Lessons

Lesson Info

Retouching

suffer retouching. There are three main tools you want to end up using, and they are the clone stamp tool. The healing brush in the spot, healing brush and really thinking about the difference between those is what's most important. It's not as important what kind of image or work on or what kind of thing I want to retouch out. If you truly understand the way those tools work, you can tackle most jobs. So let's take a look at So with this image I'm working on the This is the version after it's already been retouched, and what I want to do is to show you what it looks like before and after retouching. So if you look at my screen and do this, we can, uh, progress with it. So if I turn off the weeds, be gone layer, which is what I typically name my retouching layer. This is what the image looked like without retouching. Got rid of some telephone poles off on the right, a parking meter and a car, and we'll get rid of some of those things, and then we'll move on to a different image wheneve...

r it iss. We need a different image to learn a new feature. So what's start this over? I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer. So for now, I'll hide all these layers, or at least maybe delete them to get him out of our way. We'll just use delete hidden layers to kind of get a clean looking file not distracted by them, and to create a new layer. I just click the icon just left of the trash can. Now I usually double click on that layer and call it weeds. Be gone if I can type, because I think of retouching is pulling the weeds out of my document. Yeah, because it's all those things that people might get distracted by that I want to get rid of. It really depends on what you're going to use your images for if they're used for, like, news reporting, not gonna be retouching anything out. But if it's a fine art image, which is what I typically create, then I'm free reigns for us what I could do to them and let's take a peek. I'm gonna zoom up on this before we start using retouching tools. We have to make sure that they're set up properly toe work on an empty layer, and just in case someone else has already set up the tools here, I'm gonna reset their settings so you know what they look like with defaults. If you ever want to reset all your tools to their default settings, you can go up to the icon for whichever tool is currently active near the upper left of your screen. And if you press the right mouse button when you're on top of that where you control, click. If you only have one mouse button, you'll find a choice to reset just the tool you're working with or to reset the mall, and I'm gonna reset them all just so that we make sure where it defaults. Now let's go to each of the retouching tools worth. Start with the clone stamp tool I am. The problem with the clone stamp tool is, if you're working on an empty layer at the top of your screen, is a setting that'll get in your way. That setting is called sample in its centre current layer. That means that this would only be able to copy from the layer that's currently active well The layer that's currently active is empty, so it wouldn't copy anything. The tool wouldn't work at all. I need to change that from current layer to current and below. Once I've chosen that, it's gonna be able to copy from the layer that contains our retouching. There's no retouching it yet, but it will be able to and what's below it, so it'll work just fine. Now I need to switch over to another one of my retouching tools. I'm gonna go to find it the healing brush tool and with the healing brush tool, it has the same setting at the top of your screen. They need change it again from current layer to current and below. Then I'm going to switch to the spot healing brush. So I just click on the normal hill Russian hold down. So I see the other tools. They're in the same slot. Go for my spot healing brush, and it doesn't have a pop up menu. It just check box to sample all layers will turn that on. That's gonna make it so all of our retouching tools will be able to work on an empty later. Ideally, I would like to be able to use the spot healing brush to do Onley retouching because it does most of most of the work for me here, I'm gonna get a larger brush and I'm gonna get rid of this parking meter. I'm simply gonna paint across the entirety of the parking meter. And as I do, the spot healing brush will put a black overlay over the image. And when I let go, it's gonna look at the surrounding image to try to figure out what it think would think would be there if this meter wasn't there. And so it will guesstimating in invents a new material. Here goes, Take a little bit of time, depending on the resolution. Your document. I think the problem right now is that I have four documents open and because they have four open, it's sucking upon my memory in scratch. This space. So the last act a little bit slower than usual, but it didnt okay, job of getting rid of that. It did have some issues down the bottom. I'm going to zoom up and I can see where the rocks are. It started putting in parts of the building like there is a scene from the building right there, and it's gonna run into some