Volume 1Introduction| 00:00 | Hi! I'm Lee Varis. Welcome to
Beyond Skin: Going Deeper with CS3.
| | 00:06 | I have been a photographer for 30 years and I
have been doing digital for just about 20.
| | 00:13 | I'm going to be showing some of the
things I've learned in my long career doing
| | 00:16 | digital photography.
| | 00:18 | We are going to be using Photoshop as
a digital darkroom to post-process and
| | 00:23 | enhance photographs of people, faces, and bodies.
| | 00:28 | So first we are going to start by
examining the Photoshop CS3 interface.
| | 00:34 | So let's get going.
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| Lesson 1: The workspace| 00:00 | The first thing you will notice when
you launch CS3, especially if you're
| | 00:04 | familiar with previous versions
of Photoshop, is that the UI is
| | 00:07 | completely different.
| | 00:10 | It still works the same, we still
have palettes, but now we can kind of
| | 00:14 | collapse the palettes.
| | 00:16 | If I click on this little arrow here in
the upper-right corner, you can see how
| | 00:21 | the palettes collapse into little
thumbnail icons, and then if we click
| | 00:27 | again we can expand the
palette to see the full palette.
| | 00:31 | If I click on the arrow over here,
I have all these other palettes.
| | 00:35 | Now this is the default layout.
| | 00:40 | You will also notice that on this side,
the toolbox is now one thin collection
| | 00:45 | of icons as opposed to the traditional
one, which if I can get it to work here,
| | 00:52 | that's the way it used to be.
| | 00:54 | So we can always return to the default
from previous versions of Photoshop with
| | 00:58 | two columns or go to the single column, which
keeps the Tool palette kind of out of the way.
| | 01:07 | There are a number of workspaces--default
workspaces that they give you for alternative uses
| | 01:16 | and you can explore these.
| | 01:19 | They give us a little helpful little
dialog here, which of course I don't need
| | 01:23 | to see all the time.
| | 01:27 | And it's worth exploring these
different palette arrangements.
| | 01:34 | The whole point of this however is
to make your own custom arrangements.
| | 01:40 | So how do you do that?
| | 01:41 | We can move these palettes
and set them up anyway I want.
| | 01:44 | We can grab a palette and move it out,
and then by pulling on the tab, we can
| | 01:52 | nest it anywhere we want.
| | 01:54 | I can decide to put my History
palette in this set or pull it out and
| | 02:02 | rearrange it anyway you want.
| | 02:06 | If you want to return to the default,
you can just pick it right here.
| | 02:11 | Since I am on Vincent's computer, I
see that Vinny has a workspace here.
| | 02:17 | We will select that.
| | 02:23 | For the most part I am going to be
working with the default workspace here
| | 02:27 | so that it doesn't look different
from what you're seeing at home.
| | 02:30 | However, I am going to make one change,
because I am right-handed. I am going to
| | 02:34 | move my Tool palette onto the right side here.
| | 02:40 | So now all my palettes are right here.
| | 02:44 | I can work in a collapsed state like this or
expand that or expand anything that I need.
| | 02:51 | If I want to go back to the History,
I just click on the little icon that
| | 02:56 | represents the History palette
and I can have this open like that.
| | 03:01 | If I want to look at say the Color Picker,
click on the little Color Picker icon
| | 03:09 | and now I have access to my color pickers.
| | 03:12 | I like to set up HSB sliders rather
than RGB, so I will leave it like that.
| | 03:20 | Layers, click on the Layers
icon and I get the Layers palette.
| | 03:25 | I usually like to have that open a bit.
| | 03:28 | So it's worth experimenting with
this to get comfortable with an
| | 03:32 | arrangement that works for you.
| | 03:34 | Once you're done setting up your
palettes, you can just go and save the
| | 03:40 | workspace, and we'll save this as
Lee's palette, and that's going to save
| | 03:51 | my palette location.
| | 03:53 | So now the next time I want this
I'll just go back there and pick Lee's
| | 03:58 | Workspace, which shows
up right in the list here.
| | 04:01 | So I can always return to the
default or now select Lee's palette.
| | 04:09 | The other thing that you can do with
a workspace is customize your menus.
| | 04:16 | Any menu command that you have from
the top here, the menu bar, has keyboard
| | 04:23 | shortcuts and different menu
commands that you might want to use. You can
| | 04:28 | customize that now in CS3 to be
whatever you need. So in order to customize the
| | 04:34 | workspace or the menu
commands for the workspace--
| | 04:38 | okay to customize your menus, we can go in
here to Workspace, and now going here to
| | 04:57 | Keyboard Shortcuts & Menus allows
us to customize what menus show up and
| | 05:02 | allows us to create custom keyboard shortcuts.
| | 05:06 | So what we see here is the Photoshop defaults.
| | 05:10 | We can save a new set
after we make some alterations.
| | 05:14 | So for instance, let's look at the types
of keyboard shortcuts and menu commands
| | 05:24 | that are visible here.
| | 05:26 | Under the Edit menu, there is probably
nothing that I am going to want to change.
| | 05:33 | But I could make a different keyboard
shortcut for anyone of these things.
| | 05:37 | Right now they are saying None.
| | 05:41 | Let's look under the Image menu,
because there is one thing that I always want
| | 05:49 | to eliminate and that's the
Brightness and Contrast adjustment.
| | 05:57 | I never use Brightness and
Contrast, that's kind of a baby tool.
| | 06:01 | So by clicking the icon, the little eye icon
off, I turned the visibility of that menu off.
| | 06:08 | I am never going to see the Brightness and
Contrast control again in the Image menu.
| | 06:14 | You can go through here and
kill anything that you never use.
| | 06:19 | Like I never use Variations, here is another
one. I will just go ahead and kill that.
| | 06:25 | I'll never have to see that again.
| | 06:29 | You can look through here, Pixel Aspect Ratio.
| | 06:32 | This is great for video applications,
if you do any editing of images that
| | 06:38 | are intended for video. I never do that.
| | 06:43 | I'll unclick that.
| | 06:44 | I can always get these things
back by saving a different workspace.
| | 06:53 | Here is another one, under Analysis.
| | 06:57 | In CS3 Extended, there's a bunch of
tools that are intended for forensics or
| | 07:02 | scientific measurements and things like
that, things that I am not likely to use
| | 07:09 | on a day-to-day basis.
| | 07:11 | I can go ahead and turn off these
things so that I don't even see that
| | 07:18 | menu anymore.
| | 07:21 | I may use the Ruler tool or the Count tool,
but I'll never place a marker in an image.
| | 07:28 | So I just turn those things off.
| | 07:33 | Now once you've done going through
everything and killing all of the things that
| | 07:38 | you just don't want to see anymore,
you can save, you see how this says here,
| | 07:42 | Photoshop Defaults Modified, we can
save our customized set and I'll just call
| | 07:48 | this Lee's menus and I'll save that.
| | 07:59 | Now I have that as a selection.
| | 08:03 | I can go back and select that and it will
preserve all of those changes that I've made.
| | 08:11 | Now once you've made changes like that, you
can also save that with your palette locations.
| | 08:16 | If I save the workspace, I have
the option also to save the keyboard
| | 08:24 | shortcuts and the menus.
| | 08:25 | So in this case, I haven't changed
any of the keyboard shortcuts, but I did
| | 08:29 | change some menus, so I will just
save that again into my workspace.
| | 08:36 | And now, every time I open up an image
and start to work on the adjustments,
| | 08:41 | I'll never see that Brightness
and Contrast Adjustment again.
| | 08:45 | So I just don't have to worry
about picking out of the menu.
| | 08:52 | So hopefully this helps you get
yourself organized and arrange your palettes in
| | 08:57 | the most efficient way for you.
| | 08:59 | Everybody works a little bit differently and
I encourage you to experiment with this stuff.
| | 09:03 | It's going to take a while before you
really decide that this is the way you
| | 09:07 | like your menus and your palette
locations and all that kind of stuff.
| | 09:12 | So I can't really tell you how to set it up.
| | 09:15 | I have shown you how I am going to
be working with the menus and palette
| | 09:22 | locations for this DVD, which is
primarily going to be like the default, except
| | 09:26 | that I've moved the keyboard--I mean
toolbar over to the far right.
| | 09:32 | I encourage you to really experiment and
figure out what really works best for you.
| | 09:36 | Obviously, if you're left-handed, you
can rearrange the menus completely to put
| | 09:42 | them overall on the left side if you want.
| | 09:45 | So go ahead and experiment with
this and really try to find the best
| | 09:50 | arrangement for your needs.
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| Lesson 2: Curves and grayscale images| 00:00 | Now we're going to begin to do basic
image adjustments and the tool, the primary
| | 00:05 | tool that I'm going to be using is Curves.
| | 00:08 | Curves is the least understood tool,
one of the least understood tools in
| | 00:12 | Photoshop, but it's the most
important and the most powerful Image
| | 00:16 | Adjustment tool that we have.
| | 00:18 | I'm going to show you how I use it
and give you a breakdown on the basic
| | 00:22 | functionality of the Curves, and so that
you can understand what's happening when
| | 00:27 | you use a Curve on your image.
| | 00:30 | We'll start by looking at a grayscale image.
| | 00:33 | No color at all, so we're really
only going to be working with contrast,
| | 00:37 | brightness, and tone.
| | 00:44 | All right, so I have an image open here, I have
got a black and white photograph, and I've
| | 00:50 | put a step wedge at the bottom.
| | 00:54 | This is a series of steps.
| | 00:56 | I've go 11 steps here that go from
black to white and they're all equally
| | 01:01 | spaced grayscale steps.
| | 01:05 | Now I'm going to go to the Layers palette.
| | 01:07 | At the bottom of the Layers palette,
this little circle with a slash cut through
| | 01:11 | it, that's your adjustment layer types.
| | 01:14 | So I'm going to make a new
adjustment layer, a Curves adjustment layer.
| | 01:20 | Now we see the Curves dialog.
| | 01:23 | If you're familiar with Curves at all
from previous versions of Photoshop, you
| | 01:26 | may notice a few little UI changes.
| | 01:29 | CS3 is full of these little UI changes.
| | 01:32 | They now have kind of a Histogram
display in the background of the Curve, and we
| | 01:40 | have also here now Curve
Display Options. I open that up,
| | 01:43 | I get to see other controls
that we can apply to the curves.
| | 01:48 | Right now I'm showing the Curve as
Light, this little check box here.
| | 01:54 | That gives me steps from 0 to 255,
which is what we would use in an RGB file.
| | 02:01 | Some people prefer to use Pigment,
and that you'll notice that it reverses
| | 02:07 | the gradients here.
| | 02:09 | Let me do that again.
| | 02:11 | That's where we're dealing
with the curve as light values.
| | 02:14 | So as we add light, it gets lighter.
| | 02:18 | If we do pigment, we start off with paper
white, and as we add pigment, it gets darker.
| | 02:25 | This is very comfortable for
people that are used to CMYK editing.
| | 02:28 | We're primarily photographers, so
I tend to think in terms of adding
| | 02:32 | light, adding exposure,
| | 02:35 | so I like to set up the Curve this way.
| | 02:38 | Now new for CS3, we can Show Clipping.
| | 02:42 | So if I check that, I now look in the
image and I can see way down here I have a
| | 02:48 | value that's clipped to black.
| | 02:52 | We can change and clip more of the
image, and you can see as I drag this
| | 02:58 | endpoint down, I'm clipping--all of these
areas now are clipping totally to black.
| | 03:03 | Okay, if I select the little white
triangle, now I'm showing the areas that
| | 03:09 | are clipping to white.
| | 03:10 | At the moment I don't have very much,
but if I move the endpoint over, you'll
| | 03:15 | notice that now I have more parts of
the image that are clipping to white.
| | 03:21 | It may not be apparent when you look at
the image without the clipping warning
| | 03:25 | that actually some of these high values
are now clipped to blank white, usually
| | 03:30 | that's something we want to try to avoid.
| | 03:33 | Now this particular image doesn't really
need any adjusting, but I'm using it to
| | 03:38 | show you what happens when you move
the Curve, how it affects the image, and
| | 03:43 | importantly, how--what happens down
here when we change the Curve.
| | 03:49 | Now one way that you have to
understand what's happening in the Curve is we
| | 03:56 | have an input side of the Curve which
is represented by this gradient here, and
| | 04:00 | the output is represented by this gradient.
| | 04:04 | So for instance, if I was to move
the endpoint over, let's make it really
| | 04:11 | drastic here, and you can kind of see
what's happened down here, I'm losing--I'm
| | 04:15 | clipping values, and I can see that
now this is pretty dramatic. I can see it
| | 04:20 | happening in the image here.
| | 04:22 | What the Curve is telling you at
this point, where this lines up with
| | 04:26 | the bottom gradient, this tone is
now being remapped to the output
| | 04:31 | gradient as white, up there.
| | 04:35 | And you can see that I've changed
this tone, if I uncheck the Preview here,
| | 04:42 | that's what I had before.
| | 04:44 | Now when I apply this Curve, I've
clipped all those values to white. All right,
| | 04:52 | so let's get back here to the straight line.
| | 04:54 | No change is happening at all.
| | 04:56 | All of these values map one-to-one
from the gradient down here, all the way
| | 05:03 | along this Curve, it's just mapping one-to-one
to the output, so I'm making no change at all.
| | 05:07 | As soon as I move the Curve,
I'm going to make a change.
| | 05:12 | So what this is doing now, this simple
move is darkening everything, because
| | 05:16 | this line now is below the baseline.
| | 05:21 | So every value from black to white is
being darkened by a certain amount here
| | 05:28 | represented by the gap between this
Curve and the center line, and you can see
| | 05:32 | in the image that it's all been darkened down.
| | 05:37 | I haven't clipped anything, because I
haven't moved the endpoints, and because
| | 05:41 | I'm dragging in the center, I'm sort of
just darkening everything between black
| | 05:45 | and white in equal amount, so I haven't
really changed the relationship of the
| | 05:50 | tones to each other.
| | 05:51 | I've just made the whole image darker.
| | 05:53 | So this is a very basic darkening move.
| | 05:57 | Now you ask, what about that famous S-Curve?
| | 06:01 | See, I just dragged that point off.
| | 06:03 | If I drag it off the Curve, it goes
away and I'm back at that straight line,
| | 06:08 | so I can start over.
| | 06:10 | You remember the S-Curve probably
from seeing books about film, how
| | 06:17 | the responsive film is,
| | 06:18 | so this is your kind of classic S-Curve.
| | 06:21 | The Curve makes an S shape.
| | 06:24 | And one thing to notice about this is
that the center portion of this Curve is
| | 06:29 | still passing through the center of
the graph here, and so I haven't really
| | 06:37 | changed the center point with an
absolutely mid-gray value in this image.
| | 06:43 | But I'm increasing the contrast
and you can see that in the image.
| | 06:51 | I'm increasing the contrast,
because I'm making the center part of this
| | 06:55 | Curve more vertical.
| | 06:57 | So that's one thing to remember.
| | 07:00 | Any part of the Curve that's more
vertical is going to have more contrast along
| | 07:04 | that range of tones.
| | 07:06 | And that range of tones, you can see,
it starts here, right underneath that
| | 07:12 | point, and ends here,
right underneath this point.
| | 07:17 | So this section of this gradient now
has been pushed into more contrast.
| | 07:22 | And in fact, if we take this as our
center point, this is medium gray, you
| | 07:27 | can kind of see that as it's
progressing out here towards black, it's getting a
| | 07:32 | little bit darker than it was before.
| | 07:34 | So we're increasing the contrast
away from the center point here.
| | 07:39 | Look at this area as I uncheck this Preview.
| | 07:46 | So I haven't lost steps yet, but I am
compressing these values closer to black
| | 07:53 | and these values closer to white, so
I'm getting more contrast in the middle.
| | 07:57 | Look at that again.
| | 07:59 | See the three steps right in
the middle have more contrast.
| | 08:04 | This step is now darker and this step
is lighter than the middle gray.
| | 08:13 | The other thing to remember about
Curves is that there's no free lunch.
| | 08:18 | If we make a portion of the Curve more
vertical, usually some other part of the
| | 08:23 | Curve is going to get more horizontal.
| | 08:24 | So this section here is more horizontal.
| | 08:27 | We're losing contrast in this part of the Curve.
| | 08:32 | That's these steps right here. Look at that.
| | 08:38 | You can kind of see that this is
getting lighter and this is getting lighter,
| | 08:42 | and so they're losing separation from white.
| | 08:45 | Same thing in the bottom part of the
Curve, as we flatten it out like this,
| | 08:50 | these values are getting closer together.
| | 08:57 | Now if I make a shape like this, I'm
lightening this, everything in the Curve,
| | 09:04 | but I'm actually getting more contrast
at the tail part of the Curve here, which
| | 09:12 | is these shadow values.
| | 09:13 | Look at these values right down here.
| | 09:15 | We have a big step here, whereas before, if I
uncheck this, this gray value was closer to black.
| | 09:23 | Now it's further way. I'm increasing
the contrast in this section of the Curve,
| | 09:27 | which just has the very low values.
| | 09:29 | These are things to be aware of
when you're making Curve adjustments.
| | 09:33 | You can't just use a simple S-Curve all
the time to increase contrast, because
| | 09:38 | I'm crushing low values here, closer to
black and I may need more contrast down there.
| | 09:45 | So a simple S-Curve is not always
the answer to increasing contrast.
| | 09:48 | You have to know where you want to
increase contrast and strive to have a more
| | 09:54 | vertical Curve in that place.
| | 09:58 | So for instance, if we do kind of an
inverted S-Curve here, all the contrast is
| | 10:05 | going away in the center part of the
Curve and that's kind of where these hands
| | 10:09 | live, and you'll notice how flat they've gotten.
| | 10:14 | I'm sort of flattening out the detail
in the hands because they live right in
| | 10:18 | the center of the Curve.
| | 10:20 | But I'm increasing the contrast in the
shadows, so like an area like this over
| | 10:26 | here, has actually more detail, because
I'm increasing the contrast there, the
| | 10:33 | difference between this step and black.
| | 10:37 | I'm also increasing the
contrast on the highlight side.
| | 10:41 | So the highlights here on the hand are
actually getting further away from the
| | 10:46 | midtone values, which are
getting closer together here.
| | 10:49 | You can see these steps over here are
getting brighter and there's more of a
| | 10:56 | contrast here between this light gray
and white, because those are living right
| | 11:01 | here in the vertical part of the Curve.
| | 11:05 | Okay, this is an inverted S-Curve.
| | 11:07 | It generally flattens out the image,
but it's helping the contrast in the
| | 11:11 | shadows and the highlights.
| | 11:13 | You may have an image where
that's necessary to do that.
| | 11:18 | The other thing to point out here is
right now I have a full range image.
| | 11:24 | I've got tones that go from black to white.
| | 11:30 | A lot of times you'll get an image where the
darkest tone is maybe this step right here.
| | 11:36 | In that case, I'm going to--you'll see I'm going
to pull the endpoint over until this
| | 11:43 | step goes to black. All right,
| | 11:50 | so now these two values have merged
together and that's my new black point.
| | 11:56 | The best way to increase contrast if you
don't have full range, which is usually
| | 12:01 | why we would want to increase the
contrast, is to just move the endpoints.
| | 12:07 | Then we're going to get--I'll save this,
this tone was the lightest tone in your image.
| | 12:13 | I'd move the endpoint over
until I get that to go white.
| | 12:18 | Now these two tones merge together and
I've got maximum contrast through the
| | 12:23 | range in the image from here to here,
because I've actually made the Curve more vertical.
| | 12:32 | And you can kind of see here, we've lost
some deep shadow values separation, but
| | 12:39 | we've really enhanced the contrast in the hands.
| | 12:47 | This part is straight line,
more vertical than it was before.
| | 12:53 | Now if you hold down the Option key,
you'll notice that the Cancel button
| | 12:59 | now becomes a Reset.
| | 13:00 | So I can always get back to my Neutral
Curve by holding down Option or Alt if
| | 13:05 | you're on a PC, and clicking the Reset button.
| | 13:11 | Okay, if we lower the endpoint, I'm
going to make that white grayer.
| | 13:19 | If I raise the shadow point, I'll
make the black grayer and now we're just
| | 13:24 | overall softening the contrast
and we have a more horizontal Curve.
| | 13:29 | Very rarely we see this occurring, but in some
special applications we may use a shape like that.
| | 13:36 | Mostly, we're usually looking to
increase the contrast and so we're usually
| | 13:44 | looking for the most important parts
of the image to be in a more vertical
| | 13:48 | section of the Curve.
| | 13:53 | So this is the basic
operation of the Curve control.
| | 13:57 | We have options for the UI, you can turn
--the grid spacing can be changed from a
| | 14:05 | wide space to small space here.
| | 14:07 | And a couple of these other
things we can turn on and off.
| | 14:11 | This is the default state of the
Curve where everything is showing.
| | 14:15 | I can turn off that Histogram.
| | 14:17 | If it's bothering me, I just turn it off.
| | 14:21 | The intersection line which is not
visible unless we've made a change to the Curve.
| | 14:28 | Here is the Baseline.
| | 14:30 | That's the straight Curve,
so we have a reference.
| | 14:33 | When we've made a change, we
can always see where it was.
| | 14:36 | It's always this straight line.
| | 14:38 | You can turn that on or off.
| | 14:41 | The intersect line is
where the Curve intersects.
| | 14:55 | So for instance, where the Curve
intersects, we have an intersect line.
| | 15:07 | And the Histogram shows you the
distribution of values and you can kind of see,
| | 15:13 | and it really is like the histogram
display, but it's inside the Curves dialog,
| | 15:19 | so it has the square shape
instead of a horizontal rectangle.
| | 15:23 | But it's giving us a distribution of
tones in the image and you can kind of see
| | 15:26 | generally by the shape of this
Histogram that this image has a lot more dark
| | 15:31 | tones, which are over in
this section of the Curve.
| | 15:35 | So I may want to, for instance, lighten
up just that section of the Curve and I
| | 15:41 | know that this is an area that is of
interest and I'm steeping the Curve at that
| | 15:48 | point and also moving it up to make it lighter.
| | 15:52 | In general, that's about as
useful as this Histogram gets.
| | 15:55 | We're going to be looking at a more
precise way of adjusting images than
| | 16:01 | using the histogram.
| | 16:02 | So I generally find that the
Histogram is not that useful.
| | 16:08 | Okay, so we're going to be looking at a more
precise way of analyzing the image than
| | 16:18 | we get from the Histogram.
| | 16:20 | So I generally turn the Histogram off,
just because I don't need to see it when
| | 16:24 | I'm working with Curves and it actually
will slow down Photoshop just a little
| | 16:28 | bit, as it has to update that
Histogram when you make a change.
| | 16:33 | So at this point, we can Reset back to Normal.
I don't want to change this image at all.
| | 16:41 | The next step in working with Curves is
to actually start working in color and
| | 16:45 | what we're going to discover is that
when we work with an RGB image, a full
| | 16:49 | color image, what we're dealing
with is actually three black and white
| | 16:54 | versions of this image.
| | 16:56 | The Curves work on those black and
white versions the same way I've shown here
| | 17:00 | working with this black and white image.
| | 17:03 | Only they are working with the
individual channels of a color image, so
| | 17:07 | different curve shapes and different
channels are going to give us different
| | 17:11 | results for our color.
| | 17:13 | And we have very, very fine control
over what happens with the color, in essence,
| | 17:18 | by manipulating the grayscale
channels of the full color image.
