Retouching in Adobe® Camera Raw
Ben Willmore
Lessons
9:00 am - Preparing Images for Retouching
16:35 2Retouching in Adobe® Camera Raw
30:42 39:45 am - Essential Retouching Tools
32:21 410:45 am - Retouching Tools Continued
44:42 511:30 am - The Clone Source Panel
23:42 612:45 pm - Advanced Techniques
47:35 71:45 pm - Working with Layers
30:132:30 pm - Content-Aware Scale
25:15 93:00 pm - Retouching in Perspective
30:32 103:30 pm - Working in 16 vs. 18 Bit
16:25 119:00 am - Smart Objects
1:01:42 1210:00 am - Smart Objects Q&A
25:30 1311:00 am - Blending Sliders
46:07 1411:45 am - Blending Sliders Q&A
11:27 1512:45 pm - Clipping Masks
20:51 161:00 pm - Layer Masks
36:33 171:45 pm - More Masking
24:59 182:45 pm - Puppet Warping
19:11 193:00 pm - Displacement Maps
32:04 203:30 pm - Blending Modes and Color Matching
20:41Lesson Info
Retouching in Adobe® Camera Raw
Now let's, move on to doing some retouching in camera because there are some limited features in there that we can use in sometimes they're more useful than the ones that are in photo shop so let's, take a look all right, here's a friend of mine this is cassandra and she's got some retouching want to perform? First thing I might do is again go to that sharpened tab and just make sure her skin is not being sharpened some holding on the option key haltom windows and I'm bringing up the masking to say don't sharpen her skin but yes sharpen all that useful stuff like hair and lashes and teeth. All right, then there's a bunch of different things weakened dio I'm gonna zoom up on her face right now I'm in the zoom tool so I could just click and zoom up I'm going to go to this tool right up here looks like a brush with a few little blotches next to it that's the spot removal tool in with that tool, I can click within my image in drag to define the size of a circle and that's defining where I ...
want to retouch the image when I let go fucker shop is going to look at the surroundings and try to find an area that looks smooth to use as a replacement for that and you'll see two circles and in general issues copying from the green circle in putting it inside the red, you can click on that green circle and drag it because it might accidentally choose an area that has some acne in it and you might need a drag to smooth area skin, but you could drag that anywhere you'd like and it's ok, if you drag it to an area that is overly bright or overly dark, photoshopped will adjust it to make it match the area retouching so it's more. What you're looking for is texture. Oh, brightness color doesn't matter, it's just the texture that you're trying to work with. So in this case I can click in a bunch of areas and on lee, if it messes up well, I drag the little circle and if I need to work on an area larger, then the circle that I've been using, I just can click on the image in drag to define a bigger one, and I could re touch on all sorts of things. If you just click and drag, you'll end up defining the size and then if on future ones you just click and let go without dragging. It'll just use the same size circle and so just make sure it's copied from appropriate areas in with us there some settings involved and they're over on the right side of my screen and the first thing is up at the top is rather important eyes the type you can either clone where you can heal and we'll talk a little bit more about this when we get into the main part of father shop but any time you see the word hell it means perfectly matched the brightness in color of the areas surrounding whatever it is you're retouching if you clone clone means blatantly copy from what's the area you're using to the area applying it but don't try to make it match just blatantly take what was there and move it to a different location don't adjust it so it matches the brightness so if you want to see the difference let's just say I wanted to retouch out something on her cheek here I click and drag like this and I'm going to tell father shop to use something from the other side of her face way over here now the brightness is obviously different in that area but you notice it's adjusted it because any time you have it set to heal it means precisely match both brightness and the color of the surroundings and so it did that if I change this to clone though now notice that area all it is is blatantly copying from one area in placing it somewhere else and doing no additional work at all so most of the time I'm gonna have this set to hell the only time I'm going to have it set to clone is possibly when I'm re touching up against the edge of an object like the edge of a building let's say and I don't want it to match that edge because otherwise you've probably seen this a few times you try to retouch something out that bumps into something else and whenever you do the edge of that thing that it bumps up against seems to just get pulled out towards the area retouching and that's because it's trying to precisely match it and blend everything in this doesn't look right and that's the main time when I'd set it over to clone is when I'm bumping into the edge of an object we'll get into that mohr and photoshopped when we're not doing the simple camera stuff most of time I'd have it set to heal here also when I'm in here I clicked and I drag dragging is actually defining the setting on the right side that's called radius, so I never really mess with that. Uh the only time I might is if I've already clicked on the image and I found the circles just a little bit too small it's like didn't cover the entire blemish was trying to get rid of I could come over here to radius and just say hey force that to be bigger if it wasn't big enough to cover the entirety of something but I could also just click on its edge in poll, and that would do the same thing, and I'm a very visual person, so I usually go over there and more pull on the edge than deal with the number. Yeah, I got a question, maybe I'm just being lazy, but I found that continent where does the same thing? Yeah, right now what you'll see when we're in the main part of photo shop, we'll have a lot of features that