Lessons

Lesson Info

Digital Darkroom: Retouching Panoramas

I got a little carried away with a 37. I reduced the file size for our go pro, a little panorama that we had. And it's chewing away and that aspect of RAM on a laptop as opposed on a desktop machine. So we'll see. I may not be able to show that I may have to show you the resulting things of coming from panels from the GoPro, but, um, let's let's give it a second. Let's see if there's any other questions from the TV audience. I'll give it a second to see if it just pops over. Sometimes that's not a accurate thermometer as far as progress but jack question of your upcoming classes. Yeah. What? You're kind of you're frightened of your favorite one that you're sort of most excited about. Since they're all mine, they're all favor, OK? And I'm the one who chose them all. I wondered about the underwater. Could you talk to us about under over water about that one? Because I'm really psyched for that. Yeah, that the idea is not just I do teach, have taught scuba photography where your tanks and...

below in dealing with that situation and lighting. It will have a component of that. Primarily, a lot of that is not going to be focused on the scuba diving aspect of it. But the post processing what I found in dealing with people who shoot underwater is they have gone to great lengths to get all the great gear traveled to the four corners of the world have a amazing experiences. And yet when it comes down to adobe camera, light room or even photo shop, they may be still doing things. That is how we did it 10 years ago. As an example, When you're underwater, there's something is known as backscatter. When you've got a flash going on all this little junk in the water, you have million little dots. You know, in the last class that I taught did a little technique how to get rid of instantly get rid of back scattered, and people just freaked out because they were manually going through in. Getting rid of spots is supposed to automating that process, so that's dealing with underwater and the power of post processing that you could bring to it. So the other aspect about the underwater that is great is it really is going to be dealing with under and over water in the sense that with the advent of whether it's a GoPro or the TG or these affordable housing that you can get even housings for your IPhone that are waterproof, so excellent ones that will go down past an atmosphere past 30 feet, Um, for scuba just opens it up because we were normally so protective of our cameras and rightfully so but shooting around water even if you are just doing like, oh, hopefully we probably should cancel it because I have this picture that you guys asked for. So we'll go ahead and will. We will cancel that. Hopefully it will cancel and not throw me out of it completely. But even as an example, this is the shot that we were talking about before um, shot by using this little trick of putting the camera down at Aunt View level little GoPro in the waterproof housing it is, if you're gonna have this splashing around and hitting the ground, I'm It can be real fun. But even something like this, I consider this water photography just because you normally wouldn't put your camera around this, especially running, looking forward So you don't hit somebody. So I'm shooting, you know, not looking where I'm going completely. And action photography. So even something like a GoPro or a pocket camera or a housing on something. All of these I put into the context of water photography. And because 3/4 of the planet's seven and the planet is water, your you should be around water. I love water so under an over water will be dealing with the idea of at shoreline shooting waves, lakes underwater, shallow as well as a few some tips related to scoop of photography and deeper. I'm obviously did a trip down to the Kingdom of Tonga with the humpback whales. So we'll be talking about, you know, that sort of stuff as well. Talk about a little bit. I do shoot surf. I love surf here also, as you mentioned a fellow surfer here. I do shoot a lot with the go pro surfing and talking about telephoto, so we'll probably will talk a little bit about that, I actually asked. One of my good friends is Aaron Chang, one of the world's most renowned action photographers, specializes in surf. I first met him back in on the north shore of Oahu. He'd loaned me aboard a complete stranger to go surf pipeline in 76 That shows a guy with some Kony's whatever the Hawaiian is for Kony's. Yeah, so he's been He was a pro shooter back then of shooting sir photography. Now he has to galleries in San Diego. Excellent guy, good friend. And he may do some sort of test our guest session. I'm going to record him and bring him in, related that idea of coastal photography and specifically served. So yeah. So for this image right here, you shot this with the GoPro you say is theirs. Is that a full image or how did you did? You know, because it's a fish. I want really close. So it's cropping in to get rid of the distortion. Another little tip here is that the father wasn't in the scene. The other is placed in the scene after the fact because the kids just took off and, you know, they're following me. Like I said, it's you know, whoever can catch the GoPro. So here they're looking down. I don't know what was over my shoulder, but to catch, you know, the one daughter in mid air. Low tide, wet sand. You just can't ask for a better, you know, photography studio, then a beach at sunset. Especially with low tide. So, um yeah, I'm crapping out because of the distortion on there. I am taking advantage of that fact that we could correct for the distortion inherent in the fish islands, but yeah, yeah, absolutely. That now this Presuppose, you could