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12:45 pm - Advanced Techniques

Lesson 6 from: Adobe Photoshop: Retouching and Collage

Ben Willmore

12:45 pm - Advanced Techniques

Lesson 6 from: Adobe Photoshop: Retouching and Collage

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

6. 12:45 pm - Advanced Techniques

Lesson Info

12:45 pm - Advanced Techniques

Talk about retouching we were in the clone source panel, which seemed to be interested in I didn't know that everybody doesn't use it or something. I use it all the time and find be great, but I wanted to get into some other issues one issue have run into in the past is if you look at this particular image, I'll show you before and after this isn't just the retouch, though this is also some enhancement to get it so your eye looks in certain areas, but before there was a car sitting in the the scene and there was a bunch of telephone lines and ended up removing those, and then I enhanced a bunch of areas, color, contrast and and elsewhere, I want to concentrate over here and this one I don't know that I'm actually done with because they're still a couple little areas would like to fix, but let's, take a look at what some of it wass, uh, in the retouching, so I usually create a new layer and empty one to put my retouching honest, I showed you before I happen to usually call that layer we...

eds be gone just because I think of pulling weeds in a garden is my re touching, you know, just pulling out all the junk for my photo. So this particular location, this is a guys man cave, you know, it's like his place to hang out, and he's got so many people driving by to take pictures of it, he doesn't want to move his car. He was nice of him to put his car here instead of right inside of this thing when I took the picture, but he doesn't want to come out every time, move his car, so I needed to retouch out his car also wanted to get rid of all the telephone lines and so let's see what I ended up with. Once I got rid of most of that, I'll just turn on the weeds, be gone, layer you see all that's felt with now doing that there are certain parts of this that are much more difficult than others, and so I'll give you a few hints as to how he did it. It took me some time to do this. I'm not going to do the whole thing because it's going to be boring for you to watch, but let's, take a look at some of the details first look at the house would assume up on the house with the house, look at how much house there is left over when the car's still there compared to what I ended up having to create, so sometimes there some features in ah, you're retouching, and they're going to make that a little more easy. Well, let's see if we can figure out what some of those are. I'm gonna create a brand new layer in here and first get rid of all these extra layers you're just making the file much bigger if you go to the side menu of the layers panel there's a choice called delete hidden layers so had turn off all the eyeballs on the layers I don't need, I can choose to lead hidden layers and it'll get rid all those for me, and I'm just going to leave that weeds be gone, layer and there so I can turn it back on again if I need to just to show you what I end up having, but I'm going to try to do some of that retouching for you. Ah created brand new empty layer just acting as if this image has never been retouched before and I'll just get started, so I want to extend this rough down to accomplish that, I'm going to use the clone stamp tool to copy, and of course, I'll go over to the clone source panel and just make sure I got one of these. Pushed in it looks I could think some on the third one here I'm going to be on the first stored in there and actually actually see it looks like it might actually remember some of these because I don't have that old document open anymore and it is remembering the some of those settings so that's interesting I thought it would clear out once I went tio another document but I'm in a story on the first one we're going to come over here I'm going option click right here to say this is where I'd like to copy from then I'm going to come over here and I want this tree to stay there I want this roof to begin after the tree well the problem is I can't see exactly where it needs to be to line up so one of the things that I will frequently do is use the pen tool to create guides because photo shop offers guides but they're always horizontal or vertical and sometimes they needed him at an angle so what I'm going to do is click on the tip of the roof here then I'm going to click down here somewhere and if you click if you happen to have the newest version of photo shop you can hold the space bar to reposition this in older versions you couldn't reposition it as you were clicking um if you have an old version what you'd need to d'oh it is instead go to this little direct selection tool it's called like the hollow arrow tool just below the textile, and then you could grab that and move it. But anyway, I'm just going to create a line that lines up with the edge of the rooftop, so that's it the same angle is the edge of the rooftop. If I need to move both sides, I already have clicked on the lower right. I could hold shift to also grab the upper part and then moving them both. In that way, I might build a gator to precisely line up with the edge of that roof. Now I'm going to go about working that layer. I'll go back to my clone tool, we'll go back and