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Hiding Clouds

Lesson 30 from: Photoshop for Photographers

Ben Willmore

Hiding Clouds

Lesson 30 from: Photoshop for Photographers

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

30. Hiding Clouds

Lesson Info

Hiding Clouds

eso. Let's take a look at what I did. I'll turn on these layers one at a time. First. Here's something we didn't do yesterday, which is I retouched out part of the sky because I didn't find that these were adding anything to the image up here. And it was something where it was bumping into the edge of the picture, which usually gets your eye to the edge. And then you might leave the picture. And so I try to keep busy detail off the edges would be great if there's little clouds in the middle and stuff, but what I did to get rid of that area, it looks like a introduced a tiny amount. There is. I made a selection of the opposite side of the photograph all the way down into here in, I used the lasso tool do that because with the last so I could make a freeform selection where the straw. But problem is, if I just make a selection like that, that selection will have a hard edge on it. So if I were to copy this and move it somewhere else, they look like he used a razor blade to cut it out. So...

to get a softer edge on it, I went to the select menu, and that's where I found a choice called modify. And then something called feather feathers going to soften the edge, just like if you are to soften the edge of a brush. And I can do that now. The problem with Feather, though, is it makes you type in a number. It's not visual. I wish there was a preview check box here instead of that can put a number and put a slider in. So that way I could have a preview. I move the slider and I can see how soft the edge becomes. I think that would be great. Wouldn't it be more helpful than just dealing with a number? Well, you can replace this, which is called feather with something else that gives you exactly that, and I'd like to share that with you. This is a little, uh, kind of bonus tip off topic kind of bonus tip. So if you ever find that you would usually go to the select menu, you would usually choose modify and choose. Feather here is a replacement for that. You're welcome to use. It does exactly the same thing, but it gives you a preview. The first thing you want to do is type the letter Q. All by itself, que turns on a mod known as quick mask mode. Quick mask mode will take your selection in transform it into a colored overlay. Do you remember the other day when we were working with masks and I mentioned a key you could hit and it would overlay the masking? Your picture is a red overlay. It's the same concept, but it's for selections, whereas the one we talked about the other day was for masks that were attached to a later already. So when I type a letter Q. It'll bring me too quick mask mode, and here's what it looks like. You see the red overland. Now, if you hate keyword shortcuts, you can also do that with your mouse. And the way you do with your mouse is at the very bottom of your tool panel. There's an icon that looks like a dotted circle inside of a rectangle. See this little guy down here? That's the quick mask icon and typing Que is just a short front shortcut for hitting that. So if you hate keyboard shortcuts, bottom of your tool panel, click the icon. So I'm typing que to get into that mode. Now, here's how I saw from the edge. I apply a filter I choose Filter, blur Ghazi and blur, filter, blur Gaussian blur in When I'm in here, I have a slider down here. I don't have to deal with numbers. There is a number there. That number is the same as the number you would use for feathering. You know, if you type five in here, it's exactly the same as typing five into the area where you could do feathering. But here you just look at your picture and you look at this red edge this year, you grab the slaughter and you bring it up until that red edge has the softness that you wanted. So that way you don't have to guess anymore, because when you feather a selection, you're really guessing because it forces you to type in a number. And you you just guess from experience. But it depends how experienced you are. And if you suddenly work on images that are much higher resolution or lower resolution than you're used to. Your experience is gonna be off, but with this you can see it. Then when you're done, you type the letter Q to get out of quick mask mode, and now you have a feathered selection that has an edge that's just a soft is. You saw that red mask have an edge, So let's do that one more time. I'm going to get rid of the selection by typing Command D, and I'll break a brand new one. Then I want to soften the edge. So instead of choosing feather, here's what I do. I type the letter. Q. I go to filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. I wish it wasn't called Ghazi and Blur should be called adjustable Blur. That would be much more friendly. That's the only reason you use it. There's a guy with the last name of gauze that came up with the math behind it, and they named it after him. It's like didn't