13. Levels and CurvesHighlights, shadows, and midtones| 00:00 | Let's begin with Photoshop's most capable
color correction commands, Levels and Curves,
| | 00:05 | which analyze an image according
to three basic attributes: highlights,
| | 00:10 | shadows, and midtones, or if you
prefer light colors, dark colors, and
| | 00:15 | everything in between.
| | 00:17 | I will also show you the Shadow/
Highlights filter, which lets you bring out
| | 00:21 | details that you would have sworn did
not exist. The amazing thing about these
| | 00:26 | commands is that they give you control
over not just every luminance level in
| | 00:31 | your image, but likewise independent
control over brightness and color so that
| | 00:37 | you can edit just brightness, just color,
or both. Be it red or blue, night or
| | 00:43 | day the following chapter
proves that even the sky is no limit.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Low contrast, bad meter| 00:00 |
We are going to begin our look at
Levels and Curves by examining neither.
| | 00:04 |
Instead, we are going to take a look at
a trio of automated functions that are
| | 00:10 |
based on both Levels and Curves. And
these commands when they work, work
| | 00:15 |
brilliantly as you will see, but first,
I want to give you a sense of what kind
| | 00:19 |
of image is best suited to these
commands. And then in the next exercise, I'll
| | 00:23 |
show you how to apply the commands, and
what kind of results you can expect to
| | 00:27 |
achieve. And then in the exercise
after that I'll show you how the commands
| | 00:31 |
work. So we've got a trio of
exercises devoted to this trio of commands.
| | 00:36 |
What commands am I talking about? Well,
let me show you. I'm going to go up to
| | 00:40 |
the Image menu, and I'm going to go to
Adjustments, and I'm going to show you
| | 00:43 |
first of all the commands that we will
be discussing throughout this chapter,
| | 00:46 |
Levels and Curves. And notice both of
these extraordinarily powerful commands
| | 00:52 |
which do an absolutely brilliant job of
enhancing the colors inside of an image
| | 00:57 |
and balancing luminance levels and so on.
Both of these commands end in little
| | 01:01 |
dot dots, those telltale ellipses that
tell you that you are about to embark on
| | 01:06 |
a conversation with Photoshop.
| | 01:08 |
So when you choose the Levels command,
you are basically hailing Photoshop, you
| | 01:11 |
are saying levels, and then Photoshop
is responding by saying "what?" with this
| | 01:16 |
dialog box right here. And then the
two of you proceed to have a non-verbal
| | 01:20 |
dialog inside of a box. And if that
doesn't sound like more fun, then you can
| | 01:26 |
imagine. Well, just stay tuned because
you won't have to imagine, you will see
| | 01:30 |
the fun in action. But for now I'm
just going to go ahead and cancel out of
| | 01:33 |
said dialog box. Let's go back to the
Image menu, and let's take a look at the
| | 01:37 |
progeny. So the idea is if Levels and
Curves were to get married, and then they
| | 01:42 |
had these three babies right here,
these would be them, Auto Tone, Auto
| | 01:45 |
Contrast, and Auto Color.
| | 01:47 |
Now the babies don't bring up dialog
boxes. Notice that they have no dot dots,
| | 01:50 |
so they are just going to do their
thing and each one of them is smart. They
| | 01:54 |
are conditional; it's really the better
way to say it. They can take a look at
| | 01:57 |
the condition of the image and apply
their algorithms accordingly in order to
| | 02:02 |
do what they consider to be the best
job of correcting the image. So each one
| | 02:06 |
of them does a different thing, based
on features that are found in both Levels
| | 02:11 |
and Curves. So they can't do quite as
much as Levels or Curves, they are just
| | 02:14 |
babies after all, however they do it
automatically without talking to you at
| | 02:18 |
all. They just do their things.
So they are very easy to use.
| | 02:21 |
Now before we apply them, let me
introduce you to this sample image here,
| | 02:25 |
because it's very important. I want to
give you a sense of what kind of image
| | 02:28 |
is best suited to these auto commands,
because they don't work on every image
| | 02:32 |
by any means. It's very specific
kinds of images. So we've got a bad image
| | 02:36 |
here, which really needs work obviously.
