Lessons

Lesson Info

Adding Finishing Touches to Photographs

but I wanted to do for this first part of this statement is just kind of go through a little example of a kind of approach I might take on a project where I'm looking at a photograph. I think I'd like to do some things to this. I'd like toe finish it off, or perhaps add some finishing touches, we could say. So here is my Rafa. I'm gonna start in here and just play with the exposure a little bit now. So as I mentioned, I'm gonna take longer to do this because I'm gonna verbalize everything that's going through my head right now, which is that would be really scary if I did verbalize everything going through my head because you don't want to know some of the things. Uh, but for example, I'm thinking, Well, I want to kind of tweak the exposure, but I'm not 100% worried about it because it's not gonna end up looking like this is gonna end up having texture on it and maybe a mask and maybe something else so that this is just sort of a quick let me fix the exposure or just little bit click O...

K, knowing that I've got this set up is a camera smart camera, raw, smart object, so I can edit it at any time. So I know that for two reasons. First of all, because I always leave it on and also down the bottom says open object. So when I do that, I know now that that's my kind of base image looking the way that want. But I have the ability to edit in anyway, just for background information. This was a photo shoot we did in Buffalo. In a There's a place called Silo City, which is really interesting there. A big giant, abandoned grain silos from the shipping days, and it's concrete. But there's still enough holes where, like snow gets in. And we just happened upon this area where there was randomly on old chair and table on basket. Sitting there. I'm like, What better place to have a ballerina in the middle of the freezing cold because you know makes perfect sense. So now let's take a look at some of our textures, and I think I have another one I want to use that I like even better. So let me go and dig and find it in here. I think I showed you this the other day. I was talking about texture and I said I just in Texas, I just walking through and randomly finding things is one of the ones that I remember finding that was really fun, This one here. So it's just this kind of cool wallpaper that I found. So I'm going to place that into my Photoshopped document. It is a camera off, while in this case I'm gonna pretty much just click OK without doing anything, because once again, I'm not gonna leave the text like this. I'm gonna try and blend it in some way. So once it's blended, I may choose to come back here and adjust the settings to try and make it look the way that I want. So for now, really on trying to do is get it in there because this point I'm experimenting once again, I chose place because I knew that would scale it appropriately. So I don't have to worry about doing any kind of scaling because it is a smart object and because it's a texture. If I did choose to scale it up slightly because I think I might look better. That's okay, too, because normally has said, we don't really like to scale things up, but when it's a texture, it's not as important. So this is the kind of process I typically go through, is not pretty sure it's not gonna be blend mode alone. It's probably gonna be blend mode and something else to get the result that I want. But I'm gonna press V for my move tool so I can press, shift, plus and start going through the blend Mose and see if there's any that jump out at me initially as a possibility, knowing that I'm gonna do other things with it as well. So I would say a pretty high percentage of the time. I tend to like I really like. What Overlay does is already looking pretty interesting without me having to do too much, but I want toe continue to work with it. I may switch away from overlay at some point. I may tweak it a little bit further, but for now that's gonna be the blend model used for now and then double click to get to my favorite thing. The blend. If sliders. I want the dark parts of this to sort of push through, so I'm gonna take the underlying layer and move that triangle. And my approach is to initially do it in broad strokes. Like move the full triangle even though it goes too far and the edges look very hard and not very pleasant. But I want to get a feeling for what this is going to do, so I'll drag that over. Can kind of get a sense of it. Take the other one, drag it over and see There's honest, much light areas. But now I can start to get a sense as to where my boundaries are. Same thing with the top one, this top layer one. This won't do too much because most of the images pretty lightly colored, because in overlay mode, I'm not going to really see much of a difference. I move it pretty far, so that tells me or suggest to me perhaps that most of the work I'll do in the blend insiders will be the underlying layer pushing through the top layer. So move this a little bit, so I start to see some difference hold down option all to split the triangles and then drag it a little further to try and start to blend it in the same thing on this side, trying to get it so there's not as much texture in her dress, and it's perfectly fine to do something to see how the half the trials kind of overlap each other. That's OK, because you're saying this is the range of black. This is the range of white remembering again that when I click OK, nothing I've done here is permanent, so I can always go back and go. Well, now that I do that, I want to tweak a little bit more. Always do that. Let's get a little closer and make sure we've got the correct with hand tools. I