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| Lesson 3: Curves and color images| 00:00 | So we saw how curves can be used on a black
and white image to control tone and contrast.
| | 00:06 | Now we're going to look at a color
image and develop a strategy for addressing
| | 00:11 | the color as well as the
tone and contrast using curves.
| | 00:19 | So I have an image here and let's start
working on a strategy for dealing with
| | 00:26 | what appears to be a
kind of cool colorcast here.
| | 00:30 | What I want to do first is find the
lightest value in the image and the darkest
| | 00:37 | value in the image and there's a
little trick that we can use to do that.
| | 00:41 | I'm going to call up a
Threshold adjustment layer.
| | 00:45 | Click on the little Layer adjustment
icon down here at the bottom of the Layers
| | 00:51 | palette and select Threshold.
| | 00:52 | Now I get this Threshold adjustment
which turns the image into black and white.
| | 00:59 | Right now, the slider
control is right in the middle,
| | 01:03 | but if I move it down towards the left,
I'll see everything turns to white
| | 01:09 | except the very darkest area
will be the last thing to go.
| | 01:13 | And it looks like we have a
shadow down here in the bushes.
| | 01:17 | If I turn the Preview on and off, we
can kind of see, yeah, this dark point is
| | 01:22 | down over here in the bushes.
| | 01:24 | I'm going to hold down the Shift key and
place a Color Sampler right in that point.
| | 01:31 | Now I'll go back to my Threshold control
here, move the slider to the right this
| | 01:37 | time to find the lightest area in the image.
| | 01:41 | And right before everything goes to
black, I'm looking for a white point in the
| | 01:46 | subject which are the people.
| | 01:48 | And it looks like right here on this
woman's shoulder is the lightest value in
| | 01:56 | the image of any importance.
| | 01:59 | So I'll hold down the Shift key here,
place another sample point right there.
| | 02:04 | Now I'm done with this, I don't
have to use the Threshold command.
| | 02:07 | I'm only using it temporarily, so I'll
hit Cancel and it goes away, and now I
| | 02:12 | have two sample points;
| | 02:14 | one right here and one over in the
shadows in the bushes, and we can see
| | 02:19 | those numbers up here.
| | 02:20 | Let's zoom in and look a little bit.
| | 02:22 | Over here the number one point is the shadow
value which says right now 14, 12, and 12.
| | 02:31 | It's not balanced.
| | 02:32 | It's pretty close, but ideally
I'd like to see 10, 10, 10 there; a
| | 02:37 | neutral black point.
| | 02:38 | And then over here, I see for my number
2 sample point, this is the white point
| | 02:48 | on her shoulder, 201, 223, 247.
| | 02:53 | Well it's pretty high in blue and ideally,
what I'm looking for is 245, 245, 245
| | 03:00 | and a balanced white point.
| | 03:03 | So let's see how we can
achieve that using curves.
| | 03:05 | I'm going to go down and go to my
Adjustment Layer icon here and I'm going
| | 03:11 | to select Curves and make
a Curves adjustment layer.
| | 03:15 | So here is the Curves Control dialog and
I'll start with my white point which is
| | 03:22 | the most unbalanced here.
| | 03:24 | I see that I'm high in blue, but I'm
pretty close to what my maximum value
| | 03:29 | should be there for blue.
| | 03:31 | So I'll start here, select the end
point for blue, and I'm just going to nudge
| | 03:37 | that down using the Arrow
keys until I get to 245.
| | 03:43 | Now I'll go over to the Green
channel and I still have that end point
| | 03:48 | selected, but now I need to clip that.
I want to move that point to the left
| | 03:55 | and bring it up to 245.
| | 03:57 | So I'll start just by pushing it over,
I'm looking at those numbers, 238, 241,
| | 04:02 | 243, and now I'll finish it off
with the Arrow keys, 244, 245.
| | 04:11 | There's a shortcut for changing
from one channel to the other.
| | 04:15 | So I can go Command+1 or Ctrl+1
will give me the Red channel;
| | 04:21 | Command+2 or Ctrl+2 gives me the Green;
| | 04:24 | Command+3 or Ctrl+3 gives me the Blue,
and then Command+~ or Ctrl+~ gives me
| | 04:30 | the Composite channel.
| | 04:32 | I want to go to the Red channel, so
I'm going to go Command+1 or Ctrl+1.
| | 04:36 | I'm in the Red channel, my white
point here is still selected.
| | 04:40 | I'm going to move that over until I get
close to 245 there, and then finish off
| | 04:48 | with the Arrow keys, 242, 243.
Here we go, 245, 245, 245.
| | 04:53 | So I've balanced the white point and
we've made a significant improvement in the image.
| | 05:02 | Let's look over at the black point.
| | 05:04 | Well we could do a little improvement here.
| | 05:06 | I'm going to go ahead and select the
black point in the Red channel, which
| | 05:11 | now reads 16, and I'm going to move that
point over using the Arrow keys until it says 10.
| | 05:19 | So I move it to the right, now it says 10.
| | 05:24 | Let's move on to the Green channel,
Command+2 or Ctrl+2 gives me the Green channel.
| | 05:31 | That point is still selected.
I'll nudge it over until it says 10.
| | 05:37 | Let's go to the blue channel,
nudge it over until it says 10.
| | 05:42 | Now we have 10, 10, 10 for my black point;
| | 05:45 | 245, 245, 245 for my white point.
| | 05:48 | And let's look at what we've achieved
just by setting the black and the white point.
| | 05:58 | So we've improved the contrast and it seems
like we've cleaned up the image a little bit.
| | 06:06 | We still have more to go on this, but
you can see how powerful it is just to set
| | 06:10 | the black and the white point.
| | 06:12 | Now we need to start working on the
most important color in the image.
| | 06:16 | And what's the most important
color of any picture of a person?
| | 06:21 | It's going to be the skin tone.
| | 06:23 | Almost everything else we can accept some
variation, but we like to see good skin tone.
| | 06:28 | So next, we're going to look at how we
can adjust the skin tone.
| | 06:33 | All right, so let's get back into this.
| | 06:35 | I'll open up the Curves dialog again, and
now I want to find out what my skin value is.
| | 06:42 | So I'm going to place a sampler on
this woman's cheek here and we need to
| | 06:48 | evaluate skin tone. It's kind of hard
to tell how red or yellow, and we know we
| | 06:55 | can see it's kind of
definitely high in the Red channel here.
| | 06:59 | But it's easier to evaluate the skin
tone if we look at CMYK numbers, even
| | 07:03 | though we're in RGB, we're going to
change the readout, and I do that here by
| | 07:09 | clicking on this little Eyedropper
icon and selecting from the dropdown menu.
| | 07:16 | Hang on, here we go, CMYK Color.
| | 07:20 | Okay, so now I get CMYK numbers.
| | 07:24 | And the important thing to look at is
the relationship between magenta and
| | 07:28 | yellow, and then secondarily
what the value of cyan is.
| | 07:33 | What we're looking for is magenta and
yellow to be close to each other; magenta
| | 07:38 | and yellow should be closer than
either one of those is to cyan.
| | 07:43 | But usually we see yellow as a bit higher
than magenta, and right now we have the opposite.
| | 07:49 | So we have more magenta than we have
yellow and that's giving us a pink skin.
| | 07:53 | It's like sunburned color.
| | 07:56 | So we want to increase the
amount of yellow in this image.
| | 08:01 | So we're going to do that by using the
opponent color to yellow, which is blue,
| | 08:08 | and the Blue channel is where we're
going to find the control over yellow.
| | 08:13 | So I'm going to take a little blue out
and I'm going to place a sampler in the
| | 08:20 | curve by Command+Clicking that color.
| | 08:25 | And that's where the skin
color lives in the Blue channel.
| | 08:29 | Now if I take that out, I will
increase the amount of yellow.
| | 08:36 | So now I'm getting 63 and 63.
| | 08:40 | So now they're equal, but I'm also
making the color a little bit darker, and in
| | 08:45 | fact, what I'd rather do now is make it lighter.
| | 08:48 | So instead of adding yellow by taking
out blue, I'm going to knock back how much
| | 08:54 | magenta is in this mix by adding green.
| | 09:00 | So I'm going to place now--I'm going
to go ahead and place a sampler in all
| | 09:05 | three channels, and the trick to doing
that is to hold down the Command or Ctrl
| | 09:09 | key and the Shift key and click.
| | 09:12 | And that'll place control
point in all three channels.
| | 09:16 | So right now, we're going to add
green to knock back the amount of magenta.
| | 09:23 | So ideally, what I'd like to see is at
least 10% more yellow than magenta in
| | 09:29 | this value, and so I'm adding green and I
am now in 55, 68--over here. Here we go,
| | 09:36 | 57, 67, that's a pretty good
value for the skin tone mix here.
| | 09:43 | And I look over here and I can see
that I've taken the red out of the skin.
| | 09:49 | Now ideally, I'd like to see cyan at
about a third or up to one quarter slower
| | 09:58 | than the average between magenta and yellow.
| | 10:01 | And right now it's way up at 45, so that's
giving me kind of a dark color for the skin.
| | 10:07 | I'm going to look at the opposite or
the opponent color for cyan is red.
| | 10:13 | There's that tone in the Red channel and
we'll move that up by adding red, we'll
| | 10:21 | reduce the value of cyan.
| | 10:23 | So I'm going to add red, and you
can see 43, it's dropping down, 42.
| | 10:28 | The magenta is changing as well
but not as rapidly as the cyan.
| | 10:34 | I will at some point have to go back
and readjust this mix, because now yellow
| | 10:39 | and magenta are changing
slightly in the relationship.
| | 10:46 | So I'll go back and go back to the Green
channel, add a little bit more green to
| | 10:52 | knock down the additional
magenta which just showed up.
| | 11:00 | And I'm going to stop there.
| | 11:03 | This value--this tone is in the
shadow side of her face, so I'm not going
| | 11:07 | to really take cyan all the way down
because we're starting to look much better now.
| | 11:15 | Now the last step here, I'm going to go
to the Composite channel, the RGB, and
| | 11:20 | make a final little tweak; make it a
little brighter, add just a little more
| | 11:26 | contrast through the center,
steeping the center part of that curve.
| | 11:33 | And now let's look at the result.
| | 11:34 | We went from dull and blue kind of
overcast really somber-looking scene, now
| | 11:42 | we've put a little more life into it.
Opened it up; warmed up the colors, all
| | 11:46 | with a curves adjustment.
| | 11:48 | So you can see by using a Curves
adjustment layer, we can target individual
| | 11:54 | colors, very importantly, the skin tone color.
| | 11:58 | Place a point on the curve exactly
where that skin tone lives and adjust the
| | 12:01 | color in surgical precision by
moving those points up and down.
| | 12:06 | The numbers give us a clue as to which
direction to move that point in the curve
| | 12:12 | to achieve the result we're looking for.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 4: Curves and skin tone| 00:00 | Okay, we're going to work on a slightly
more difficult image, but we're going to
| | 00:04 | use the same strategy.
| | 00:05 | We're going to find the white point,
the black point, and then we're going to
| | 00:09 | use the curves to adjust the
colors to get what we want.
| | 00:13 | So exactly the same strategy;
| | 00:15 | start it off finding the white point, the black
point, and move on from there. Okay, let's go!
| | 00:21 | Okay, so first we open up this image and at
first glance it doesn't seem like there's
| | 00:27 | a whole lot wrong with it,
| | 00:29 | but we're going to use the numbers to
identify where a colorcast is and we're
| | 00:36 | going to enhance this image using Curves.
| | 00:39 | So the first thing I want to do is
find my white and my black point.
| | 00:43 | Now don't be fooled, if you look at
this image, it may seem obvious where the
| | 00:48 | light point and the black point is.
| | 00:50 | The black point probably is in the
shadow area and almost everybody will pick as
| | 00:55 | the lightest important value
of this collar here on the girl.
| | 01:00 | But if you do that, you'd be wrong.
| | 01:02 | And to prove it, I'm going to go ahead
and sample that color and let's paint
| | 01:11 | that perceived white color up here, the
actual white color that we got here, I'm
| | 01:21 | painting it up there and you can kind
of see that the white color is actually
| | 01:26 | darker than this cabinet back here.
| | 01:30 | So even though we think we can identify
the white and black points just by eye,
| | 01:37 | it's very easy to get fooled.
| | 01:39 | So we're going to actually identify the
real light value and dark value in this
| | 01:43 | image using our Threshold command strategy here.
| | 01:47 | So I'll pull up the Threshold command
and we'll move the slider over to find
| | 01:53 | out that yes, in fact, at this point,
that white collar has disappeared and all
| | 02:01 | of these tones back there on the cabinets
are actually brighter than the white collar.
| | 02:07 | So I'm going to place a sample point
there for our highlight by Shift+Clicking,
| | 02:13 | we'll move our slider over to the left to
find the black point, and as expected, our
| | 02:22 | black value is going to be somewhere in
the shadow between the girl and the boy.
| | 02:27 | So I'm going to hold the Shift key
down and place a sampler there for that.
| | 02:32 | Now we can cancel the Threshold
command and move on to fixing the white point
| | 02:37 | and the black point with the Curves.
| | 02:41 | So what this demonstrates is that your
eye can be very easily fooled by other
| | 02:47 | values in the image.
| | 02:48 | So don't think just by glancing at
this that you can identify accurately the
| | 02:53 | real light point and dark point in the image.
| | 02:56 | It's always good to verify with your
Sampler tool; find out what is the actual
| | 03:02 | lightest value in the image,
not what just looks white.
| | 03:08 | Okay, so getting back here, we're going to
open up our Curves and start working on the
| | 03:13 | light and the dark point in the image.
| | 03:16 | Okay, so we're going to look at
the white and the black points.
| | 03:19 | My black point over here 24, 18, 17; I'd
really like that to get down to 10, 10, 10.
| | 03:28 | So I'm going to start in the Red channel,
move it over a little bit until we get
| | 03:35 | close to 10, and then use the
Arrow keys to nudge it, zero in on 10.
| | 03:41 | Okay, right now, red is at 10.
| | 03:45 | Let's move to the Green channel. I'll
use Command+2 or Ctrl+2, gets me the
| | 03:52 | Green channel, move that over,
Arrow keys, zero in on 10.
| | 03:58 | Now I've got 10 in the red,
10 in the green, next is blue.
| | 04:03 | I'll move that over a little bit,
nudge it with the arrow keys.
| | 04:09 | Now I have 10, 10, 10 over here.
| | 04:12 | So my black point is set.
Let's work on the white point.
| | 04:17 | I can see the white value here 217, 187,
186; kind of high in the red, and it's
| | 04:26 | not particularly bright.
| | 04:27 | We might really want to force
some contrast into this image.
| | 04:30 | I want my white point to be actually white.
| | 04:32 | So we're going to have to move this quite a bit.
| | 04:35 | Since we're in the Blue channel, we'll
go to the end, the white point in the
| | 04:39 | blue channel, and nudge it over to the left,
and I'd like my white point to hit 245.
| | 04:46 | So I'm just moving this over,
looking at just the numbers.
| | 04:52 | Don't freak out about how the
color changes because we're not done yet.
| | 04:55 | So we'll just use the numbers to hit
245, and I'm nudging past 245 here.
| | 05:05 | We will stop at 246.
| | 05:07 | Okay, move to the Green channel, same
thing, and move over here until we get to
| | 05:15 | 246. Red channel, same thing.
| | 05:27 | Use the arrow keys to nudge into.
| | 05:29 | Well so we're going to end up with 245,
246, 246, and that's pretty neutral.
| | 05:35 | Let's check the image.
| | 05:36 | So far, we've set the white and the
black point and you can kind of see what
| | 05:40 | we've done is sort of removed
this brown smog from the image.
| | 05:45 | So now we've cleaned it up, we
improved the contrast, and even improved the
| | 05:49 | color quite a bit, but we're not quite done.
| | 05:54 | So strategy, again, find the white point,
the black point, and neutralize them.
| | 06:01 | Nine times out of ten that kills any
colorcast that's apparent in the image.
| | 06:06 | But then we have to look
for the most important color.
| | 06:09 | Right now, all we've done was
balance the white and the black.
| | 06:13 | What's the most important color in this image?
| | 06:15 | Got to be the skin tone.
| | 06:16 | Any picture of a person or people, the
most important color is definitely going
| | 06:22 | to be the skin tone.
| | 06:24 | So let's work on adjusting this file for that.
| | 06:26 | Okay, now we're going to start working on
the most important color, the skin tone.
| | 06:32 | So I'm going to place a sampler
right here on the boy's forehead.
| | 06:41 | One thing that you want to do before
you really start doing any of these things
| | 06:49 | is to check your Sample tool and make
sure that you have it set to 5x5 sample.
| | 06:58 | Right now, it's set at Point Sample.
| | 07:00 | So we could be measuring noise here and
we'd rather have that at 5x5 average.
| | 07:07 | So I'm changing the sample point here,
sample size to 5x5, instead of where it
| | 07:15 | was, which was Point Sample.
| | 07:21 | All right, so now we've set our
black point, our white point.
| | 07:27 | Now let's start attacking the skin tone.
| | 07:32 | I placed the sampler around his forehead
and now I'd like to place that point in the Curves.
| | 07:41 | A shortcut to doing that is to use the
Command+Shift+Click or Ctrl+Shift+Click.
| | 07:54 | That will place a point in all three channels.
| | 07:59 | So you can see now I've placed a single
point in all three channels, right where
| | 08:03 | that skin tone lives.
| | 08:06 | Now let's analyze the skin tone.
| | 08:07 | We're going to analyze the skin tone in
Sampler 3 here, but we want to use CMYK numbers.
| | 08:13 | So I'm going to come up to the little
Eyedropper icon here, switch that to CMYK,
| | 08:20 | so now I can see CMYK numbers.
| | 08:24 | All right, looking at this value, I can see what
I'm aiming for is magenta and yellow to be
| | 08:31 | closer together than cyan
is to either one of them.
| | 08:35 | And right now I have much more yellow
than magenta, and in fact, I think magenta
| | 08:41 | is probably closer to the
Cyan value than it is yellow.
| | 08:44 | That's a big warning sign.
| | 08:46 | We definitely have a skin tone that's
kind of too yellow, jaundice-looking here.
| | 08:51 | We have to reduce the
amount of yellow in the image.
| | 08:55 | So the fastest way to do that is
to work in the Blue channel which is
| | 09:00 | exactly opposite yellow.
| | 09:03 | And as we add blue, we're
going to reduce this Yellow value.
| | 09:07 | So let's switch over to the
Blue channel. There is my point.
| | 09:11 | I want the Yellow value to go down relative to
the Magenta value, so let's lower that point.
| | 09:25 | So ideally, what I'm looking for here is
about 10% spread, and I'd like to reduce the cyan.
| | 09:37 | So the skin tone value is
easier to evaluate in CMYK than RGB.
| | 09:43 | We can see how yellow or magenta the
skin is just by looking at the numbers and
| | 09:48 | it's very helpful to know how magenta
something is or how yellow it is, even
| | 09:53 | know we're working in RGB.
| | 09:56 | So what's important to point out here
is the opponent colors for the CMY are
| | 10:02 | actually red, green, and blue, RGB.
| | 10:04 | We're working in RGB file, but we
can shift the percentage of magenta to
| | 10:11 | yellow using the RGB channels.
| | 10:15 | So if we want Yellow value to go
down, we'll raise the blue level.
| | 10:21 | If we want magenta to go up,
we would reduce the green.
| | 10:28 | Green is opposite to magenta,
blue is opposite to yellow.
| | 10:30 | So let's look at that in action.
| | 10:33 | So right now, I'm reducing the amount of
blue and I'm increasing the Yellow value.
| | 10:41 | If I want less yellow, I want to
increase blue, and you notice how the
| | 10:46 | blue value goes down.
| | 10:49 | So I'd really like to get these closer
together, I'm going to increase blue a
| | 10:55 | little bit more here.
| | 10:57 | I'd also like to get, maybe I can
move the magenta up, and I'm making a big
| | 11:03 | move in the Curve here.
| | 11:05 | Let's switch over to the Green channel
and if I want magenta to increase, I've
| | 11:13 | got to remove green.
| | 11:15 | So I'm going to move the Green value
down and you'll notice as I do that,
| | 11:19 | now we're at 31, 41.
| | 11:22 | That's a pretty nice spread,
10% more yellow than magenta.
| | 11:26 | The skin tone is starting to look better.
| | 11:29 | If I toggle that on and off, less yellow,
so we're definitely doing better now
| | 11:37 | as far as the skin color goes. Are we done?
| | 11:41 | We're not done yet.
| | 11:43 | The next thing to check for, once
you've set your important color is, are there
| | 11:48 | any other neutral colors in the image
that you might be able to neutralize?
| | 11:52 | Right now, I'm thinking that the boy's black
sweatshirt should be black instead of brown.
| | 11:57 | It looks brown to me now.
| | 11:59 | We'll check that with the numbers
and see if we can improve the image.
| | 12:05 | So for that, I'm going to place another
sample point in the black sweatshirt here.
| | 12:13 | So oops! Hold the Shift key, click, now I've
got a fourth sample point that represents
| | 12:20 | my black sweatshirt.
| | 12:22 | And sure enough I can see the
numbers again here, 67, 53, 36;
| | 12:30 | definitely it has a warm bias.
| | 12:32 | It's very low in blue.
| | 12:34 | What I'd like to be able to do is
bring up the Blue value to match the green.
| | 12:39 | So I'm going to try and force blue to
be 53, green is 53, and I would like to
| | 12:44 | reduce the Red value to be 53 and
then I'll get a neutral color there.
| | 12:52 | So green we're going to leave alone.
| | 12:53 | Let's go to the Blue channel.
| | 12:57 | Here's where that sweatshirt is in the
Blue channel and I need to increase the
| | 13:05 | Blue value so that it matches the green.
| | 13:07 | So let's just use the
Arrow keys and nudge that up.
| | 13:11 | So I'm really aiming for 53 and you
can see this point nudging up here and my
| | 13:19 | numbers change until I'm at 53.
| | 13:21 | So I'm 53 in blue, 53 in green,
now I need to work the red.
| | 13:25 | So let's go back to the Red channel,
there's that point in the Red channel. I
| | 13:30 | need to bring it down from 67. I'll
nudge it down with the arrow keys and
| | 13:37 | stop when I get to 53.
| | 13:42 | All right, right there I've balanced
out the black sweatshirt.
| | 13:47 | But now I need to check and see if any
of the other values have changed, because
| | 13:54 | I've made a lot of changes in the curves.
| | 13:56 | If you change one place in the curve, it very
often will affect another area in the curve.
| | 14:01 | So let's look and double-check all our
black point, white point, our skin tone
| | 14:06 | and see if we've damaged either of
those other areas by making this move for
| | 14:11 | the black sweatshirt.
| | 14:15 | All right, so I'm going to go up here, our skin
tone has value 3, it's in CMYK, and
| | 14:23 | we're still pretty close.
| | 14:24 | We haven't really damaged that color at all.
| | 14:27 | Let's look over here,
number 2, that's our black point.
| | 14:29 | Well that suddenly got a lot bluer.
| | 14:33 | And I'd like to neutralize that, so
let's go back to our Blue channel.
| | 14:39 | I want to reduce this from 24 to get
it back down to 10, and notice that I
| | 14:47 | might have a problem doing that,
because the black sweatshirt is pretty close
| | 14:52 | to that shadow value.
| | 14:54 | And this point right here
on the Curve is anchoring.
| | 14:59 | I can't move this over that much.
| | 15:20 | And now I'm at 11, now I'm at 10. There I am;
| | 15:30 | 10 in the Blue channel, let's go back to
the Green real quick, move that point over.
| | 15:37 | Now I'm at 10 in the Green channel. My red
is at 9; move over to red and nudge that over.
| | 15:45 | Now I'm 10, 10, 10 there.
My highlight, let's check that;
| | 15:48 | 246, 245, 244, well within a three-unit spread,
so that's fine. I don't need to change that.
| | 15:56 | Check my skin tone again; 11, 31, 42.
| | 16:00 | That's all still good.
| | 16:03 | My black sweatshirt; 53, 53, 45.
| | 16:07 | It's lost some of the blue when
we corrected for the black point.
| | 16:12 | At this point, I think it's close
enough, and I'm going to call it done.
| | 16:17 | Let's just see how far we've come.
| | 16:19 | That's where we were, kind of brown,
smoggy, haze over the whole image and
| | 16:24 | not enough contrast.
| | 16:26 | Here we've improved the contrast and the
color using one Curve adjustment layer.
| | 16:34 | Okay, we saw how that image was a little
more complicated than the others, but
| | 16:38 | basically we're using the same strategy.
| | 16:40 | Set your white point, your black point,
and attack the most important color.
| | 16:45 | In every case with a picture of a person,
the important color is going to be the skin.
| | 16:50 | So we saw how placing a value, a point
on the Curve where the skin color is and
| | 16:55 | adjusting it in each channel up or
down, we can solve 99% of all the color
| | 17:00 | issues that you might have with an
image with a simple Curves adjustment layer.