It's called Pool deck.psd. I shot this
| | 02:41 |
image with just a great camera, it's
an Olympus Stylus 1030 SW, and you might
| | 02:46 |
not think it's a great camera based on
this lousy image that I captured, but
| | 02:50 |
here's what happened. There are two parts to it.
| | 02:52 |
First of all, this was a very cloudy day,
as were all the days on this cruise,
| | 02:57 |
and you can tell that's a case because
I mean witness this pool deck, that's
| | 03:00 |
why we have a preponderance of blue
inside of this image, because there is a
| | 03:04 |
lot of cloud covered but does not
explain the preponderance of green. This is
| | 03:07 |
the image I ended up with.
| | 03:08 |
Now why is it perfectly suited to the
auto functions, because for one thing, it
| | 03:13 |
kind of defies the other commands, right.
I mean, it not only has low contrast
| | 03:18 |
as we can see, which is very
important, if you are going to apply an auto
| | 03:21 |
function and expect the results from it,
you want a low contrast image, that's
| | 03:25 |
essential. So that you don't have rich
blacks and you don't have bright whites,
| | 03:29 |
you have sort of this murky in
between, and also it's got a terrible
| | 03:33 |
color-cast, which two of the commands
are suited to. These two commands right
| | 03:37 |
there, Auto Tone and Auto Color, will
correct for color cast. This guy, as you
| | 03:41 |
will see in the next exercise, won't.
Otherwise how would you go about by
| | 03:44 |
fixing this image, or you might try
something like Brightness/Contrast, because
| | 03:48 |
it lacks contrast, right? So you'd
raise the Contrast value there, and you
| | 03:52 |
would get this sort of nuclear image as
if we're close to a source of radiation.
| | 03:56 |
And I could increase the brightness if
I really wanted to wipe everybody out,
| | 04:01 |
or I could decrease the brightness but
that just makes the scene murkier. So
| | 04:04 |
we're really not getting the results
we want out of Brightness/Contrast.
| | 04:07 |
Instead, I guess I cancel out of there.
Presumably, I could go to the Image
| | 04:11 |
menu, choose Adjustments and try
something like Variations down here. I have
| | 04:17 |
already been in this dialog box, let's
go ahead and click on Original to reset
| | 04:20 |
it. I could say, well, you know what,
it doesn't need More Green or More Cyan
| | 04:23 |
or More Blue, it needs in fact the
opposites, we will try More Red a few times
| | 04:28 |
here. I'll just click three times in
a row. I might try, that's about it, I
| | 04:32 |
guess, I could reduce this Fine/
Coarse slider and click on More Magenta or
| | 04:37 |
something along those lines, and then
increase it back and say that I wanted to
| | 04:41 |
be lighter or darker, neither, really
because those are midtone adjustments. I
| | 04:46 |
want to make the Highlights slider
and the Shadows darker, and that's not
| | 04:50 |
something you can do using these
options by default. With Midtones anyway I
| | 04:54 |
could grab Highlights right there, and
I could say, let's make the Highlights
| | 04:58 |
brighter, and then I could click on
Shadows, and I could say let's make the
| | 05:02 |
Shadows darker. And that still leaves
a lot of room for changing the color of
| | 05:08 |
the Midtones, the color balance that
is. So I went ahead and selected the
| | 05:11 |
Midtones and then clicked on More Red.
I'm just fooling around inside this
| | 05:14 |
dialog box. Then I click OK and say hmm,
this is before, Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on
| | 05:20 |
the Mac. This is after, Ctrl+Z or
Command+Z on the Mac. So I was not able to
| | 05:25 |
correct this image satisfactorily at
all. I'll go back to the Original here.
| | 05:31 |
What in the world do we do? Well,
after all that work, and after all that
| | 05:35 |
frustration, you are going to be
amazed at how these little children right
| | 05:38 |
here, Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, and
Auto Color, what an amazingly brilliant job
| | 05:42 |
they do. When you have a low contrast
image, when you have color cast problems,
| | 05:47 |
they can absolutely correct an
image in just one step. To see them in
| | 05:52 |
operation, to see those super-children
at work, join me in the next exercise.