actually do it other ways. I had this, as I mentioned on the interval, Ometer Worth shooting two frames a second unlimited. But when you get the hero, plus it comes with a wireless remote. So sometimes what I'll do is I'll actually put the remote duct tape it, um, to the handle, And that way you can trigger it in the burst mode, which is 30 frames in one second at full resolution. Same quality. So you literally, if you're doing something, that's kind of fun, and you're seeing the moment and you know Okay, let's jump. You have the family jump or something like that. Click 30 frames. You're going to get the shot, or at least you're going to get enough shots that you can combine them as an example Here. I just took the father from one shot and composited him back into this one to get the family portrait. So, um, and all sorts of things that you can do that's what I love about this idea of maybe a little bit more creative use of the technology and that, um, 14 megapixels. This shot with some jiggery pokery that I'm gonna show you in a bit were able to blow this up. I think it was a 16 by 20 print. So 16 by 20 coming from a little, you know, toy camera, you know, beautiful frame print. That was the print the twin at prints out to almost, you know, two feet by three feet by the time you put a nice cream on it, which is nice to know that you've got White House, excellent print house, and yeah, that they're doing these. We were talking about doing prints there. Obviously gonna have expert experience in terms of what to recommend. If you have lower resolution and things like that color space so great to know that they're part of the creative life family. This is that image Siri's that I was just trying to stitch that will hold off on. This is the GoPro shots from that one. You can see in a second that I'm up high, but it's exactly what I'm just showing you right here. It's shooting that, you know, two frames a second, and I'm just simply spinning it. And these are the images that have got the ah, distortion. These, you'll notice, are the pre tweaked shots where they've got more of the fish. I the horizon line ISS curved. So by simply going in there and doing what we did before in camera raw and telling it to go into the lens profile in this case telling it that its a GoPro, it can, um, straighten out some of that distortion. In this case, I reduced the size of these files so it's doing a little bit mawr distortion correction than it needs to, because it's not the full size files. But doing that in concert with what we did before being ableto pull out some shadow detail or had some clarity for our landscapes were able to do a lot. Okay, so and also in terms of those sample images, these which again are coming off the same basic camera. They are aerial shots coming from the, um from the Phantom. See, if we've got that here is showing you what the resulting in that you saw those ones with the hotel del. So these are all fisheye shots combined by getting rid of that distortion based upon a profile and you can see that you can you could get away with murder. But this area, we didn't use that little trick because of the distortion that was coming in with a fish eye. This is where we're going to bring in another alternative in terms of fixing our images than what we've used before. So let's first we'll go back to this file because we've got a couple of the things to do with this one. This is our file before this is the file doing are transformation specifically image warp, and that's allowing us to again without doing any retouching or anything else. Get our image the way it is, but sometimes you may want to extend it. You don't want to change it, or there's just so much information that you want to try and recreate that edge parameter, and in that case there's a great little steps, a few steps that you can do to automate that process of needing to retouch by hand. And that's where that content were filled that I mentioned before comes in. But what I'm gonna dio t kind of cheat. As I mentioned before, any time you do anything that you like and is useful and that you can repeat, in other words, it's not based upon you hand drawing or painting retouching something, see if you can automate that process by making a preset or writing an action or doing something to that effect. In this case, I can actually write an action related to what I'm gonna do here. So I'm gonna come over here. We did. Ah, we created an action the other day. These will all be these air, the imprints guy. We create one in class. We're going to create another one right now. But as was mentioned as part of the final Siri's, when all 10 classes have done, I'll be having about 100 presets, brushes, patterns, textures, actions that will be part of the Siri's if if people choose to do the whole Siri's. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to click down in our little actions palette. If you've never written in this, would consider this as a little teaser on that. I've created a folder. Here's our little folder, and I created a folder that I'm gonna put stuff into. I'm gonna now click on the little dog eared page ad icon and we're going to call this content aware, content aware, fill edge extension. And yes, I am. And so ready for Margarita. Always good to misspell things. When you have clients, that proves that you're the artist, not them. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Okay, you'll notice down here at the bottom. I've got a little red light, fortunately, doesn't blink, so it's not as annoying as the record option on your phone or your video camera are even on your VCR at home. But it's actually recording everything that I do everything that I say every website that I visit So beak. No, actually, just recording when I'm doing inside a photo shop right now, and the first thing that I want to do is I'm going to select the areas that have no information in them right now. And I'm gonna tell Ask Photoshopped, Remember to ask nicely if photo shops not working, it's cause you're copping an attitude, not because it's buggy. Yes, the bad jokes are gonna come quick. Fast Now, at the end of the day. So what I need to do is I need to select that area so I can tell Photo shop, Would you please fill that make up stuff on your own and to select that area, I'm going to give a little shortcut. This is a nice shortcut in this allows you to create the marching ants anytime you have anything that is on, transparency lets you create the marching ants, um, instantaneously. Whether you have life type, whether you have this, you know, transparency based upon this panorama, whatever you have, even if you have a mask, if you want to get a mask and turn it back into marching ants, you can load anything as a selection by holding down the command key on the macro control key on the PC and clicking on the thumbnail. Whatever you're interested in, click and Now I've got my marching ants. Okay, if we look over here, you'll notice it. Even knowing that my panorama is going off the edge. It were even off the edge, which is fine. In fact, let's actually do this before we up. Of course I'm recording, which includes it's recording all my problems, my problems. That's a lot of recording. I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to go image reveal all, and that's gonna bring in everything. So let's see how much of that entire area that it's going to create from scratch. So we're gonna I had cropped it when we did that initial, um, free transform. But we're going to see if we can recreate all this amount of area rather than distorting filthy edge. So, back to my action, hit the record button. Hold down the command or control key, click on the thumbnails for that layer. It automatically loads that transition between opaque and transparent. As a series of marching ants. It's now selecting. You'll notice it selects the pixels. It doesn't select the empty area. That's what it does it's meant to do. Like I had a piece of type, I could click on the thumbnail for the type, it would load the type of a set of marching ants. So I want to inverse that selection. So I go under the select menu and I'm gonna come over here to inverse. This is not invert color range, which is command eyes, a shortcut, but command shift. I if you're in short, cuts wood, inverse that selection. So now you'll notice that I have the transparent portions of this document selected So far, so good. Nod your head enthusiastically. You'll notice also that I have got the set selection and the inverse is being recorded assed part of this action. Normally, you'd go through the action. You go through the thing and get it set up. What you want to do. I wouldn't rarely would. I started in action, not sure where I was going. Technically, it would work. Even if you have your undoes, it will have the n dues as part of your action. But usually I try to make my actions as elegant as possible. So Presuppose that I know what I'm doing. I've got the image I now need to tell photo shop. What to use for that fill in other words. Right now, all I've got is empty pixels. If I tried to do a content aware fill, it would say, Dude, there's nothing there. What? I have no idea what you're trying to ask me to do. So what I need to do is I need to expand that selection toe, add a portion of the edge. So it goes, Oh, you want me to take that edge and recreated out into this nether land of nothing? Yes, that's exactly what I want you to do. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over here under select because I'm dealing with selections. I'm under the selection menu. Select, modify, expand, select, modify, expand. And that's going to expand from the nothing into the something. And that's going to allow Photoshopped to know what I want to do it magic with. I'm just going to say expand. It depends by how high resolution your file is. You need to give it enough. I'm gonna expand it 40 pixels. So that's gonna give it a nice chunk for this file. You can experiment with how much you need to do, but when I say OK, you can see it's coming in here not to dramatically. I probably could have gone 60 maybe even 80 if I wanted to do that. But we'll go ahead with 60 and see what it's gonna dio. You'll notice that also recorded the expand. And if I click down this, it expands by pixels. So it knows exactly what I'm doing. And now I'm ready to do content aware fill, which is found under edit and Phil, and it is part of content aware these are all your fill options. If you were to do a shift delete, that would be get you to this field dialog box. We'll just say yes, please content aware and we're not gonna preserve transparency were trying to fill that, and you just say OK, and it's now looking at all those different edges and is going to try and create something that didn't exist before. I'm getting a little greedy because I've got so much of this area both light and dark, and we'll just see what it's gonna dio. I'm not quite sure. Well, gosh, darn it, that's pretty freakishly cool. Okay, so that created we're gonna do undo. Okay. I don't say, especially considering that it did. The arch continued it off. The frame is pitching. Okay? It's did my Phil. I'm actually done it. Has the selection is still active. I hit it. So I'm gonna do under select. I'm now going to do a de select as the last part of my action. I don't want to leave in that marching ants there because that's gonna confuse if I do something else. So now I can hit Stop. And I have now created an action that I can use on any panorama