have content where available to them, but the thing that's good about this particular process is if we can do it on camera often times we can go through a large number of images very quickly, because when I'm done, I can just hit the done button or if I have a bunch of images, I can actually open more than one in here and just quickly clicked between them and sometimes it's just much faster to do it in here so let's do a little bit more. Sometimes there are some recognizable features. If anybody has a mole or a birthmark, you should either ask if they want it removed. Or instead of completely removing it, you might want to lessen it because if it's something that they've had from childhood kind of thing they might ask, you know, if you have gorbachev and he's got this birthmark on his forehead and you remove it, they're going to say who the heck is that? You know, we have a twin and so what you might want to do is if it's somebody has a mole birthmark or prominent freckles let's say that you find to be distracting and image what I might do is click on the particular area, let photoshopped completely retouch it out like I have here and then over on the right side there is no opacity control and just bring down the opacity all the way and you'll see the original area within that and then just slowly bring up the capacity and as you d'oh it's not going to completely remove that object it's going to lessen its effect but if somebody were to actually look for it, they'd still be able to find it. And so what I do is I do kind of multiple passes in an image if there's anything in the image that's completely temporary if it's acne let's say and if you saw somebody a month later the acne wouldn't be there or the in different locations on their face I'll completely retouch it out if it's something that is always there like a mole, a birthmark or something similar? I will if I find it to be distracting, I might reduce it just by using the capacity down a bit. This is also what I end up using for removing death spots on my images and that's one thing I'd like to show you, I'm going to click the done button and here's another advantage of working with camera and that is here I have multiple images that were shot the same day I'm going to select all the images I have the first one already selected a hold shift and click on the last one and I'm just going to say opening camera now before I start messing with the image you'll see the over on the left side all these thumbnails, those air, all the images that I had selected and usually any changes I make with any of the tools will only effect image that's currently selected over here on the left and I could switch between them to work on different images if I hit the select all button above it though that way you'll get them all selected and then any changes you make within cameron will affect all of them and so what's good about that is if I happen to zoom up on an image and I hope this is one in a find sensor dust spots which I thought I had in this image before I see a couple of them that are I could have somewhat hard to see him on here. I thought I had some prominent ones, but you could go to the spot removal tool and come in here and retouch out any sensor does spots you might have, and what it's doing is re touching him out of all over the photos at once, which that would take a lot more time to do in photo shop much better to do it here in camera. And one thing is, if you want to be able to more easily, see where those dust spots might be located is you can go to the detail tab and you remember that choice called masking. Well, if you bring it up when you're holding on option, it gives you this weird look of the image, and it will usually be much easier to see any sensor dust spots when you bring this up because you're going to see that is sharpening them. It'll put a little ring around them in this case. I already read such down I think the two that I had but it's going to show up in a way similar to what might be right over and here, watch this area. Do you see a little thing where it seems to be highlighted around? Almost like there's an object there when you let go, there's not really an object there. Well, that's, what it's gonna look like with sensor does spots and there's, a new version of photo shop that's supposed to come out on june seventeenth, which happens to be my birthday kind of a birthday gift adobes giving us if you subscribe to adobe creative cloud, you would get this update it's in there when you're in the spot removal tool, that that tool will be a check box down here at the bottom two can't remove the wording, something like visualize dust spots or something, and it does the exact same thing. We just showed you it's going to turn on that same view that you see when you're sharpening, and it make it easier to find those death sparks. So anyone just make sure you have the select all button before you end up doing that spot removal in that way, to apply to every image, and therefore you could get rid of it in a huge number of images. The only thing I'd be concerned with is when you do your spot removal, you have each one of these spots, and each one of them has a an area is being copied from and it might not be appropriate on every image, so when I'm done I would click through each image just to make sure wherever those little of spots are that's being retouched, they look appropriate like here you can see we're be touching a cloud but were copying from blue sky it might not be appropriate on every single image, so you might need to clip between the images individually and then drag these things around to say where would you like it too either retouch or copy from so just double check each image by clicking through and make sure like here see it used to be in a sky area where it was relatively didn't matter it wasn't critical as far as what was being copied but here it's much more detailed and I might need to find tune where things are being copied from so just go through and double check that it looks appropriate on each image before he had that done button couple other tricks