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Recompose Tool and Color Select

Lesson 20 from: Adobe® Photoshop® Elements for Photographers

Lesa Snider

Recompose Tool and Color Select

Lesson 20 from: Adobe® Photoshop® Elements for Photographers

Lesa Snider

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Lesson Info

20. Recompose Tool and Color Select

Lesson Info

Recompose Tool and Color Select

So now we're gonna start scooting objects around, and this is brand new and elements 12. So if you don't have lace and greatest version, then you can just sit back and appreciate what we're about to do. So I'm gonna show you this feature on a snapshot of my Children. My baby's Sherlock and Samantha and these guys are still trying to decide if they like each other or not. But let's say for whatever reason, I want to scoot. Shared a lot closer to cement that I could absolutely get that done. What we're gonna do is use the continent were moved tool. So it lives down here at the bottom of your layers panel. And let's create another new layer onto which we're gonna do our Sherlock scooting. So you want to make sure to turn on a sample. All layers option for the continent were moved tool and let's click and drag to draw an outline around the thing that we want to move. Now I'm purposefully including some of the background, a little bit tough to do with the mouse, but we'll get it done. I'm p...

urposely including some of the background, just so it comes along with the moves so it looks more realistic, gives elements a little bit more pixels to try to blend when it makes this look realistic. Because the continent where move tool is also part of the blenders rock bam! But it only blends just around the edges it doesn't do is much blending on the inside is a spot healing or healing brushes. So now once you get a good selection, you're gonna click and hold down your mouse button inside the selection and you're gonna scoot it over. And when you release your mouth, button elements will do the blending to make the retouch look as realistic as it can. It's going to do a better job if you have quite a bit of free pixels. Free background pixels around the object. So with this carpet, it does a pretty good job. I'd have to go back in on another layer and do a little bit of cloning in this area to make it look real. But again here we're using elements specific tools so that it does the heavy lifting for us when we just have to finding a little bit after the fact. So that's a pretty handy thing. I mean, we skated him over quite a bit and it worked out pretty good. And as soon as you're finished with that, you can get rid of the marching ants by pressing command or control d for D Select or by choosing the select menu and choosing de select from there. So that is all kinds of fun. So let's do that on a couple of more images. I'll go ahead, delete the layer that I made for you, and we'll scoot that football over a little bit. So what's the first thing we're gonna do? Nondestructive editing. Create a new layer onto which we're going to scoot the football. Then we go grab the content aware Move tool from its options bar. You want to make sure that sample all layers turned on. Now this little slider right here lets you determine how much blending is happening along those edges. So depending upon the image, you may have to have a go click the undo button. If it didn't do such a great job, and then fine tune the slider and then have another go at it. But for this one will leave it alone and see what happens. Now let's drag click and drag to draw a rough selection around the object, being careful to include a little bit of the background around the object. And then we can skewed over here. IFC Gosh, you were so close. I don't know what happened. Wow, that's a little evil. So this did an amazing job in this case because we've got such uniform color behind the behind the football, so everything that you want to move won't be that easy. But what you could do is just add another layer and then use the clone stamp tool to fix any problem areas that you've got or if you happen to get a color shift around the objects after you move it. And we have that here because I had a little bit of that background in my selection, all you have to do right here would be to add a layer mask and press be to grab your brush tool, set your foreground color ship to black mouse over to the area you want to hide, and I could just hide that extra bit of good background that I had in my selection. So that it looks riel. Course you want to look over your shoulders before you start doing this stuff. Make sure nobody's watching, you know, coworker back there. So pretty amazing. So let's look at another image to use that on. Let's say you shot this flower. You're in tow macro photography, but the B isn't as close to the flowers. You need to say that image needs to fit within a certain size frame. You could have a go with that recomposed tool that we looked at earlier to scoop the objects together. But you can also grab the object itself, so we'll just delete the layer that I made for you at another new layer Grab the Continent were moved to will make sure sample all layers is turned on. Draw a rough selection around it. Click and drag. Get rid of your selection. My choosing. Select D Select. Now I've got a little bit of a problem area right here. How can we fix that new layer and bet you the spot healing brush would get rid of that? Or we could use the clone stamp tool or the healing brush, But I bet you the spot healing brush was at that. So we click to activate that tool, come down here just paying across that area or resize your brush. So that's large enough to encompass that. And now we've moved. RB might have to go in there with a clone stamp told to make that that little spot look more realistic. But we moved him pretty far. I wish that this tool was called content aware. Scoot, because that would