way I'm kind of gradually burning and dodging as what's going well. That was a lot. So I sometimes when I'm demonstrating, I like to use higher numbers, so it's more obvious, but I wouldn't use numbers that high. And would you have your ash actual brush on multiply or normal? Normal they Whenever you're on a layer like this, I want to be normal because I'm letting the black or white be the part that's making the effect that you want.