when we're in camera there is one problem you could encounter when shooting fabric and here's an example of it this is known as a more a pattern and if you have something like the nikon d eight hundred e that's a special dslr camera where that little filter that's usually in front of the camera sensor that tries is to prevent more a patterns has been removed and by removing it, it gives you a sharper image, which is great for things like landscapes. But if you take that kind of camera and you shoot textiles with it, you might get a more a pattern that doesn't have this little filter in front that tries tio prevent that getting rid of moray patterns in fabric is much easier in camera raw than it is in photo shop, so let's, take a look at how it's done. I'm going to take this image since it's the j peg instead of a raw file gonna have to come up here and she's opening camera wrong to force it into camera, an in camera at the top. We have a bunch of tools I'm going to choose this one that is my just mint brush. It looks a lot like the tool we're using earlier because there's two of them up there, it looks like a brush, but the one we were using earlier had these little spots around it, which is for removing despots. This one over here, though, is an adjustment brush. When I get in there, we have a limited set of sliders on the right side of the screen, and one of the choices within that is one called moray reduction. What I'm going to do is crank it up this high as it goes. Now just train up the slider is not going to affect your image because it's waiting for me to paint on the picture to have me tell it where to affect the image so I'm just telling it what to do what adjustment am I looking for when I paint but I haven't painted yet I turn up his highs it goes just to make it overly obvious when I paint so it's not a subtle change it's an obvious one I'm going to click here and I'm just going to paint over the areas that contain the meringue and then I'm going to take that slider that's called maria reduction and what I'm going to do is double click on the slider anytime you double click on a slider it resets it to its default setting so therefore I'll see what it look like with no more a production so double click and then I'm going to slowly bring it up. What I'm looking for is the lowest setting that gets the job done what you probably right around there around fifty percent because what's going to happen is any areas where you have a crisp, abrupt transition between colors, let's say of a red object touching a blue sky? If you've painted across that using more a reduction that transition from the red object to the blue sky is going to be softened, not going to be his crisp and so if we have a lot of variation in color like we have a textile that's multicolored we want to reduce that softening effect by using the lowest setting that gets the job done we start off with one hundred percent just so we can see obviously where we're painting you can see the effect if you started out for the low setting you might not have enough when you paint you might not see that it's happening also if there are other areas within the image that have less more a then the areas I've just retouched what I can do is at the top there's a choice of either adding to the adjustment I have if I paint again or I can choose new and now I can work in other areas that had a lesser maury in effect I do the same process though after I choose new turn this all the way up so I can see what I'm doing tonight pain because I can see a hint of marie right in here I can see almost like diagonal stripes of the various colors I know if you guys can easily see especially in the video feed they compress the video feed so much it might be very difficult to see but I'm going to paint across that to smooth it out but that was much less so that on the lapels of this so now when I bring my more rate reduction down, I'm going to need a much lower setting for their I only need about ten to fix that part and that way I don't have to apply it at the stronger strength across the entire area. Instead, I do the really tough stuff in a high setting and then up there at the top, I chose new right up here knew before I tackled the lesser areas that way I could use a lower setting, but that's more a reduction in that feature I believe was added in photo shops yes, six so if you have an older version of photo shop, you won't find the slider for marais in like c s five or cs four I wish it was there, but you know they slowly add stuff couple other things that I do in camera raw with that same adjustment brush is if you find that the sharpening that's being applied to your image is being a still being applied in some areas that you didn't want it to be instead of using masking like we did earlier let's say have that turned down because maybe that took the sharpening off of another area that was important there was wood behind her head and this is a wood artist, you know they make sculpture or something in when I tried to get their face to smooth out the wood didn't get sharpened. It got smooth that as well? Well, here's a different approach to try to prevent the sharpening from happening to her skin. All I would do is go to the detailed tab in glance at what the scharping is currently set to the default settings. Twenty five that's what I'm going to use you just glance I don't remember what it's happened then go to your adjustment brush and in the adjustment brush one of the choices I get rid of my more a reduction is sharpness and just put in a negative twenty five and there all you're doing is putting in the exact same value for scharping that's being applied to the entire picture, and you're putting the minus sign in front of it. So now, wherever I paint it's not that I'm going to soften the image, it's just that I'm going to remove the sharpening that's being applied everywhere else, and so I could come into this image. Now get a smaller brush and if I paint on her face, it's going to remove all the sharpening from the areas where I pain so that's just another approach you could use depending