really help us much, but yeah, its adjustable blur. And so then you can just move the slider around and look at the red overlay until it has a softness. You want click OK, when you're done, and then it's type queue again to get out of quick mask mode. Nice little tip. Kaspars. I hate feathering because it's not visual, and that makes it visual. All right, so now I have this left side. I'm going to copy that area under its own layer. There many different ways of doing that. I personally usually use a keyboard shortcut because I have to do it all the time. The keyboard shortcut for doing it is command J on a Mac that's controlled J and Windows. And think of that is jumping something to a new layer. In that way, you might remember Command J. Otherwise, if you hate keyboard shortcuts, which some people dio you could go to the layer menu. You could choose new, make a new layer, and here say you want to make that new layer by copying the layer you're currently on. See the keyboard Charcot Command J. So Command J just means copy. The area have selected onto its own layer. Jump it to nuclear. So if you watch my layers panel when I do that, you'll find a new layer shows up with. Only the area had selected in it So it pops up there. So many layer. Then I want to use it on the other side of the photograph, and if I just move it over there, it's not gonna look right because our horizon line is is drooping as it gets towards the edge of the image. So what I'll do instead is I'll go to the edit menu in about halfway down on my screen is the choice called Transform. That's where you can usually scale in rotate things. But you also have a choice of flipping the image horizontally or vertically, making like a mirror image of it. So I'm gonna flip this horizontally in. When I do, let's see what happens. You see, it just flopped over the other direction, and then I need to move it to the right side of my picture. So I used the move tool top tool in our tool pounds click and drag it over this way. The problem with that, once I get it over there, is that the clouds on the horizon are identical on both sides, and that makes it overly obvious that you've done something your image, and so there's some things I could do. The main thing is I could grab the eraser tool and with the eraser tool, get a larger brush. And I want my brush to have a soft edge. So if I paint with that, you don't see exactly where I stopped. There are many different ways of changing how soft the interview brushes, but one of them and I mentioned today, was to hold on to keys on your keyboard. I doubt you remember him yet, but on a Mac, it's control in option those two together, and it actually is easy. It used to cause on the keyboard those keys air right together and there at the edge of your keyboard. So it's like if you just hold down the two keys at the edge of your keyboard, you got it. And then I'm gonna drag up and down to see if I get a soft brush. Whatever size I need right now, I'm just gonna paint with the eraser tool to say a race. The part down here I'm working on the layer that contains the stuff we moved over there. So that's all I'm erasing, and I'm gonna make sure erase up here to where the clouds were on the edge, but not too much further now. Usually I would use a mask for this because with a mask you could bring things back as well. But I just don't want to complicate it at the moment. All right, so there I can replace the clouds on the right side. And since I deleted away a little piece of what we put in there, I can have the clouds on the edge of the horizon look different on each side. So if you want to see what's in that particular layer, I'll just hide the layer that's underneath. And so that little chunk right there is from the other side of the photo, and it's helping me clean up that image. So to me, the first thing you do when it comes to directing the viewer's eye somewhere is to get rid of distraction, and that's pulling weeds or retouching whatever you want. Call it, and in this case, it was getting rid of the clouds because I felt them to not contribute to the image. It pulled you to the upper right of the photo, and not in the middle, where I wanted you So after doing that, I'll throw away the later where I did it. Last night. I started working on various parts of the image and remember there was a selection saved into this image. I had spent some time earlier making a selection, and so I loaded that selection and I started out with curves and admit it. So it only affected the iguana, and I ended up bringing out contrast in it. Any time you want to make it, it's easier to see detail in something. I want to bring up the contrast in it and curves. You have two dots and that's what I have here, usually one doc for the dark part of the image and one dot for the bright part of that object. And you make it steeper in between the two, which is exactly what I did here. And that's what caused you wanted to pop out the only thing that was when I originally did that in order to get it to pop out enough on the body up in here. Um, I found that the tail popped out way too much. It just went overboard. So if