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Lesson Info

Portrait Makeover with Detail Smart Brush

I can see at a glance that Oh, okay. Smart brush was used somewhere up here. I can see smart brush was used on her lips and I could see another one was used, you know, down here. So they don't marked the exact area that a smart brush was used on. But it's just a visual feedback thing letting you know there was one use and those things don't print. You can drive yourself insane trying to get rid of them. The only way to get rid of him is to choose another tool. Because while a smart brushes active and you're on a layer that was created by a smart brush, then you're gonna have those little icons. So if I choose any other tool, the icons go away, so there is no way to erase them and they don't harm anything. They may drive you a little bit crazy, but just remember to select another tool or select another layer and those will go away. Okay, so now let's take a look. I'm gonna close that for a second here. Let's take a look at this image and all the different layers that I created to make t...

his happen? So I'm just gonna toggle them off one by one. This one is actually called spray paint. You see, if I could make my layers pain a little bit bigger and it won't let me, so I won't try to do that. So this is spray paint spray tan. Actually, to me, it doesn't look like you're adding a tan. It looks like you're just smoothing out complexion. Okay, so you'll find some of the descriptions of these smart brushes aren't really exactly what they say. So that's often on in. The next thing I did was I I added some lipstick here. So there's the There's the before there's the after. So we added some lipstick purple, and then we also whiten teeth. So I'll turn that layer off and on so you can do all this kind of stuff with smart brushes as well. So I go ahead and delete these layers, and since I've got three layers and I'm gonna delete, I wouldn't delete them quickly. I don't want to drag each one down to the trash. So what I'm gonna do since I've got the 1st 1 in the list activated, I can shift click the last one, and elements will activate everything in between. So now I can click and drag from my layer thumbnail because you always want to get in the habit of grabbing them by the layer. Some nail and I can drag them all down to the trash at one time. And now we get back to the original image. Okay, so for this one, we're again gonna use our detailed smart brush because we're painting small areas and we won't want to mess around with the marching ants of a selection again. If your panel of smart brushes doesn't open, don't panic. Distraught up to the options bar and give the little photo icon a click. Now, this time, we're gonna choose the category of portrait's to kind of narrow down the various different smart rushes that would be appropriate to a portrait. Great expectations would not be one of them. OK, so you can see we've got a bunch of stuff we can do here. Let's start out with something that's really, really common to photos. And, um, that's whitening teeth. This is one of 100 different ways to whiten teeth, but it's a good one start out with. So we'll go ahead and give very pearly whites a single click to activate it. Mouse over to my image, and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more by pressing command or control. Plus, I use my space part and move around within the image, and I'll use the left bracket key to go down and brush size. And I already know that I have a soft edged brush activated. So if you are unsure, make sure to go up to the brush preset picker and grab one of these fuzzy guys. So now this is just a matter of painting over the teeth. And as you release the mouse button, your paint is applied. Okay, so I was gonna quickly go over all the teeth here, and sometimes when I'm doing fine or detailed retouching like this, I keep one or two fingers on the left and right, or the left and right bracket keys to change my brush size while I'm moving around with my mouth. That should be a little bit faster with that. Okay, So to see the before and after, I'm gonna move this panel out of the way and I'll just toggle the little visibility. I often on Siachen see the difference that we made. So there's the four and there's the after and again, you've got full opacity control by default elements. Thinks 75% teeth whitening is good. You may decide to change that question on the question so you can reduce the size of the brush wire actually brushing while using the tool. Yes, with the button down Do left or right brackets? Okay, yeah, exactly. Select. Yeah, So as you can see here, too, there's been a blend. No change with this layer. Okay, so normal is normal, so normal would be the default blend mode for the layer. But elements has chosen to change this to soft light. Okay, so that's where the the lightning is happening. And it's not a it's not so harsh as it would be. If you just put white paint on a separate layer, you know that would be overly Why? So what's happening here is it's the equivalent this blend mode. It's like shining a soft light on your subject. So you're signing it. A soft white light on those teeth allows the change to not be quite so harsh. Okay, but again, you can experiment with the with other different blend modes to see if you like something else better. The other thing that you can tell elements did here is that by looking at this layer thumbnail, you can tell what kind of layer it created to make this effect. So