issues like that on occasion. In general, with this tool, I usually give it three chances. And then I switched to a different tool. So if it messed up on an area, just paint over that area again and see if it does a better job than it did there in each time, I give it three chances. I try to use a smaller brush with each chance toe only, cover the area that had a problem, and so go into another area. I cover the entirety of that problem area and let go. Sometimes it will do a much better. Other times it will be finicky and will continue to mess up. Once you've given it three tries in an area, then I would instead switch to the normal healing brush tool because otherwise you're just gonna be constantly painting over it and only randomly getting good results. So I'm going to switch over to the healing brush tool differences of spot healing. Brush tries to figure out what to copy from on its own, whereas the healing brush forces you to tell it where to copy from, and so I know it could do a better job if I confined appropriate area. So in this area right up in here, we need the transition from painted concrete to rocks. And I have that same transition over here. So I'll just move my mouse over that transition area right here. Option click. That would be all clicking and windows to tell it to copy from that area. And then I'll move this over to right where that transition should be, you know, apply it, trying to cover all of the problem, at least all the continuous area of the problem and let go, you know, blend in with its surroundings. There is a problem right here. It's just a little bit blurry, so copy from over There it is. Cover that up. But you should be aware that the healing brush will always try to match the brightness of its surroundings, which means I could try to copy from this area that's out in the sunny rocks and use that in here in this shady area. Even though the brightness is completely wrong, it's gonna try to match its surroundings. You notice how it got darker, got bluer and all that. But since the sun was hitting that and had much darker shadows, it didn't quite look right. Let me show you how might really try to match the surroundings, though, even though you're using radically different colors. For instance, here there are little holes, little marks on the building. I want to get rid of them, and I'm gonna copy from this red area down here. I'm not saying that's the best very to copy from. I just want to show you that it's not really gonna copy the color of this area. And I'm gonna plied up here. You see out work just fine to get rid of those little dots. That's because any tool that has the word healing attached always will blend into its surroundings. So it's more about where you applied it, and it's going to match the brightness in the color of those surroundings. So what I'm gonna do is come in here and look at where that parking meter used to be and look for areas where it messed up. And right here it looks like a small earthquake happened, so I can try using the spot healing brush again. Just give it a second chance. Remember, I give it about three chances in each area. We're gonna smaller area each time. It's messing up in smaller areas, and sometimes it does just fine if it doesn't. Then I switched to the normal healing brush where I have to tell it where to copy from. Once I'm done working in an area like that. I look for duplicate shapes because it's not uncommon to have, like, the same rock. Sorry, I'm not used to this overlay. The same rock might show up more than once that kind of thing. So I'll just searched the area and look for any obvious duplicates. If I find ob obvious duplicates, I'll use my spot healing brush and cover up one of the two duplicates just because it's easy for your eye to pick up on those duplicates here. I'm not seen a lot of duplicates. One doesn't popped to my eye, but in the past I've retouched this image in this little rock in this area was found again over on the side. So look out for those things. You do have to be careful, though. Any time you're trying to retouch something out and you need to bump into the edge of your documents or you need to bump into the edge of any object. And I think I'm gonna run into that issue in the lower left of this document. When I was in camera raw with this image, I corrected the perspective so that vertical lines would remain vertical, even though I had my camera tilted up a little bit. We did that earlier. I think yesterday or the day yesterday were early today. When we were in camera, there was a slider called Vertical and it bent to building like this or like that. I think we might have done it both yesterday and today, and I done that and I didn't feel like cropping a lot of the image out. So I have this little extra area of gray now. If I try to use the spot healing brush on that, I think it's gonna run into an issue because it always tries to blend in with the colors that surround it. And once you have the edge in your document, there's nothing beyond that for it to look at and trying to match. So it's going to try to blend them with what's right on the edge of my document. So I'll come over here and try to cover this up. But