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| Lesson 5: Curves techniques| 00:02 | Okay, we're going to look at one more
image and partly why I'm showing this to
| | 00:07 | you is to show you how
fast you can get with Curves.
| | 00:10 | You don't have to take all that time
and measure everything so precisely.
| | 00:15 | Once you know how these things work,
you can get much quicker at it and I'll
| | 00:19 | show that with this next image.
| | 00:20 | And I'm also going to show one other
technique for using Curves that can help
| | 00:25 | you out when you don't want to adjust
the contrast and all you're looking for is
| | 00:29 | a color change, so let's look at this.
| | 00:32 | Okay, I've this image up here this is a
lovely photograph by Erin Manning, nice
| | 00:38 | little portrait of this little girl.
| | 00:41 | One of the things I'm looking for here
is skin tone of course, important color,
| | 00:47 | and something to watch out for.
| | 00:49 | Here we have--she is lying down on the
grass and the skin on the shadow side is
| | 00:54 | picking up green from this grass, so
that's something that we're going to want
| | 00:59 | to address, as far as the color, but
overall the contrast is pretty decent.
| | 01:04 | So I don't really want affect that with the
curves. I do want to affect the color only.
| | 01:10 | So let's start with our strategy.
| | 01:13 | We'll get our Threshold adjustment up to
find our black point and I'll just move
| | 01:21 | that over and it looks like our
darkest tone is this shadow under the ear, so
| | 01:27 | I'll set up fix sampler for that, and
let's move our slider over and it looks
| | 01:34 | like our collar here is the light
point. I'll put a sampler for that.
| | 01:38 | And all right, now let's evaluate; our
shadow point, 10, 8, 9, within three units
| | 01:45 | of each other, so I'm not even going
to worry about that, but our white point
| | 01:49 | is, well, it's clipped in the Red
channel, green is 249, blue is 239. I'd like
| | 01:57 | to get red up to 245 and everything
should be equal at 245, thereabouts, but
| | 02:07 | overall, I don't want to change the
contrast of this image, so here is a little
| | 02:11 | trick to doing that.
| | 02:13 | Before you go and make the Curves
adjustment layer, hold down Option key, then
| | 02:19 | when you call up the Curves adjustment,
instead you'll get a New Layer option
| | 02:22 | dialog and that allows us to change the
Mode or how the Curves will be applied
| | 02:29 | from Normal to Color only.
| | 02:33 | So this way we can only affect the
color, we can't change the contrast of the
| | 02:36 | image. So let's see how that all works.
| | 02:42 | My white point, I need it to get balanced,
so we'll start with blue. I'm going to
| | 02:50 | select the endpoint of the blue,
| | 02:52 | the white point move it over. I'm
aiming for 245, I hit 246. That's good
| | 03:00 | enough. Let's go to the Green channel,
it's 249, I'd just like to bring it
| | 03:07 | down just a little bit.
| | 03:07 | Now watch what--I'm bringing it down,
but both the green and the blue numbers
| | 03:15 | are changing, that's because
I can't affect the contrast.
| | 03:19 | So right now I have a balanced green and
blue, but all three numbers will change
| | 03:23 | as I try to hit that balance point.
| | 03:30 | So one thing to watch out for with this
approach, when you have Curves in Color
| | 03:38 | only mode, contrast is in all three
channels, but now we're telling Photoshop
| | 03:45 | you can't change the contrast, you can
only change the color. So it's going to
| | 03:49 | sort of proactively adjust the other
channels as I try to hit a certain color,
| | 03:56 | and all three channels will change.
| | 03:58 | So it's something you just got to pay
attention to when you're working the
| | 04:01 | numbers in the Curve.
| | 04:03 | So now I have to bring the red down,
but again, I can't change the contrast, so
| | 04:09 | you see what's happening.
| | 04:11 | As I bring the red down, it's bringing
the other two numbers up. So I'm trying
| | 04:16 | to equal those--get those values equal.
| | 04:18 | Right now they're equal at 250.
| | 04:21 | If I need to bring it down even more,
I'd have to go into the other channels,
| | 04:26 | bring them down, and go this sort
of back and forth nudging thing.
| | 04:30 | 250 for me right now in this area is
just fine, I'm going to leave it alone,
| | 04:35 | I've got a balanced white and a black point.
| | 04:37 | The next thing to do was attack the
important color, so let's put a fix
| | 04:42 | sampler on the right side of her
face here, and let's look at those color
| | 04:50 | values, what those are;
| | 04:53 | 6%, 31, 48. We're actually really close
to a decent color skin tone on that side;
| | 05:01 | Let's look on the other side.
| | 05:06 | Okay, our shadow side is a bit
different. Let's see what the CMYK numbers say.
| | 05:12 | All right, 48, 53, 78, so there's a
much bigger gap here, and so we are
| | 05:18 | definitely more yellow.
| | 05:21 | So I want to leave the good color side
alone and work on the bad color side.
| | 05:28 | So what I'm going to do now is place a
point on the Curve in all three channels.
| | 05:33 | On the good color side, I
will just lock that down.
| | 05:36 | And I'm going to go to the bad color
side, do the same thing, holding down the
| | 05:41 | Command+Shift or Ctrl+Shift key
clicking, and that puts a point in all three
| | 05:46 | channels. So this is the
point I'm going to want to work.
| | 05:49 | Looking at my numbers again, I need to
get the Blue value up. Let's see what
| | 05:56 | happens if I just move that Blue
point up to decrease the amount of yellow.
| | 06:03 | And as the numbers change, now I have
53, 73 and I'm looking at the image, 54, 71.
| | 06:20 | I'm not going to be fascist about this
and force these to hit a certain value,
| | 06:24 | because right now the
color is looking pretty good.
| | 06:28 | The shadow side is going to have to be
a little darker, so it's going to have
| | 06:32 | more density in all these colors here.
That's good enough for me, so I'm done.
| | 06:39 | Now if we time that, you'd probably find
that wasn't--it didn't take long at all,
| | 06:47 | and you can get even quicker
than this if you're not talking.
| | 06:50 | So you can see how the curves can
be very powerful and very accurate.
| | 06:56 | I can target a shadow side, a
highlight side, I can also use the curves in
| | 07:00 | Color Only mode, so I don't change the
contrast and just the color, and it's
| | 07:05 | very quick and precise.
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| Lesson 6: The Hue/Saturation command| 00:00 | All right, well, we've seen how to do
basic color adjustment using curves.
| | 00:04 | Now I've got a technique that solves a
little more complicated problem that you
| | 00:09 | just can't quite address fully with curves.
| | 00:12 | This is a special technique using Hue/Saturation
and we're going to talk about
| | 00:17 | getting the red out of your skin tone.
| | 00:23 | So here I've an image I took of a Dr.
Doug. He's an acupuncturist and a
| | 00:30 | really, really healthy guy.
| | 00:32 | But in this picture his skin looks
really red and it seems like he's been
| | 00:38 | drinking or something. He's got a red
nose and he looks just way too pink.
| | 00:45 | So there is a couple of things here, this--
people complain about this all the time.
| | 00:50 | One of the reasons it's like that,
and I'm going to check the profile here,
| | 00:56 | whatever has been assigned to this.
| | 00:58 | And we kind of see here that this
image is opened up, it's in Adobe RGB.
| | 01:05 | Well sometimes when you shoot JPEGs in
the camera and you get a choice to pick
| | 01:12 | Adobe RGB or sRGB in the camera
settings, some of the cameras, especially the
| | 01:17 | older ones, weren't really doing this
properly and they would tell you that it
| | 01:21 | was Adobe RGB, when actually it was sRGB.
| | 01:26 | So one thing, if your skin is always
coming out way too red, a simple thing to
| | 01:30 | do is check and make sure if you have
your camera set on Adobe RGB, maybe it's
| | 01:35 | not really giving Adobe RGB;
| | 01:38 | sRGB seems to work better for this
image, so this is one quick little way to
| | 01:42 | help take some of the red
out, but it's still too red.
| | 01:46 | So how are we going to deal with that?
| | 01:48 | We're going to use a Hue/Saturation
adjustment layer and there's a little trick
| | 01:54 | for using Hue/Saturation.
| | 01:57 | And as we're not going to change the
color using the master here, we're going to
| | 02:02 | edit a specific color.
| | 02:04 | We're going to look at red.
| | 02:07 | When I select Reds in this Edit
dropdown, you'll notice that there is this
| | 02:12 | eyedropper selected here, the first
eyedropper, that allows me go into the
| | 02:15 | image and click on the most offensive
red color on his face. It's right on
| | 02:22 | the end of nose here.
| | 02:24 | And you'll notice that this area in
the rainbow bars at the bottom of the
| | 02:28 | dialog has shifted and moved and centered
itself over that color that you just clicked on.
| | 02:34 | Now we can take the minus eyedropper
and find--like over here I see is a
| | 02:43 | good skin color.
| | 02:44 | I want to click on that and it's
trimmed it in just a little bit.
| | 02:50 | So we subtracted the good color from the
bad color and right in the center, this
| | 02:55 | region, this is where the Hue/Saturation
adjustment is going to be most strong.
| | 03:01 | And then in this gray regions is where
it ramps off into the surrounding color.
| | 03:06 | So we can visualize which
colors are going to be shifted by doing a
| | 03:11 | ridiculous Hue shift here, and all these
areas that are bright cyan, that's right in
| | 03:18 | the center. That's where it's most
prominently going to be affecting the color.
| | 03:23 | We can ramp off and adjust how much of
the other color is affected by pulling in
| | 03:29 | these little triangles in the gray bars.
| | 03:31 | And you'll notice I am taking it off
the color on the side of his face which is
| | 03:36 | actually a good color.
| | 03:40 | Now I've trimmed down the selection a
little bit, maybe I can go in and just trim it
| | 03:45 | in just a little more.
| | 03:47 | So now I am really only going to be
effecting the regions that are most red.
| | 03:51 | I will bring this back to 0, and actually
we're going to move the Hue towards the
| | 03:58 | yellow, until the color
merges, and check this out.
| | 04:03 | I'll turn this off; that's before the
adjustment, on. I've cleaned up his red
| | 04:09 | skin. I haven't done any cloning.
| | 04:16 | So this technique you can use a lot.
It's really great for dealing with acne,
| | 04:22 | without ever picking up the Clone
tool, we can use this Hue/Saturation to
| | 04:25 | target just that red color and shift it towards
the yellow and merge with the rest of the skin.
| | 04:31 | A really powerful technique and you
can use it over and over again in all
| | 04:35 | kinds of situations.
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| Lesson 7: Curves and Hue/Saturation| 00:00 | All right, let's look at another image.
This is going to be another quick correction.
| | 00:05 | We're going to use a
combination of curves and Hue/Saturation.
| | 00:08 | And we're going to address another type of
problem that you may see from time to time.
| | 00:14 | All right, so I've an image here,
this one was taken by Anthony Nex, who
| | 00:20 | specializes in child photography and I have
got a great little shot of a little baby here.
| | 00:25 | It's a very pink baby.
| | 00:28 | Let's look--I am just going to move the
cursor over the image here and I can see
| | 00:33 | up there in first set of numbers in
the Info palette there, magenta is higher
| | 00:41 | than yellow by 10 units. That is the
exact opposite of what we want.
| | 00:45 | So clearly we need to do something here
with this. White point, black point; this
| | 00:51 | image has clipped highlights over here.
| | 00:54 | We are just going to leave that alone.
| | 00:58 | And there isn't anything that is
particularly black in this image, so right now
| | 01:02 | I'm really just concerned about the skin tone.
| | 01:05 | So I'll bail on the Threshold adjustment.
| | 01:09 | We'll go right into Curves and let's
place a fix sampler on the skin here.
| | 01:21 | And change our numbers to CMYK.
| | 01:28 | All right, well we need to take and
increase yellow relative to the magenta,
| | 01:34 | so we are going to use that in the Blue channel.
| | 01:37 | When we put a point there for the
blue--I'll actually put them in all three channels.
| | 01:53 | Okay, so there is our point for the skin.
| | 01:56 | I need less blue to make more yellow.
| | 01:59 | So I'll just use the Arrow keys and now
we're starting to get this reversed out here.
| | 02:07 | We have a much nicer looking baby.
| | 02:13 | Let me check our Highlight value here
and put a point in the image there.
| | 02:20 | So number 2, we should really get this
neutral and right now I'm a little hot
| | 02:28 | in the Red channel, so lets go back to
the red, find out where that is. Way,
| | 02:35 | way up there, okay.
| | 02:36 | There is also where my skin tone is,
so maybe I'm not going to bring the red
| | 02:44 | down, I have to bring green up.
| | 02:46 | I'm going to have trouble
here, this is pretty light.
| | 02:50 | So I am going to have to bring
this red value down, it's too close to
| | 02:54 | my original skin tone.
| | 02:55 | So I am going to move it down, looking
at these numbers, then we will have to
| | 03:01 | come back here--we are actually
still okay there. I keep looking at the 2
| | 03:05 | numbers, bring this down to 26,
That's good, that's good, a good neutral.
| | 03:13 | And we're still okay with our skin tone
here, a good spread. All right, so far
| | 03:21 | we've fixed the color, but
there's one other problem.
| | 03:26 | The issue with this image now is in the
shadow area, and we'll zoom in and check
| | 03:31 | that out in a minute.
| | 03:33 | The shadow on her hand is way too red,
so we're going to use Hue/Saturation
| | 03:38 | adjustment in a unique way to
target that one specific red color and
| | 03:43 | desaturate it a bit.
| | 03:47 | So what's the problem here?
| | 03:52 | Here we have a lot of red in the shadow.
| | 03:57 | Sometimes this happens when you make
an adjustment or you--as you in your RAW
| | 04:02 | processor, you increase the saturation
to improve the appearance of picture, but
| | 04:07 | the shadow values get too saturated. So
we have to target this value in here, but
| | 04:12 | save the rest of the skin.
| | 04:15 | So again, our little friend the Hue/
Saturation adjustment comes into play.
| | 04:22 | I am going to target reds and actually
I think these maybe even more magenta
| | 04:27 | than they are red, so I'll select
magenta and target the magenta color.
| | 04:36 | So Photoshop decided it's not really
magenta, it's red, and it changed the name
| | 04:40 | up here. It says Reds 2, centered it
in that area. Now let's use the minus
| | 04:46 | eyedropper to subtract the good color,
| | 04:49 | and in fact, we're pretty far away from
the good color. Let's just double-check
| | 04:54 | and make sure by cranking the Hue,
ridiculous yeah, we're pretty much targeting
| | 05:00 | just those super red values.
| | 05:03 | Maybe I can trim this in just a
little bit off of the good color skin.
| | 05:08 | And so we want to bring those red
values now, instead of changing them one way
| | 05:17 | or the other, let's just desaturate it.
| | 05:19 | So we're going to desaturate
those--see what's happening here?
| | 05:23 | I pulled the saturation to the left
and now I've killed that really ugly look
| | 05:28 | of the supersaturated shadow.
| | 05:32 | This is pretty normal. Shadows as
they get darker, they get less saturated.
| | 05:36 | If they are doing something else, there's
a problem and our friend Hue/Saturation
| | 05:41 | here can help solve that for us.
| | 05:45 | So there is our baby, now let's look
at the way she looked before; pink baby,
| | 05:54 | now we have much better color.
| | 05:56 | So we use two image adjustment layers.
| | 06:00 | So in general, I try to do all my color
correction with as few layers as possible.
| | 06:07 | In this case, we had use two because
we had two different things going on.
| | 06:11 | And Hue/Saturation was a much better tool to
address that one particular area of the image.
| | 06:16 | So I used to--took care of most of the
color with a Curve adjustment layer and
| | 06:21 | we followed up with Hue/Saturation
to do the fine tuning.
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| Lesson 8: Basic retouching| 00:00 | Now when you say Photoshop, the first
thing people think of is retouching.
| | 00:07 | That's what Photoshop means to most
people, taking out all the flaws and pimples
| | 00:11 | and zits and wrinkles
and all that kind of stuff.
| | 00:14 | And in fact, now-a-days anytime you look
at a picture in a magazine, there's a
| | 00:19 | 99% chance that it spent some
time in Photoshop getting retouched.
| | 00:24 | So we're going to cover the basic
retouching tools right now to do the typical
| | 00:31 | flaw removal sort of retouching.
| | 00:37 | All right, I usually have trouble
finding somebody who's willing to show the
| | 00:41 | before picture, so I have to resort to
this really ugly looking gentleman here.
| | 00:53 | Now when you're working with a client,
it's always a good idea to kind of markup
| | 00:56 | notes and make sure that you get
all the things that you dislike.
| | 01:01 | So I'm going to make an empty layer
here this is just my markup layer.
| | 01:05 | I'll type in Markup and really what you
do is you circle all the little things
| | 01:14 | that you want to remove, little moles,
lines, under the eyes and take off a few
| | 01:26 | years here. There are some defects,
little spots on the sensor here.
| | 01:30 | Work the hairs around, the hairline,
stray hairs; anything that you think
| | 01:43 | needs to be removed you want to circle,
and we're just doing this in an empty
| | 01:48 | layer, so we can turn it on and off
and this just helps us make sure that we
| | 01:52 | caught all the mistakes. This little
thing here, hairs in the middle of the nose.
| | 01:58 | All right, now we're ready to start retouching.
| | 02:04 | Always, always, always retouch
into an empty layer, if you can do it.
| | 02:09 | We're going to start off with this most
basic retouching tool, which is new with
| | 02:17 | CS2 actually, the Spot Healing brush.
| | 02:23 | This tool is just a great retouching
tool and really makes work so much easier.
| | 02:30 | I am going to zoom in a little bit here.
| | 02:32 | Spot Healing brush, you just
locate a spot and take it out.
| | 02:38 | Now you notice nothing happened.
That's because there is something you
| | 02:42 | have check and make sure you sample all
layers, because we're going into an empty layer.
| | 02:48 | If I don't check that, I'm sampling
empty and I can't fill in that little spot.
| | 02:54 | So what the Spot Healing brush is
doing is it's looking for a proximity match
| | 02:59 | here. It's looking in for the
surrounding area to sample from and it
| | 03:04 | automatically fills in from
the area surrounding the defect.
| | 03:09 | If you are brushing along and it
seems like it's too smooth, you can
| | 03:14 | try clicking on the Create Texture, but I
find most of the time this is too textured.
| | 03:19 | So leave it at the Proximity Match there.
| | 03:22 | And now as you kind of cover up the
spots with your brushstrokes, it just sort
| | 03:30 | of magically takes them away.
| | 03:32 | And now quite a bit of work being
done in retouching just uses this one
| | 03:40 | tool, whereas before we had to do a lot
of cloning to eliminate these things.
| | 03:47 | Now we can use the Spot Healing
brush to remove a lot of these defects.
| | 03:56 | Turn on and off the layer to check your
progress and just keep working the tool
| | 04:04 | to take out the spots.
| | 04:11 | So Spot Healing brush is used mostly
for spots, taking out the little lines,
| | 04:18 | little features, little defects, but
for larger things we use different tools.
| | 04:25 | So let's look at a different
retouching tool, the Healing brush.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 9: The Healing brush| 00:00 | The next tool we're going to use is
the Healing brush and this tool is very
| | 00:06 | popular, because it's great to demo,
it's like a magic Cloning tool.
| | 00:12 | It blends in seamlessly, and well,
you just kind of have to see it.
| | 00:17 | I am going to takeout the
bags under my eyes here.
| | 00:21 | But I want to make a separate layer
for that, now I'll explain why that
| | 00:25 | happens in a minute, but I am going to make a
separate layer that we're going to call Healing.
| | 00:34 | And again, I'll go and select the
Healing Brush tool, it's underneath the same
| | 00:42 | Spot Healing brush, all of the
sophisticated retouching tools are in the same
| | 00:47 | place in the Tool palette.
| | 00:48 | This next one down is the Healing
Brush tool and you really have to make sure
| | 00:53 | that you're not sampling on the Current
Layer. You can sample on the Current &
| | 01:00 | Below, or All Layers.
| | 01:04 | So right now Current &
Below makes the most sense for me.
| | 01:07 | I am going to just sample Current
& Below and check Aligned, okay.
| | 01:14 | Source should be sampled.
| | 01:16 | And right now it's going to work pretty
much like a Clone tool, but unlike the
| | 01:25 | Clone tool, which we would use a very
small brush size, I can use a pretty big brush
| | 01:30 | here to take out this wrinkle.
| | 01:33 | And I'm actually going to
sample from the forehead.
| | 01:39 | Now watch this, we're just going draw it in
and it looks like ooh, nasty, okay.
| | 01:46 | So you see what happened here, my source went
into the hair, but it blended in seamlessly.
| | 01:53 | Let's try a different place to sample from.
| | 01:56 | I just hit Command+Z or
Ctrl+Z. Here we go again.
| | 02:02 | Now it doesn't look like this is going
to blend in very nicely, but as soon I
| | 02:07 | let go, it blends into the underlying color.
| | 02:11 | So this is very easy to blend out
wrinkles and it assumes the same value
| | 02:23 | structure of the underlying image.
| | 02:27 | Let's do the same thing over here.
| | 02:41 | Okay, now this looks a little weird. It
looks like the alien from outer space.
| | 02:48 | Nobody is this perfect.
| | 02:51 | And the more you retouch out the stuff, the
more smooth and perfected it gets to look.
| | 02:59 | The reason I'm doing it in a separate
layer is that the whole secret to this
| | 03:03 | retouching is not to kill the wrinkles
entirely, but just to knock them back.
| | 03:07 | So if I reduced Opacity just a little
bit to bring back some of the underlying
| | 03:13 | wrinkles, that looks more believable,
but it's certainly more attractive than
| | 03:18 | having the full strength wrinkle in there.
| | 03:22 | So that's the Healing Brush tool.
| | 03:26 | The trick to all of these tools is to
do the retouching in a separate layer,
| | 03:30 | that way you can always
back off if it's too much.
| | 03:34 | And you're starting to look to plastic,
you can back off, reveal some of the
| | 03:37 | underlying skin and we're
patching the skin with other skin.
| | 03:42 | So when we blend the two together,
it's pretty seamless and you can't really
| | 03:46 | tell where the retouching begins and
leaves off, it just makes it look nicer.
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| Lesson 10: The Patch tool| 00:00 | The next tool we are going
to look at is the Patch tool.
| | 00:03 | This is another new of retouching tool
that was introduced in Photoshop CS, and
| | 00:09 | has gone through some improvements.
| | 00:12 | I'm going to use the Patch Healing tool
to remove these spots from the CCD, the
| | 00:17 | sensor on the digital camera.
| | 00:19 | The Patch tool is the third one down in
the list here of retouching tools that
| | 00:27 | really is kind of a special case selection tool.
| | 00:31 | I have the image layer in this case
selected and I'm going to use the Patch tool
| | 00:37 | to patch the source.
| | 00:40 | So what I'm doing here is making--identifying
the source for my patch, make a little
| | 00:45 | selection out of it.
| | 00:47 | I drag it off, and you can see as I drag
it off, it shows me inside the previous
| | 00:53 | selection what it's going to look like.
| | 00:55 | It replaces what was in
there where I dragged to.
| | 01:00 | This tool is great and it's really
fast for removing these kinds of defects.
| | 01:04 | So you can go through the whole image
really quickly and smooth out a background
| | 01:11 | or remove little defects.
| | 01:14 | Now it's not so good in this situation here,
where I am right at the edge of something.
| | 01:22 | In some cases this will work fine, in
other cases it tries to blend in at the edge.
| | 01:29 | Let's see if that--yeah, some of the
hair got blended back in, because what
| | 01:32 | it's doing really is
blending the edge of the selection.
| | 01:35 | So go to be careful where you draw the
selection and how big you make it, but I
| | 01:42 | primarily use that for
cleaning up the background spots.
| | 01:51 | So Patch tool is not used as frequently,
it's more of a quick select and fix thing.
| | 01:57 | It happens to work pretty good on even
backgrounds where we are trying to remove spots.
| | 02:02 | I wouldn't use it inside the face,
because the edges will get blended and we
| | 02:08 | have problems with the skin texture.
| | 02:12 | Spot Healing brush and the Healing brush
work great in retouching the skin areas.
| | 02:18 | The Patch tool is really just something to
use for a real quick fixes in an even background.