give you an indication of them were a realistic use of that. You're not gonna be able Take something that's on the far left side of your photo and moving on the far right. Not unless it's on a solid color background like that. Then you could do it. But most often times you're gonna be looking at scooting things around in your image versus just completely repositioning them. But that's a really handy tool again that was new in elements 12. So you're not gonna have that in previous versions. And when I come across something that is new like that, I will let you know. I will tell you any questions on content aware move were good up here. I was thinking that maybe If Adobe was in Texas, it would be content to wear. Scoot. All right, we have in the audience. Do I've noticed that sometimes you've been copying, um, during the edit. Sometimes you're copying the actual image, doing command J and copying that image. And other times you're making a new layer. So how do you decide if you're just making a new layer or copy of the great question? The only time I have to copy the layer is when the tool that I'm gonna use does not have a sample. All layers option. Yeah. So the spot healing brush has a sample All layers option. The clone stamp tool has a sample all layers option the continent where move tool has a sample all layers option. So only when I run into a tool that doesn't have that. That's when I have to duplicate the image layer. Great question, though. Okay, Now let's move on to changing color. I love old cars. I'm gonna gearhead Teoh. So I love love, love, love, love cars, vintage cars to muscle cars of them. So if we look in my layers panel here, we can see that the original image was red and we changed it to blue, not too shabby. So we're gonna do this in three different ways. They're three different tools you can use or three different methods rather to get this done. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the visibility I of that layer that I made for you. And in this instance, we're gonna use a command that doesn't have a sample, all layers options. So we're going duplicate the image layer to protect it. Commander Control J. Now we're going to come up to the enhance menu down to adjust color and choose replace color in the resulting dialog box. You can use these little eye droppers to tell elements what color you're trying to change, and you're going to see the area so it will create a selection of that color, and you're gonna see that represented as areas of white down here and then using this little color box weaken tell elements what color to replace it with. So, using this eyedropper, we're gonna come over here and start clicking on the red bids so you can see that area that I clicked on is now represented and white in the preview area. Now I'm gonna click the eyedropper with a plus sign, which allows me to continue adding to that selection. So this is a bit time consuming, but if you've got uniform areas of color, then it does a pretty good job. So all I have to do is keep clicking until I can get as much of that red area of the car to turn white as possible. I may have to do a little bit of touch up, but I won't have to do much on this particular image. Now I can come down here, Teoh this area, and I can either use the hue slider to pick another color, which doing it that way also reveals that I need to come back over here. I still have the eyedropper with the plus sign active, which is gonna add to my selection, and I can click those areas toe. Have it be a little bit more accurate, but But sometimes it's hard to see if you've missed any spot until you start changed in the color down here, our jaws dropping all over the place. That's pretty incredible in it. Photoshopped has that to you. It's called replaced color over there as well works exactly the same way. Pretty dad. Gum. Impressive. And because I left off this check box right here, localized color clusters. It even picked up areas of the reflection that we're rid. Look, So I've got a red reflection down here that's really not touching this area. So because I left that localized color clusters option turn off, it'll actually work on those areas to so that basically, that's just say, Hey, change all the pixels that are contiguous or don't the contiguous means attached to each other? Pretty cool. So that's one method, so let's do that again. So what I did was start by creating a either a copy of the layer. If it's a single layer document, or if your image consists of multiple layers, then you're going to do that stamped copy trick that we talked about earlier. But for this one, we're just going to duplicate the layer. Now we're gonna come up to the enhance menu and choose adjust color, replace color automatically the regular little eye droppers active mouse over to your image and click to activate a color and then with the plus eyedropper, which is add to selection kind of tool. Just keep clicking around until you get as much of it as you can into your selection. And again that's gonna be representatives white over here on your image. So depending upon the image, you may have to do more or less clicking if you need to. If you click so much that you got too much into your selection, then you could activate the subtract tool right here that I drop it with little minus sign and then you would click on the area to remove it from the selection. And now, using the sliders down here at the bottom, you can change the color. And that also illuminates that I need to keep clicking a little bit more to catch those other areas. And it did an amazing job. Click OK. You can also change the saturation level to make it a brighter, lighter blue. Make it darker, lighter, OK, and you're done Yes, like it. Okay, now the next two methods both involved painting on a new layer, which we've done already in changing the blend mode. You can do that a couple of different ways you can hand painted in this file. That's