when I let go, it might do OK. But most likely it's gonna have some issues because it's trying to blend in a little bit with what used to be on the edge of the document will choose undo. In order to prevent that from happening, I'll switch to the clone stamp tool. The clone stamp tool is the tool that's been Photoshopped the longest, and it makes you manually do all retouching. All it does is blatantly copy from one area and put it somewhere else. So I'm gonna copy from one area by option clicking, and I'm gonna apply it on the edge of my documents. It doesn't try to blend them with anything at all, and it's just gonna blatantly put that information in there. But after doing that now, if I switch back to my spot healing brush and I heal that area again, it shouldn't have a problem, because it's gonna find the proper colors on the edge of the document when it hits that left side and so it shouldn't look overly dark. It might still mess up a little bit. If so, just go for the second time. Give it three tries in each area. Let's try that again in the upper right of this photo. Telephone poles and telephone lines are notorious for having those kinds of issues. If I end up trying to completely get rid of this area, the problem will be when I have to come down here and it touches the building. Just kind of kissed the edge of the building like that. Come down here in right there where it touches Go out here, get rid of these lines, come down. We're just touches wherever it just touched an object or the edge of the document. When I let go, I'm guessing I might end up with an issue. Usually the color of that object gets pulled out away from the object, and in fact, it actually didn't mess up that much. Here it just put in the wrong stuff. But if you ever use these tools in the past, you find that often times have you come up and just touch the edge of a doctor of object. The color of that object. It's pulled up into the retouched area. He didn't do it here, which I was surprised about. But let me show you how you solve it, just in case it does happen. You do the same thing we did at the edge of the document. You switch to the clone stamp tool, I'll get a smaller brush and I'm gonna get the edge of my brush to match the edge quality of this building. So because the edge of the building is not blurry, I don't want to soft brush. I want to brush that has this heart of an edge. If you hold down the shift key and use the same square bracket keys that I used to change the size of my brush get a harder edge brush out of it, a copy from the sky that's close by but option clicking. And then I'll come down here and just try to sever the end of right where that line touches the building. And I'll do the same thing right in this area. Copy from right in between here or the brightness will be OK. And then put it in. Right there. Down here the bottom will do the same thing I can try to copy from the sky. But there's not a clean area until up to about here. And it might be difficult for me to reproduce the exact transition that I need from sky to building. So the other thing that I commonly will dio is copy from another part of the building. All shoes undo there. And Zuma, I'll get a smaller brush, usually with a softer edge so can blend in with its surroundings a little bit. And I'm just gonna copy from this area here and possibly a little further over its first sever off this little line option clicking right on this edge. Apply it right there. Well, I put it back in right next to it. She's undo for a moment. Option click. You've maybe a smaller brush option. Click right there. Just need a little gap between that and the object. Now, to get rid of this, I'm gonna copy from this whole edge. But option clicking right here and in trying to get that tow line up the way it should all the way across there. So I have this little gap of sky then I might copy from part of the sky there. Just get the color right to fill in that one little spot. The other thing that I might do is the If I zoom out, command minus exposes him out. Oh, okay. Is I'm going to sever this where it hits the edge of the document. I'll just copy from the area nearby. Cut off the edge, copy from area nearby. Cut off the edge like that and wherever any of these connect. So they're all independent little pieces. Let's see if I've done that up above. Since this is a huge object, I will sever the very end. Work touches the edge of the document, and I just might break it off right in there. So now I can treat those all separately. And now is when I can go to my spot healing brush and go over those areas. It puts in the wrong information. Give it three chances, but I always cover the entire problem area with one paint stroke because otherwise, if you let go halfway up this telephone pole, anything with the word healing attached to it tries to blend in with its surroundings and what's going to be its surrounding directly above where you stopped. It will be some of that poll leftover. Try to blend in with the colors of it won't look right. That's why have to cover up the whole thing. And that's how it works. There's one spot right here. Why didn't clone quite right when I severed the end of something, I