option click on that roof, and now I have a guide to help me figure out exactly where I need to put it down here. Does that make sense? As far as you know, normal guides or horizontal or vertical, they're not always all that useful, but being apart like that can be helpful. The other thing I'm going to do is before I click the mouse, but and there's this sitting at the top of my screen called aligned and let's, look at what it does, I'll click right now, and I'll drag until I run out of rough space if you look at the cross here that's on my screen indicates where I'm copying from you'll see that eventually it's going to come down and it's going to hit the tree do you see there right now just hit the tree so I'm starting to get the tree to show up over here if I let go of the mouse button and I click again it keeps it lined up so that it's a ziff I never let go of the mouse button and I can continue adding let go of the mouse button let go of the mouse button in all of these peace is line up with each other it's a ziff I just painted over a big area instead of letting go of the mouse but in each time and that's not always the most helpful so I'll choose undo a few times to get rid of this and I'm gonna turn off this check box up here that's called aligned and what that means is each time and released the mouse button it should reset itself back to cloning from the original position I told it to clone from go back each time I let go of the mouse button and reset yourself to that copy from that same original spot so watch what happens I'll come up here option click to tell it where to copy from come down here make sure its lineup with my guide click and drag until they start seeing the tree show up I might add some house down below here as much houses I have available, but when I get over here and get the tree to show up so I just let go of the mass. But since it's not set to aligned if I simply go over here again, it reset itself to copying from the original spot that I had option clicked on so I could click again and just continue putting more in and then let go and just click again and let go click again. This is what use if you want to put you have one goat in a picture and you want nine goes you clone it once let go click again on another one and just do it nine times and it always reset back to the original spot. So that's, what allowed me to extend that roof area is a combination of the guide to tell me where it needs to be positioned and then turning off the check box called aligned so that I can have it just automatically reset itself to the original spot to clone from. I'm not saying what I have in here looks amazing or anything, but I have the edge of the roof that's all I was trying to create right there. Uh other areas I sometimes end up doing the same thing with very small spots here I have a very small area of rooftop and I could again come up there I might end up again using my pen tool click right on that tip of where that roof fairy would be in all of this is connecting it to the er pan I already had you don't want that to happen just grab the aero tool and click away from the previous path that you created I still had the little endpoint selected, so I thought I wanted to add to it if I click in an empty area with that arrow tool it will know I'm done with the first one that does create a second one here and I will go back to that arrow to if any to move the end of an old version uh I'm just looking at the angle at the very top of this path where I can see the smallest little smidgen of rooftop and I'm getting this to match the angle hopefully about like that I think that's give me an idea of where to stop when I add additional rooftop does that make sense? So then I can come in here, you know, I want to do a lot of this is going to be really boring, but I'm just going to use this tiny little part of rough option click and I would come in here and apply until I run into tree that I'll grab another part of rough and I'm just going to fill us in it doesn't have to take too long to just try to create some sort of phil keep going when I'm done, I can retouch out all the repeated textures and other things once I get a bigger area, I'll have a larger area to clone from that tree is going to stay there, so I don't need to go any further to the left and now that I got this area is starting to fill in now I concur copy from a much larger area go all the way down here and get this in and I would just create a rooftop of some sort it might not look perfect and then later on I'd go in in retouch out repeated shapes you no idea how right now I'm starting to create a relatively large area of rooftop and I'm just going back and back to areas where I have clean rough to copy from that's when I read you see me move up to the upper portion of the roof, I'm holding on the option key and clicking to say a copy from this area now and stop right where that sinuses they don't need more rough beyond that, so you see how I just made a big area now I could go back using either the, uh, spot healing brush or other things and try to clean up some of this or what would be best is if I knew I was going to have to retouch out that vehicle. When I took the photograph, I would have walked to the left a bit until the car was no longer covering up the roof and I would have taken a second photo and you know how with photoshopping clone between documents or I can copy an area one document paste into the other would make it