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| Lesson 11: The Clone tool| 00:00 | Okay, so you're saying to yourself
with all these cool new retouching tools,
| | 00:04 | am I ever going to use the Clone tool again,
when I have the Healing tool and Spot Healing tool?
| | 00:10 | And yes, in fact, the Clone brush still
has a use and I'll show it to you right now.
| | 00:16 | All right, the problem with using
these sophisticated retouching tools like
| | 00:22 | the Healing brush and Spot Healing
brush is when we come up to an edge here
| | 00:28 | where part of the background is gray here, you
can see, and then on this side we have skin tone.
| | 00:34 | If I use the Healing brush to establish
a source for the background and then I'm
| | 00:40 | brushing over it here, it
looks like I'm doing okay.
| | 00:43 | I go right up to the edge, all right,
great, I have done my retouch. As soon as
| | 00:48 | I let go, you can see what happens, it pulls
the skin color from this side into that retouch.
| | 00:55 | No good, so I can't use the Healing brush there.
| | 00:59 | What still works, however, is
the venerable Clone Stamp tool.
| | 01:02 | It's perfect in this instance.
Establish a sample, and then just clone right
| | 01:10 | up to the edge and I don't have to worry
about pulling in the skin color into that retouch.
| | 01:17 | So there is still a use
for the Cloning Stamp tool.
| | 01:23 | We tend to use the Clone Stamp tool
with very, very small brushes and do
| | 01:28 | very little detailed things along
edges like this, that's primarily the main
| | 01:33 | use right now.
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| Lesson 12: The Dodge and Burn tools| 00:00 | Now I'm going to use a special Dodge and
Burn technique that I find a lot of use
| | 00:06 | for this to when we're trying
to preserve the skin texture.
| | 00:08 | If you do too much healing, too much
cloning or spot healing, you tend to smooth
| | 00:14 | out the skin texture.
| | 00:15 | So what I'm trying to do is avoid a
smoothing--creating plastic looking skins.
| | 00:21 | I want to preserve the texture.
| | 00:22 | But in many cases all I really need
to do is knock back some wrinkles.
| | 00:26 | So for that we use a special
technique here with an overlay layer.
| | 00:35 | So I'm going to create a new layer
above my healing here and hold down the
| | 00:39 | Option or Alt key when I click on the Create
New Layer icon, and I get New Layer options.
| | 00:47 | So very important here at this point
we're going to make this an Overlay layer.
| | 00:54 | We're going to fill with Overlay
neutral. You notice how as soon as I switch to
| | 00:59 | Overlay I get this option down here.
| | 01:00 | It says, Fill with Overlay-neutral color.
| | 01:03 | I'll check that, I'm going to
call this a Dodge & Burn layer.
| | 01:17 | And it creates this gray layer here.
| | 01:19 | You'll notice that nothing is happening,
that's because in Overlay mode as
| | 01:24 | opposed to Normal, we'll
just fill it with gray.
| | 01:26 | Overlay--50% gray has no effect on the
underlying image, but where it gets--where
| | 01:34 | it deviates from 50% gray, it has the
exact same effect on the underlying image.
| | 01:39 | So we are going to pick the Dodge tool
here and it's a thing that looks like a
| | 01:45 | little Dodge tool you'd use in the Enlarger.
| | 01:47 | And pick a small brush size. We'll
leave it at 50% Exposure and Midtones.
| | 01:59 | And we're going to dodge back the
wrinkles here in this overlay layer.
| | 02:10 | So this is a detailed type tool.
I can use it to knock back little wrinkles.
| | 02:21 | It looks like I am kind of not doing a
whole lot here but bear with me here.
| | 02:41 | Usually work this with a very, very
small brush, we're just going to dodge right
| | 02:49 | into those wrinkles.
| | 02:56 | Look at these areas up here
as I turn this on and off.
| | 03:00 | It's a subtle kind of thing, you
can see what's happening back in here.
| | 03:07 | I'm using this gray layer to
dodge back the darker wrinkles.
| | 03:13 | And this is a technique that we use a
lot for people that have better skin than
| | 03:17 | I do, but we still want to remove fine
lines and smooth out the skin without
| | 03:23 | destroying the skin texture.
| | 03:25 | Sometimes you can use Soft Light.
Overlay is a little bit stronger acting than
| | 03:30 | Soft Light, if you watch this area
right now as I switch to Soft Light, it gets
| | 03:35 | just a little bit darker.
| | 03:38 | Soft Light also tends to a not
have as much of a saturation effect.
| | 03:45 | So if you see how that works there.
| | 03:49 | So Soft Light and Overlay layers can
be used to dodge or burn in and make
| | 03:55 | things darker or lighter.
| | 03:56 | And they keep that dodging and
burning away from the actual pixels.
| | 04:00 | Prevent the over saturation that you
sometimes see if you burn or as you
| | 04:05 | lightened a colored area you
get this light color in there.
| | 04:10 | Soft Light and Overlay layers allow you
to control that a lot better, and it's
| | 04:14 | perfectly suited for dodging back wrinkles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 13: Rebuilding skin pt. 1| 00:00 | All right, so you've seen the basic
retouching tools when you don't have to
| | 00:04 | completely reconstruct something and
you're trying preserve as much skin texture
| | 00:08 | as possible, those are the tools of choice.
| | 00:13 | Now what if you have a situation
where you really need to cover up defects?
| | 00:19 | In some cases it's better to just kind of
wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.
| | 00:25 | And I have a special technique for
rebuilding the skin, and actually Vinnie
| | 00:30 | used that in his tutorial for retouching
on a laptop. I'm going to show how I do it.
| | 00:40 | All right, so here we have--I usually
have trouble again getting people to
| | 00:45 | show the before picture.
| | 00:46 | This is my sister who has given
me permission to show the before.
| | 00:51 | All right, there she is in all her glory,
and you can kind of see that this is
| | 00:59 | not a spring chicken anymore and she's
seen maybe a little bit too much sun.
| | 01:05 | And we're going to have to
really rework the skin quite a bit.
| | 01:09 | This is the technique we use for the
older actresses, and it starts by copying
| | 01:15 | that background layer,
make a new copy, all right.
| | 01:20 | And then we're going to go up to our
Filter menu and we're going to use a
| | 01:24 | special kind of blur.
| | 01:25 | I am going to use Surface Blur.
| | 01:29 | All right, now Surface Blur is a
really interesting filter because we can use
| | 01:34 | this to smooth out the skin
without blurring major edge transitions.
| | 01:40 | So you can kind of see we've got a--
kind of even blur that skin out even more.
| | 01:48 | The Radius is how much of a blur,
the Threshold tells us how much of the
| | 01:55 | original image we're going to try and preserve.
| | 01:58 | Higher Thresholds will result in more blur.
| | 02:05 | So I'm stopping right at the point
where I'm really kind of covering up those
| | 02:08 | wrinkles under the eyes.
| | 02:13 | All right, now obviously we can't use
this the way it is, that's not helpful at all.
| | 02:20 | But I'm going to use this blur layer to
cover up parts of the underlying image.
| | 02:25 | The next thing I'm going to do here is
to make a mask that hides this blur layer.
| | 02:30 | Let me come down here to the bottom of
the Layers palette and you'll see the
| | 02:34 | little Layer Mask icon.
| | 02:37 | If I hold down the Option key when I
click that I'll create a black layer mask.
| | 02:44 | So that's Option+Click or Alt+Click; you'll get
a black layer mask which now hides the blur.
| | 02:51 | Now the trick is to paint into
the black layer mask with white.
| | 02:57 | So I've got white as my foreground color.
| | 02:59 | I'm going to pick a nice soft-edged brush.
| | 03:12 | Now I go in here and just paint into
the area of the skin that I want to cover up.
| | 03:26 | I'm working into the areas that I want
to cover up but trying to avoid all areas
| | 03:32 | that I want to remain sharp.
| | 03:34 | But I'm going to actually cover up all
of her skin, with this blur image here.
| | 03:47 | Now here along transitions like this
nose, I want to kind of preserve a little
| | 03:52 | bit of that edge of that nose.
| | 03:56 | So I can shift to a smaller brush,
and just go through and work this in
| | 04:02 | pretty good detail here.
| | 04:06 | All right, so we're going to go ahead
cover up all of these areas with this blur.
| | 04:19 | So it's somewhat tedious to go
through and cover up all these areas and
| | 04:25 | that's only step one.
| | 04:26 | I am going to cover up all of the
bad skin with this blurred skin.
| | 04:32 | And then we're going to go back
into this and work at some more.
| | 04:35 | So it's gradually build
up bad skin texture again.
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| Lesson 14: Rebuilding skin pt. 2| 00:00 | Now I've completely covered up all
the bad skin with this blur layer.
| | 00:05 | I've painted in the mask to reveal
the blur on sitting on top of the
| | 00:12 | original unretouched image.
| | 00:13 | And I have to at this point start to
rebuild the skin texture, so let me show
| | 00:18 | you this technique here.
| | 00:19 | We can see here that I've covered up
all of the bad skin with this blurred
| | 00:25 | layer. I've kind of created a whole mask
over her which covers up all that skin.
| | 00:31 | The next step is I need to re-create a
skin texture, a convincing skin texture
| | 00:36 | here, and I'm going to
use a little trick for that.
| | 00:40 | But right now I'm going to punch a hole
through the mask so we can see the skin
| | 00:46 | right underneath it, right
next to the smooth skin.
| | 00:54 | So here is the old skin
texture underneath the smooth skin.
| | 00:57 | I am going to create a skin texture layer.
| | 01:02 | To do that I'll hold down the Option
or the Alt Key, create a new layer.
| | 01:08 | Very important, this check box
gets checked, Use Previous Layer to
| | 01:14 | Create Clipping Mask.
| | 01:16 | This is going to be my skin texture layer.
| | 01:23 | Okay, we're going to change the Mode
to Soft Light and fill with Soft Light
| | 01:32 | Neutral Color, 50% Gray.
| | 01:37 | What this does when we create a
Clipping Mask, we force this layer to affect
| | 01:44 | only this underlying layer and it will
be controlled by the mask which is going
| | 01:50 | to prevent this texture from
going anywhere but the smooth skin.
| | 01:54 | So now I'm going create my
texture by going up to the Filter menu
| | 02:00 | selecting Noise > Add Noise.
| | 02:07 | And one of the reasons why I punched a
hole in the mask to show the underlying
| | 02:12 | skin is, so that I can get the noise
to sort of match the texture of the
| | 02:17 | underlying skin, so we're going to use
Gaussian, Monochromatic, and we'll pick
| | 02:23 | a level of Noise.
| | 02:27 | A lot of people--this is as far as they
get, they just add Noise into the Blur.
| | 02:32 | We're going to actually create a
sort of fake skin texture here.
| | 02:36 | But it starts with Noise and you
really kind want to use a little more Noise
| | 02:41 | than you think you need, because
we're going to do a couple steps; first we
| | 02:47 | noise it, then I am going to blur the Noise.
| | 02:51 | So take Gaussian Blur and pick a
small amount of Blur just enough to knock
| | 03:06 | the edge off.
| | 03:09 | And I actually I'm already starting to
get something that looks a little bit
| | 03:13 | more like the skin texture, but we're
not quite done. We're going to run another
| | 03:18 | filter on this which is our Stylize > Emboss.
| | 03:27 | And now we're actually creating more
of an embossed texture for the skin. It's
| | 03:32 | not just noise, but it now has some depth to it.
| | 03:37 | Usually what I do is I'll create a
fairly strong Emboss effect, and then
| | 03:49 | immediately after running that, this
looks like it's way too strong, but
| | 03:52 | immediately after running that I'm
going to go back here and fade the Emboss,
| | 03:56 | and I found that this actually really works
better to create a kind of fake skin texture.
| | 04:03 | So I am going to fade this back, right
now it's looking to me like 50% is about
| | 04:10 | right, and one more application of
Noise and we should be just about there.
| | 04:20 | Only this time a very small amount of
Noise. Let's go to about 3, all right.
| | 04:37 | Now we've punched a hole to see that
you can kind of barely see now where
| | 04:42 | the real skin texture is a little more
chaotic and it blends into this fake skin texture.
| | 04:50 | Let's now cover that back up by
painting with white again into that area of the
| | 04:55 | mask, and now it doesn't look that
convincing yet, but we're not done yet.
| | 05:05 | Now we're ready for the next step.
| | 05:09 | So I've created this blur layer to hide
the underlying skin and I created a kind
| | 05:15 | of fake texture layer which
is again on a separate layer.
| | 05:18 | So everything is in a separate layer
and I have a lot of control over how I
| | 05:22 | apply these things, and we're going to
keep working this texture until it
| | 05:26 | looks really convincing.
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| Lesson 15: Rebuilding skin pt. 3| 00:00 | Okay we've blurred the skin and now
added this sort of fake texture and by now
| | 00:07 | you're probably saying to yourself, but
Lee, this doesn't look good at all. And
| | 00:11 | that's because we're not done.
| | 00:13 | We have a couple of more steps to go
through and we'll get to that right now.
| | 00:17 | All right, so here we are and we have
this sort of sandpaper like texture over
| | 00:25 | the skin. It's a little heavy, one of
the advantages of keeping this texture
| | 00:30 | stuff in a separate layer of course is
that we can dial back the opacity which
| | 00:34 | will help a little bit here.
| | 00:37 | The other thing is we can also dial
back the opacity of the whole blur and
| | 00:43 | blend it back in with the original skin
texture, so I'm going to do that right now.
| | 00:50 | And you can bring back as much
or as little of that as you want.
| | 00:54 | I'm now down to about 64% and let's
just toggle back to the original picture,
| | 01:00 | kind of see how far we've come.
| | 01:04 | So by changing the opacity and blending
it back in with the real skin texture,
| | 01:11 | we create a much more convincing
effect than if we applied it at a 100%.
| | 01:16 | So again, taking that whole layer off
you can see the original skin, blending it
| | 01:25 | back in. We still have a sense of the
reality, but we have this more uniform
| | 01:30 | texture kind of covering up most of the defects.
| | 01:33 | Now there is a couple of other
little fine-tuning things that you can do.
| | 01:37 | Sometimes when you have this skin
texture sort of uniformly in all different areas of
| | 01:44 | the image it looks a little fake.
| | 01:47 | And sometimes the shadow
areas look too textured.
| | 01:52 | So I am going to use another little
trick here to help improve that, and just
| | 01:57 | so you can see what's going on, I'm going to
bring the opacity of that texture back up to 100%.
| | 02:03 | Right in this area I've got too much
texture, as it gets darker I'd rather that
| | 02:09 | that textured sort of ramp
off and be less apparent.
| | 02:11 | So we're going to double-click on the
skin texture layer, and when we do that we
| | 02:17 | get this Layer Style dialog.
| | 02:22 | What we're interested in is this bottom
part down here, the Blend If area. So we
| | 02:26 | have this area which is the skin
texture and the underlying area which is the
| | 02:32 | rest of the picture.
| | 02:34 | So this area being the texture, if I
want to ramp it off of the shadow area I
| | 02:39 | can actually pull this little black
point slider over until we start to lose--
| | 02:46 | and now you can start to see it's starting
to lose the texture underneath the nose there.
| | 02:53 | Now I want to ramp it back so
that we don't get a hard transition.
| | 02:59 | I want to bring back some of that texture.
| | 03:01 | I'll hold down the Option or the Alt
key and split this little triangle apart.
| | 03:05 | We can then ramp that into the shadows.
| | 03:09 | So now when it gets really dark the
texture ramps off and it looks more natural,
| | 03:16 | and when it's light the
texture is applied at 100%.
| | 03:21 | So that's another little fine-tuning
kind of thing to help you make the texture
| | 03:26 | look a little more convincing.
| | 03:32 | All right, so let's now back out,
toggle on and off, and really you can use this
| | 03:44 | layer now as a kind of let's roll the
clock back 20 years, or now I'll bring it
| | 03:53 | back up to only 5 years.
| | 03:55 | Just how opaque you make that layer
determines how smooth the skin looks.
| | 04:05 | There are few more refinements.
| | 04:08 | You can use this--you can create that
skin texture as a Smart Filter, so you can
| | 04:13 | adjust the Noise of that layer after
the fact, interact with it that way.
| | 04:20 | Vincent Versace, he use that in
his retouching on a laptop tutorials.
| | 04:27 | I have another method here to store
libraries of these textures. I am going to
| | 04:31 | show that to you right now,
it's very useful here.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 16: Rebuilding skin pt. 4| 00:00 | Okay, so I'm going to now take my
texture layer back to Normal, and I'm going to
| | 00:12 | release the Clipping Mask.
| | 00:13 | So now bring it back up to 100%.
| | 00:16 | This is the texture I used.
| | 00:19 | All right, so I have a method of
creating a whole library of these textures that
| | 00:24 | we can call up at any time at a later date.
| | 00:27 | First, I'm just going to select that
whole layer, Command+A or Ctrl+A, and now
| | 00:38 | I go up here to the Edit
menu and Define Pattern.
| | 00:43 | So we can call of this--I'll call it Texture 1.
| | 00:51 | And give it a name that means something
to you, because this is going to go in
| | 00:55 | your Pattern Library.
| | 00:56 | All right, now that I've defined this
as a pattern, I don't--I can call up
| | 01:04 | this texture again.
| | 01:05 | I'm going to throw this one away.
| | 01:08 | When I'm ready to introduce the texture
let's bring this smoothing back up a 100%.
| | 01:13 | I go down here to my adjustment
layer and I'm going to make a Pattern
| | 01:21 | Fill adjustment layer.
| | 01:24 | So here's my skin texture pattern and
actually it's better if I do it like this.
| | 01:34 | Hold down the Option key and we're
going to make that pattern adjustment layer
| | 01:39 | apply it as Overlay here.
| | 01:45 | Use the Previous Layer to Create
Clipping Mask, pretty much the same way we
| | 01:48 | started off, only now my
texture is already done.
| | 01:53 | And I can now decide how to scale it.
| | 02:00 | So maybe I want to actually make
this skin texture a little smaller.
| | 02:05 | So I can scale it to make the
texture any size that I want.
| | 02:12 | Same things apply here, I can reduce
the Opacity, plus I get a Layer Mask to
| | 02:19 | further control how that texture
interacts with the underlying layer.
| | 02:23 | Let's bring our Opacity back down.
| | 02:35 | So I can still control the opacity of the
underline layer, the opacity of the texture.
| | 02:42 | I can interactively come back in here
and change the scale at any time to make
| | 02:46 | the texture match up or look better.
| | 02:49 | And I can have libraries of
different textures to apply.
| | 02:55 | So I find that the ability to store
these different skin textures as a pattern
| | 03:01 | library, very useful when working on
different skin textures because I don't
| | 03:06 | have to stop and run a filter again,
and multiple steps to create that texture.
| | 03:12 | Only have to do it once.
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| Lesson 17: Rebuilding skin pt. 5| 00:00 | Now we've really gone quite far
with this image and done a lot of work.
| | 00:07 | What this represents is a whole
strategy for dealing with this kind of thing.
| | 00:11 | I start big and apply a broad move. We
blurred the skin, really hammered it.
| | 00:19 | Then I wanted to build up skin texture.
| | 00:22 | Put a really aggressive skin
texture and then backed off.
| | 00:25 | So often times when we are approaching
the stuff, we go a little bit further
| | 00:30 | than we think is right, and don't try
and attempt to end up at the finished
| | 00:35 | result in the first step.
| | 00:37 | So we start with a fairly aggressive move,
the blurring of the skin, and
| | 00:43 | then begin to refine it, refine it, refine
it and polish it down into its final state.
| | 00:49 | We're getting to the point now where
I'm going to put the very fine-tuning
| | 00:52 | little things on, just to nudge it
back into just the right condition.
| | 00:57 | So to do that, I'm going to use my
Overlay Dodge and Burn at the top.
| | 01:08 | Reviewing here, I'm going to create a
new layer, but hold down the Option or Alt
| | 01:13 | key, so that I get the New Layer dialog here.
| | 01:18 | I'm going to change the apply
from Normal to Overlay, and Fill with
| | 01:24 | Overlay-neutral color.
| | 01:27 | Now sometimes you can go to Soft Light,
I'll start with Overlay because that's a
| | 01:32 | stronger effect. If it ends up being
too strong, I'll just back off again to
| | 01:37 | Soft Light. It's a part of that same strategy.
| | 01:39 | I'll call it Dodge & Burn or
I'll just call Dodge right now.
| | 01:49 | And now I'm going to work just the fine
lines under the eyes here. Do a very, very,
| | 01:57 | very fine-tuning kind of thing.
| | 02:03 | I'll just Dodge back.
| | 02:08 | So now I'm really just kind of using
the last little emery board to polish this
| | 02:16 | image down into its final state.
| | 02:22 | And this part actually and usually
ends up taking longer than all the other
| | 02:28 | steps that have gone before this.
| | 02:29 | We are really starting to arrive at the
final destination here and this is where
| | 02:35 | I'm going to really be polishing and
polishing and polishing it down to its
| | 02:42 | complete finished state.
| | 02:46 | So this Dodge & Burn, it's very subtle,
but that's like the last 1% that it
| | 02:52 | really needs to finish off.
| | 02:54 | I'm not going to take the time to go
everywhere that I need to go in this image
| | 03:00 | for this demonstration.
| | 03:02 | But I wanted to talk about how keeping
all your retouching like this in separate
| | 03:09 | layers, we have all our steps are separate.
| | 03:11 | I can always return to my background.
| | 03:13 | If I Option+Click or Alt+Click this
little Eye icon on the Background Layer, now
| | 03:18 | I reveal the original
starting point, the original image.
| | 03:22 | Everything is in a separate layer, so I
can go back and refine any one of these
| | 03:26 | later--these layers at a later day.
| | 03:29 | If I decide later that I don't like
the dodging and burning that I did, I can
| | 03:33 | just delete that one layer and fix
that, or I can change the texture.
| | 03:37 | I can come back in here, recall up a
different texture out of the library or
| | 03:42 | scale it differently.
| | 03:44 | So I have lot of options for revising this image.
| | 03:49 | And that's what it's all about.
| | 03:50 | You got to keep your options open, so you
never want to work yourself into a corner.
| | 03:54 | So many times very talented retouchers
I've seen, they worked an image and they
| | 04:00 | work themselves in the corner,
they have no way to escape.
| | 04:03 | So by leaving your options open,
always preserving your layers, don't flatten
| | 04:08 | the image too early.
| | 04:10 | And you can get out of any
corner that you paint yourself into.
| | 04:14 | Remember, sometimes you think it's done,
you show it to a client and they have
| | 04:20 | other ideas, so you have to be able to
get back to wherever you need to get to,
| | 04:26 | in order to finish off the job properly.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 18: Depth of field| 00:00 | We're going to look at a common
photographic technique of limiting the depth of
| | 00:04 | field to throw the background out of focus.
| | 00:07 | Now this is achieved photographically
in the camera by using a larger f-stop,
| | 00:13 | a more open f-stop, to throw the background
out of focus, and have limited depth of field.
| | 00:18 | Very often we need to replicate that
effect after the fact. Maybe we couldn't
| | 00:24 | use the right f-stop, maybe we didn't
have the right lens, the background was
| | 00:27 | too close to the subject.