the whole point being you won't always use smart brushes, but they're a great way to learn. They're a great way to see how some things were done. OK, but you will learn how to do these things yourself. So if we know this is a solid color fill layer, If I wanted to change the color that that layer is being filled with, I could just double click. It's layer thumbnail and up pops the color picker. So using the smart rush is a great way to dissect some of these techniques. Oh, okay. I see how they're doing that. There are other ways to do this to, but this is definitely one. So if you didn't like the color for whatever reason the elements was using here you could just double click this layer thumbnail and shoes any other color. You know, if it's Halloween. Wanted Teoh something like that. Something awful s. So point being you're not stuck with the choices that elements makes, but certainly a great, nondestructive way to whiten teeth. So we could say OK, and we could pump up the opacity if we decided they were not white enough. And if you decided that, you know, I really didn't mean Teoh White in that area in there. All you have to do is grab the minus brush from the little floating palette or hold down the option or Ault key and then paint over that area to take it away. Or you could get right inside the layer mask itself and using the regular brush tool like we did earlier paint with either black to conceal or white to reveal. Okay, now, earlier, me Open up our panel of smart brushes here. Remember having were playing around with the make dull skies blue brush and I was telling you all that while you have a new adjustment layer activated that was created by a smart brush, and if you click any other smart brush from this panel, Elements thinks you're trying to change the currently active layer so I found this one out the hard way, so I wanted to add lipstick to my to my lady now. So I just clicked Lips Day and immediately Elements thinks you're trying to change the teeth color OK, or you're trying to change that one layer, so don't panic. Disco Click The one smart brush that you had just used to bring it back to the state that you expect now you want to click the image layer, just get on any other layer. Now we can come back over to our smart brush panel, Click Lipstick, and now, when we go over to our image and begin to paint, it's creating a whole another layer instead of changing the currently active layer. So this is a great way to add a little bit more color to your subjects, lips and again if you look over here in the layers, Panel Elements has chosen the blend mode of soft light, and the next question will be what if you don't want red lipstick? Can any of you guys guess how you might change that? What color? Absolutely. So I'll just try toe touch this up a little bit. Here, here we go, We're gonna call that close enough. So absolutely. Where's the color coming from? We'll take a peek in your layers panel. Logically, this is the only thing that's red. Which one is the color I was painting so it might make sense. Give that suffer. Double click a pop. Sure. Color picker. So now you can choose any color lipstick you want. So, for example, if I wanted something in the purple or pink range, I'd select the range of color with the rainbow Bar and then come over here to this larger box to tell elements how light or how dark I want that color to be. And then you can click, OK? And so you can start to see the imagine or the power rather of editing with layers. So you print this out for yourself or for your client and you think, Yeah, haven't know what I was thinking. That purple lipstick that is really awful. You've saved this as a native Photoshopped file. You pop it back open. All these layers are right here. And to change that lipstick color, you don't have to throw the layer away and redo it all. You have to do is double click the thumbnail. Take another color and that's it. Print around again and see what you think or send it to the client or what have you. So it's a very flexible way. Teoh. Edit your image, and there's a slew of other things that we could do to this image. As you can see, there's a bunch of different smart brushes, but they all work in exactly the same way. OK, any questions on that part? It was a question from Cheryl. It was just a little ways back, but she wanted to know. How do you get to the portrait setting again? Oh, great question. So always choose another tool. So we get rid of all this. So let's say I was on the move tool. I'll activate my spark brushes. And for portrait, do you want to choose the detail Smart brush because you don't want to have to mess with the selection of those marching ants. So grab a detailed, smart brush and this panel will either open or it won't. It opened this time so we can change the category by using that poppet menu at the very top of it. and that's how you change all categories. Now you could say show all but let me show you what happens. You get all of them and look how many different things you can paint on with a smart brush that's a little overwhelming and a little difficult to find specific things unless you knew what elements had named them. Okay, so there's all those different things that you can paint on with a smart brush, and every single one of these things will trigger a non destructive adjustment layer to be created automatically. And again. If this panel didn't open, you could just click the little icon appear in the options bar that you'll see while you have a smart brush activated. Okay, If