so much easier, but this just gives you some little tips about how I keep track of angles and how he might try to cover a large area. I did the same thing with the bricks in there and let's see what the end result is looking like right now and see if I could get rid of those paths, but if you look at it from a distance, I mean, when you look real close, you're going to be picky, but when you actually see this that the size it would be seen at, I don't think it's that bad, considering how much of it was covered up said you saved you some sense now let's talk about some trees when it comes to getting a telephone line that is going through a tree toe look ok there are some big challenges there, so let's see if we can at least partially tackle it. We'll go for this one in here. First off, out here in the empty area remember how I usually sever the ends of telephone lines for the clone stamp tool where they touch something sever these ends like this exact same technique we used earlier today or sometimes the um ah, what he called that phil thing we used the and it, phil, we have content where sometimes they can handle it, but I guess sever those things. I think that's all severed, then I can go to my spot healing brush see if it will handle getting rid of this stuff. I didn't sever all these, but I could just see if it will work without severing. Sometimes it does other times it'll take the color of that tree and pull it out this way like just right there, but anyway, I'll fix that stuff, but the difficult part is where is going through the tree? So the first thing I'll usually do is get a brush that's just the tiniest bit bigger than the telephone line, and what I want to do is just try to get rid of it in general, even if the end result doesn't look perfect. I'm just looking for something where the end result looks better than what we started with then we're making a step in the right direction and we could go on from them and do further enhancement so what I might do here is I'm going to click on the end of where this line is click and let go I'm gonna hold shift and remember that shift connects the dots is if you draw a straight line and it's going to shift click later on down the line and then I'm gonna shift click and I'm going to do that until I've gotten line in general disappear and it's gonna look bad and a lot of areas you see it's pretty obvious where it went through right now here's what I can end up doing I need to reconnect any branches that have been severed in the way I reconnect branches that have been severed is I'll go in and use the clone stamp tool and with the clone stamp tool active, I will option click on a part of branch. The problem is if I come up here to fill it in and I just click in a drag it's going to start replacing stuff in the surroundings and it's not always gonna look right but if I change the blending motive this tool to a mode called darken now it's only able to dark in the picture which means it's not able to suddenly introduce any sky into the image because the sky would lighten up the image and it's something where then I can easily just kind of connect through there without messing up the stuff in the surroundings so I'll end up going to each of these branches that are broken option click in one part of it see if I could get those to align and in darkened mo just kind of reconnect them if at all possible with reconnecting them it gives you a little bit more natural through there then I'm going with my clone stamp tool just get a small brush and just start grabbing random kind of branch areas look up in here to see where I am I'm going to copy from the area like that it was going to come in here and see about trying to put in a little bit copy from somewhere else like over here try to put on a little bit and sometimes it helps and dark and mode other times have to be a normal so let me try normal in this case but I'll grab a little part here put it in crab little part from up here put it in grab a little part from down here put it in and just grabbed from random spots in here just so it doesn't look like the blurry mass that was there as the result of what I had done previously if it ends up putting too much in, try, put it in darkened mode and then go back in, connect up any branches that were broken, so if there's any very solid branches coming through there's one right here, go back option, click on one, bring it down here and see if you can get it in darkened mode to fill in. Sometimes I can't get it from there because there's, too many branches gone sideways, and so I'll just look for a branch of approximately the right with likely this one option click and then I'll come over to where it needs to be applied, which is here, and if it's not the right angle, I go to my clone source remember how you could rotator scale of clone source? Well, this actually looks like it's about the right angle and in dark and motor should be ableto just kind of put that in. So anyway, I've only done a very small part of this. I don't want to spend too much time on x it's, not the most exciting thing to d'oh, but if I show you what I've done before here's, some of my end result, I don't think it looks perfect at all in this case when you look this close, but we are at what percentage? Three hundred percent view in a three hundred percent view especially if I show you before and after you'll see things but if you look at it at one hundred percent view which is this view and I don't