what we did is him in a little bit. So here's our original car so we can create a new empty layer college dream paint. Click our foreground color ship to open the color picker until elements what color we want. Toe paint the car. Let's say green click OK, and now, with the brush tool set to use a soft edged brush, we can begin painting the car. These are bracket keys to go up in breast size, but all of our details are being covered up. Why? Because we need to change the blend mode. We need to change the way Color on this layer is interacting with color on the car layer underneath so we can click the blend mode menu anyone to come down and choose hue. Their other ones that would work like color would work as well. Overlay would work as well, but Hugh seems to work best for changing just the color of the image, because what it that mode does is it keeps the saturation and lightness values of this original layer, but it applies the hue color of this layer of the top. Other modes do different things. Some of them would not preserve the saturation in the lightness, our brightness values, rather of the original color. It'll start doing all kinds of blending. This one really works well for color change. So just remember, Hugh, so I'm not going to spend the time toe to really do a good job painting this car. But you guys get the idea, so that's the hand painting method. Okay, so when you spend enough time on it, you'll eventually end up with something like that, and you could do the same kind of technique is we did on the colorizing a grayscale. If you mess up and add too much paint just at a layer mask to that layer and then just mask it out or finished painting the whole thing and switch to the eraser tool and then go back in and find team. And if the area that you're changing color on is really honking big, then fill that layer with the color and then go back and hide it with a layer mask in the areas that you don't wanna change. So the other way to do that instead of hand painting it is to start out with a selection and feel the selection with color. So this particular car used to be read, so is treat the new layer. Call it paint. Now we can choose the quick selection tool turn on its sample all layers check box because we're on an empty layer, we could create the selection first and then create the new layer. But if you don't just turn on that sample all layers option for the quick selection tool. And then we've already used the quick selection tool we used in conjunction with the refining dialogue to select the mom and the daughter in Supergirl. So this one, you just paint on a selection and get it as accurate as possible, and then you would choose at it. Phil selection. And if you've chosen the color that you want to change that to down here in your color chips at the bottom of your tools panel, then you can just choose foreground color from this pop up menu. But if you didn't do that by choosing color, you're gonna pop open the color picker so you can set the color that you want to use right here in this dialog box. And then when you click OK, elements is gonna fill that layer with color. And now all you have to do is change the blend mode. So either select it first and then fill it with color or just hand painted, whichever one you want to use. If you're charging by the hour a mountain dew, the hand painting kidding, one of those ways is gonna feel better to you than the other. Now you'll notice that I've got a little bit of a problem spot right up here. Big deal. Grab the breast tool. Use our little. This is a good trick for you that we've not done yet. You could use this eye dropper right here to come over and sample the paint color and then go to the brush tool. But honestly, it's just as easy to click the foreground color chip and the mouse away from your color picker and then grab the color that you want to use. And then you could just come in here with a very small brush and fine tune just the areas that you need to you again. This is using leveraging power of elements to make it do most of the work for you. So if you've got a big swath of color that you want to change right there have ago with that replaced color command. If that doesn't do the job for you, select as much of it as you can quickly, by using the quick selection tool and then fill it with color and then go back in with a brush tool and fine tune those edges. Any questions on changing the colors of object? I know one question will be this will be fun to preempt. This only works if there is color already there. If that car was black not gonna work because you need some color in order to change it. So by chance, I do have a few questions. And here's one from by chance. What if you're s so, uh, they ask, um, if you're in the replace color window and youth and you set your color and you've replaced it and there's parts of the picture that are changing and you don't want them. Teoh is there a way, even though it like it's matching colors. Is there a way to then fix that or only select part? Well, you could try using the different eye droppers there while you're within that dialogue box. But if it's only when you get out of it that you realize that's happened. If you've wisely ran that command on a duplicate layer, then you'd simply add a layer mask to the duplicate layer, and you would just hide those areas. OK, yeah, that's perfect on then Molly Mom would like to know. Does replace color option work on textured items as well, say fabric, for instance, in a family portrait where everyone's wearing blue jeans. But one person didn't get the memo and is wearing light blue jeans and you want a match? Absolutely yeah, anywhere. It's just selecting color so it doesn't have to be flat color. But although obviously it's easier to use on areas of flat color, they don't have texture. But yeah, it should work. It was should work on that, too.

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