you don't see that icon, then you don't have a smart brush activated, and you can just change the categories appear now, you will have to do some hunting to figure out what is in which category, just like I did to figure out that. Okay, the clouds air in the nature category, so you'll have to route around a little bit. New smart brushes. Will it allow you to change either change the settings that you have on effect or or create a whole different. You know, call it. You know, Diane's brush, whatever. That's a great question. I don't think you can create new ones. I believe you can tweak the settings of the ones that were there, but that's a great question. I can find that out. Thanks A question from Johnny E. If you change the mask in layer one, when you created layer to how do you update the mask in layer to that makes sense? Oh, yeah, that would, um, that would be a great situation for a copy paste in the mask. So the question is, let's say you maybe we're talking about duplicating the layer. So if you let's say you did two teeth players, for whatever reason, or he applied two coats of lipstick on two different layers. If you change the mask and one of them, the other one is not going to change. So that would be a situation if you didn't need the masks to be identical, that you could option or all to click to go into the mask itself. It's one that's a little bit creepy because its a mask of teeth then you could choose, select all and then option. Or also click the second mask to get inside of it and paste. So if you wanted your masks for whatever reason, to be identical, that would be a an excuse or a reason to do the copy paste thing. Let's have another question from Hadiya in the chat room. What if I want to increase intensity of the red? Say hot red color? Well, I use the opacity again as well you could. You'll have to see what opacity elements has suggested. A. Some of these are created at 100% opacity. Most of them aren't, though, so if we wanted the pain to be a little bit more intense, we could certainly increase. Um, the opacity of that changing the opacity in conjunction with double clicking layer thumbnail and actually changing the settings over here would get you to the color that you actually want it. You have to do a little fiddling. One more quick question from earlier, which was from MD wine. How can you lock a layer that is not locked and similarly, can you re lock background layer? Oh, OK, Sure. If you've created layer that you don't want to accidentally do anything else to. You can lock it. Your layer locks live down here at the bottom of the layers panel. Okay, so you can use the padlock right here to lock that layer, and that will keep you from doing anything to it. If you click that layer lock and then try to come paint on that layer or do anything else to elements will squawk it. You because you've effectively locked yourself out of it and tow. Unlock it again. All you have to do is click the same lock. So I usually only do that when I'm messing around with collages and I may be moving a bunch of different layers around. And if I get one layer just in the right spot, then I'll go ahead and lock it just to keep from accidentally merging it with the move tool. Okay, great. Now let's we're gonna be moving into retouching, and when I say retouching, we're talking about changing portrait's. We're talking about fixing color, all that kind of stuff, But there's one one technique that I would call a retouch that you cannot do with any kind of retouching tool. There's no tool in the world that will fix Animal White I or Green I Okay, so while we can fix Red at Red Eye all day long, we can't do anything to fix an animal's people's. So let me zoom in a little bit. This one is a manual recreating the pupil affair, but it's a really good technique to have in your bag of tricks for this kind of thing. But it's also a great way to practice creating new layers, creating selections, filling selections with color and softening the edge of selections before you fill them with color. So that the so that it looks riel. Saul Tremendous. A little bit more so we can all see this. So here's what I created. Here's our original image. Okay, this has happened to you. I know. So what I did and what we're going to do is we're gonna create another new layer, and we're gonna create a selection of the offending people's, and we're gonna fill them with black, then to make it look, really, we're gonna add another new layer, and we're gonna add a glint because all eyes have a reflection in them. And so if we created these pupils with no reflection, it would look a little bit creepy. No, Look, still looks a little bit like double cat. So adding that reflection from whatever light sources in the room is going to make the new people's look realistic. Okay, so I'll go ahead and delete the layers that I created for this. Since I already have the glint layer activated, I'm gonna press shift before I click the other layer. So I get both of them activated and then drag them down to my trashcan icon. Now, what we need to do is to create a selection of these peoples. We're gonna fill that selection on a whole nother layer. So it doesn't really make that much of a difference whether you create a new layer first or you create your selection first, there is an additional step if you create the layer first. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is go ahead and create my selection. So I'm gonna zoom in to see the offending area. And this is gonna be the first time we've talked about manually creating a selection with fashion photo shop elements selection tool. So let's just look at those real quick here. They live towards the top of your tools panel. These four guys right here. The 1st you're going to encounter is called your marquee tool, and it's available in a square shape or in oval shape. Okay, so what I always do when I faced with making a selection is too Figure out. What tools? Going to get me the farthest and use that tool first. So I look at the area and I think, Is it a shape that elements has a tool for somewhere that I can use the shape to actually make the selection? Well, obviously the rectangles not going to do it. The elliptical marquee. If we come over to our pupils and we start drawing the, uh, circle or in the lifts, we're really not gonna be able to get the right shape. Okay, so maybe that won't be the best tool for us. So I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of that selection. My cheesing select D select. Now, the next tool that you'll encounter is called a lasso, and you've got three different ones. If you choose the lasso tool, it's a freehand drawing affair. So if you have a graphics tablet or a amazingly steady hand, you might be able to select these peoples with the lasso tool. So we'll go ahead and select that. And incidentally, this technique is exactly the same steps in Photoshop, the photo shop, CS, whatever. CS five currently. So if any of you guys were watching out there that have Photoshopped actually, all the techniques, the color changing techniques and the colorizing a gray scale of all exactly the same in the big version of photo shop. So here we are with our lasso tool. We could if our hand was steady enough, try to freehand draw a lasso around the people kind of a hit or miss situation. I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of that selection by choosing select D Select. Now, let's look at the other tools we have down here. We've got a tool called the Magic One. Now the magic wine will select by color. Okay, so if we mass over two part of the image and we give it a click, Elements is gonna look at the color of the pixel that we clicked on, and it's going to try to grab all the similarly colored pixels that were touching the original. Okay, next to it. Well, did it? Okay, job. You know, if we were to keep clicking with this tool, you can put this tool in add to selection mode by pressing and holding the shift key, and I'll zoom in here so you can see it as I press and hold the shift key. See how we get a little plus sign next to her magic. One that lets you know that while you're holding down the shift key, if you click anywhere else, you're going to be adding that to your selection. So if you keep clicking around with this tool, you can get a decent selection based on color. Okay, so that can be very useful. Let's take a look at another one just to make sure that we have explored all of our options. The next tool over here, you've actually got two of them. You've got a quick selection tool in a selection brush tool. The quick selection tool is pretty much the same as the magic wand. If you click with it, Elements is gonna grab all the similarly colored pixels that are touching the original one. The selection brash tool is kind of same thing, but you click and drag with it. Okay, so we'll give that one. A shot will come over here to our image and let's click and drag. And what we're doing here is we're painting on a selection. Those of you who are using the full big version of photo shop, this is the equivalent of using quick mask mode to paint on a selection. Okay, so it allows you just to paint it on. So in some cases, that may be the easiest way to select the people. Okay. And of course, if we were doing this for real, we would come in and zoom in and make sure that we got right up to the edge of the offending people. Okay? And then we come down to the other I and I'm using back out just a hair here, and you can continue painting, so you'll get both peoples selected. So it doesn't matter which one of those tools you use. But in your own images, you'll find that, you know, depending upon the image, one of them will feel a little bit easier to you. I've done so much painting that if I can create my selection by FREEHAND painting, it feels more natural to me. So you may like the magic wand better. So whichever way you go, you'll end up with both of the pupils selected and you have your nice marching ants. Now is the time when you want to go ahead and create a new layer onto which we're gonna fill those pixels with color. The reason that we didn't create the new layer first is that, um, selection tools work on layers filled with pixels. If we try to use a selection tool on a layer that's empty, elements will squawka this and say there are no pixels to select, so we would have had to click the other layer to begin with. So starting out with the selection saves you step. So now we're ready to make our new layer so you can click the little new layer icon at the bottom left of the layers panel, or you can choose the layer menu and say new layer. Either way, you'll get a new anti layer in this one. We're gonna cleverly name peoples, so now we've got an empty layer. Our next step is to fill the selection with black. But we need to do one more thing first. If we felt a selection with Black right now, it's gonna be a really hard edge between black and what color the peoples used to be. We want to soften that up a little bit. We might also want to