show you where the original branches were and you just look at it when I just glance at it I don't notice a huge amount of issue with it it's when I get up to three hundred percent or when I turn this layer off and back on again where you know exactly where to look, then sometimes you'll have to spend a little more time if you need it to be quite that clean but those are a few tips from this image I just want to share with you the main thing is darkened mode for connecting branches I find to be overly useful steel branches from other areas that are a different angles using the clone source panel were able to move it around like that and get much more than you would otherwise be able to so let's see what else if there's anything before I close this image that's uh I want to mention so the main ones those guides really helped me a lot as faras be able to know where things need to go question I've noticed you haven't got rid of the big time telephone pole no no because it would be too difficult or it's not that it's too difficult it's just a matter of the amount of time I spent on the rest of the image to get rid of all that I have one hundred sixty gas station images to take and retouch and if I spend the time to do that is just going to distract me from other stuff and actually didn't mind it quite as much because it seems to be kind of disguised within the tree s o I decided to leave it there if I wanted to get rid of it what I would usually dio is see if there are any other pictures I took in this area because usually when I take a shot like this I didn't take just run one I took one from a different angle I took one from the other side of the station I take it from all over the place and what I could do then is steal from those other photos or let's say this is let's say this part of the left is from another photo I can cover here and if I want use the clone source tool uh make sure this is set to current and below I could copy from over here I go to my where is a clone source panel and I might say flip this horizontally so it's not going to look like an exact copy puts on the left side that's been flipped like a mirror get a big enough brush where I can see what it would look like get it over there where I think it might look good, we're like that if I need to change the angle remember its shift in option a shift in alton windows and then I think it's the greater than and less than symbols I could row tape I'll try to get it so the angle the branch is matching the angle of other branches in there and click but I would most likely just replace that whole side of the tree I'd probably want a line turned on them so that if I accidentally let go I would be able to click multiple times we'll take this and see if I can do but anyway I would start grab other parts of the photo do that this is gonna be a little bit too blatant have a copy though with simple brands so I might use the outer edge of that grab from a different part of the tree used another part and just you in patches to try to get rid of that out to be very careful where it hits the clouds that I end up stopping at the right point not doing a great job of it here because I'm just not trying that hard but as I give you some sense for how I might approach it all right, then let's talk about this retouch this is one of my latest retouch is I just took this picture I think less than two weeks ago this gas station is in portland, oregon if you over there just look for signal station pizza if you want to find it uh look it up on google maps or something else and let's look at the original and then what has been retouched so I mainly want to tackle the mural it's the most difficult thing in the entire photo that was to retouch so I mean a turn on the layers up until I get to the one for the mural going to see where it is in there there it is all right and so this is what the stage I was out at the time it decided to tackle the mural I'd already retouched all this stuff before I said ok it's time for the mirror I knew I wanted the wall that was there to be a single color I have seen a picture of this station before when I first attracted to it they knew I wanted to go shoot it and at the time that wall was a solid color and then I got there and I was like oh man eso let's take a look at how I went about it I knew I wanted to be a solid color so the first thing I did was I actually made the wall black and white I went in here and I did a black and white adjustment layer when you're in a black and white adjustment later you can grab this little hand tool to isolate particular colors within your image in brighton or dark in them. So if I click on this area here, I think this area used to be red, but I'm not certain if I click there it'll isolate the reds and I could drag it to the right to brighton or darken and what I want to do is try to get the reds to look similar to the rest of the stuff on the wall so I'm looking at this area right in here then said, hey, can I get this part to look like that part? You know, just kind of pick an area to be your reference point somewhere in there I'm getting close then I would click on the next color in the wall that's exactly yellows and I say ok, let's, move this up and down until it's similar in brightness to its surroundings. So right now I'm looking at this guy shirt and I'm comparing it to the area around him and I was getting that then I'm not sure what this color was it was green's I'm going to move it up