I actually look at my mask Show you what I ended up doing to view a mask on. If you remember, there's couple keys you could hold down to do things with Mass. They're hard to remember if you've just gotten thrown out yet. So I want to remind you the things you could do with a mask where you could hold the shift key to disable it. So I'm holding shift right now, and I'll click on it to disable it. You see the big Red X? Go through it to say it's not on right now, and that means this adjustment is applying to the entire picture that was shift. Or if you wanted to view it directly, you could hold down the option key, which is all time windows, and you could click right on it. So here's my mask. If it if the iguana area was all white, then the adjustment would apply equally to it. But after I adjusted this image, I found the tail had too much contrast. So I painted with black and I lowered the opacity of that brush so that I would not remove this area from the mass completely. Instead, I might really remove maybe 40% of it, and I just painted across the tail to say, Don't affect this quite as much that tone down the tail after I'm done viewing the mask. If you want to stop viewing it, I can option click in a second time, and so that's what that was doing. Then I decided, Well, if I'm pulling out contrast in the Iguana and that's making it jump out, then why not do the opposite to the rest of the picture? So the next one here is darkening the rest of the picture. It's just saying, Hey, let's make him bump out even more by darkening the rest of the image. So that's just a curve. With one dot moves down, that means I click somewhere within the surrounding area and push down in the mask. There's Theo Guana in there to say, Don't affect the Iguana, and that made him pop out even more. Then I kept going, and I said, Well, if you're gonna mess with brightness, why not mess with color? And so I loaded my selection once again and I did a vibrant adjustment, and all the vibrance adjustment is doing is if you look at the sliders and vibrance. It's been boosted up a little bit. It only affects the iguana, so that means Tijuana is becoming more colorful. If I'm going to make the iguana more colorful, why not make the rest of the image less colorful? So I loaded the selection of the iguana again. I selected in verse from the select menu to get the opposite, and in this one I lowered the saturation of the rest of the picture and that tone down the surrounding colors. I didn't like that it affected the sky, because if I toned on the colors in the sky, just doesn't look right. So I grab my paintbrush. It paid with black and I painted across my sky. Then I did another one, and in this case I'm just darkening. The image is a whole again. Ah, because I just wanted that you wanted to separate even more by making it really pop out. I find bright things feel like they're coming towards you. Dark things feel like they're recessing away in, So by darkening the surroundings around the iguana, it would make him pop out. So you see how for an image like this I've just build up a bunch of layers. These layers did not take a long time to create. I might have spent a total of I'm guessing on this 13 minutes. That's my guest. But that's once you're comfortable with what you're doing when you're looking at your notes to see how you're doing it. You got an hour into this thing, you know. But do that to a dozen images and then and you're gonna be down to, like, five minutes to do it, because this is one selection used over and over again and then painting on the mask and painting really quick in the mask, and it allowed me to transformed the image from that to this. It's too much for you. If you think it's it's an over adjustment. Just lower the opacity on whichever adjustment is making it be overdone. Thanks. So remember directing the viewer's eye. It has a lot to do with making sure the most colorful area is where you want him to look and, more importantly, that places where you don't want them to look don't contain a lot of color, so tone it down a little bit there. If you want it to feel like it has more dimension, brighten some areas and dark and others. The bright areas will feel like they come towards you. The dark areas will feel like they go away. And then, if you want to see more detail, cause details another thing your eyes attracted to go into curves and make it steeper for whatever object it is, you want your I to go to.

Class Materials

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Bens Actions.zip
Ben Willmore creativeLIVE Class Files Day 1.zip
Ben Willmore creativeLIVE Class Files Day 2.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Jim Pater
 

I taught Photoshop (version 5) to graphic design students at the college level. I had great fun teaching. This is the perfect course to show others how they might go about teaching a Photoshop course. Congratulations Ben, on your excellent teaching style and methods. I thought I already knew quite a bit about Photoshop but this course made me aware that there's always more that you can learn.

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