expand our selection just a hair making a tiny bit bigger just in case we didn't get all of the of the pupil area in our original selection. So the way to do that is to use what's called the refined edge dialogue box. And this is another great elements feature that was snatched right out of the expensive version Photoshopped. So the way you get at it is you can go up to the select menu because it kind of makes sense. You're dealing. You want to find tuna selection, go to the select menu and you want to choose refined edge. This is a fabulous little dialog box, lets you do several things. First of all, you can preview the selection that you've created on one of several different background colors. Okay, so right now, We're just seeing the selection on top of the image. Well, if we click this red overlay now we're seeing the area that we've selected is not in red. Everything that that is not selected is in red. Okay, so with some images, you can see the edges of your selection a little bit better when they're previewed on this red overlay. You can also choose to view your selection on black on white. Or you can preview just what it would look like if he created a layer mask out of that selection. Okay, So is depending upon the image. One of these methods will work better than the other 19 times out of 10. When I'm refining a selection for this purpose, I'll use the red overlay because actually, I was even a little bit. You do have fulls in control while you've got this dialog box open. Okay, so what you can do now is you can choose to smooth the edges of the selection itself if you wanted to. Um, selections made with a magic wand are notoriously Jaggi. So if you've created, if you decided to use the magic wand just like the people's you might want to add a little bit of smoothing to the edge. Don't look so draggy. But for this one, I'm gonna go ahead and leave it set about one. And what I really want to change here is the feather amount. Okay, that's adobes. Fancy way of saying soften because if you want to soften the edges of a selection, you want to feather it and I'm gonna said it. I believe it set to about a one pixel feather, depending upon how many pixels your in your image. This one is a fairly low pixel dimension image. Or if you've changed the resolution to be high, so the pixels are really, really small. You will have to use a larger feather amount that I'm using right here. This is a really low resolution image. So one pixel works finance. You might have to experiment with that. The next slider down here lets you make your selection smaller, Bigger. So if you got your selection too big when you're creating it, you could contract it, okay. And as I'm contracting it, making it smaller, see how the red overlay is coming over into the people's. So my selection is getting smaller, smaller, smaller. Okay, so I'll go back up. And of course, it works the opposite way as well. If you drag the contractor, expand slider to the right, you're gonna be making your selection larger. So if I go up far enough, you'll see that now, my red overly, you know, is way back here. So I'm adding a little bit to the selection. So if you don't get the selection, destroy, you can always find tune it here. I'm gonna go ahead and go back down to around 30% or so and again that sistah experimentation. So when you're ready, go ahead and click, OK? And you won't really see a change happen here, you know, because if you've done any kind of ah, feathering or smoothing or anything, you're not going to see anything until you actually fill that selection with color. Okay, so don't think that elements didn't really refine your selection. It did. You just haven't done something else to it in order to see that change take place. So now let's zoom back out a little bit, and we're ready to fill these eyes with color. A really easy way to do that is to try it up to the edit menu and choose Phil Selection and elements is gonna actually what color you would like to use to fill the selection. And if you click the use poppet menu, you'll see that black 50% grade. Why are always options? Okay, so you can choose black, leave everything else that like it is and click OK, And now our people's air filled with black. So at this point, we're finished with our selection. We're finished with the marching ants. We don't need them anymore. So we want to get rid of them so we can go up to the Selectmen, you and shoes de Select. So now we've gotten rid of our march chance. Now, to make this all look, really, we need to add another new layer and put our glint on that layer. Now, if you're brave enough, I guess you could put the glint on the people air. But if you mess up the glen, then you've messed up your pupils and you would have to start over. So that's the logic of doing everything on its own layer. So we're gonna go ahead and create another new layer. And I'm gonna name this one glance and with that layer active, I'm gonna come over here to my tools panel, grab the regular brush tool, and I need to tell it what color to paint with. And I do that with my foreground color chip. Well, if I look at my color chips down here, I want Why? Well, why? It's already on bottom here. So I could simply switch my foreground background color chips rather than clicking the pink one and choosing why and then closing the color picker, you can just switch him. So now I'm all set to go. Want to make sure that you've got a soft edged brush again mouse over to the offending pupils and this one is pure experimentation. It doesn't