and down to see the green pants on that one person try to get it similar again to the same reference area each time I click on a different area, see if I can get it not sure what color this wasn't little right, but see if I could get it to look similar to whatever I can't get looked to to look similar with this. What I'll end up doing is I will do a curves adjustment layer. We talked about curves in a previous class that it did case you're not aware of this, you just happen to tune into this class. This is part of syriza syriza's called photoshopped mastery, trying to get you to truly master what you're doing in futter shop. One of the previous sessions was on color and tone, which meant adjusting color in tone ality, so now he just means brightness contrast in one of the things we talked about was curves, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it, but in general, what I would do is the following I'm trying to match this brightness right here so let's say I wanted to change this area to match this. What I would do is grab this little hand tool, move your mouse on top of your image and if you drag down in the bottom of curves, you can expand it down here because usually these numbers they're kind of hidden you gotta pull on the bottom to make him tio there's enough space for him anyway, I put my mouth down here and I'd look at the number that shows up in courage. Do you see the number two? Oh, wait, that's just a number that sells you. How bright this is. I would click on the area I want to change. Click in down here. Worse is output I type into a weight that means make it that the brightness of the other air my mouse was on. Now the only problem is the curves adjustment is affecting the entire picture. I would need to paint on the mask to control which area is affected. So what I would do is just hide this adjustment layer and hide the black and white layer two so I can see what color that used to be somehow going and select it. I'm not going to be precise right now. I would usually spend more time getting the selection. I'm trying to show you that concept, though not every little granular detail, but let's say I was able to somehow select that area. Go back and turn my black and white layer back on turn my curves layer back on and that's the only part of this adjustment that I wantto be adjusted s o I want that part of the image to be of the mask to be filled with white I select inverse to get the opposite in the way you get an adjustment to no longer apply to your images you fill it with black so if I choose that it fill one of the choices and edit phil is to fill with black that's going to remove my adjustment from the rest of the picture do you see how the brightness now between these two are pretty darn close? Well, the idea is get the brightness of the large areas to be the same get the brightness of the large areas to be the same after you've gotten the brightness of large areas to be the same credit new it's a new empty layer to do your re touching on and all you do is research out the little details so here I'm using the clone stamp tool and I'm just going to break the problem up into small little chunks surrounded by the proper brightness so I'm going to sever his head you know we're going to be doing headset or indigent I'm going to set her off his little arm I'm cruel I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to sever their leg I mean come over here and try and copy from here I'm going to sever through there all I'm trying to do is isolate the stuff that's left in the little chunks surrounded by the right brightness then I'll come back and just use my spot healing brush and hope photo shop could deal with it, but it's the matter of getting the huge areas of color to match in brightness, any transitions that don't look good just crossing but you get the idea how I got some of it so the main choice there let me show you what I actually ended up with because it took a little bit of time it's not the simplest retouch I'll get rid of these layers we created let me show you the actual layers for the retouch I did and just so you know, with my fine art images I will spend as much time as it takes to get them to be exactly what I want even if that's multiple days and I don't expect that for most things but all turn off these layers one of the time and we'll get a sense for how they contributed to the end result someone did ask earlier in the day, do you have any concept of approximately how long you worked on this image in total, this image of actually probably spent a day on because it's ridiculous as far as what needed to be retouched although I shouldn't say full day it wasn't like a I've probably spent about six hours on it, which is a long time I mean that's a ridiculous longtime for retouched that's but I think you can learn from it on another things. So anyway here's the black and white being applied to the wall then these air just curves adjustment layers all they do is I moved my mouse over one area and I might have used this areas the reference in whatever number showed up remember we had a number that showed up in curves when I move my mouse there I used the exact same number for every adjustment it was based on one area I'd select an area, I'd go to curves and I'd adjust it so you see that part becoming the same brightness is another and then I do the same thing for another big area same thing for another big area these adjustments here did not take very much time