at any time when I have this no man's land of no information along the edge. I can and will just do it because we'll undo it. So we're back to scratch. You probably all know that Command Z or Control Z is undo. Hopefully, you also know that command option Z or control all tizzy lets you step back through time. Multiple steps command shift Z or control shift See lets you go forward through time. Whatever you do, don't do command option Shift Z that will create a temporal conundrum. Remember that episode of star track with the evil spot with the goatee? That's how it happened. Yes, yes. Thank you for laughing. Okay, so now we've got will pretend that that is our original shot. We just did our panorama. We haven't done anything else to it. That layer is active. I'm going to go back to that action. Just hit the play button. And 123 It still has to do its calculation to it, but it's it's done all the selection. It does all the expansion. It inverts the selection, and that is now in my bat. Utility built. And I can use that whenever I want. So that is content aware fill. That is an action that you can create to do that. Or if you're patient, you can wait and I'll give that to is part of the Siri's. Okay? And this would be a good comparison, because this right here is the image that I used, um, the free transform on and you can see that had the distortion I fixed of the rise in line and everything else and the warp that I did to get along that edge. So that, in the sense gives you, you know, this is the accurate What was going on there again. I didn't fill up this one, so I could Philip this one if I wanted to, or if you remember, I actually cropped it. Okay, so that being the case, we want to do one more step. And that is, um, targeted adjustments in terms of this one particular one and what I'm going to recommend Excellent. Let's go ahead and do that while I'm yakking because I like what it did. Um, what I want to do is a targeted adjustment to the image, and we're in photo shop. So weaken, take advantage of all the tools we have in photo shop curves, brightness and contrast layer masks everything else at our disposal. So here is the image where we extended just that little part of that image. So there is our come image that's been tweaked up. Probably it would do a little bit of hand retouching, but instead of doing the 10 million things you would normally do to a file and Photoshopped optimize it, especially in relationship to a target fashion. What we're going to do here is simply go under the filter menu and find camera raw because in photo shop CC, the entire develop module of light room, which is the exact same engine as the entire engine in adobe camera. Raw is now built into a filter, which is really, really Savoy or bitchin or shiny if you're into fire flat. Okay, we're going to other ones. It's movie bueno, so I'm going to do that. And the other thing that's really cool about this is that if you brought in a raw file as a smart object, this could be applied to the image as a smart filter. And if when you actually when you double click on the raw file that you brought into photo shop is smart, object sends you back to camera raw and you're working back on the original raw file, even though it's come into photo shop with all your slider still intact because this had to be rast arise, so to speak is part of that panel process. You'll notice all my parameters have been zeroed out. This is a pixel image. It's processed image. So with Panorama is, I'm afraid you can't stitch as I mentioned smart objects, so I don't have access to that information. Um, but that's why I did as much of the my total in on color correction prior to coming into photo shop. Prior to doing my merge, I went through in light room and did my basic color and tone. Right. Remember all that? Now that I've got this image here, I can do my targeted adjustments. There's a couple things that I mentioned that I would probably do one If I go into my graduated filter, I can knock that down and do a little graduated nd So I've got my radiant filter. I'm taking my exposure down. I'm simply gonna click and drag down. And I'm just giving that that extra little off of the sky darkening toe make my I not go off the top of the image here, so a little bit of nd is always nice. I use it on most landscapes, often times depending upon what I'm doing. I may do the exact same thing at the bottom of the frame so I can simply click and drag up. That's going to give the again the a foundation for the image of the eyes Not gonna go off. It's not looking at detail. Any little of the structure or Strad of these rocks is gonna go into shadow there, obviously behind where the sun's coming from. So it's a natural thing also for the story, for that to be part of the equation. The other thing that I'll do here is I'll go into my adjustment brush and I mentioned that that may be where I come up and do a little bit of clarity are targeted popping of the rock texture to add just a little bit more. So I'm gonna leave that exposure in here. We'll take up our clarity. I'm gonna go back to my walk. Um, cause there's anytime I do anything, just really I'm gonna leave that annoying green arrow. That's something called in app called Pinpoint that's allowing you just to see where my cursor is and just on a reduced screen. Sometimes it's nice to to be able to see that, so we'll consider that that is my brush. I've got a nice, big soft brush. Its feathered completely flow and density is 100%. Whatever I do will be affected 100%. That's how I usually like to work, but I want to fine tune the amount of either my clarity or my exposure. I will change that after I've already done my mask. The other thing that I may do and then I like doing any time I'm doing hand