wanna look and make sure I don't really want texture like this on her face. I want the texture to look like it's elsewhere, so I'm gonna try a couple things, and this is where I often experiment because I want to see well, what does it look like? So my first thought as well just paint on the mask. But if there was a lot of painting, it might be easier to click back on the background layer and take a tool. When that happens randomly, like the quick selection tool. Make a very fast selection to begin with. Make sure you get all these pieces. I usually do this fairly zoomed out just to get started and then get a little closer and say, All right, I don't want this part selected, so let's hold down the option key and remove that part from the selection. The quick selection tool isn't unusual selection tool because it has a very small amount of intelligence built into it, meaning if you make a selection and you take away from selection, for example, now part of her arm is gone. But if I go back here and try and add it back in by painting a bit mawr, usually it'll kind of say, Oh, I get you You actually want that. So if you go over the same place a couple of times, it's almost like each time you do it, it kind of starts toe learn a little bit. In a sense, Um, now I should also mention something that I thought I had turn on was turned off at some point, there is an option in here called Auto Enhance. I'm gonna actually start my selection again cause I like to have that on auto. Enhance means I'll try to make a better selection right from the get go. The reason it's on option that you might turn off is if you're working on something, that's a very large file and you drag with the quick selection tool. And then there's his paused A little progress bar says Hold on a second, I'm working on it. That's why you might want to turn off auto, enhance this is it in order to be accurate, it slows things down. My personal feeling is most of the time it doesn't slow down that much. And I like the results that I get better with auto enhance turned on. I'm not gonna be as finicky about this selection as I would if I was, for example, extracting her because all I'm going to do for this is to mask so the texture doesn't appear is much on her. So on here, I'm gonna add a layer mask now by default. At first it appears the wrong way round, so now it looks like she has a disease and nothing else does. And I don't want that. So I'm going to invert the mask, he said. Invert the mask, we go. So now the texture is on Leon. Everything else and not her. That looks in my mind almost too much now because I really like the texture a little bit. But this is my ongoing philosophy is do it dramatically. At first you can always pull it back. So by going Mascaro completely so I can see how it looks. Now I have the opportunity to say, Well, I think I want a bit of the texture in there, So the simplest way to do that would be to lower the density of the mass. So now, instead of being in effect, fill with black. It's filled with gray. So if you look more closely here, you know, see if I well, with this way at 100% there's nothing on her at all. If I come to a lower percent, there's some things, but it's more changing the color a little bit, not dramatically saying Take it away completely. The only time that wouldn't work is if I said, for example, I want. They're to be nothing on her face, but a little bit everywhere else. I couldn't do it this way. If this is the problem, if I start to try and paint with Black on her face, well, it's already, though. Densities lowered so that wouldn't work. So let me show you how I would also potentially do it if that was the case. So let's go back to this point. Get rid of this. So when I had my selection, if I add the layer mask while it's still selected, though, I say, Let's how about we fill that with 50% gray? Sorry, Wrong way around that again. That's the downside of being zoomed in so much as you don't see where your selection handles we're going. So I've done 50% gray. So now there's areas where all over her it's 50%. But this now means I can take my paintbrush and say, but I don't want any on her face and paint with 100% black. So that's giving me a layer mask that now looks like this where there's some grey and some black. Still, the thing that I'm looking at, where I look at this that I'm thinking it's still a little bit too hard and dry. I don't want to be quite so hard on edge on the mask. I'm gonna take this feather amount and just try to push it up so that there is a bit more kind of blending in so it doesn't look like she's pasted on their something like that. Maybe now, once I get to this point, then I pause for a moment and kind of revisit the settings for both the photograph and the texture. Now I look at it. I'm thinking maybe the texture is a little too yellowish because that's the way it Woz. But let's try an experiment or two and see what happens if I go into the saturation of the yellows and pull them out a bit. Come back here and increase the contrast. Maybe a bit. A bit of clarity, perhaps, and up the blacks okay, and it will update its a subtle update. But it is making a small little change to the way that I'm seeing the result. Any time that you find that overlay is the blend mode that you've come up with, say that's the one I want. Soft light is a slightly less intense version of overly. So if you find like, overlay is too much than maybe soft light in this case, mind you soft light. I feel like I've lost too much of it. That's okay, because then I could say, Well, maybe let's come back to these blend if sliders and try and bring some of it back in again. So part of the reason I'm doing this kind of experimenting assure