because I was using the quick selection tool to select most areas and then I was using curves to just try to get the brightness of the paint to be relatively evened out. Once I got to this stage I broke all these pieces up into little chunks by surrounding them with the proper brightness and that I use thie spot healing brush and by doing so but that looks like a lot to retouch out but it's exactly the same as what I did with his head in his arm just break them up into little pieces and then spot healing brush to get rid of them good question coming in from the chat room right now from beats for thirty five wondering why you wouldn't merely take a patch of wall and then clone that into a bigger patch and then clone that into their path because I'm going to see a repeated pattern of texture similar to when I did that to the rooftop next to the car everyone I was creating rooftop and I was taking little areas and copy them you could see a lot of repeat fine if it's in a tiny area when it's in a big area can end up looking I think because you see a lot of repeats I wanted a lot of the original texture on the wall so using tones you retain all the original text yeah I just received all the original texture in the wall on lee where I actually retouched out the fine detail that I transplant texture after that ended up adding color to the wall you can do that either with the human saturation adjustment layers little check box called colorize or I happen to do with curves but if you're not comfortable with curves and then I added a little shading to the wall on the left side so it wouldn't be so even that that's just the grady into well sitting on a layer uh with the capacity of twenty percent you know that ad that it's a great we ask a couple of uh let's see divorce has been are you on ly adjusting lightness at that point or the other two numbers also incurs? No, I'm only adjusting the lightness in what happened is if I adjust all three numbers it's going to take three times as much time for me to think about it and that's why I turned the wall black and white first when the walls black and white I don't think I have to think about the color only have to think about the brightness, which means I'm only working on the curve where at the top it says rgb instead of the individual colors it cut down on the amount of work. I'm not saying this is the only way of retouching this wall, but I wanted to rate maintain a lot of the original texture in the wall and that's how I did it without getting a lot of repeated texture. So it's kind of a crazy one in the free minder could you maybe explain again? I missed how, after adjusting in black and white, the colors became consistent. Um well, in black and white, the main thing is take off these top two layers. When I converted it to black and white for the wall, it took out all the color, and therefore the only thing we had left once all the color is gone is brightness information and therefore I could select an area and a justice brightness so it matched somewhere that was near it in the surroundings and so in general I was trying to make the brightness of most of the large areas of color to be the same once I did that then I just surrounded each area with the proper brightness to kind of break it out just like when I severed the head one or severed the arm to make it a small digestible easy to retouch spot so I don't know if I understand exactly what the question is but um I think that just you know, after I retouched that out part of retouching though got rid of the shadow that was on this air hose thing and so I did have to add a shadow back in the end that was just taking this exact shape, moving it down into the right and filling with black it was using a selection of that shape maja who wonders whether select color range and some shift clicking would work to select that lets you yes, it would what's good with color range is if you use the quick selection tool it's only going to select the area where you're painting and if that same color is used elsewhere on the wall it wouldn't be selected but if you go to the select minion use color range if I click on a blue area let's say it's not only get a select blue where I'm clicking but everywhere else on that wall as well and so that could be used as well and actually now that I think about it I did use that quite a bit a combination of that and the quick selection tool so you have a good idea other things here is the garbage can if you look at the garbage can uh and I find the layer that removes it take me a moment to locate it. There it is. Remove trash can that's where again I ended up using the pen tool to make guides because do you see this angle of the shadow that's right here I made the pencil with a guide there another one going this direction so I could tell exactly where those two edges would end up being combined together over in the distance and so you see how he was able to get that too join together and that's simply copying this exact edge and moving it over although if it happens to not work out just right I could also copy from this shadow edge right here because using the clone source panel I could have it rotated around and scaled even tio be able to use that edge and put it over here when it came to other little pieces and here it was just a matter of grounding small pieces from the surroundings and I ended up doing small parts at a time so this little edge over and here I believe was stolen from over