| | 00:30 | So the trick is, how do we achieve a
realistic looking limited depth of field
| | 00:35 | using Photoshop after the fact?
| | 00:40 | All right, here we have a photograph with a
subject against a slightly blurred background.
| | 00:45 | I'd prefer that this
background was more blurred.
| | 00:48 | Now the usual way of achieving that
is we're going to separate the subject
| | 00:54 | from the background by masking him off,
and I have prepared a Channel mask
| | 00:59 | ahead of time for this.
| | 01:00 | I'm just going to load it by
Command+Clicking or Ctrl+Clicking on it.
| | 01:04 | I load that selection.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to place it in the layer.
| | 01:08 | I've duplicated this layer and if I
click on the Mask icon here at the bottom of
| | 01:13 | the Layer palette, I'll put
that selection in the Layer Mask.
| | 01:16 | So now you can see I have him
separated from the background, and the normal
| | 01:22 | strategy at this point would be to
select the Background, and what most people
| | 01:27 | do is blur that background using Gaussian Blur.
| | 01:33 | And we can make it as blurry or soft as we want.
| | 01:39 | However, this is not an
entirely convincing effect.
| | 01:43 | There are two problems with it.
| | 01:46 | One is, if I zoom in to the edge of the
subject here, the hair from the original
| | 01:54 | background subject has blurred into
the background and it's causing a sort of
| | 01:58 | dark halo around the subject.
| | 02:01 | So that's a problem that we have to solve.
| | 02:06 | The other issue is this is not
actually a very convincing appearance for
| | 02:14 | a blurred background.
| | 02:15 | It's not an actual optical blur.
| | 02:17 | Let's look at what a real blur looks like.
| | 02:23 | Here is real camera blur.
| | 02:26 | This is an out of focus lens and
you'll notice that an out of focus lens will
| | 02:31 | take highlight areas and actually
generates these artifacts. These are little
| | 02:35 | images of the iris of the lens,
and they actually have sharp edges.
| | 02:42 | So if I look at this, this is out of
focus, but it has some sharp edges and it
| | 02:47 | creates all these interesting
little patterns in the image.
| | 02:51 | This is what I want to try and
replicate rather than just blur everywhere.
| | 02:56 | The other thing that goes on is that the
highlights that are out of focus stay bright.
| | 03:00 | When we do a digital blur, we use Gaussian Blur;
| | 03:06 | these highlights get darker when we blur it.
| | 03:12 | So they are bright here and then when
we blur, they actually get a little bit
| | 03:16 | darker and that's another telltale sign
that what we've got going on here is a
| | 03:20 | digital blur and not a real optical blur.
| | 03:23 | So we're going to try and replicate the
real optical blur, and I have to fix the
| | 03:32 | halo effect that we created earlier,
we're going to take care of that in the
| | 03:36 | next step here before I decide how
I'm going to blur the background.
| | 03:41 | Okay, so to eliminate this halo
thing, I'm going to be working on the
| | 03:45 | background, which is this part of the image.
| | 03:48 | So I'm going to turn off the figure in the
foreground here and look only at the background.
| | 03:54 | I'll make an empty layer here that's
going to contain my cloning, because what
| | 03:59 | I'm going to do is clone over the edge,
so that when we blur this, the dark edge
| | 04:06 | of the hair won't blur
into the lighter background.
| | 04:08 | So I'll take my Clone tool here and
I'm just going to very roughly clone into
| | 04:17 | this edge to hide the edge
of the foreground figure.
| | 04:26 | This is in preparation for the blur step.
| | 04:36 | If I just clone all the way around like
this, I don't have to be that careful,
| | 04:53 | because none of this is
actually going to show up.
| | 04:58 | I'm going to be blurring it. All right,
| | 05:01 | so I decide if I've covered up all the
edge here, turning my layer on and off,
| | 05:06 | and now I'm satisfied. I'm just going to
merge that down, because it needs to be
| | 05:12 | part of that background
layer that I'm going to blur.
| | 05:19 | Now the next step, I want to make sure
that this background I can blur so that I
| | 05:24 | don't dull down the highlights.
| | 05:28 | That's another little trick here.
| | 05:30 | We're going to end up using another
technique to blur, to avoid darkening
| | 05:35 | down the highlights.
| | 05:38 | So right now I'm going to duplicate
this whole image, but I only want to
| | 05:45 | duplicate the merged layers, and what
that means is I've turned off this layer
| | 05:49 | on top and I only want to
duplicate essentially the background.
| | 05:55 | So I Duplicate Merged Layers Only.
| | 05:59 | I get a whole new document.
| | 06:01 | Now why do I want to do this?
| | 06:03 | Well I'm going to convert this from
eight bits, and if I can do this right, 8
| | 06:13 | bits to 32 bits, this is what we
use for high dynamic range imagery.
| | 06:19 | And in fact, I think I'll make another
duplicate of this document so I've at
| | 06:25 | least two different types of images or I'm
going to do two different types of blurs.
| | 06:34 | But right now, because it's in high
dynamic range, 32 bits per channel, I can
| | 06:42 | control how these highlights render.
| | 06:47 | Now I'm going to use a Blur filter here
and we're going to use a different Blur
| | 06:54 | filter. This is a new filter from CS2, and
available of course in CS3, the Shape Blur.
| | 07:01 | Now the Shape Blur allows us to use
different shapes, and in fact, they give you
| | 07:08 | a library, an extra library of shapes here.
| | 07:12 | And I'm going to select that from this
little fly-away menu here. I'm going to
| | 07:19 | add these shapes on to here, and now
I have a shape that's very similar to the
| | 07:28 | iris shape that you get
with a real optical blur.
| | 07:32 | And if I find the right blur level,
I can replicate some of that telltale
| | 07:43 | shape in the blur.
| | 07:55 | Let's look at the other copy here, and I'm
going to run a different shape on that.
| | 08:11 | And here, this one is giving me that
sort of double image look, which is closer
| | 08:18 | to the effect you'll get with an out of
focus lens, and now the trick for making
| | 08:32 | this all work is that now I'm
going to go back to 8 Bits/Channel.
| | 08:40 | Now as soon as I do that,
I get to make some choices.
| | 08:47 | I can change the Exposure here, putting
some brightness in to some of those out
| | 08:54 | of focus shapes, or I can change the
contrast using this Gamma slider here.
| | 09:04 | Right now, for this layer,
I'm going to leave it alone.
| | 09:12 | Let's go back, go here at Gamma 1.
I'm going to leave this alone.
| | 09:19 | This is the way it was.
| | 09:20 | Let's return to the other one
which is out of focus, and go back to
| | 09:28 | 8 Bits/Channel again.
| | 09:31 | This one I'm going to crank it up just a
little bit, so that my highlight blasts
| | 09:36 | out just a little more.
| | 09:45 | All right, so now I have two copies. I'm going to
go back to Window Mode here, so I've got
| | 09:54 | two different blur variations,
and here's my original image.
| | 10:00 |
| | 10:19 | All right, so I'm going to take the Move tool and
drop these into my original document.
| | 10:26 | The trick here is you hold down the
Shift key when you do this, and I'm going to
| | 10:32 | drag from when inside one
window into the next window.
| | 10:36 | By holding down the Shift key I make
sure that it lines up and now I am getting
| | 10:41 | a profile mismatch here. It doesn't matter,
| | 10:45 | Photoshop will convert from the
one profile environment to the other.
| | 10:51 | Hold down the Shift key again,
| | 10:52 | drag the second copy in there.
| | 10:59 | All right, so now I've got two different
types of blur going on here.
| | 11:08 | This is going to be kind of my main
blur, and I can always stick the sharp
| | 11:12 | focused picture on top.
| | 11:14 | You'll notice now that the edge doesn't
have that halo that it had before. Now
| | 11:22 | it's pretty convincing.
| | 11:27 | And now I have like a second
level of blur here that's really just
| | 11:33 | containing bright areas.
| | 11:37 | I'm going to use predominately this
blur shape which has the interesting little
| | 11:41 | geometric patterns in double shapes.
| | 11:45 | But this one, I'm going to paint in just
the little bright areas to pick up some
| | 11:50 | of the highlights, and so I'm going to
start by masking it off here, Option and
| | 11:56 | clicking on the Mask icon at the
bottom of the Layers palette will give me a
| | 12:01 | black mask that hides it.
| | 12:03 | Now I can come in with a Paintbrush and
paint right into that mask where I want
| | 12:08 | to pick up a brighter shape in there.
| | 12:12 | Inside the centers of these
highlights, I can bring in a brighter shape;
| | 12:19 | put some highlights back in there.
| | 12:27 | So I'm really not using this for a lot,
but I am changing up the highlights to
| | 12:36 | bring them back into this blurry image.
| | 12:41 | So you can do this technique with
a number of different blur layers.
| | 12:48 | Sometimes I'll use three or four
different shapes to create interesting effects
| | 12:53 | in the blur background.
| | 12:56 | And the Shape Blur filter actually
replicates the look of an optical blur a lot better.
| | 13:03 | Now I know what you're thinking,
why don't you use the Lens Blur?
| | 13:07 | Because there is a whole new
filter in Photoshop called Lens Blur.
| | 13:11 | Let's look at that.
| | 13:16 | I'll go and we'll try Lens
Blur on this background right now.
| | 13:22 | So now I've duplicated that so I can
look at the Lens Blur filter to our copy.
| | 13:33 | And just looking at the interface it
looks like we should be able to get
| | 13:37 | that those Iris shapes.
| | 13:38 | We've got these things in here.
| | 13:40 | I can pick the Hexagon shape and I've
got a Radius for the blur, even Blade
| | 13:48 | Curvature, all this kind of stuff, but
the problem is I'm not seen any of those
| | 13:54 | shapes. I'm not--it's really just
looks a lot like the Gaussian Blur.
| | 14:00 | The only good thing is that I can keep
my Specular Highlights, and I have a slider
| | 14:06 | here, so I'm going to make
those Specular Highlights brighter.
| | 14:14 | Somehow, still it really just looks
like Gaussian Blur to me. I'm not really
| | 14:18 | getting the same thing as
that Shape Blur gives me.
| | 14:21 | So I find that aside from just making
the highlights brighter, I can't get the
| | 14:30 | effect that I'm looking for here.
| | 14:34 | All I get is really pretty much
what Gaussian Blur looks like.
| | 14:38 | So that's why I use the ones that I
prefer is the Shape Blur effect, and maybe
| | 14:47 | altered a little bit
with a secondary blur layer.
| | 14:50 | Then we turn on or put our subject on
top and we've got something that looks a
| | 14:55 | lot more convincing than
the regular Gaussian Blur.
| | 15:01 | So this is something that's
worth playing around with.
| | 15:05 | Try different shapes in the Shape Blur.
| | 15:09 | Different shapes will give you
different effects, also depending on what the
| | 15:13 | background looks like.
| | 15:15 | So it's well worth experimenting with
different shapes to see what effects you
| | 15:19 | can get and it creates a little more
character for your blur, and it makes it
| | 15:26 | more convincing than just
the straight Gaussian Blur.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
Volume 2Introduction| 00:00 | Hi! Lee Varis here again!
| | 00:01 | What we have seen so far has been the
application of basic tools and techniques
| | 00:06 | to enhancing images.
| | 00:08 | We've been looking at images of people
and using a simple strategy step-by-step,
| | 00:14 | we've been developing and enhancing the
color, tone, and contrast of our images.
| | 00:20 | We're going to look at this in a little
more detail in the following lessons and
| | 00:24 | combining different techniques to
extend these enhancements into a little more
| | 00:29 | complex imagery and achieving some
results that would be impossible using single
| | 00:34 | technique by itself.
| | 00:36 | Whenever we're working with images,
it's not just two different things that we
| | 00:41 | do, or one, two, three step tricks.
We're trying to use a bunch of tools in
| | 00:47 | concert to create a more evolved effect,
a more mature kind of image enhancement
| | 00:53 | technique that goes beyond
just the simple tips and tricks.
| | 00:57 | So let's look at some of these
more advanced techniques in the
| | 01:00 | following lessons.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 1: Portrait glow| 00:00 | We've looked at color correction and
retouching, and now I would like to put
| | 00:06 | them both together in one project,
a classic kind of high school senior
| | 00:11 | portrait, and I want to finish with a new
technique to add a soft diffusion glow in the image.
| | 00:19 | So let's get started.
| | 00:23 | I have this image here of my daughter
and we want to start again with our color
| | 00:29 | correction strategy.
| | 00:31 | So I am going to go ahead here, and we'll
find out white point and our black point.
| | 00:35 | So I get that Threshold command up,
and let's find our black point. Okay.
| | 00:44 | It looks like it's this area under
her chin at the collar, I am going to go
| | 00:51 | ahead and place a sampler there, and I
will zoom in a little bit and make sure
| | 00:58 | I've got that placed correctly.
| | 01:03 | Sometimes it's a good idea to check by
turning on and off the Preview and make
| | 01:06 | sure where you've placed that point.
| | 01:11 | Let's go ahead and now look at what
the white point is, and it looks like we
| | 01:20 | have a little area here
that's part of the shirt.
| | 01:24 | It's a pattern in the fabric.
| | 01:26 | I will place the sampler there.
| | 01:31 | Okay, now we're done with that.
| | 01:34 | And let's look at what our numbers are.
| | 01:38 | So our black point, 9, 9, 2,
we're a little weak in the blue there.
| | 01:45 | Our white point also a little low.
| | 01:48 | Let's see what happens if
we just set those values.
| | 01:52 | So open up my Curves, and let's start
with a black point since we're pretty
| | 01:59 | close, we want 10, 10, 10.
| | 02:01 | I will take 9, I am not going to go
ahead and push the red and the green, so
| | 02:06 | we'll go with the blue.
| | 02:08 | And blue is a little weak. I am just
going to nudge it up a little bit until
| | 02:15 | it's the same value.
| | 02:16 | So now we have 9, 9, 9, that's close enough.
| | 02:19 | Now we've got to work on this white
point. Let's see what happens here.
| | 02:23 | I'm looking for, again, my 245 value.
| | 02:29 | So I am just going to see what
happens when I set that to 245.
| | 02:36 | Let's go to our other channels.
| | 02:43 | I am using arrow keys
here just to nudge it over.
| | 02:49 | All right, go to the Red Channel.
| | 03:04 | Let's back up just a little bit,
look at the whole image, and try and
| | 03:12 | evaluate where we are.
| | 03:13 | Well we've added some Brightness and
some Contrast, and the color has kind of
| | 03:19 | cooled off a little bit.
| | 03:21 | So now the strategy calls for us
to look at the important color.
| | 03:24 | What's the important color?
| | 03:26 | Again, it's the skin tone.
| | 03:28 | So I'll place some samplers for the
skin tone and then we'll try and evaluate
| | 03:31 | and see where we are with that.
| | 03:38 | All right, let's see, we'll place one on her
forehead here, and it looks to me like her
| | 03:47 | face might be a little on the pink
side than her neck down here might be right.
| | 03:53 | Let's just place two
samplers there and take a look.
| | 03:56 | I've got to change them from RGB to CMYK.
| | 04:00 | So again, I am going to zoom in here
and take the little Eyedropper, move it to
| | 04:06 | CMYK for both of those.
| | 04:12 | All right, so let's look at that.
| | 04:13 | Well number 3 is on her forehead,
that's 29, 28, we've got magenta and yellow
| | 04:19 | very close together, so
it's a little on the pink side.
| | 04:23 | On the other hand, the neck, which
is sampler number 4, has 32, 44, we've
| | 04:30 | actually got a better color on the neck.
| | 04:36 | So I have a situation that seems to
call for perhaps our Hue/Saturation move,
| | 04:44 | because I've got a good color in the neck,
and I've got a little bit too pink in the face.
| | 04:49 | So I don't necessarily have to move the
color for the rest of the skin, I just
| | 04:55 | have to move the pink skin back
towards yellow to get the right color.
| | 05:02 | So I am going to leave Curves now and
go up to our Hue/Saturation technique.
| | 05:13 | I am going to edit Reds, and let's go
ahead and use our Eyedropper, which is
| | 05:19 | selected here, and click on that redder skin.
| | 05:24 | In fact, I think her cheeks maybe
have a touch of acne showing, we will
| | 05:29 | select that, and it's moved the region and
centered it around that area that I just clicked on.
| | 05:36 | Now we use the Minus Eyedropper to
subtract the good skin color, which is on the
| | 05:42 | neck, and you see it's trimmed it in.
| | 05:46 | Let's check by making our kind of
crazy move with the Hue, and I think I can
| | 05:54 | afford to trim in this
just a little bit more here.
| | 05:59 | Let's look at that a little closer.
| | 06:00 | See, in this region, the dark gray
region is what's being affected very strongly.
| | 06:06 | The gray area is where it ramps
off into the surrounding color.
| | 06:11 | If I take the end of the gray ramp
and move it in a little bit, I make that
| | 06:16 | transition a little more rapid.
| | 06:20 | So I am confining the correction now to
areas that are really too red, and you
| | 06:25 | see it's come off
completely off the neck.
| | 06:29 | All right, well now instead of moving towards blue,
I am going to move this correction a
| | 06:34 | little towards yellow.
| | 06:36 | And my forehead color is over here.
| | 06:39 | So let's see what happens.
| | 06:40 | I am going to try and affect the color.
| | 06:45 | It's changed a little bit.
| | 06:47 | Now we have 30 and 25;
| | 06:49 | 30, 24, we're getting there.
| | 06:53 | Looking over here on my other side,
it hasn't really changed at all.
| | 06:58 | So I can afford to go just a little bit
more, right there is probably close enough.
| | 07:04 | So I have more yellow than magenta.
| | 07:07 | My Cyan value is pretty low.
| | 07:10 | So I have a good saturated skin color,
and I am going to say OK at this point.
| | 07:19 | Now again, remember, when you use
this move, it affects every area that's a
| | 07:25 | little too red, like the lips.
| | 07:28 | So we have to make sure that we take
the correction that we've applied to take
| | 07:31 | the pimples out and remove that from the
lips and bring back some red lip color.
| | 07:40 | So I am going to zoom in here.
| | 07:46 | This Hue/Saturation correction has a
layer mask built in and all I really need
| | 07:51 | to do is paint into that
with black to remove it.
| | 07:57 | So I am taking that off
by masking it off the lips.
| | 08:11 | Now while I'm here I notice that the
teeth are perhaps a little bit too yellow.
| | 08:18 | This is another common situation where
you would want to brighten up the teeth
| | 08:23 | and maybe take the yellow out.
| | 08:24 | So we'll do an additional correction
specifically for that, and it's going to
| | 08:29 | require doing a selection and a mask.
| | 08:35 | So I am going to do this as simply as possible.
| | 08:38 | I will use the Lasso tool to make a selection.
| | 08:42 | I will go ahead and put 5 pixel feather in it,
and let's lasso just the teeth area.
| | 08:54 | And this is just kind of
a preliminary selection.
| | 08:59 | I am going to check my selection by
going to the Quick Mask mode and I can
| | 09:05 | see now what is actually selected,
because it's the clear area, and I am
| | 09:12 | going to check and make sure I may
have a little corrective action I need to
| | 09:16 | do here to adjust the mask.
| | 09:19 | So I am going to open up the selection
here by painting white and make sure I
| | 09:27 | get this little tooth in there. Okay.
| | 09:31 | Now I can go back to my
selection and I'm going to go to Curves.
| | 09:40 | So what is the opposite of yellow?
| | 09:43 | Yellow, we want to take the yellow out,
so we're going to work in the Blue Channel.
| | 09:49 | And I'm just kind of looking at this,
and you don't want to go too far,
| | 09:55 | because if we make it too perfectly
white, and I'm just holding the Eyedropper
| | 10:03 | over there and looking at the top, because
I don't want to place another fixed sampler.
| | 10:07 | I am just checking.
| | 10:09 | I don't want to make it too neutral.
| | 10:11 | So right now that area reads 224, 220, 216.
| | 10:16 | I just want it to be a little bit on the
warm side, and that's exactly where it is.
| | 10:21 | So we're going to leave that there.
| | 10:24 | And now, this one tooth here is bugging me.
| | 10:28 | Well I think the easiest thing there
is just to paint a little white into it.
| | 10:32 | So I am going to sample the color of the
white tooth right next to it, and we'll
| | 10:39 | just gradually paint up that color.
| | 10:45 | I'll use a lower Opacity on the
brush, like 33% here, a third, and I'm
| | 10:52 | painting into an empty layer here,
just add a little bit of whiteness to that
| | 10:57 | tooth, and that's good enough.
| | 11:10 | All right, now I've made a bunch of
corrections really quickly.
| | 11:14 | At this point, it's a good idea to
start to go back and make sure you've named
| | 11:19 | your layers, because we're going to
save this document, maybe later on make a
| | 11:23 | print and decide, well, we want to
change something that we've already done, but
| | 11:28 | which layer was that, that I did that in?
| | 11:30 | So it would always be a good idea to
name your layers, and be careful that you
| | 11:35 | know what you did so that you can
go back and fix it later.
| | 11:40 | All right, so here I've gone in and I've renamed
these layers according to what they do, so
| | 11:46 | I know later on what this is actually doing.
| | 11:49 | And you can see here my first curve
layer is the black and white point, the
| | 11:54 | hue/saturation layer is the skin color,
the next curve layer is for the white
| | 12:01 | teeth, and I've labeled it
all so I know what's going on.
| | 12:04 | The last one up here just
contains the white paint for the tooth.
| | 12:09 | Now I am going to look at this
and do a little bit of spot healing.
| | 12:16 | And usually what you want to do with
your whole strategy for working on the
| | 12:23 | image is work on the color first, then
do the retouching on the corrected image,
| | 12:29 | and then after that any special effects
or any other things that you want to do
| | 12:34 | to finish off the image.
| | 12:37 | So work for the big problems first.
| | 12:39 | The biggest problem here was the color, and
then we kind of fine-tune it as we go along.
| | 12:44 | So we work global, down into the
sort of granular level of the image.
| | 12:50 | So now we're into the next step, which
is the spotting, and we'll get the Spot
| | 12:57 | Healing brush out here.
| | 13:00 | I've made an empty layer at the top,
and I'll go ahead and name that now.
| | 13:04 | We'll call that spotting.
| | 13:11 | Okay, so what I'm looking for
here is just any little things.
| | 13:16 | We've taken care of a lot of the acne,
but the Spot Healing brushes can take
| | 13:22 | care of those little last minute
things like this, and we'll just go through,
| | 13:27 | and little moles, and little bad pores,
and very quickly kind of removing all
| | 13:37 | that kind of stuff,
little thing on her lip here.
| | 13:43 | So you want to go through the whole
image and do the little fine-tuning,
| | 13:47 | spotting, clean it all up,
before you move on to anything else.
| | 13:53 | Now that I have taken care of the spots,
I am noticing that she has little bags
| | 13:57 | under her eyes, I am going to
use the Healing brush for that.
| | 14:02 | So I will select the Healing Brush tool
here, and I am actually going to make a
| | 14:08 | separate layer for the Healing brush,
because very often underneath the eyes I
| | 14:12 | want to back off on the Opacity of that layer.
| | 14:14 | So we'll call this a healing layer.
| | 14:20 | And I want to make my brush size big enough;
| | 14:28 | make it big enough to cover the area
that I want to heal, and that's about right.
| | 14:34 | So we'll hold down the Option or Alt
key to sample, and then I'm going to
| | 14:42 | brush in my healing here;
| | 14:47 | I do the same thing on the other side.
| | 14:59 | And again, this is like way too much, so
that's why we put it in an empty layer.
| | 15:05 | I will just back off from the Opacity,
just a little bit, bring back some of
| | 15:10 | that, and okay, now let's see where we are.
| | 15:19 | So here we are.
| | 15:20 | And let's look at the original.
| | 15:25 | Yeah, you can see we've taken quite a
bit of the red out, we've cleaned up her
| | 15:30 | pimples with the Hue/Saturation move,
and now we're ready for finishing touches.
| | 15:37 | I am going to show a technique here
for putting a kind of soft glow over the
| | 15:42 | image, and it takes a few steps, but it
gives you that sort of classic portrait look.
