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Finishing Touches In Photoshop

Lesson 15 from: Real Estate and Architectural Photography

Mike Kelley

Finishing Touches In Photoshop

Lesson 15 from: Real Estate and Architectural Photography

Mike Kelley

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Lesson Info

15. Finishing Touches In Photoshop

Lesson Info

Finishing Touches In Photoshop

And the last thing I'm gonna do is clone out all the extraneous little items such as fire alarms and extinguishers. You can see down in here all these exit signs. It's my last layer before I end up putting the finishing touches on. Again, I took out the breakers in here. Again, same concept, I sampled a single color, made a selection, dumped it in there, kind of played with the opacity, looks like a painted wall. And again, I took out the exit signs, and just lots of cleaning up to finish it. And then the last thing I do is I straighten the vertical lines. Tilt shifts are good for that but they don't get it perfect. So I use that, I use the, I'll show you what I do. I make a new layer of everything, I hit Command + Option + Shift + E, that flattens everything to a new layer. You never wanna flatten your layers before you're done but if you flatten 'em to a new layer you preserve your work. And then I will just hit Command + T or File, I think it's Image, Edit, Transform and I will sele...

ct Skew, right click Skew, and then I'll drag over some vertical lines. I can, you can do this just by clicking on your ruler on your left there and dragging them into place, and then I will skew and I will get in here nice and close and you can see how that's not exactly perfectly lined up. Again, I want people to think that my client knows how to use a level and a ruler so to correct for my work I will drag that over until it's straight and do the same thing on the other side. You can see it's bending away just slightly. So I'll skew that over there and I'll come down and check my work. That looks perfect. Come across, that looks pretty good. And my horizontal lines, I can zoom in and I can follow that all the way across. And it looks like I nailed that. And it's especially important to get your vertical lines and horizontal lines straight on these one point perspectives because as soon as it starts to tilt you'll lose the effect. Hit Enter and commit the save. And then what I like to do is select everything and turn it into a group and I will look at my work and see how far I've come and see that I like all my changes so here's what we started with. Again, a little dark, not too much lighting going on, something's blown out, no detail in the medallion. After all the work, I think we're left with a much more compelling photo that isn't that much different but at 100% has a lot more going on on a detail level and a texture level and a subconscious level and if you blew this up to a 36 inch print, if you walk up to it and you could see texture on everything and it's not flat and it's inviting and they eye moves through it. And that's pretty much what I do. That's the bulk of the Photoshop work.

Class Materials

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Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Mike Kelley is fabulous, so many aspects of his work would make for great classes! I hope Creative Live brings Mike back for many more classes. He's a great communicator with lots of info presented in his class with understandable instructions. . . not that you'll leave the class being able to recreate his amazing images! Although he is very generous in the knowledge he shares on his great techniques. Only issue was not being able to hear/view most of the class as the "live feed" kept cutting out, which was so frustrating. So, I'm purchasing the video. Hope to see Mike in more courses! Excellent!

Victor Zubakin
 

Firstly this course should be renamed to just Architectural Photography. There's very little information here about shooting real estate photography. Mike Kelley is more of a fine art architecture photographer and the techniques he shows are not really relevant for real estate photography. Kelley's well-known for his blue hour shots and with these he often sets his camera up for a few hours and documents the changing light to later blend into one image. His work is very Photoshop intensive and each photo could require a few hours post-processing in PS. Real estate photography generally requires a complete house to be shot in less than an hour and delivered to the realtor in 24-48hrs. The course is more of interest to those wanting to shoot high-end architecture or interior design projects. Kelley gives some great tips on the business side - how to do marketing, attracting new clientele, how to maintain a healthy relationship with your clients, what to do when things go wrong. Kelley also discusses what gear he uses including the very useful tilt-shift lenses, geared head on his tripod for fine control, shooting tethered, and also some of the lighting he uses. The course features a photoshoot that Kelley did of a historic theatre, and he discusses the techniques he used to capture the images as well as how he processed them in Photoshop. The course was enjoyable & informative, and Mike Kelley is an engaging & fun presenter, with a laid-back style.

a Creativelive Student
 

Enjoyed this class. Took it to learn more about architectural photography because I know little to nothing about that area of photography. I feel Mike gave a solid introduction in the how-to's of getting into this business, offered some good outside sources, gave good supporting personal stories. Would have liked to lean more about balancing light color and to be referred to some outside sources on learning more about that. Overall, I feel this was a solid intro to architectural photography.

Student Work

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