here uh just put in the little edge it just build it around small pieces at a time until I was able to get that that didn't take all that much time though the wall is what took a bit of time when it comes to the tree that's up here the tree I ended up actually using a second photograph at the time I took the photograph I noticed that the tree was over there and if I moved my position with the camera over to the right or left to avoid that I didn't like the composition of the rest of the image but I knew I was going to want to retouching away from there and so I simply walked ah little bit over to use a different portion of another photograph that had taken and the thing that I needed to do was to make sure that that peace was processed with the exact same camera settings as the main image and so if I can get in here I'll show you the part of that that was used there it is that's from another photograph and that was simply me moved over a little bit so that the tree wasn't there I ended up masking it so it only showed up in that one area and then I ended up retouching around it so if I end up just plunking it and looked like this I had retouched that little piece out and a few other little parts that's the shadow for the tree ideas shorten and then a few little transition areas where I could still see through the tree but that was from a separate photograph we'll talk more about some of those ideas and a little bit when we get into layers one of the thing we haven't had time to talk about but I wanted to get into wass how to think about working with panoramas because there was a few simple things there here's a panorama that I shot when I was in iceland iceland is one of my favorite places tio go and so here's the shot this is a waterfall and what's weird about it is up above you can't see a river assed faras the source goes it's just coming out of the ground it looks almost like a spring coming out of the ground but it's really really wide and so I had two shooters of panorama I'm gonna select the first image hold shift and clicking the last image to get him all selected and I'm going to stitch this panorama the same way you would stitch any panorama which is where the command called photo merge and when photo merge comes up in photo shop I will use the default settings and simply click ok it should do all the work to stitch it together and if all goes successfully, this is what we end up with great when we're done, we end up with separate layers in what I would like to do is two things. First, I want to straighten the horizon line where the base of the waterfall is and then secondly, I want to crop the image, but I don't know if I'm gonna want to crop out as much as I'd usually need to, so let's see how we could accomplish that. First, I'm going to combine the layers together that we have, I'll go to the layer menu in near the bottom of the choice, the menu that's here, I'm just going to choose merge visible just means combine all those layers I'm not going to choose flatten, flatten would fill in the checkerboard area, and I don't want that filled in yet you'll see why in a few minutes, so now we just have one layer in order to straighten out this edge. What I would end up doing is I would go to the filter menu and there's a choice in here that's in the newer versions of thunder shop called adaptive wide angle adaptive wide angle is really nice when you're working on panorama is when I get to adapt of wide angle, the first thing I notice is that I think it's cutting off a little bit of my panorama if you look on the far left you see if I can zoom out if its really cut off no, it didn't okay I thought it was cutting it off little bit, but it it hasn't I just needed to zoom out, but the first thing I notice is that this little edge here just isn't straight, so all we need to do is click right on that edge in drag to the right and there's this line that comes out in that line curves along with the curvature of the picture I'm going to just kind of follow along here and I'm gonna get that line to be a cz long as I possibly can get it while still matching the curvature of the image when I get all the way out here it's no longer matching the curvature of the image you see how the middle it's bowed down too far so I'm going to back up and so whatever the longest is I can get it where it's still matches up with the features in the image it's about here. I think if I want that area to become straight, I hold the shift key shift means straighten this so I'm holding on the shift key before I let go of the mouse so I'm gonna let go of the mouse now and it'll straight in that area but since this line did not extend all the way across the entire picture, it didn't straighten the whole image, so I'll go to the end of the water click and I'm gonna come this back in until I get to the end of that other line hold the shift key to tell it straight in this two mile echo it should straighten that out as well. This could be done with architecture as well if you have buildings after doing a panorama and they're still tilted a little bit, that kind of thing doesn't matter if it's a vertical or horizontal line click on it drag and its long is the line that photo shop is drawing matches the curvature of whatever that object is hold shift down and keep it held down at the moment you let go of the mouse it will straighten that part then I will click ok, so that's straighten it out I'll choose undo something to see the difference