| | 15:52 | Now in order to achieve this, we're
going to make a duplicate of the image the
| | 15:57 | way it looks right now at the top.
| | 15:59 | So I make an empty layer at the top, and
this is going to be my blur layer, so I
| | 16:05 | will rename it here.
| | 16:07 | And this layer I want to get a
duplicate of the result of all this work that
| | 16:16 | I've done, I want to put it in there.
| | 16:18 | So here's the trick, I've got to hold
down the Option or the Alt key, and we'll
| | 16:22 | select from the Layer
Options menu here, Merge Visible.
| | 16:26 | So what this does is it puts a copy
of the image into that top empty layer,
| | 16:33 | which I've labeled blur here.
| | 16:35 | So this image is exactly the same as
everything, the combined result of all the
| | 16:40 | layers underneath it.
| | 16:44 | I want all of the color changes and all the
retouching to be represented in this layer.
| | 16:48 | But I am going to use this layer as my
blur layer, so I am going to go up here,
| | 16:54 | go to Blur > Gaussian Blur, and I
want to pick enough blur to really pretty
| | 17:03 | much obliterate all of the texture, all
of the detail, I don't want to see the
| | 17:10 | eyes, just kind of dark circles here, but I
don't want to completely eliminate the image.
| | 17:17 | I want to get some sense of the
image here, but I am totally blurring out
| | 17:21 | all texture and detail.
| | 17:26 | And here is the next step;
| | 17:28 | this is kind of the trick
for the Soft Glow thing.
| | 17:30 | We're going to change it from
Normal to Overlay.
| | 17:37 | All right, so check that out.
| | 17:41 | At this point we're still not done, but
we've created a kind of a glow effect.
| | 17:46 | It's not really out of focus anymore,
we're seeing through that top layer to the
| | 17:51 | underlying layer, but
it's changing the contrast.
| | 17:55 | So we have to work that a little bit.
| | 17:57 | It's too contrasty. Let me turn this
layer on and off and you will see what I mean.
| | 18:01 | We have a nice glow effect, but
we've added all this extra contrast, and
| | 18:08 | in fact, it's maybe a little bit dark, and
it's also a little bit light in the skin.
| | 18:13 | I want to put some color back into the skin.
| | 18:16 | It's warmed up and gotten a
kind of an interesting look to it.
| | 18:20 | So here's the next part of the trick.
| | 18:23 | So we're going to go and select
the layer right underneath that.
| | 18:26 | I am going to add a Curves adjustment to
take care of this increase in contrast,
| | 18:34 | start by just dragging the white point
down until the skin tone value starts to
| | 18:41 | get some more weight.
| | 18:43 | So before it was a little white here
in the cheeks, so we're bringing this
| | 18:47 | down just to kind of soften that, and
I'm going to open up the darks a little
| | 18:53 | bit at the bottom here; just a little bit.
| | 19:02 | All right, now let's evaluate the result.
| | 19:04 | Here's our before and after.
| | 19:12 | Now sometimes I do one more thing,
because at this point we have a nice glow
| | 19:19 | and it's got a kind of really
interesting look. We can check the color and make
| | 19:24 | sure that it hasn't shifted too far,
but I'm going to open up the shadows a
| | 19:29 | little bit more, because they tend to get a
little plugged up when you use this technique.
| | 19:36 | To do that, I am going to do my trick
again and put the combined result of all
| | 19:42 | this work on the top.
| | 19:44 | And we won't rename it yet, but I am
going to hold down the Option or Alt key,
| | 19:51 | select my Merge Visible command here.
| | 19:55 | And again, now this is the
combined result of all those layers.
| | 19:59 | And now, I am going to go up here to
Image > Adjustments > Shadow Highlight.
| | 20:08 | I find this now is a very cool way to
open up the shadows without altering the
| | 20:16 | overall glow look here.
| | 20:18 | So I am going to--I just need just a little
bit, I am right in there at like 10%, 15%.
| | 20:26 | And I can actually darken down the
highlights a little more too, just a little bit.
| | 20:38 | Check my numbers on the skin.
| | 20:41 | I'm a little more yellow, which is
pretty typical once we do this technique.
| | 20:46 | So at this point I probably want to
put just one more Curve adjustment to
| | 20:53 | fine-tune the color.
| | 20:56 | So we'll use the same technique to
adjust the color and get the skin tone back
| | 21:03 | into a little bit nicer color, away
from the yellow, which it tends to pick up
| | 21:07 | with this Overlay Glow technique.
| | 21:12 | All right, so what I did is put a color adjustment
layer at the top and take out a little
| | 21:18 | green to redden back the yellow, too
yellow skin, so there's my adjustment.
| | 21:25 | And to review again, always name the layer.
| | 21:30 | So I've got my color fix layer on top,
that shadow highlight layer was how I
| | 21:36 | opened up the shadows, the
blur glow layer is right here.
| | 21:40 | Underneath that is the Minus Contrast
that we used to adjust that Overlay Glow.
| | 21:47 | The healing, spotting, that
white tooth is down there;
| | 21:49 | you can see how by labeling these
layers I know exactly what they are.
| | 21:54 | So if I need to go back in and readjust
something, now that I've put all these
| | 21:59 | layers on top, I'm thinking
maybe I made those teeth too white.
| | 22:04 | I will go back and make a slight
adjustment with the blue here to make it
| | 22:11 | a little bit more yellow, and I've
still got my skin adjustment with the
| | 22:20 | Hue/Saturation, and the first thing I did
was the white point and the black point.
| | 22:26 | So there we are with the complete image.
| | 22:30 | Let's turn it on and off so you can kind of see
the total effect of that kind of portrait glow.
| | 22:36 | That's where we started,
and that's where we ended up.
| | 22:41 | And we have this nice kind of glow on the skin,
but it doesn't look like it's out of focus.
| | 22:46 | That's the kind of classic
portrait look I like for this.
| | 22:51 | One last thing that I might like to do
here as a final finishing touch, I am
| | 22:57 | going to do some edge burning to
darken the edges and bring the eye into the
| | 23:02 | center, towards the face.
| | 23:04 | And this is very common, we used to do
this in the Enlarger, burning the edges,
| | 23:09 | and I am going to achieve this in a
very similar way using the Gradient tool.
| | 23:16 | So I am going to select my gradient
here, and very important to make this
| | 23:20 | technique work, I have to
have an empty layer at the top.
| | 23:25 | So I will make sure that my top layer is
selected, and I make a new layer, a new
| | 23:30 | empty layer, I will call this edge burn.
| | 23:40 | And the Gradient tool, you have to
change the mode for the Gradient tool.
| | 23:46 | Let's select black as our
foreground color, and I'm going to select the
| | 23:52 | second gradient from the end here, from the
left corner is foreground color to transparent.
| | 24:00 | Very important; when we're doing this
that's what you want to select.
| | 24:04 | And the other thing to make this
technique work, I am going to reduce the
| | 24:08 | Opacity of the tool down to about 30%.
| | 24:14 | Now I am going to work from the end.
| | 24:17 | I start with that black
gradient and work to transparent.
| | 24:22 | But because I am only doing it at 30%,
it's going to build up very slowly.
| | 24:28 | So see, I work from the edges--this is
exactly how you would do it in Enlarger, and
| | 24:33 | work from the bottom.
| | 24:35 | Let's zoom out just a little bit here.
| | 24:39 | Maybe not that much. Here we go;
| | 24:42 | coming up from the bottom.
| | 24:44 | You can hold down the Shift key and
that will constrain the action to a perfect
| | 24:50 | straight line, 90 degrees.
| | 24:52 | I do the same thing in the corners.
| | 24:54 | If you hold down the Shift key,
you get a perfect 45 degree angle.
| | 25:02 | All right, just gradually kind
of build up the edge burning.
| | 25:07 | And we will also do it from the top.
| | 25:11 | Hold down the Shift key, and I
will bring it way, way down here.
| | 25:16 | And now you can kind of see what's happening;
| | 25:19 | the edge burning helps bring the eye
into the center and contains the edge.
| | 25:26 | And that's a good
finishing touch for our portrait.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 2: Basic sharpening pt. 1| 00:00 | We looked at a softening technique, and
now I think it's time that we looked at
| | 00:04 | sharpening, which is something that we
have to do at the end when we're ready to
| | 00:08 | go to print, we often
have to sharpen these images.
| | 00:13 | So I've got another picture of Erica here,
in costume, she is a belly dancer, and
| | 00:21 | we want to sharpen this image.
| | 00:24 | Most of the time people tell
you, we've got to sharpen at 100%.
| | 00:27 | So now I will zoom into 100% here.
| | 00:35 | I'll show you a basic strategy here, as
I am going to duplicate that Background
| | 00:40 | layer and then run Unsharp Mask on it.
| | 00:44 | So I will go the Filter >
Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.
| | 00:52 | And usually people tell you, oh, you
adjust the amount until it look sharp enough.
| | 00:56 | Well I subscribe to the Dan Margulis
School of real men sharpen at 500% and I
| | 01:04 | am going to really crank this sharpen up
here until I can really see major sharpening.
| | 01:10 | Now why am I doing that?
| | 01:11 | This just seems a little extreme, right?
| | 01:13 | And it is now at 100%, but I'm never to
make this image that size in the print.
| | 01:21 | So actually I find the best way to
evaluate this to zoom out to 50%.
| | 01:28 | See down here 50% magnification
and then evaluate the sharpening.
| | 01:34 | In this case it still looks a little hard
and that's why I put it in a separate layer.
| | 01:42 | So we can always back off from the
Opacity and also very important, I am going
| | 01:46 | to change from Normal
Apply mode to Luminosity Apply.
| | 01:51 | Okay, and then we can modify how this
sharpening interacts with the underlying
| | 01:58 | image, because it's in separate layer,
so I can back off from the Opacity;
| | 02:02 | bring it down to where I want it.
| | 02:04 | Or another little more advanced technique;
| | 02:06 | we can go our Blending options.
| | 02:08 | If I double-click on that layer, I get
the Layer Style dialog and remember we
| | 02:13 | have this Blend If section down here.
| | 02:17 | And I can tell the sharpening to ramp off
the shadows by moving my black point. Now,
| | 02:24 | absolute black is not going to be sharpened,
because that's where most of the noise is.
| | 02:29 | Hold down the Option or the Alt key and
I can split that little triangle apart,
| | 02:34 | and ramp off the sharpening from the
very darkest parts of the image and that's
| | 02:38 | going to kill a lot of the noise
enhancement that happens in the lower values.
| | 02:44 | Sometimes you want to ramp it off the
highlights, in this case though, I'm going
| | 02:49 | to leave it like that.
| | 02:50 | So this a good basic sharpening
strategy, but sharpening is an art and very
| | 03:00 | often basic only takes you so far.
| | 03:02 | So we are going to look at a few
more advanced sharpening techniques.
| | 03:10 | So one of the problems with
sharpening is that it sharpens highlights and
| | 03:17 | shadows equally. We've ramped off some
of the sharpening in the low values, but
| | 03:23 | one of the things here that's going
on in this particular image, and you can
| | 03:27 | probably see it better close-up, is
the Sharpening effect is most prominent
| | 03:38 | in the highlight areas.
| | 03:39 | You can see that on this edge the halo
that's really obvious on this arm that's
| | 03:47 | causing sharpening around
this edge is the highlight halo.
| | 03:51 | The dark halo can barely
perceive the dark halo in this image.
| | 03:55 | So what I need is a way to separate
the darkening halos from the lightening
| | 04:01 | halos. So the basic application of
sharpening is to apply to luminosity
| | 04:08 | sharpening, rather than normal sharpening.
| | 04:16 | But another way of achieving this, is to
immediately after you sharpen, to fade
| | 04:24 | this, so I am going to go ahead
and redo the sharpening effect.
| | 04:30 | I am going to throw away this layer, do
it again, now you can see how blurry it
| | 04:34 | really is and I will do that same
thing again, use the same filter settings,
| | 04:41 | run it again.
| | 04:43 | And now immediately after doing that I
go up here to Fade Unsharp Mask and I'll
| | 04:50 | select Luminosity in the little fade dialog box.
| | 04:59 | So watch what that does, if you can
see, all of the colored areas have
| | 05:05 | colored halos and all these little
jewels sort of pick up little red and green highlights.
| | 05:15 | Using Luminosity, we fade that back,
so we don't get those kind of color
| | 05:19 | artifacts everywhere.
| | 05:23 | All right, I am going to split this
layer, duplicate it, so now I have--oops!
| | 05:29 | Come on, I now have two
different sharpening layers.
| | 05:35 | They are of the same application of
sharpening, but I am going to change the one
| | 05:41 | on the bottom to Darken; watch what happens.
| | 05:45 | So now all the lightening halos go away,
and I'm only using the darkening halos.
| | 05:50 | Now that looks kind of funky, but again,
we're not going to evaluate at 200%, I
| | 05:56 | am going to back out just a little bit
here, try and to evaluate this at 50%.
| | 06:03 | This is just the darkening halos, the
darkening part of the sharpening, and you
| | 06:07 | can kind a see that it
does sharpen up the image.
| | 06:11 | But now I'm going to add this layer on
top and change that layer to Lighten. So
| | 06:17 | now I have lighten on top, darken on the
bottom, together they look the same as the
| | 06:22 | regular application of Usharp Mask.
| | 06:24 | But if I take the Opacity down of the
lighten sharpen, I can take off that
| | 06:33 | that over-bright white halo.
| | 06:36 | So I can adjust the ratio of light halos to
dark halos this way, and I get a better result.
| | 06:43 | And then when I'm when I'm done,
I can select both those layers.
| | 06:48 | I'll hold down the Shift Key and
select both those layers, and now we can put
| | 06:52 | both of those layers into a group
by selecting New Group from Layers.
| | 06:57 | We'll call that Sharpen and now that can
be treated as if it was one layer and I
| | 07:09 | can back off the Opacity of that to get
just the right result on the sharpening.
| | 07:17 | So this is a little more advanced
application of sharpening, but a there is
| | 07:22 | way more we can do.
| | 07:25 | Experiment with this and adjust the
lighten to darken halos. That's the first
| | 07:29 | step because very often the
sharpening should not be applied equally across
| | 07:34 | both highlights and shadows.
| | 07:36 | And we want our lighten halos
usually to be a little less heavy than the
| | 07:40 | darken halos.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 3: Basic sharpening pt. 2| 00:00 | We're going to look at another
sharpening issue that you have to pay attention
| | 00:04 | to when you have subjects
on a real plain background.
| | 00:10 | So right here I have an image shot
on a white seamless, so all very clean
| | 00:16 | background here, and we need to sharpen it.
| | 00:18 | It's actually quite soft, so let's
go and just do our basic sharpening.
| | 00:23 | I am going to duplicate the background layer.
| | 00:27 | We'll change the Opacity
from Normal to Luminosity.
| | 00:31 | I'm just going to do straight
Unsharp Mask on this, nothing fancy.
| | 00:36 | Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.
| | 00:42 | Again, real men sharpen at 500,
and maybe 1.3 is about right.
| | 00:53 | All right, one of the biggest problems when you
sharpen on a plain background, it could
| | 00:59 | be sky, in this case it's a white seamless,
we have what I call an exposed edge here.
| | 01:05 | This is a real clear edge, and it gets
sharp, but the edge that's closest to
| | 01:13 | this light background receives the
strongest haloing, and that tends to give the
| | 01:19 | whole thing a very cutout look.
| | 01:21 | So we're going to build a mask here.
| | 01:23 | I am going to pick my Magic
Wand tool and very quickly--
| | 01:31 | use a Tolerance of 15 here and just
start selecting the background.
| | 01:36 | Hold down the Shift key and I can add
to the selection, and make sure I add all
| | 01:40 | the negative space here.
| | 01:48 | And I need to keep adding to the selection here.
| | 01:53 | And I am going to switch over to Quick
Mask mode to make sure I can repair any
| | 02:03 | problems with this selection.
| | 02:05 | So paint with black.
| | 02:09 | I am essentially selecting the
background so the black areas, which are colored
| | 02:14 | red here, are the ones that I am not selecting.
| | 02:18 | And then, what we're going
to do is invert the selection.
| | 02:25 | So now the figure is selected.
| | 02:28 | Now you'll notice that the marching
ants are just outside of the figure here.
| | 02:37 | If I zoom in really close you can
see that they're just outside the edge.
| | 02:44 | I want to get this to come inside the edge.
| | 02:46 | Let me just double-check my little mistake here.
| | 02:57 | Part of my selection was creeping into the
white cuffs, so I want to paint that out.
| | 03:03 | I want this selection to
come just inside the edge.
| | 03:06 | So I am going to go up to the Select menu
here, Modify, and Contract the selection.
| | 03:15 | And I'll look at this,
maybe 2 pixels will do it.
| | 03:18 | Now you can kind of see in here
it's coming just inside the selection.
| | 03:22 | So why am I doing that?
| | 03:33 | I have this selection on the sharpen
layer, if I now add a Layer Mask by
| | 03:42 | clicking on the Layer Mask icon, the
selection is put into the Layer Mask.
| | 03:46 | Now what that has done is it has
trimmed into the hard halo, and just the
| | 03:57 | interior of the figure is now sharpened,
and that hard edge is kind of ramped off.
| | 04:04 | When it prints, this will look more
convincing than the hard cut out edge,
| | 04:09 | because we have a light background.
| | 04:10 | And what we're attempting to do is
create a convincing kind of an image.
| | 04:17 | If the background is really light,
it will kind of bleed around the edge.
| | 04:21 | As soon as you make that edge too sharp,
which we did with the Unsharp Mask,
| | 04:25 | your eye picks it up as there's
something wrong here, because it has defined
| | 04:29 | optics and we're expecting the
edge to round into the background.
| | 04:34 | So look for these exposed edges, and if
possible mitigate that sharpening effect
| | 04:41 | along edges where it really shows up.
| | 04:43 | This is a quick and easy technique to
trim off the cookie-cutter hard edge in
| | 04:48 | the Unsharp Mask halo.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 4: Basic sharpening pt. 3| 00:00 | I'm going to talk about another
sharpening technique that I use for more
| | 00:03 | aggressive sharpening and this is
something that I've dubbed Octave Sharpening,
| | 00:09 | and I'll explain that in a moment.
| | 00:12 | Here I have an image that has some
motion blur combined with just kind of, just
| | 00:19 | missed the focus with auto
focus during the action here.
| | 00:23 | And I'm going to need to really sharpen this up.
| | 00:26 | So my first move here is
I'm going to make four copies.
| | 00:37 | To duplicate, just drag that on to the
background, so I've got four copies of this.
| | 00:43 | And we're going to build the
sharpening up from the bottom to the top.
| | 00:48 | And what we want to do, start with our sharpening,
again, change Luminosity mode there.
| | 00:58 | And I'm going to apply the
strongest sharpening to the bottom layer.
| | 01:06 | So let's zoom in here, I will show it at 100%.
| | 01:11 | Let's go down to Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.
| | 01:20 | Now the strongest sharpening, I'm
going to use the smallest Radius I can.
| | 01:26 | I want to have the tightest halos, and
this is going to pick up all the little
| | 01:31 | details and bring them out.
| | 01:33 | But, I'll go down to 0.5 pixels,
so less than one pixel, Amount 500.
| | 01:42 | We're going to leave that layer
on at 100%. Now let's move up.
| | 01:49 | I'm going to do another
level of sharpening here.
| | 01:58 | I'm not going to change the Amount,
what I'm going to change is the Radius.
| | 02:02 | I'm going to go to 1.0 pixel.
| | 02:04 | Now the sharpening is stronger here.
| | 02:10 | But I'm going to change the
Opacity of this layer to 50%.
| | 02:22 | Then on my top layer, I will go and do
sharpening, and this one, I'm actually
| | 02:33 | going to use a wider Radius, 3 pixels here.
| | 02:44 | And that one, I'm going
to change to 25% Opacity.
| | 02:52 | And why am I doing this?
| | 02:55 | Again, make sure I have all of
these layers on Luminosity only.
| | 02:59 | I start at highest amount of
sharpening with the tightest radius.
| | 03:06 | So that's going to be the smallest halo.
| | 03:09 | Then I go up to a little wider halo but
drop the sharpening amount by changing
| | 03:18 | the Opacity of the layer down half, cut in half.
| | 03:23 | And then I go to the next layer,
even more wider sharpening, more obvious
| | 03:27 | halos, but I cut the Opacity down to 25%.
| | 03:30 | What this achieves is a
gradual ramping off of the halo.
| | 03:36 | So the halo starts at 100%, it's the
tightest to the edge and then it gradually
| | 03:43 | ramps out to invisible at the wider radius.
| | 03:49 | So this achieves a more invisible kind
of a halo, instead of having a hard edge
| | 03:54 | halo, which Normal Unsharp Mask gives
you, it softens it as it gets wider.
| | 03:59 | And overall it creates a stronger
sharpening effect without as obvious a halo.
| | 04:06 | We still have a problem with this
image though, because again, it has those
| | 04:10 | exposed edges against the white background,
so we'll trim that off in this next step.
| | 04:18 | I'm going to combine all of these layers,
all the sharpening layers into one group here.
| | 04:26 | I'll select all the layers and then
I'm going to go, New Group From Layers.
| | 04:32 | I'll call that Sharpen.
| | 04:40 | And now this is the sharpening layer
and you can kind of see how radical
| | 04:46 | that sharpening is.
| | 04:48 | Now I already built a selection for
the background and inverted it, so now I
| | 04:55 | have a--my trim off selection, I have
already built, just like we did before,
| | 05:00 | I'm going to add a layer mask for
the whole sharpening group all at once.
| | 05:05 | So I have the Group selected, Active
Selection, click on the Layer Mask, and it
| | 05:12 | puts that selection into the Layer
Mask and trims off the extra hard cookie
| | 05:19 | cutter edge off of that.
| | 05:24 | And that helps us to keep--contain the
sharpening into the interior of the figure
| | 05:29 | and it makes it less obvious how
much sharpening has been going on.
| | 05:32 | Occasionally we'll see like, let's zoom in;
| | 05:35 | there's an exposed edge,
interior edge right here.
| | 05:39 | There is a little extra sharpening halo,
on the light side it's really obvious
| | 05:44 | and I want to take that off.
| | 05:46 | So I can work it on the mask here.
| | 05:50 | I'll just fine-tune it by painting with
black into the mask area and I'm going
| | 05:59 | to take the sharpening off that's
exposed, and hide that halo effect.
| | 06:07 | So these are all things to consider if
you're trying to create some sharpening
| | 06:11 | but not make it obvious.
| | 06:16 | So remember to hide the sharpening on
exposed edges, so it doesn't look so cookie cutter.
| | 06:24 | And also look for interior edges where
that extra haloing can show up and you
| | 06:29 | can mask it out with a Layer Mask.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 5: Combined tools| 00:00 | Now we are going to look at an image
that has some problems and we are going to
| | 00:04 | use several of the tools that we've
already discussed and gone over in
| | 00:08 | conjunction to help bring the
foreground figure away from the background, give
| | 00:13 | it more shape as well as sharpness,
fix some color problems, and all of these
| | 00:19 | things working together to
create a complete unified effect.
| | 00:26 | I have this shot here.
| | 00:27 | It has a number of problems
just initially looking at it.
| | 00:32 | But let's start with our color strategy
first and I am going to find the white
| | 00:38 | point and the black point.
| | 00:39 | So we will use our Threshold command,
find the black, black point, it's going
| | 00:47 | to be in the shadow down here, pick sampler,
and well, there is white in the background.
| | 00:59 | I don't care about that.
| | 01:01 | I am going to look for the whitest
thing in our foreground subject, which is
| | 01:05 | sleeve on his arm here.
| | 01:12 | Now let's look at those numbers.
| | 01:13 | We have a black point that's 555.
| | 01:15 | It's perfectly balanced, and
our white point is 251, 251, 251.
| | 01:21 | It's a little high, but at the
moment I am going to leave that alone.
| | 01:27 | I am not going to really
fix any of these color things.