really matter what size the glint is. This what looks good to you, so experiment with size. But what you want to do is make sure you put the glint in roughly the same place on each people, or else you will get really weird effects. So I'm gonna go ahead and click about here on the first, I and I'm gonna go down roughly the same spot on the next one to add my glint and it's too strong. It looks fake. It looks obviously painted, So the way we fixed that is we simply lower layer opacity of the glint layer until it looks riel. And that's all there is to it. That's a great exercise for creating the layers, creating selections, filling them. We're finding your selection, adding more layers and on and on any questions on that technique. That's a really useful when we definitely have questions. Um, one of the first ones that came up from Steve Currie. Does the magic wand have a threshold option? Does the magic want have a threshold? Option? Doesn't have a threshold option, but what it has is I like to call it a picky meter. Okay, so let me go over to the magic wand. When were how we said the magic wand will let you select based on color. So, for example, if I get back on our original layer here, which has all the colors and the pixels, if I want to select the cats white pau, I could click once and Elements goes and grabs all the similarly color pixels next to it. Well, What if it didn't do a very good job? What if I need, you know, more pixels or fewer pixels. What you can do is change the magic wands, tolerance setting. I believe that's what he was thinking of for threshold. The tolerance setting. Right here. Let's she tell elements exactly how picky that magic wand is. So, for example, the default tolerance values 32. Okay, so as you saw when I clicked on the white Pawlett grabbed all of this white. Okay, so I'm gonna de select, and I'm gonna decrease the tolerance drastically to about five. Now, when I come over here, I get a much smaller selection. Okay, So the lower the tolerance value, the more picky elements is going to be. So it's on Lee picking up the exact shade of white. The match, the one I originally clicked on. It didn't grab the whole both pause of the kitty. So likewise. So change the tolerance. If you think the magic wand is selecting too much, you want to lower the tolerance. If the magic one is not selecting enough, you want to raise the tolerance so you can come back up here and let's say, I'm gonna put it at 100. And now when I come down here and click the white, I get all kinds of white all over the photos. So that's how you can change how the magic wand works. Next question is from the case, and the question is, Could you use an adjustment, Hugh Layer, somehow, to keep the natural shadow and glint that's already there? Not that I knew of. Yeah, I would say no on that one, because you're having to recreate, you know, the pixel from scratch, so I don't think that would help you any. Another question from Mamadou. Could you have painted the glint in first, using the circles of color in your base in an attempt to mimic the original Glenn and then paint in the black? Of course, assuming you will layer the black under the glint, maybe could have I'd have to experiment with that, But I think this method is a little bit cleaner and certainly quicker. See, um, I think we can keep going Well, there's a couple quick things that people wanted you to kind of revisit Chris and ask if there's a keyboard shortcut to subtract from this election. Uh, let me see. Sophie creates selection. We want to add to it. That's the shift key. Yes. Option or Ault? Perfect. I had to do a terrorist. Which key? It was, um And then Whitson asked if you could please repeat the part about quick. Quick mask equivalent, please. Oh, quit Mice, equivalent. Okay, over in photo shop. Well, here always make a selection, okay? And I'm gonna bring up the refined edge dialogue box. See this red overlay that we've got here in the big version of photo shop, you have the same thing, and it's called a quick mask. And it allows you to use any tool you want to paint on a selection. Brushes really easy. So it's really just an overlay of red. That marks, um, either the area that is selected or the area that is not selected, and you can determine which area it's marking. But we don't have that elements. But where we do encounter quick mask is here in this red overlay preview. So this is actually the same quick mask that you have in in photo shop. But you can. But it's a great way when you're refining a selection. So let's say, for example, we wanted to I'll just go ahead and let's say we wanted to create a soft edge of this cat, okay? So we could create our oval and then we could come up to the select menu and she's refined edge. And while we've got the quick mask preview turned on that red overlay, we start experimenting with feather, see how we're actually able to see the selection change. Okay, which is really hard. So you can see the difference between, ah, high feather amount, right and no feather amount by using this overlay because it shows you the softness of the edge. Well, if we go back to our regular preview, which just shows the selection itself big deal, you can't see anything because the marching ants is just showing you what areas selected. You can't see how the edge of that selection is changing. So that red overlay, which is really the quick mass from Photoshop, is, you know, transparent enough where you can actually see the selection edge changing. So that's why it's in there