straightening, but now with my panorama I need a crop it and I really would rather not have to crop out appear at the top on the bottom I might end up cropping in too tight because look at how much of this sky is missing on the right side if I go to my crop tool and I crop it until we get rid of that stuff on the right side now look at how low my crop is in the middle that's just not acceptable, so I want to do something to retouch all the areas that look like a checkerboard and I do this very commonly after stitching of panorama here's the technique first I need a selection of the panorama, so to do that I'll go to my layers panel, I'll move my mouse right into here and here's the trick if you hold on the command key that's, corrupt control and windows and you click on this little thumbnail image, you're going to get a selection he had command click on the little thumbnail not the name, not the eyeball but the thumbnail command click its control clicking and windows that's going to select everything that's in this layer it's gonna just ignore the checkerboard select everything else I need that selection to be the little list it's smaller than it is right now because the edge of that selection could be what's known as anti alias anti alias means it fades out some people called feathered but feather the smallest amount you could possibly have. So I'm gonna go over here and said like to modify it and I'm going to do something known as contracting contracting simply means keep it the same shape but make it smaller imagine it's a balloon full of air just let a little bit of air out it's the same shape it's just smaller so when I choose contract, I'll tell to contracted to pixels and that's simply so that if the edge of that object was the tiniest bit soft, our selection is now not in the soft area on the edge it's into the solid part of the panorama because we made a smaller now I actually need the exact opposite of that because we have the panorama selected and what I need selected is the parts that should be filled in, so if I go to the select menu I can then choose inverse to get the opposite. So now what we have are all the checkerboard areas selected and that selection extends to pixels into the image itself to get across any little soft edge that might be there now we'll go to the edit menu and choose phil and in here I'll use the choice called content aware so edit phil content aware click ok and it's going to figure out what to put in those areas based on the rest of the picture content aware is what's good at dealing with things when it hits the edge of the document? If there's either nothing there or there's weird stuff on the edge and so I'll choose undo let me hide the edges now choose unto that's what it did it's not absolutely perfect, though you do need to review it but you'll find usually in sky areas you need to make very few changes because it'll look just find a sky, but wherever there's fine details like rocks and stuff, you probably need to touch it up like down here it doesn't quite look right as far as the waves go, so just either go to your spot healing brush or the normal healing brush and given a second chance by going over there an area that looks odd see if you can get it to look better and if you can't using the spot healing brush, go to the normal healing brush where you can force it to copy from a different area and retouch all those little spots you think might not look quite appropriate. Everyone is amazed at this by the way personally, my photoshopped life is complete now I usually try to maintains imposture when I'm up here, but I've just been pending yeah uh I think it's just fun. The water is somewhat difficult if you have it really like every little wave and things, you'll have to spend a good amount of time trying to get that to look just right I'm not going to spend too much time with it because it's not technically that difficult it's just time to look at where is the right place to copy further put it in the hard part is filling the empty stuff that's. A game changer for out of people with panelists so well done, and that way, and now I can still crop the image. It's. Not that I didn't want a crop. It's. Just I didn't want to give up so much up in the top, where the sky wass so on crop down here at the bottom, going to bring it up. I'm going to keep that rock that's on the right side, so he's going to probably bring it up to write about. They're bringing in a little bit on the left, like that press return when I'm done, but that allowed me to maintain a lot more of the top of the image without having to deal with it. And it's, the content aware, feature in the phil dialog box. Use it all the time with panorama.

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Ratings and Reviews

Kim Doucette
 

Always love Ben. So clear and deep at the same time. I like buying his courses and love the added notes file. Shout out to his lovely wife for the awesome job she does!

a Creativelive Student
 

This is the my first purchased Creative Live course. Enjoyed the live broadcast and now practice a bit of the segments at my own pace. Ben Willmore is an outstanding instructor. Went off and purchased his Mastering Curves which is just as useful.

a Creativelive Student
 

Absolutely loved the class! Found out so many things that could either help me out when in PS or just add to my arsenal of editing. :) Thanks so much!!

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