| | 01:30 | What's the next problem
that we have is the skin.
| | 01:34 | Let's zoom in here and I can see I
have that same kind of red sort of roseola
| | 01:43 | kind of effect on his face here.
| | 01:45 | Let's check what the numbers say about the color.
| | 01:54 | On his forehead we will look at the
CMYK numbers, 43, 43, and this is the
| | 01:59 | skin that's not red.
| | 02:00 | So he's already starting off a little too red.
| | 02:04 | So let's put a Curve on there to
fix the overall color of his skin.
| | 02:09 | So right now we didn't need to do too
much with the black point or the white
| | 02:15 | point, but we have to make
his skin a little yellowier.
| | 02:18 | So I am going to go into the Blue
channel and let's go ahead and place a
| | 02:22 | sampler on all three channels there
right where his forehead is and we need to
| | 02:27 | get that color, right now it's 43, 43, magenta
and yellow are equal, so his skin is too pink.
| | 02:35 | We are going to remove blue, until we
change this relationship and now we're 42, 52;
| | 02:46 | it's looking much better.
| | 02:49 | Now I can fix this red
discoloration using our friend Hue/Saturation.
| | 03:00 | We are going to edit red, so I will
click right in that red color.
| | 03:06 | It moves the range to center it over that color.
| | 03:10 | Let's subtract what is now the good color.
| | 03:12 | It's trimmed it in. Let's check.
| | 03:17 | I'll do the crazy hue shift, and
pretty much I am going to open up that
| | 03:24 | range just a little bit.
| | 03:25 | These are the things that are most going
to be affected and it's the reddest part.
| | 03:32 | So let's bring this back, shift it a
little bit towards yellow, and I'll
| | 03:39 | stop when I get it.
| | 03:45 | All right, we are pretty good there.
| | 03:50 | So this Hue/Saturation has adjusted
the red discoloration on his cheek.
| | 04:02 | So now we've handled the quick color fix here.
| | 04:08 | We've fixed the biggest problems in the color.
| | 04:11 | The other thing that's bothering me
about this is that the subject isn't
| | 04:14 | well-defined from the background.
| | 04:16 | He is sort of blending in with this
and there is unfortunate placement of
| | 04:19 | elements in the background that
are conflicting with the subject.
| | 04:23 | So I've got to find a way of toning
that back to help bring him forward.
| | 04:27 | We are going to do that in the next step.
| | 04:30 | So looking at this I am really
concerned about this background is conflicting
| | 04:35 | with him and there's too
much going on in the background.
| | 04:38 | I want to push it back.
| | 04:40 | So I'm going to make a selection around
him and I've built that ahead of time here.
| | 04:45 | So I am going to load the
selection. I've selected him.
| | 04:52 | Now actually, I don't want to work on him
right now, I want to work on the background.
| | 04:57 | So I am going to invert the selection.
| | 04:59 | I have everything but the foreground
figure selected, and I am going to put
| | 05:06 | another Hue/Saturation
adjustment layer on there.
| | 05:09 | And I am just going to
desaturate the background.
| | 05:19 | So I'm looking for a way of subduing the
background without making it too obvious.
| | 05:24 | So I don't want to really crank it
down to black and white, but knock the
| | 05:30 | saturation back just a little bit and dim down--
| | 05:33 | this will take, if we use the
lightness slider here, it takes the white point
| | 05:37 | down, just sort of knock into the background.
| | 05:40 | But I don't want to go too far.
| | 05:45 | So let's see the effect of that.
| | 05:47 | I will turn on and off and it just
sort of brings him forward a little bit.
| | 05:51 | The next thing I am going to need
to work on is to actually enhance the
| | 05:58 | foreground figure and pull him forward more.
| | 06:01 | And the way I do that is through sharpening.
| | 06:04 | Right now everything has the same
uniform sharpness, but if we sharpen just him,
| | 06:09 | he'll come forward off
the background a little bit.
| | 06:15 | So let's go in and work our sharpness.
| | 06:22 | For that I am going to put a merged
version of all of this in the top layer.
| | 06:29 | Hold down our Option or Alt key and
select Merge Visible, and now I have in this
| | 06:40 | top layer an exact duplicate of
the result of all of our adjustments.
| | 06:45 | This is the one that I am going to
sharpen, but first I'm going to put a
| | 06:50 | selection for the mask that isolates him.
| | 06:55 | I'll load that from the saved Alpha Channel I
have here, and I am going to make a mask first.
| | 07:02 | So click on the mask icon at the bottom
of the Layers palette, and the selection
| | 07:07 | goes into the Layer Mask.
| | 07:10 | So if we turn off everything underneath
it, you'll see he is separated out from
| | 07:14 | the background and this is
what I'm going to sharpen.
| | 07:19 | We'll change the Apply mode back to
Luminosity and I am going to do a little bit
| | 07:25 | of sharpening on him using Unsharp Mask.
| | 07:32 | Of course, you've got to be careful--
see when I created the mask, the mask was
| | 07:36 | selected, make sure you have the actual
image pixel selected, so you can sharpen that.
| | 07:48 | All right, now that's pretty extreme.
| | 07:51 | I don't want to sharpen so wide that
the halos become that obvious, so I am
| | 07:57 | going to narrow this down.
| | 07:58 | You can see a little bit in the inside
preview what's getting sharpened here and
| | 08:06 | a narrow radius will give us nice
edge sharpening without obvious halos.
| | 08:16 | So at this point he's starting to come
forward from the background, but I need more.
| | 08:21 | I need him to have a little more substance.
| | 08:24 | So we are going to use another trick,
another sharpening trick that's really
| | 08:28 | kind of a midtone contrast enhancing move.
| | 08:32 | It utilizes the high pass filter.
| | 08:35 | Let's look at how that works.
| | 08:38 | So what I'm looking for is I want to add
more shape and volume and more contrast
| | 08:44 | to bring him out, but I don't want to
darken the black things or lighten the
| | 08:49 | light things too much.
| | 08:50 | So I am going to use another
technique that's really more like a
| | 08:53 | sharpening technique.
| | 08:55 | So first I am going to duplicate that
whole layer that I already have as Luminosity.
| | 09:02 | We are going to change this back to
Normal and now I am going to desaturate it.
| | 09:11 | Now I want to actually just desaturate
directly, so I am going to go up here
| | 09:16 | under Image Adjustments and do the Hue/Saturation
directly on those pixels,
| | 09:22 | rather than as an adjustment layer.
| | 09:24 | So I'll move the Saturation back to 0
and we have essentially a black and white
| | 09:29 | version of this foreground figure here.
| | 09:32 | Now part of the trick is we are
going to run a special filter on this.
| | 09:40 | Filter > Other > High Pass and what
this does is at low radiuses it mimics what
| | 09:51 | happens with Unsharp Mask, and you
see how all the edges get emphasized.
| | 09:56 | If we up the radius and we are
looking for a kind of sculptural effect,
| | 10:03 | almost like a bas-relief sort of
effect, and I want to go and stop when I see
| | 10:09 | the kind of shape I want.
| | 10:12 | So the highlights in the hair are
starting to come out, his face is getting some
| | 10:17 | shape and volume, we have some details
showing up on his leatherneck protector
| | 10:24 | here, and when I go too far,
it gets softening out again.
| | 10:31 | I have to find just the right level of
kind of embossing to bring out the detail.
| | 10:38 | I'll stop here, and now if we change
the Apply mode for those two overlays,
| | 10:48 | we get an additional kind of contrast effect.
| | 10:51 | Look at the difference here.
| | 10:52 | See how his face all of a
sudden picks up some contrast.
| | 11:01 | Now we are in at 1:1.
| | 11:02 | This looks a little sharper than it
should, but look at the shape that's showing
| | 11:08 | up in his leatherneck protector here.
| | 11:11 | It's really now suddenly
gotten a much more 3D look.
| | 11:15 | At size when we print this,
this is going to look really nice.
| | 11:20 | I might have overdone it a little bit
here, so I am going to adjust the opacity
| | 11:24 | of this effect just by changing the
opacity of that layer, bringing it back.
| | 11:30 | So we've brought this figure forward
out of the background by adding more
| | 11:34 | contrast and shape using that High Pass
Overlay effect, which is very similar to
| | 11:40 | sharpening, but we are sharpening with
a very wide radius and thus adding shape
| | 11:44 | and contrast mostly to the midtones.
| | 11:48 | We haven't really affected the light
shirt so much or the dark shadows in some
| | 11:53 | of the dark leather, but we've added
contrast in the midtones and created a
| | 11:57 | sense of volume and shape for the rest
of the image and thus helps bring that
| | 12:01 | figure forward and separated
from a distracting background.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 6: Black-and-white conversion| 00:01 | We're going to look at black and white
and we're going to specifically look at
| | 00:05 | converting color images into black and white.
| | 00:08 | I'm going to make a departure from
the usual here, instead of looking
| | 00:11 | at pictures of people;
| | 00:12 | I'm going to start off
with a picture of a flower.
| | 00:15 | We're going to use this exploration of
black and white to begin to understand
| | 00:21 | the channel structure of color images
and how we can take advantage of that.
| | 00:26 | This will become very important later
on when I get into luminosity blending,
| | 00:30 | but right now, let's try and
understand what happens when we make a black and
| | 00:35 | white conversion; how best to take advantage
of the individual RGB channels of a color image.
| | 00:41 | All right, here we have a very colorful picture of
a flower and what we have to understand
| | 00:47 | with all color pictures, they're
actually made up of three black and white
| | 00:51 | pictures, the three channels,
Red, Green, and here's Blue.
| | 00:59 | As you can see, the Blue channel is very dark
in the yellow flower but bright in the blue sky.
| | 01:06 | The Red channel is dark in the blue
sky, but bright in the yellow flower.
| | 01:12 | So we really have three different ways
of rendering this color image into black
| | 01:17 | and white and they're
found in the three channels.
| | 01:20 | In this image, it looks like the
most useful channels are red and green.
| | 01:26 | So when we go to make a black and
white conversion, if I will go to Image >
| | 01:31 | Mode and select Grayscale, I get this
dialog that says, do you want to start the
| | 01:38 | color information?
| | 01:40 | And they're suggesting that we use
the new black and white adjustment tool.
| | 01:45 | We're going to look at other ways of doing that.
| | 01:48 | But if I throw away the color
information, I end up with a grayscale conversion
| | 01:53 | and a single channel.
| | 01:56 | Let's look at a more controlled way of
doing that that takes advantage of the
| | 01:59 | individual channels.
| | 02:03 | Because what happens, when we do a
grayscale conversion, if we do Mode >
| | 02:09 | Grayscale, Photoshop
actually mixes the channels.
| | 02:13 | So we're going to use a Channel Mixer
adjustment layer, so just enter it here,
| | 02:18 | and if you check Monochrome, you get a mix.
| | 02:24 | This is the default mix here of the
individual channels to give us a grayscale picture.
| | 02:29 | The total of the mix adds up to 100.
| | 02:34 | Now the actual conversion that
Photoshop uses is this, 60 and 30 in the Red
| | 02:44 | channel and 10 in the Blue
channel. It adds up to 100.
| | 02:51 | This is a standard grayscale conversion mix.
| | 02:56 | We're not getting a lot of benefit from
the Blue channel in this mix, so if we
| | 03:00 | put that to 0, we might like a different mix.
| | 03:03 | So we can try 50, 50, it still adds up to 100.
| | 03:09 | Maybe we try 30, 70.
| | 03:14 | So we can try out different mixes and
come up with different rendering for
| | 03:18 | the color flower.
| | 03:21 | But there's also no rule that
says you can't subtract a channel.
| | 03:25 | So we're going to move, I'm going to
subtract blue and darken the sky way down,
| | 03:30 | and now we have created kind of an
infrared effect where the sky has gone black
| | 03:36 | and all the brightness is in that flower.
| | 03:39 | We can also do crazy things like
subtract green and add red and crazy mix and we
| | 03:46 | can get this solarized effect.
| | 03:48 | So we have a lot of power in the
Channel Mixer that most people never see.
| | 03:53 | We also have some presets here.
| | 03:57 | We can see what this image would look like;
| | 04:00 | they have an infrared
preset, so we can select that.
| | 04:04 | That's not very convincing with this image.
| | 04:06 | We can see a Green Filter, and this is
the effect that you'd get if you use the
| | 04:13 | Green Filter over the lens and
it's 100% of the Green channel.
| | 04:18 | An Orange Filter would be an equal mix
of the Green and Red channel, and if we
| | 04:25 | use the Yellow filter, we're going to
get a mix that favors the Green channel,
| | 04:29 | and this simulates what would happen,
if you took the picture with a colored
| | 04:33 | filter in front of the lens.
| | 04:35 | All right, well there's a couple of ways of taking
advantage of the channel structure and
| | 04:46 | we're going to look at those next.
| | 04:50 | Okay, so when I place a Channel Mixer
adjustment on the top, what I get is as
| | 04:58 | soon as I check Monochrome, I
get one mix of the channels.
| | 05:03 | And this may or may not be
exactly what I need for the whole image.
| | 05:07 | If I would like to use a different mix
for a part of the image and another mix
| | 05:12 | for another part of the image, what
I'd like to be able to do is put multiple
| | 05:17 | layers of these mixes in
there and blend them together.
| | 05:22 | So we're going to use Vincent
Versace's special stacked Channel Mixer layer
| | 05:27 | technique to achieve that.
| | 05:29 | What I'm going to start off with is
a Red channel mix here for the bottom
| | 05:38 | layer, because that represents
now what the Red channel looks like.
| | 05:42 | I'm going to put on top of that a new
Channel Mixer layer and we're going to
| | 05:49 | make that the Green channel here, 100%
Green channel, and you may have noticed
| | 05:55 | that nothing happens when I do that.
| | 05:58 | And that's because by the time I put
this Channel Mixer layer on top, all the
| | 06:03 | channels are already equal, red equals
green equals blue, and there's no change.
| | 06:07 | So no matter what mix I put in there,
it's always going to be the same.
| | 06:12 | So because this has already been
established as the Red channel, even though I'm
| | 06:17 | asking for the Green channel up here,
I'm getting the same thing that has
| | 06:21 | already been established.
| | 06:22 | So the trick is to force the Channel
Mixer to dig down to the bottom and we're
| | 06:28 | going to do that using Blending Options.
| | 06:31 | So I have my second Channel Mixer layer
selected and I select Blending Options.
| | 06:37 | I get the Layer Style dialog and
here's the trick, I'm going to zoom in,
| | 06:43 | because this is a good one.
| | 06:44 | We're going to force this Channel
Mixer layer to reach down into the bottom.
| | 06:49 | So we take the Knockout and force it to go deep.
| | 06:53 | So the Knockout option here Deep, and
that's going to force this Channel Mixer to
| | 07:01 | dig all the way down to the
bottom layer and give us a new result.
| | 07:05 | So this now represents the Green
channel, but the first Channel Mixer layer
| | 07:11 | represents the Red channel.
| | 07:12 | So now I have the Green channel on top
of the Red channel and looking at the
| | 07:18 | difference between these two, I
decide that I like the lighter Red channel
| | 07:24 | center of the flower here, and I'm
going to mask off the Green channel, which
| | 07:30 | gives me better petals so that I can get at
the center of the flower and make it brighter.
| | 07:37 | So I'm going to paint with black
into this layer mask and reveal the Red
| | 07:43 | channel version of the center of that
flower by masking off the Green channel
| | 07:50 | version at that place.
| | 07:56 | Okay, so far we've got two Channel
Mixers that are giving us different results
| | 08:02 | and I'm now selectively bringing forth
the Red channel in the center of this
| | 08:07 | flower by using a Layer Mask.
| | 08:11 | The real power of using layers with
these channels is the different blend modes
| | 08:17 | that we have available.
| | 08:21 | But unfortunately, using the Channel
Mixer, I can't effectively use the blend
| | 08:26 | modes like Overlay, Multiply, Screen,
because they don't interact very well with
| | 08:32 | the Channel Mixer commands.
| | 08:33 | So I'm going to do one other trick
here to get at the Blue channel, which I'm
| | 08:38 | going to use in an interesting way.
| | 08:41 | Okay, so now I have the Green channel
on top, the Red channel on the bottom
| | 08:48 | here, and what I really want to get is
access to the Blue channel, because I
| | 08:53 | want to do something with that.
| | 08:55 | And I'm going to show you a
different way of getting and putting the
| | 08:59 | Blue channel in a layer.
| | 09:01 | So I'm first going to make an empty layer.
| | 09:05 | I'll actually call it Blue, so we know
what we're doing, and now we're going to
| | 09:13 | use a different way of getting the
Blue channel information into this layer.
| | 09:17 | Go up here to Image, and then
we're going to use this little known
| | 09:21 | command, Apply Image.
| | 09:24 | Apply Image allows us to take any
channel from any document that's the same size.
| | 09:31 | We have a Target here.
| | 09:32 | The Target in the center is
the empty layer that we selected.
| | 09:37 | So right now, we can see that
we're putting a merged copy of the RGB.
| | 09:43 | So it's a copy of everything we've done so far.
| | 09:46 | Actually, what I want to get at is
the Blue channel, not from the merged, so
| | 09:51 | here I select channel Blue, but the
Layer instead of Merged, I want to go all
| | 09:58 | the way down to the Background layer,
which gets me the Blue channel from the
| | 10:02 | original color image.
| | 10:05 | Right now it doesn't really matter
what we put in here for blending.
| | 10:08 | We're going to select Normal and
this now is exact copy of the Blue
| | 10:13 | channel sitting on top.
| | 10:16 | Okay, and why do I want to do this?
| | 10:18 | Well if I invert this, I got
to do Image > Adjust > Invert;
| | 10:27 | now I have a negative version of this.
| | 10:29 | And the flower inside is white instead
of black, but if we now take the Layer
| | 10:36 | Apply mode and change from Normal
to Multiply, now I have a darker sky.
| | 10:47 | Because this dark sky is in a separate
layer, I can use Layer Mask and I'm going
| | 10:52 | to add a Layer Mask to this top layer,
it'll crop right here. Here we go!
| | 11:00 | And I'm going to put a gradient
into the Layer Mask.
| | 11:04 | All right, so we're going to select our Opacity
100% and put a black to transparent
| | 11:14 | gradient into this white layer mask.
| | 11:17 | And we're going to get, we'll start
with black, hold down the Shift key to
| | 11:23 | constrain it to exact vertical line.
| | 11:28 | Now I've put a gradient filter over the sky.
| | 11:34 | So I've got to darken the sky at the top
and it blends into lighter at the bottom.
| | 11:39 | This is something that would be
impossible to achieve any other way.
| | 11:43 | So now we've really taken advantage of
the individual channels in this black
| | 11:49 | and white document.
| | 11:51 | The three color channels can be
interactively blended and mixed together in all
| | 11:55 | kinds of interesting ways.
| | 11:57 | If you think about it, take advantage
of the differences between each channel.
| | 12:02 | This is a very powerful way of working
with black and white conversions from
| | 12:06 | color images, because you always have
three different versions of black and
| | 12:10 | white in every color image.
| | 12:12 | So I've completely stopped
shooting black and white anything.
| | 12:16 | I always shoot color.
| | 12:18 | My digital files, I never use the
black and white mode on the digital camera;
| | 12:22 | I always shoot color, because I can
come into Photoshop later on and get all
| | 12:26 | kinds of different black and
white treatments of my color images.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 7: Channel mixing| 00:00 | Now we're going to look at another image,
this time of a person, and we're going
| | 00:05 | to see how we can use these channels in
the layers and blend them together with
| | 00:11 | layer mask to achieve some interesting effects.
| | 00:15 | Right now I have this lovely picture of
Jamie here and I want to convert it into
| | 00:20 | a black and white, but we're going to
put the different channels using the
| | 00:26 | Channel Mixer into layer.
| | 00:29 | So let's start off with the red filter
which is the Red channel on the bottom
| | 00:41 | and then we're going to go for new Channel
Mixer layer and this one we'll make green.
| | 00:52 | We have to change the Blending Options so
that we can dig down to the bottom layer.
| | 00:59 | I'll change my Knockout to Deep.
| | 01:03 | Now that actually is the Green channel.
| | 01:07 | This first one was red.
| | 01:08 | Now we're at green.
| | 01:10 | Now let's put blue on top of that.
| | 01:14 | Channel Mixer will take the blue filter
which gives us 100% of the Blue channel.
| | 01:18 | We have to change the blending
option here Knockout > Deep.
| | 01:29 | So now we have blue on top, green
in the middle, red on the bottom.
| | 01:34 | Well the Red channel has the lightest
skin which we often find attractive for woman.
| | 01:41 | It gives you that kind of high fashion look.
| | 01:45 | I can use the Green channel for some
things, but really what I think I want to
| | 01:55 | have predominantly the Red
channel for the nice light-colored skin.
| | 02:00 | Let's invert the mask here for the
Green channel and I'm just going to use
| | 02:08 | Command+I or Ctrl+I to turn
this mask into black mask.
| | 02:12 | So now I'm hiding the Green
channel with a black mask.
| | 02:16 | Now what happens if I paint the
Green channel just in certain areas?
| | 02:25 | I'm going to kind of
enhance the edge shape here.
| | 02:30 | I'm just going to paint in with white
into the black mask here and reveal just
| | 02:39 | along the edge, a little
shadowing here on the face.
| | 02:43 | So I'm contouring and shaping the tones.
| | 02:55 | So, right now I'm using just the
Green channel to provide some shading.
| | 02:59 | Let's zoom in on the face here
and see what else we can do.
| | 03:06 | Now something that's kind of
interesting with Jamie here;
| | 03:10 | she has green eyes.
| | 03:13 | So let's see what happens if I
bring the Green channel eyes in. Oops!
| | 03:20 | Let's paint with white.
| | 03:21 | I can increase the eye shadow here and
I actually have darker eye shadow and
| | 03:31 | slightly lighter eyes from the Green channel.
| | 03:43 | Now the lips in the Green channel
though, well, they're too black.
| | 03:48 | So I don't want to use the
Green channel for the lips.
| | 03:51 | But let's see what
happens with the Blue channel.
| | 03:54 | Well Blue channel has even more
dramatic skin tones, really dark.
| | 04:00 | Let's invert that mask the black, but
I know that the lips are not quite as
| | 04:09 | black and the Blue channels they're in
the red and the Green channel, but maybe
| | 04:19 | that's even too much and I can reduce
the opacity here to color the lips just
| | 04:25 | the way I want them.
| | 04:31 | So we've created a blend and we've
painted in specific areas to give us now
| | 04:38 | completely different shading.
| | 04:40 | Let's go back down to my Red
channel there. No shading.
| | 04:45 | We had the shading from the darker
Green channel, and in fact we could
| | 04:50 | probably add even more dramatic arm
shaping from the Blue channel, which I
| | 04:54 | think is little darker. Let's try that.
| | 04:59 | On top of everything here, yeah,
a little bit more dramatic there.
| | 05:11 | Now we've created kind of a unique
conversion for our color image turning
| | 05:19 | into black and white.
| | 05:20 | I've blended all these channels
together in layers and I'm creating something
| | 05:25 | that's not possible just by straight
channel mixer adjustments by taking the
| | 05:32 | best parts of each channel and blending
them together, I can achieve a unique effect.
| | 05:37 | Now what's interesting is we can take
advantage of the luminosity structure
| | 05:43 | which we've just built up in black and white and
apply that to the color image. Check this out!
| | 05:52 | So here we're with our black and white,
but we can actually apply the color to
| | 05:59 | this black and white luminosity.
| | 06:01 | I'm going to duplicate this background
layer, move it to the top, and there is
| | 06:11 | our color image, but now I
don't want all of the color image.
| | 06:16 | I only want the color from the color
image so I change the Apply Mode from
| | 06:21 | Normal to Color and I have a
combination of the color with the black and
| | 06:28 | white luminosity.
| | 06:30 | So I have all the contrast
and the shading and all that
| | 06:33 | that happened with the black and
white applied to the color of the image.
| | 06:38 | And you see what a dramatic
change it makes to the color image.