on what you're trying to accomplish, I'm gonna make a new adjustment here let's try something else faces. There where you can often see a little bit more age and people it's where it shows up, and we might want tio help things out a little bit. So what I'm going to do here is create a new adjustment brush, and this time, instead of putting negative sharpness on there, I'm going to go to a setting called clarity and with clarity, I'm going to turn this all the way down to begin with negative one hundred and then got a painted on my image and let's see what happens when I paint clarity when I paint is going to soften the image and in this case, if you got clarity at negative one hundred it's, usually going to be way too much in is going to look fake now some people like the look, though they you know, is if you put vast lean on the lens of your camera or something like that and they like the kind of dreaming little ah look it's not my taste, but if it is yours, go for it, but we can make this look better. I only have the clarity at negative one hundred so I can see where I've painted so that the change that I'm making is obvious. After I've painted on the face and I've smoothed the doll out, I go back to the clarity slider and I double click on it that's going to reset it to zero anytime you double click any slider and camera wrong you get it back to zero then I'm just going to slowly bring it down and see what is the what's the highest setting for negative clarity I can get away with before I really think that I've applied it before somebody else might notice so just take clarity now and I'll start being it negative and I just look at the image and say when does it start looking to be too much in each person has a different idea of what this is because I see some people's images where I look at him I'm going what the hell is that? That doesn't look like a human you know? And but other people love that their clients love it and if so go for it so I'm going to bring this down until for me personally it doesn't look like it's too much so for me maybe around negative fifty or I might not even be able get away way with that much but negative fifty let's say if you want to see before and after when you're using the adjustment brush well you're still in the adjustment brush at the top of your screen is a check box called preview just turn off it'll preview just the adjustment brushes changes so when I turned off here's what it looked like without the adjustment brush you turn it back on and here's what it looks like with and you see how much is softening the skin if you find it's too much just back off on that clarity everybody has a different standard as far as what they would like if you mouse over one of these pins the pins represent the adjustments you've painted into your image it will give you a color overlay of where it's applying it looks like she's having a little of mud mask there in that way you could make sure you didn't get over too many areas of the image in this particular case, I should probably remove it from the lower eyelids that air there, you know like your eyelashes on the lower parks. I got a little much over spray also her upper lip, that type of stuff because that stuff doesn't look is good being sharpened were being soft and I should say s o to do that over on the right side you have three choices you can say new because I want to completely new adjustment independent of the others have already applied the default setting is toe ad sofa continue painting, it keeps adding to the areas we're adjusting or over here I can choose a race and so if I choose a race then I can come over here and zoom up on my image and get it off of her upper lip get it off of her eyelashes the lower ones obviously no to change my brush size I'm using standard keyboard shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts that work with every painting tool in photo shop and if you're not familiar with him there the square bracket uh keys square bracket keys will make your brush larger or smaller and if you add the shift key it will instead change how soft the edge of the brush is. So if you ever see me changing that and if you see me zooming in and out there are many different keyboard shortcuts I'm kind of old school when it comes to photo shop have used it for so long and that means I do command plus and minus on a mac control plus and minus and windows but there are many other ways of zooming in and out just in case you're wondering how I'm doing all that stuff if you need to see that overlay uh for a while you can go to your pin and moss over any one of the pins and you'll see the overlay attn anytime if you find the pins to be distracting at the bottom of this list there's a check box called show pins just turn it off and they won't show up but if you want that overlay to stay there so it's not there are on ly when your mouse and over the pin there's a choice of the bottom that's just called show mask and that means leave that overlay on your picture and that way when you're painting with the erase setting you can see what it is you're hitting and see if you're actually getting it off the areas where he wanted to and when you're done just turn off the show max uh checkbox alright lets it done so those are some things you might think about in camera the main thing is I'd like to get a lot of my work done just in camera rob because I find I can go very quickly especially if I have a large number of images I can load up all the images at once by selecting more than one in that's using opening camera the showbiz thumbnails on the left side and then I could just click between if I stay in my adjustment brush I could just sit there and paint on one person's face click on the next image paint on their face cook on the next image and just power through them whereas in photo shop I have the more cumbersome process of opening the image applying the retouching in in camera everything is undoable nothing is permanent it's easy to undo things in photo shop I have to think about it, I have to create a new layer to put things in, make sure the tools