| | 05:55 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Auto tone, contrast, and color| 00:00 | In this exercise, we are now going to
apply the three children of the blessed
| | 00:06 | union of Levels and Curves, and those
children go by the names, Auto Tone, Auto
| | 00:10 | Contrast, and Auto Color. I must say
not names that I ever considered for my
| | 00:16 | own children, but they are
commands and commands are special people.
| | 00:20 | Now we are going to see how these
commands just make mincemeat of the problems
| | 00:25 | with this image right here, which is a
good thing. We want to make mincemeat of problems.
| | 00:29 | I do want to show you something else.
I'm working wide screen, notice that. For
| | 00:34 | those of you who are with me in
Photoshop CS4 One-on-One Fundamentals, that
| | 00:40 | gargantuan 12 chapter series that
started you on your way, we are going
| | 00:43 | wide-screen now that we are in the
advanced series. But we are still not wide
| | 00:47 | enough to accommodate this image and
the palettes. So I need to press Shift+Tab
| | 00:52 | to bring my palettes back, so
I can see my Layers palette.
| | 00:55 | Notice that I have layers setup for
Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color,
| | 00:58 | so you can do your thing, but first I
want you to switch over to the Channels
| | 01:02 | palette right there. This is an RGB
image, Red, Green, Blue, and that just
| | 01:06 | figures because I captured it with a
digital camera, the Olympus Stylus 1030 SW
| | 01:11 | as I was telling you, and digital
cameras have a habit of capturing RGB images,
| | 01:17 | 99.999% of the time, or percent of
cameras I should say will capture RGB
| | 01:22 | images. There are a few exceptions out there.
| | 01:24 | But we do have this RGB image and
that means it's made of a channel of Red
| | 01:30 | information, a channel of Green
information, and channel of Blue information,
| | 01:33 | and all three of these channels are
essentially independent grayscale images.
| | 01:38 | And so if I click on Red, we can see
that we have a dark red channel, not
| | 01:41 | surprising because the image is
very bright. Where Green and Blue are
| | 01:46 | concerned, we have a Green and
Blue color cast going right here.
| | 01:51 | So the odd man out, if you have Green
plus Blue, you are getting Cyan, the
| | 01:55 | opposite of Cyan is Red. So Red is out
of favor where Luminance is concerned
| | 02:00 | inside this image, so it's dark. In
other words, that's one way of saying dark
| | 02:04 | I suppose. And then Green, very bright,
overly-bright. So we have a lot of
| | 02:09 | Highlights to work with but very
little on the way of Shadows. I mean,
| | 02:12 | basically no shadow detail, just
Midtones and Highlights. And then same with
| | 02:15 | blue, we do get a little darker in
the shadow detail, but only slightly.
| | 02:20 | It's normal for channels to deliver
different information. So for one channel
| | 02:24 | to be bright where another channel is
dark, that's fine. But for the channels
| | 02:28 | to be this widely out of sync with
each other, that's bad. Where we have
| | 02:32 | basically no Highlights of any merit
inside the Red channel, just Shadows and
| | 02:36 | Midtones, and no Shadows inside of
the Green channel, just Highlights and
| | 02:40 | Midtones, that's a bad thing. And so
we have problems on a channel by channel
| | 02:44 | basis. Each channel is different. That
is something that the Auto commands and
| | 02:48 | Levels and Curves can take care of beautifully.
| | 02:51 | So the other commands like Brightness
/Contrast, those functions, they are
| | 02:54 | really looking at the full composite
image whereas Levels and Curves are
| | 02:58 | capable of taking a look at each
channel independently, which is a great thing.
| | 03:02 | It makes them that much more powerful.