| | 06:42 | Here is the original color image
and here is the new super high fashion
| | 06:49 | altered color image.
| | 06:54 | So this is a very powerful way of
shaping the tones in your color image by
| | 07:00 | concentrating on the black and white.
| | 07:03 | We can often see the tonal structure
easier if we look it black and white and
| | 07:07 | then apply that artificially to the
color and we can get some very interesting
| | 07:12 | effects and achieve some things that
would be impossible to do using Curves in
| | 07:16 | Contrast Mode alone.
| | 07:19 | So the next thing we're going to look
at is another image and explore this
| | 07:23 | technique a little further.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 8: Luminosity blending| 00:00 | Okay, we've been concentrating on black
and white conversions from color, going from
| | 00:04 | color to black and white.
| | 00:06 | And we know that we can actually go
from black and white and apply that back
| | 00:10 | to the color image.
| | 00:11 | There are some very, very powerful things
you can do with this and this comes out
| | 00:15 | under the heading of luminosity
blending where we are taking luminosity, using it
| | 00:20 | to our advantage, the luminosity that
may exist in the individual black and
| | 00:24 | white channels, and changing the tonal
structure of the image in the color, full color image.
| | 00:31 | So we're going to look at some of the
very powerful things we can do with that
| | 00:35 | and I'll start with this next image.
| | 00:40 | Here I have a picture of Nathan.
| | 00:44 | The actual values for my skin tone, if
just check the values, really not too bad.
| | 00:53 | The mix of the skin is fine.
| | 00:55 | He just looks kind of pasty here.
| | 00:57 | So let's take a look at what this
might look like in black and white.
| | 01:02 | Well here's the Red channel.
| | 01:03 | There's the big problem.
| | 01:04 | His face is completely white in the Red channel.
| | 01:07 | Well the Green channel is better.
| | 01:10 | He actually now has some tone in his
face, but most of the tone or the richness
| | 01:17 | of tone in his face is
found in the Blue channel.
| | 01:20 | So let's see what we can do
here to take advantage of that.
| | 01:23 | I am going to go back to our color image.
| | 01:26 | Let's zoom in for a little bit better look here.
| | 01:30 | And what if I took from the Channel
Mixer, turned it into a Blue channel mix.
| | 01:40 | Let's select the Blue filter here, I
get 100% of Blue channel, monochrome.
| | 01:47 | Now if I change the Apply mode from
Normal to Luminosity, I'm taking the black
| | 01:56 | and white luminosity from the Blue channel and
applying it to the color image. And look at that.
| | 02:02 | I get a complete reversal or a
whole new look out of the tones.
| | 02:07 | I haven't run a curve on this yet.
| | 02:09 | And in fact I get much better
richness of tones than I had in the
| | 02:16 | original color image.
| | 02:17 | He is real pasty here.
| | 02:18 | Now he is movie macho, has a nice tan,
and the only problem I see now is that
| | 02:24 | I've created a kind of baby
blue gi here; his karate uniform.
| | 02:32 | And I've rather get back some of
the richness of that blue color.
| | 02:37 | So let's look at Blending Options.
| | 02:40 | A lot of powerful things can
happen here under Blending Options.
| | 02:47 | So let's look down at the bottom here, our
Blend If area, and I'm going to zoom in on this.
| | 02:53 | And what we're looking at here is
Blend If and we have the darkness in
| | 03:03 | this Blend If Gray.
| | 03:05 | So if This Layer which represents
our Blue channel, Channel Mixer, the
| | 03:08 | Underlying Layer which
represents the original layer.
| | 03:13 | But what if we looked at the Red channel?
| | 03:19 | In the Red channel the blue gi is very dark.
| | 03:23 | So if I want to get some of that blue
gi back, if I move this black point over,
| | 03:28 | and you can kind of see in the
image here what's happening.
| | 03:31 | Let me zoom back out.
| | 03:33 | As I move this little gray black point
slider over there, I'm getting black more
| | 03:37 | and more of that original blue color.
| | 03:42 | I'll use the Option key or Option or
Alt and split this little triangle apart.
| | 03:46 | So we get a smooth blend into that.
| | 03:50 | And I'm actually getting a little bit
of this texture of the original blue or
| | 03:58 | the lighter blue from the Channel Mixer.
| | 04:01 | And I'm using this too put a
little of that texture back.
| | 04:07 | So now here's my new mix.
| | 04:09 | I still preserve the darker skin
from the Blue channel luminosity.
| | 04:17 | But I'm going back to the
original color in the blue gi.
| | 04:24 | And I've also put a little more detail
in the gi, because I didn't blend a 100%
| | 04:30 | back using the Blending Options.
| | 04:33 | So let me turn that on and
off again. Look at that.
| | 04:36 | I haven't had to mask this off or
anything and I achieved a result that I could
| | 04:41 | not achieve just using Curves.
| | 04:45 | So this is a hint at the
power of luminosity blending.
| | 04:49 | You can achieve much more complicated results.
| | 04:52 | This was a solution and an easy
solution to a somewhat more difficult
| | 04:56 | problem in the color image.
| | 04:58 | It turns out to be pretty trivial if
you know how to use your Blending Options.
| | 05:02 | We are going to look at a
more complicated image next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 9: Blending continued| 00:00 | Well here we have a very interesting
photograph of a dancer dancing with a veil
| | 00:06 | and I'd really like to see a
little bit more of her face.
| | 00:12 | This is going to be somewhat difficult,
I could try using Curves and try to get
| | 00:20 | some contrast in this area which
happens right through the middle there, try
| | 00:28 | and contrast that up.
| | 00:31 | Now if I use the Curves this
way it oversaturates the color.
| | 00:36 | I can change the Apply mode from
Normal to Luminosity and that way this Curve
| | 00:42 | can't affect the color, but there is
sort of a limit to how far I can contrast
| | 00:50 | up this and all I'm really doing
is getting the highlights here.
| | 00:53 | So we'll leave this here, but we're
going to use a different method to at her
| | 01:03 | face and let's find out where
her face is in the channels.
| | 01:06 | Well I can see where the big problem
is, there's no girl there in the Red
| | 01:12 | channel, she was completely blasted out.
| | 01:16 | Here is where she is in the green channel.
| | 01:19 | The Blue channel is little bit better
than the Red channel, but it's not nearly
| | 01:22 | as good as the Green, so I know that
I'm going to be using the Green channel to
| | 01:26 | try and get her luminosity into the color image.
| | 01:30 | Now the other issue is because it's blasted
out in the Red channel, it's pretty saturated.
| | 01:37 | A good strategy here is to first try
and desaturate this and see if we can get
| | 01:46 | back some kind of color, because we
have--we're losing tonal shape simply
| | 01:52 | because it's too saturated.
| | 01:55 | So first I'm going to try and build in a
little bit by just desaturating, and you
| | 02:03 | can kind of see I'm starting to get
a little more shape in certain areas.
| | 02:08 | I don't want to lose the color
completely, but--and if I stop around here, I'm
| | 02:13 | starting to get a little more
shape, so that helps a little bit.
| | 02:19 | Now let's go and we'll put a Channel
Mixer and get at the Green channel here.
| | 02:34 | Actually if we check Monochrome here
and pick the Green filter, we get 100% of
| | 02:42 | the Green channel, and there is the
Green channel and we can apply that as
| | 02:49 | luminosity over the color image, and
we're starting to get a little more
| | 02:54 | information, but it's now too dark.
| | 02:59 | So really what I need is a
lighter version of the Green channel and
| | 03:03 | unfortunately I cannot apply a Curve
to this Channel Mixer to lighten up
| | 03:09 | the Green channel.
| | 03:12 | So I'm going to use the other method of
getting the Green channel in there and
| | 03:18 | create an empty layer and use our
Image Apply mode to apply the Green channel
| | 03:29 | from the background to that layer.
| | 03:36 | So now I have the Green channel up
there as black and white, I can apply the
| | 03:40 | Luminosity, and now here is the trick.
| | 03:46 | Now I can put a Curve adjustment and
attack just this layer with a Curve
| | 03:51 | adjustment and brighten up the Green channel.
| | 03:53 | So the way I do that is I'm going to
hold down the Option key when I create--the
| | 03:59 | Option or Alt key, when I create a Curve
adjustment layer, this Curve I can make
| | 04:06 | it use the previous layer as a clipping mask.
| | 04:09 | So I'm going to make this Curve lighten
up just that the Green channel, so I'm
| | 04:19 | going to open up and make
it a little brighter here.
| | 04:29 | Maybe do a little bit of a contrast
move there and now I'm really starting to
| | 04:35 | just see the face coming out here.
| | 04:45 | So this Curve is affecting the Green
channel copy first and then that whole
| | 04:51 | thing is being applied over the color image.
| | 04:53 | Okay, so what's the problem?
| | 04:55 | Now I've created, although I'm getting
more of her face showing up, I've these
| | 05:01 | ugly black areas in the image, so we can
mask those out, but I'm too lazy to do that.
| | 05:08 | So I'm going to use Blending Options.
| | 05:10 | So I select my Green channel
layer, go to Blending Options.
| | 05:17 | Now in this layer, the Green channel
layer is black and white and I want to see
| | 05:23 | through the darkest areas, so I'm going
to move the little black point slider and you
| | 05:29 | can see now I'm seeing through to the
underlying layer and I'm just going to move
| | 05:36 | it over until I've
eliminated most of those black areas.
| | 05:38 | Now the problem is I have a hard edge
transition here, so holding down the
| | 05:43 | Option or Alt key allows me to split
apart the little triangle there and blend
| | 05:48 | that in until it disappears.
| | 05:54 | And so now I've blended into the underlying
image and blended out the dark, ugly parts.
| | 06:03 | Let's look at how this is applying again,
so we've really brought her face back
| | 06:12 | in and all that remains maybe now there
is parts of this image up in here where
| | 06:20 | I think I can mask it off, I'll add
a Layer Mask to this Green channel
| | 06:25 | Luminosity and I'll just brush that out.
| | 06:33 | So I don't need it up there or maybe
down in here, and right now I've got--an
| | 06:40 | impossibly--impossible to achieve any
other way, brought her face through the
| | 06:46 | veil and made it more prominent in the image.
| | 06:51 | So here's the background without
that, there it is with the Green channel
| | 06:58 | luminosity and let's compare that now to
the Curve adjustment; that's the best I
| | 07:05 | could have achieved using Curves alone.
| | 07:09 | Here's with the luminosity.
| | 07:14 | So you can see that luminosity blending
is a very, very powerful way to actually
| | 07:20 | control--put detail into a color image
that you could not achieve any other way.
| | 07:25 | So we should explore this further and
really understand how much and how far we
| | 07:30 | can push these things and how we can
take advantage of the black and white
| | 07:34 | channel structure in our color images.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 10: Channels continued| 00:00 | We're going to look at another image
now where we can take advantage of the
| | 00:04 | different black and white channels of a
color image and achieve a corrective result.
| | 00:10 | So let's take a look here.
| | 00:13 | I have this great shot.
| | 00:14 | This is by Anthony Nex.
| | 00:15 | My child photography expert here.
| | 00:18 | He has got great shot of Jordan here,
and one thing we want to do we want to
| | 00:24 | correct, he is a little dark looking.
| | 00:26 | It's always a problem with African-
American, try and bright them out without
| | 00:31 | changing them too much.
| | 00:33 | Let's start with our--let's
start with our color first.
| | 00:38 | I'm not going to check black and
white points, but I'm going to check for
| | 00:41 | the color of the skin.
| | 00:42 | So let's first put a
thick sample around the skin.
| | 00:47 | Check out the CMYK values here.
| | 00:50 | And we can see magenta
is at 61, yellow is at 51.
| | 00:54 | It's exactly opposite the usual.
| | 00:56 | We are very high in magenta
here so his is looking kind of red.
| | 01:02 | African-American skin is a little bit different.
| | 01:04 | As it gets darker we usually want to
have a little more magenta than yellow,
| | 01:08 | otherwise the skin starts looking green.
| | 01:10 | But this is just a little too far so.
| | 01:13 | What we'd like to do is get a
little more yellow relative to the green.
| | 01:21 | So I'm going to actually brighten the
skin up by adding green to knock back the magenta.
| | 01:31 | So I'll Command+Click and put a
control point on the Green channel where the
| | 01:37 | skin color lives and I'm looking at the numbers.
| | 01:42 | Let's add green, and you see the
ratio is changing now 56, 54, 55, 54.
| | 01:51 | With African-American skin we usually
go to maybe equal and that gives us--on a
| | 01:58 | Caucasian that will look sunburned, but
on African-American or darker skin it
| | 02:04 | looks better if magenta equals yellow.
| | 02:08 | So we're going to stop there.
| | 02:10 | Now I want to take advantage of the
fact that in the Red channel he's brighter.
| | 02:20 | Green channel is pretty dark.
| | 02:22 | Blue channel, he is dark. He is the darkest.
| | 02:25 | But the Red channel he is actually even more
opened up than he is in that full color image.
| | 02:31 | So we're going to apply.
| | 02:33 | I'll go back to make an
empty layer here at the top.
| | 02:38 | I'm going to use this approach.
| | 02:40 | I'm going to apply the image here under
Image > Apply Image and we get this command.
| | 02:48 | We're going to go back to the Background
where the Red channel is actually brighter.
| | 02:55 | Pick the Red channel and
we're targeting that empty layer.
| | 03:00 | So now we have the duplicate of the Red
channel brought into the layer on top.
| | 03:11 | Now we're going to apply
the Luminosity from that.
| | 03:16 | You see how now he's opened up here.
| | 03:20 | So we already helped him
out by making him brighter.
| | 03:25 | The problem is look at his blue shorts.
| | 03:29 | Blue shorts get dark.
| | 03:32 | So I'm going to put a layer mask there
and mask off the blue shorts by painting
| | 03:40 | with black into the layer mask.
| | 03:52 | So we've open him up a little bit.
| | 03:54 | I want to push this a little bit further
and create a little more shape in his face.
| | 04:01 | So we're going use the technique that we
had from the sharpening moves and we're
| | 04:07 | going to add that High Pass
Luminosity overlay effect to create more shape.
| | 04:14 | So in order to do that I'm going to
hold down my Option or Alt key and select
| | 04:22 | Merge Visible while I'm targeting that
top layer and that'll put a duplicate of
| | 04:29 | the result of all these
layers into the top layer.
| | 04:35 | Now I'm going to go Image > Adjust >
Hue/Saturation, because to make this
| | 04:43 | effect work properly I want to
desaturate the layer that I'm going to run the
| | 04:48 | High Pass filter on.
| | 04:50 | So now that he's desaturated.
| | 04:53 | I'll use Filter > Other > High Pass
and now we're looking for a level of
| | 05:03 | High Pass that gives us enough sculptural
shape in the face and highlights on the arms.
| | 05:10 | So if I'm way down here it's
almost like sharpening just the edges.
| | 05:14 | I'm going to find a level, a Radius
setting that's going to increase the
| | 05:22 | highlights on the face and on the arms,
think I'm right around here around 15.
| | 05:32 | Now this is going to be applied in Overlay mode.
| | 05:35 | Let's zoom in little bit so
you can see this a little better.
| | 05:46 | We've added the highlights
and added some midtone contrast.
| | 05:51 | Look at how the highlights have
brought out his arms and his face.
| | 05:56 | Now let's compare this to the
original image at the bottom.
| | 06:02 | See we've achieved a very dramatic effect.
| | 06:06 | This effect would be difficult
to achieve using curves alone.
| | 06:10 | So take advantage of those channels
and you can achieve really interesting
| | 06:14 | results, combine that with a High
Pass overlay layer and we can open up and
| | 06:20 | create shape that wasn't there before.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lesson 11: Channel mixing wrap-up| 00:00 | So here we have an image, a
landscape shot, stand of trees here.
| | 00:04 | And we're going to use our same
strategy for adjusting the color and contrast.
| | 00:10 | We're going to get up a Threshold
adjustment layer here, and we'll start by
| | 00:17 | finding the darkest important tone in
the image, which looks like it's going to
| | 00:22 | be a shadow here, in the
background right about here.
| | 00:28 | So I'll Shift+Click to place the
sampler there, and now I'm going to find the
| | 00:34 | lightest point, and it looks to me like
the lightest value is most likely going
| | 00:39 | to be one of these tree branches here.
| | 00:45 | And yes, there is a highlight side of
the tree branch, so I'm going to place of
| | 00:49 | sampler there by Shift+Clicking.
| | 00:52 | Now I'm done with that Threshold
adjustment, I'll just zoom back out.
| | 00:58 | Okay, so we're going to attack this
problem with the Curves adjustment layer.
| | 01:04 | So I'll make a Curves adjustment layer here.
| | 01:07 | Look at my values here.
| | 01:09 | For Shadow it's 21, 21, 16.
| | 01:14 | It's a little high, I really like 10, 10, 10.
| | 01:16 | My Highlight 210, 227, 229; so it's on
the blue green side and it's not very white.
| | 01:24 | So let's start with the Blue channel here,
and I'm going to take the Black Point
| | 01:32 | first, we'll move that down to 10,
and moving over Command+2 or Command or
| | 01:41 | Ctrl+2 gives me the Green channel.
| | 01:45 | We'll move that endpoint over as well,
nudging it to the right to inch up on
| | 01:52 | 10 up here.
| | 01:54 | We have now 10 in the Green channel,
moving over to the Red channel, we'll do
| | 02:00 | the same thing, 10, 10, 10.
| | 02:05 | Now let's look at the Highlight
side, our numbers 208, 226, 229.
| | 02:11 | Well I like that really up at around
245 to get a nice white highlight on these
| | 02:16 | white birch branches here.
| | 02:20 | So I'm going to move my endpoint in the
Red channel over to the left and we're
| | 02:27 | going to use the Arrow keys to inch up on it.
| | 02:30 | Now I have 245 in the Red channel.
| | 02:33 | Command+2 or Ctrl+2 gives me the Green channel.
| | 02:36 | Same thing, we're going to move that
over to the left, and inch up on it with the
| | 02:42 | Arrow keys until we have 245.
| | 02:47 | Now we'll go to the Blue
channel, do the same thing.
| | 02:56 | And now we're inching up on it.
| | 02:58 | We have 245 in the blue.
| | 03:00 | It's 245 all the way
across red, green, and blue.
| | 03:02 | And looking back at my
Black Point, it's 12, 11, 11.
| | 03:08 | Close enough, I'm not going to
go back and adjust that again.
| | 03:11 | And let's take a look.
| | 03:12 | We've got a lot more contrast and we've
moved away from the green look to get a
| | 03:22 | little more color in the image actually.
| | 03:28 | Now what I'd really like to do in this
image is improve the tone and contrast
| | 03:36 | and I'm going to look at the channel
structure here and see if I can't get these
| | 03:42 | stand of trees, the bare birch
branches to stand out against the background.
| | 03:47 | And we can use a little luminosity
blending trick here to improve the look of this.
| | 03:54 | Okay, now I'm looking at this image
and I really would like to bring out the
| | 04:01 | white tree branches and
separate them more from the background.
| | 04:05 | So I'd like to darken the background
and I'm just definitely not going to go in
| | 04:11 | there and try and mask out all these trees.
| | 04:14 | So we're going to use a little luminosity
blending trick here with the Channel Mixer.
| | 04:21 | So I'm going to make a Channel Mixer
adjustment layer, bring it up at the top
| | 04:25 | here, and let's go right to Monochrome.
| | 04:29 | I know that the trees in
the background are green.
| | 04:35 | So I'd like to subtract green out of the mix.
| | 04:39 | I'm going to bring this down
here, maybe like around 60 or so.
| | 04:45 | I'm going to add back the other
channels to bring back the tree branches.
| | 04:52 | So I think as long as I end up at a
100 here I'll end up back with the tree
| | 04:59 | branches at full intensity and
I've darkened the background.
| | 05:06 | Now this is my black and white mix,
I'm going to apply that, instead of
| | 05:13 | Normal, which gives me a black and white image,
I'll apply that Luminosity to the color image.
| | 05:18 | Okay, so now we've darkened all the green
trees, but I don't want to do that over
| | 05:26 | the whole image, only behind these trees
right here in the foreground, because I
| | 05:30 | don't want to destroy the
green leaves everywhere.
| | 05:33 | So I'm going to invert the Mask, Command+I
or Ctrl+I, I'll change the mask for
| | 05:39 | the Channel Mixer adjustment to Black,
and now I can paint in with a paintbrush
| | 05:44 | and white paint into the mask which
will now reveal the darkening adjustment,
| | 05:51 | and I can just bring it behind the
trees that I want to emphasize here.
| | 06:00 | Make it look like I've got a shadow
that perfectly highlights these trees.
| | 06:06 | I don't have to mask that.
| | 06:08 | You can see now it's really knocking
back the background behind these trees.
| | 06:20 | So I'm using the Channel Mixer to
create a special blend of the channels that
| | 06:25 | knocks the Green channel way back and
reduces the brightness of the green so
| | 06:30 | that I can bring these tree branches forward;
| | 06:33 | a kind of complicated maneuver
that achieves a result that I couldn't
| | 06:38 | achieve any other way.
| | 06:40 | One last thing I'm going to do to
finish this all off, we're going to use
| | 06:43 | our High Pass Overlay layer to just crisp
up the image and give it a little more shape.
| | 06:50 | All right, so I'm going to do our
little trick with a High Pass Overlay layer.
| | 06:55 | So I'm going to make an empty layer at
the top. I'm going to hold down my Option
| | 07:02 | or Alt key, and select Merge Visible,
and that will put the result of all that
| | 07:10 | we've done so far merged
into the top layer there.
| | 07:12 | Okay, so this is identical to
everything that we did before. I'm going to
| | 07:16 | desaturate it with an Image > Adjustment >
Hue/Saturation, we'll do that right
| | 07:24 | on those pixels, Desaturate.
| | 07:29 | And now I'm going to run
the High Pass Filter on this.
| | 07:32 | Let's zoom in just a little bit so we
can get a little bit better idea of what's
| | 07:37 | happening with that, Filter > Other > High Pass.
| | 07:48 | So here I'm just looking for just
enough to make the leaves really kind of--the
| | 07:55 | tree branches stand out against the background.
| | 07:58 | If I take a very low radius, it
all kind of goes gray and I'm just
| | 08:03 | emphasizing the edges.
| | 08:04 | I want to really kind of make those
tree branches look dimensional, so I'm
| | 08:09 | looking for just enough radius to
have the tree branches really pop out.
| | 08:16 | And I'm looking for almost
a bas-relief effect here.
| | 08:19 | Then when we go back to Overlay, or I'll
use Soft Light in this case, so I don't
| | 08:29 | need a strong effect.
| | 08:31 | I get this kind of edge enhancement
that crisps up the image quite a bit, and
| | 08:38 | that's my finishing touch here.
| | 08:48 | So here we've used a couple of the
tricks that we've learned so far and applied
| | 08:53 | them on a different subject, a landscape.
| | 08:56 | So luminosity blending and the
sharpening effects and the color controls that
| | 09:01 | we've been using on people work
just as well on other subjects.
| | 09:06 | So you should explore it
with all types of photography.
| | 09:09 | Don't limit yourself to people.
| | 09:12 | Explore everything, all of these
techniques work equally well everywhere.
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| Goodbye| 00:00 | We have come a long way in our
series of lessons on Photoshop CS3.
| | 00:05 | We have used a lot of techniques and
tools in different combinations to create
| | 00:11 | image enhancements that go beyond just
the simple tips and tricks kind of thing.
| | 00:17 | I want you to remember that it's not
just one, two little steps to create a
| | 00:22 | trick, but a series of techniques in
combination to create more mature and more
| | 00:31 | evolved image enhancements.
| | 00:34 | And all of this would be meaningless
unless you applied it to your own photography.
| | 00:39 | So that's what I would like you to
leave with. Take these techniques, make them
| | 00:44 | your own, make your own magic.
| | 00:46 | I've given you the basics and the tools
to begin your journey for your own imagery.
| | 00:51 | Thank you!
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