can see the color looking a little odd. I could go to the healing brush for that intelligence. Simply copy from the edge of the building above and apply it right down here. That way I can paint out towards the sky urine. Smooth it out now, on some images I've noticed, especially with panoramas. If I ever have any oddities in the sky and I end up using a big brush with my healing brush tool and healing across the sky on occasion, I can see where I've healed it, and it just doesn't look perfectly smooth. It doesn't perfectly match the sky. If that happens, it's usually because the document I'm working with is an eight bit document instead of a 16 bit document. It's one of the very few times when I see a difference between eight and 16 bit, usually with panoramas. Where when I'm done stitching the panorama, I have some kind of streaks in the sky where it's not perfectly smooth, and I try to heal across them, and it still doesn't look perfectly smooth when I'm done. Take the same images in when you're in camera at the bottom of cameras, a little line of text that you can click on and tell it If you want eight or 16 bits, tell to use 16 bits and then stitch the same panorama over again. The sky looks smooth. If there's any problems in the sky and a hell across them, it remains looking smooth and otherwise. Other than that, it's very Ah, a few times that I run into an image where I see a big difference between eight bit and 16. That just happens to be one of them. So now we've got rid of our telephone poles. We've gotten rid of our parking meter to get rid of the car and the the little curb that's there. I'd have to do similar things in the main thing I would do is break it down into small chunks. I would come in here, and I don't know that I want to spend the time to do it cause we work on other images. But I would go to my clone stamp tool and say, instead of trying to get rid of the entirety of a car all at once, break it up into little zones to deal with. So a copy from the painted concrete that's down here Option click, get a bigger brush and just painted across here to say All right, now we have the zone that is above that in the zone. It's below it, and I can deal with that zone separately. I need to have the proper cover on the edge of my documents. So I try to find an area of it. Maybe right in here, get that proper color on the edge of the document. I ran out of space, so I'll have to copy again from there, Get the proper color all the way around the problem area. Now, that's not gonna be as difficult oven area to fix below that, I need the transition from shaded gravel to painted concrete here, so I'll find that transition and option click on it put that transition in all the way to the edge of the document. At some point down here, the sunny rocks would hit the shaded rocks. So I'm gonna copy from one of those transitions over the left. By option clicking, I'll decide. Where would that happen? Let's say it would happen. I don't know. Here guessing. Get it up there and down here at the bottom. I need Sonny Rocks. So I'll copy from the sunny rocks in the left side, and I'll fill it in. Now, all the way around this chunk, we have the proper stuff that it should match that make any sense? It still might be too big of a zone, though. It's pretty huge chunk to fix. We could cut it in half again, working on two separate pieces. We try it. I'm gonna go over here and use my spot healing brush, and let's just see what it does. Sometimes I'm amazed by it. Other times I'm really annoyed by it. Not terrible in a couple of Larry's work messed up, though, where it put in more the texture of painted concrete than it did rocks. And so I'll just give those areas a total of three chances each time trying to work on a slightly smaller area of it. It doesn't look like it's going to do it. Let's try this area. If it doesn't, that's when I switched to the normal healing brush and I say, OK, fun. Where's the right sex? Try to copy from It's all over here, over here. So option. Click there to copy, and I'll do each little isolated chunks separately each time. Option clicking from a slightly different areas so we don't get the exact same rocks. And then up here, we need the texture of painted concrete, and I don't have a large area of painted concrete paint from There's just not a big chunk around here, so that might be too big of an area. I might go to the normal clone stamp tool. Let's break it up a little bit more. Oops, I got part of the building in there to get rid of that, and that was a little too bright, too. A smaller brush. Just need to get rid of. That was the wrong color that's in there. Look, I brought in that down to a small area. I'll go back to my spot healing brush and say, Okay, hopefully can deal with that deal with that. All right, we got rid of a car. I could spend more time fine tuning that, but it gives you an idea of how I think about it. Big Chunk. Break it down into smaller portions. Surround them with the proper color and brightness texture you can think of, so that when you use anything with the word healing attached, it's gonna blend into the proper stuff and just break it down. Make it less complicated to deal with.