So what do we do? Let's go back to
| | 03:07 | Layers. I just want you to see
the wackiness that is this image.
| | 03:10 | I am going to go over here to Auto Tone,
and I'm going to click on that layer
| | 03:14 | and I'm going to turn it on, so it's
active, and then I'm going to go up to the
| | 03:17 | Image menu and choose the Auto Tone command.
| | 03:19 | Notice that it has a keyboard shortcut,
no reason on earth to memorize these
| | 03:24 | shortcuts, you're just not going to be
applying these commands often enough to
| | 03:27 | warrant keyboard shortcuts at all. So
just choose the command, but I do want to
| | 03:31 | say this first. If you have used
Photoshop CS3 and you are wondering Auto Tone,
| | 03:36 | that's a new command, that never
existed before. It's just a rename. It used to
| | 03:40 | be called Auto Levels, now it's called
Auto Tone. It functions identically. So
| | 03:44 | no difference compared with
the old version of the command.
| | 03:47 | I am going to choose Auto Tone, and I
get this. Look at that. Amazing, this is
| | 03:53 | before and this is after. It was
capable of fixing the image that beautifully
| | 04:00 | that's stellar. We just went from a
cloudy day, not only did it take care of
| | 04:04 | the bad metering, that wasn't inherent,
there is a function of me breaking the
| | 04:07 | camera, it also kind of cleared up the
date and made the weather better, which
| | 04:11 | is fantastic of course.
| | 04:13 | Now let's try Auto Contrast, really
this is what you do. You just try them out.
| | 04:16 | See how they function. And so all I
did was I just took the exact same image
| | 04:20 | and duplicated it three times onto
independent layers. All right, so I'm going
| | 04:24 | to go to Auto Contrast,
turn it on and select it.
| | 04:26 | I am going up to the Image menu and
I'll choose Auto Contrast, and in case you
| | 04:30 | are wondering why am I applying static
color adjustments instead of applying
| | 04:33 | adjustment layers, that's because
these guys aren't easily applied. It is
| | 04:37 | possible to apply them as adjustment
layers but it's not easy to do, and that's
| | 04:41 | kind of pointless and sort of an
absurd thing to apply, something so simple
| | 04:45 | that really doesn't have any control
associated with it as an adjustment layer.
| | 04:49 | I am going to go ahead and apply Auto
Contrast now to the static pixels, and it
| | 04:53 | looks like this, so not much happened
there. A very subtle change. This is
| | 04:58 | before and this is after. Now you may
wonder, well, is there some reason that
| | 05:01 | these commands are in this order? Auto
Tone first, and Auto Contrast, and Auto
| | 05:05 | Color? Because Auto Contrast seems to
do less than Auto Tone, and you will see
| | 05:08 | Auto Color does more, so why isn't it
Auto Contrast first, then Auto Tone, and
| | 05:12 | then Auto Color? That would make more sense.
| | 05:14 | They are arranged in the order in
which they happened inside of Photoshop. So
| | 05:20 | Auto Levels occurred first. I think it
was Photoshop 2.5 and then Auto Contrast
| | 05:24 | came around, and I believe, I want to
say it's Photoshop 5.5 but it may have
| | 05:28 | been 5, and then Auto Color came
around in Photoshop 7. So this is before the
| | 05:32 | whole CS thing, and that's the reason
they have just sort of sat there in the
| | 05:36 | same order they appeared inside the software.
| | 05:38 | Auto Tone will compensate for color
cast, Auto Contrast will fix the contrast
| | 05:43 | of the image, but it will not
compensate for color cast. So it doesn't do a
| | 05:46 | very good job where this image is
concerned. Let's now take a look at Auto
| | 05:50 | Color, turn it on, this is the Auto
Color layer version of the image, and then
| | 05:55 | I'm going to go out to the Image menu
and choose Auto Color, and bang, that
| | 06:00 | does a beautiful job. So not only
did it correct the contrast, it also
| | 06:04 | corrected the color cast, and it
tried to neutralize the grays inside the
| | 06:08 | image. So I'm going to turn off this
Auto Contrast layer because it's no good.
| | 06:12 | It was not a good adjustment; and I
just want to compare Auto Color to Auto Tone here.
| | 06:16 | So I'll turn off Auto Color. There is
Auto Tone in the background, looks good.
| | 06:21 | Photoshop did manage to not only
compensate for the contrast but also the color
| | 06:25 | cast of the image, however it left the
neutral areas, the areas that should be
| | 06:30 | colorless grays. In other words, it
left them somewhat bluish-green, whereas
| | 06:35 | Auto Color was capable of making them
neutral grays as we are seeing right
| | 06:40 | there, and basically, making the
scene every bit as good as it should be.