you this is how I generally do it cause I don't have a plan. I don't have a specific. I know exactly what I want to do or what's gonna happen, because it does vary with each photograph, but without whatever that expression is beating a dead horse. That's why I do everything in this nondestructive way. So I had that ability at any point ago. Now they've done those six steps. Maybe I should go back and change the color of that texture a little bit. Okay, so I'm going to say for now I'm liking the way this is headed, but at the same time, I don't have to feel like anything's final, and I can always come back to these areas. So I'm gonna go to the top, and I think I want to try adding one more texture. Go back to her other folder of textures one of these ones like this who Wait. Maybe some smoke. All right, so let's crank our exposure. Get rid of some of this saturation. Don't want any color in there is what it looked like that, but more There we go and blend mode of screen takes away the black Still way too much. So lower capacity. Maybe this might be another case where we just again try ourselves some land If sliders, that's kind of fun like that. I'm in my experimental things where I'm my brain is going a mile a minute going okay, kind like the smoke. But I'm not 100% sure. What else could I try? The screen blend mode is intended to take away the black and leave just the smoke. But what if I did the opposite? So I invert and then clip it with just that layer below. So basically it means that just this smoke is being inverted. Maybe not Sure, I think I like it without but that's kind of the way you know. Why not try it and see what happens? Okay, so now that we've got all this happening, I want to start doing some other things, like edges and borders, all that kind of stuff. At this point, I could do a couple of different things. If I'm goingto use a clipping mask on the background layer, which I probably am, then I would need to make these layers all into one smart object, because otherwise what would happen? It was It would clip the background layer, but the top two layers would still go right off the edges. If I put things in a group, I could use a mask because you can mask a group. You can't clipping group the way I want to, at least. So this would be where my smart object inside smart object thing starts happening. So let's do that. A smart object and then go on, get one of her resources that we have available some of these things. I think I want to use the these ones, though this one perhaps get that in there and scale it up. Drank it down, clipping mask. You see me do this. How many times this session where I put a layer below and fill it with white? I want to stress that's not a necessary step. But to me, I just It helps me visualize better than on transparency. Because I want toe. See what happens if I do this. I'm gonna load this as a selection. So I want to try something, and I have no idea if it's going to work, but I want to see what happens. So whenever you have an existing shape on a transparent layer like this one, if you command or control, click on it. It loads that as load it as a selection. I go to the select menu and shoes, modify border. So this takes my selection of that whole shape but turns it into a little border. My click. Uh, gonna be enough. Let's see. Yeah, might work. Let's see. So, at the very top, I had a new layer When a see, if I can't sample a color cause I wanted to be something like this sort of dark brownish, I think is gonna probably work on that layer. I fill that and I get this little kind of border on top. It's very subtle because it's very close to the color is already there. And it take that layer and change the blend mode to something like Color Burn, so literally makes it almost looks like it's burke the edges a little bit, just kind of interesting, cause it's basically following the same shape because it was a border selection. It comes into the selection little bit anytime. I'm about to try something different, like what happens if to me I should preface that by So therefore I should convert to a smart object that's gonna preserve what's there. And now let me try. Let me see what if I do something else and I'm thinking maybe some kind of motion blur, but I'm not 100% convinced, Has to be really more subtle than that. Just cause I found over here it looked a little too obvious. Ah, could be a little bit like that. They're parts of this. I like this part in here. I don't like so much. I like the outer border. But these little holes here, I don't know, I don't find I like that as much. So how could I deal with that? He thinks out loud. Well, if I add a layer mask, take my paintbrush and just they don't do it there or there. I think that was There was a couple over here. Maybe those aren't quite as bad. That was not so bad. But maybe this is. See how that color burn know what it's doing is adjusting the color based on what's underneath it. So it's not just like saying fill it with orange or brown. It's feeling with a color than color. Burn will adjust itself to whatever the colors are underneath it. Some of this I like. Okay, I'm kind of liking the the way that we're going. So at this point, I'm pretty happy with the results at this point. And now I would do this idea of sort of take a break. I mean, not literally, because we just took a break. But you know what I mean? Take a visual break, work on something else because I find if I even after only whatever that was 10 minutes or minutes of playing, it's too easy to go. Oh, what if for what about or let me try this and so just stop it for a moment. Save it as a PSD file and we'll just all this silo and then I move on and do something different.