brushwork is I'm gonna come up here and say Show that mask. I want to see where I'm painting to get a feel for it because if I'm doing a really subtle adjustment, I may do a brushstroke and I really don't see it because it's so subtle. So I wanted obnoxious in this case, a bright red or because we've got red in the scene. I'm going to click on that and turn that into green, so I can exactly see where that mask is. It brings up a good point in light room. You have the exact same capabilities, works the same way. If you're going to do what I'm doing here of, bring in your images, even from light room into photo shop. Stitch them the only place you can stitches In photo shop. You buy light room and don't own photoshopped. You can't stitch. It doesn't do stitching. Stitching his layers layers is Photoshopped, so bring it into photo shop. If you want to do this, we're taking advantage of the engine of adobe camera on light room, you will be using this interface. So even if you are light room user, you will be using adobe camera raw because by definition, this is how you access the engine inside a photo shop. Also, I mentioned earlier One of the great things about having adobe camera inside a photo shop is Photoshopped now does complete video editing inside of it freed. No cost, no obligation video editing and adobe camera raw can be used as a smart filter for video, Which means everything that you do to your still images you can do to video. That is yeah, you know, the term. Okay, so we've got that here, we're gonna be able to see it. So I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to start off with my foreground here, and that is really big and soft. Probably bigger than I'd like. But let's go ahead. And I'm just gonna leave it at that big, obnoxious screen strike. I'm gonna use the keyboard shortcut. Which is why? Why? Because we like you. Why key is giving us our preview of our mask on and off. If you're a photo shop user. The Y key is also the preview for, um, soft proofing inside of photo shop. So that has is a is a shortcut that's been around for a long time. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. Like I said that maybe a little subtle. So I'm gonna tap my peaky for preview and you can see there's my grading, that top breeding at the bottom and just a little bit of the area here is lightening up. So let's go ahead and manipulate that more so you can see it. I'm actually I took the exposure down in this case. What I want is I really want to take that exposure up. And you can see where that soft edge mass that dodging and burning is coming into play now. Okay, Now the question is, do I want to remember? The exposure is my mid tone values. So I want to affect the mid tone values, or do I want to come up here and see what would be if I just took up my highlights? Very few highlights there, so that's not really not working, but you have access to all these different quadrants. So sometimes, even though you may think of exposure, is your dodge and burn. Remember, you Condoned and burn with both shadows and highlights, leaving the mid tones alone. That's actually is incredibly powerful. Clarity also mentioned. I'm putting in some clarity. You can see there's my exaggeration of my clarity. If I add a lot of clarity, all notice, it's also doing some frightening. Well, it's doing that edge contrast. But to use a lot of clarity, I may not. You need so much exposure. I really don't want to have this distract too much. The main story is the sun rise in the arch, so I'm gonna add just a little bit of texture there. While I'm added, I may see if I want to bring out a little bit of texture. Let's take that brush size down. And ah, this is also a nice little concept that keep in mind if I want to have one adjustment that's doing multiple areas in each one having a slightly different feel to it, I can change the density of what I'm about to paint. And now this effect will be the same as this one but half the amount it's the same adjustment I don't have to do is say new and change the parameters. I can just come over here and change my density of the brush and it is now doing, and I'll undo that. It's doing a 50% um, adjustment to that. Um, I like that using density for the intensity of an adjustment, especially when I do things like portrait retouch. If I'm doing a face that side lit and I'm doing adjustments to a night to enhance and pull out detail, I'll often do the same adjustment. I'll do it at full strength for the shadow side, and then when I come over here to the left side, needs much less. I like the same thing that I did in terms of clarity and saturation and stuff. I'll simply take the density of the brush down, do the same adjustment on the left side, and I got kind of a two for one, as opposed to changing the parameters. The density is different from opacity because, as an example, if I had opacity is setting here. If I came over here and painted another stroke with 50% opacity I'd basically be doubling it right if I do one stroke in photo shop, 50% white on top of dark, and I did it again. It would double that amount because this is density because this is a procedural processor. If it's at 2 50% density, I could paint it all day. It will never change. I could even come down here if I paint on this at 50%. It's actually going to remove some of my original brushstroke because this is 50% says okay, whatever you say. Do you want 50%? It's now taking away because it wasn't 100 before. So don't get confused with density and how it's different from a passage e You may 1st go. Well, that's kind of lame. It's actually is a great feature because it allows you to have a variable intensity of in effect, even after the fact I can, in a sense, a race. I have a partial racial races to it.