are set up for that layer saved in a file format that supports layers and it's just more complex. And so, if it's simple, I want to do it in camera rocks have have three hundred images of people going to do it there, but you're limited in what you can do, so oftentimes they'll have to pop into further shop to do much more complex stuff. So the next thing I'd like to do is get into photoshopped, but before we do that, if there happens to be any questions, but what we're doing in camera might as well get to him now, it's, like, you know what, the internet he is asking you, because what you just talked about about why you physically do this in adobe cram camera versus doing in a layer in photo shop? Yeah, everybody in the chat room is asking that question, what happens in there? I know, like, you know what, they're going to ask me? Oh, well, I mean, the main thing is, if I have twenty images to retouch, if they're raw files, by chance, doing them in camera, it's going to apply it directly to the raw file in its I'm gonna end up with one file what happens when you adjust something in camera is you just end up with this little bitty text file that's called an ex mp file they don't show up here in bridge but if he actually view an image in your operating system if I reveal this in my finder there's going to be the original raw file right here in this little bitty file that came a rock creates that's just a text file that thing is see if I can see the size over here and hopefully have the sun it's sixty five k that's how much have added to the file size so that raw image if you do that in photo shop you're going to have your original raw file but you can't directly change a raw file so you have to save the end result of something else if you want to be able to make changes later you'll have to keep layers that are in there it's going to be much larger than the sixty five k edition and so if I could do it on camera would be great so questions could just clarify something over with e you're saying that the camera softens things sort of slightly from real life a cr is adding back sharpening so big it getting it back to common training for them and so then when you're not doing the sharpening you're actually making a bit softer than I feel life you could say that it depends on the camera there are some cameras now that you can buy that don't have the filter in front of the sensor one is that nikon d eight hundred e not just the d eight hundred it's gonna have the letter e after and medium format cameras often don't have that which means they're not doing a softening to the image but in general the scharping that's happening camera that's automatically applied is trying to compensate for your camera sharpen my images twice first is in camera just to compensate for what my camera didn't in softening the image and then again what I'm completely done with the image in there I'm sharpening it too common safer whatever output device I use because output devices usually make the image looks softer than you saw on screen and so I sharpen to try to compensate for that at the end and that's based on the output device then the g c photos wondering when you were using the dust removal technique on on several photos at once jeter of sensor dust does it compensate for landscape for portrait or granted images? Yes, it does it acts as if the images mean you're all the portrait versus landscape is your camera adding one little piece of text to the image that says this was vertical versus worth on and it looks at the original orientation of that image fantastic question from one with the camera there, wondering if light room and camera rob both read the same ex mp file where you can go back between the yes, you can light room, though, by default will not save its adjustments to the best my knowledge, at least into those exxon p files unless you change your preferences. If you go into lightman's preferences there's a choice that's called something like right changes to ex mp or something like that, and if you turn that on, then whenever you adjust in image using light room, it will create an ex mp file and that s and p file could be read by bridge so you'd see the same adjustment. Or if you had previously adjusted an image in in cameron, you imported into light room, it'll automatically have that with it. The reason why it's not turned on by default is it slows light room down just a little bit, so when you move a slider it's saving that little file on your hard drive and it just takes it a teeny bit longer, I like having to do that because if it doesn't, it saves all your adjustments in the catalog file for light room, and if that file ever gets corrupted or gets thrown away or something happens to it, you just lost all your adjustments. I'd rather have my adjustments in those little ex mp files so that I know if something happens to my light room catalog and it goes away that I could still see those images and if I happen to want to just have one image and I don't have light room running I might use bridge to get to it it's going to have the adjustment in there so I'd change that preference for me fantastic really cool from a nice really cool is there a way tio view the sharpening mask with some opacity as you work? Uh not that I can think of well it's just there for when you're sharpening and so it's not really there for when you work but if you get the update that's coming out on june seventeenth if you're a creative crowd cloud subscriber then when you're in the little spot removal tool will be a check box at the bottom where she turned on it would say stay there it wouldn't just be there when you're holding option and dragging that slider so that might be a little more convenient but I don't believe there's a capacity setting it's more less retouch out they'll be pretty blatantly obvious when you see the sharpening mass censored suspects will appear very round, whereas clouds and things will peer other shapes you know, so they're usually relatively easy to notice when you have it or not
Class Materials
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!!