| | 06:46 | Now if you feel like, gosh, some sort
of mix of Auto Color and Auto Tone would
| | 06:52 | be nice, then because you set things up
on independent layers as I have for you
| | 06:56 | actually in advance, then you could
go ahead and reduce the opacity of Auto
| | 07:00 | Color. For example, I could say, you
know what, let's change the Opacity value
| | 07:03 | to say 75%, and press the Enter key in
order to accept that modification, and
| | 07:09 | just a slight interaction, so 75% Auto
Color mixed with the remaining 25% Auto
| | 07:15 | Tone gets us this beautifully mixed image here.
| | 07:18 | So I'm going to show you before and
after by Alt+Clicking or Option+Clicking on
| | 07:22 | the eyeball in front of the Background
layer. So this is before, this is the
| | 07:24 | original image, it was that bad,
absurdly horrible this image was, I tell you,
| | 07:31 | and now if I Alt+Click or Option+Click
and then eyeball again, this is how good
| | 07:35 | it is. I'm going to Shift+
Tab away those palettes.
| | 07:37 | So again, this is before, I did that by
reverting, by pressing F12, this is the
| | 07:42 | after version of the image. Thanks
to three little children, three little
| | 07:46 | incredibly powerful children that
when they work, if you apply them to the
| | 07:50 | right kind of problem in the first
place, work brilliantly well. In the next
| | 07:55 | exercise, I'm going to show you how
those commands function, just so that you
| | 07:58 | have a sense of what's going
on under the hood. Stay tuned!
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cache levels and the Histogram palette| 00:00 | The next couple of exercises are
devoted to looking under the hood where the
| | 00:05 | three Auto commands are concerned.
These guys right here, Auto Tone, Auto
| | 00:08 | Contrast, Auto Color, I'm going to
show you exactly what they are doing.
| | 00:12 | So essentially you should be forewarned.
We are going to be taking these very
| | 00:15 | simple commands. They are so simple to
apply, right? They just do their thing
| | 00:18 | miraculously, mysteriously, magically,
and I'm going to make them seem terribly
| | 00:22 | complicated, because behind the
scenes they are fairly complicated.
| | 00:26 | The good news is by understanding
how these commands work you can better
| | 00:29 | anticipate their behavior, which is
really a good thing. And you can start
| | 00:33 | actually taking advantage of them.
They are totally under-utilized commands,
| | 00:37 | believe me. If you are in a hurry and
you are just trying to get some color
| | 00:40 | manipulations applied across a wide
series of images, and you want to get the
| | 00:44 | work done in like five minutes, these
are great commands if you know what they do
| | 00:48 | especially Auto Color, by
the way, brilliant command.
| | 00:52 | So I'm going to be to showing you
exactly what's going on with them in the next
| | 00:55 | exercise. In this exercise I want to
explore this image and I'm going to tell
| | 00:58 | you a little thing about how
histograms work and how they are cached in
| | 01:03 | Photoshop. Which we need to
know before we can proceed.
| | 01:05 | So I'm working inside of this image
called Bling-bling.psd, so-called because
| | 01:10 | it contains a bunch of money. And the
term bling-bling I think is a little long
| | 01:14 | in the tooth anymore. Once upon a
time sort of a hipster term, now overused.
| | 01:18 | Since speaking of long in the tooth, we
have George Washington right here, father
| | 01:22 | of our money, and this is an old school
dollar bill. I'm here to tell you
| | 01:27 | the best way to understand how the Auto
commands work is with old school American
| | 01:32 | money, just boring old green money.
Those greenbacks, they will show you how
| | 01:37 | the Auto commands work. And so
that's why I have got this image open.
| | 01:40 | Now notice inside this file we have a
series of layers, a Control layer,
| | 01:44 | and I should say every one of these
layers is identical to each other; they are
| | 01:47 | spreading off the same way. But the
Control layer is the one we will not change
| | 01:50 | so that you can see what the original
scan look like, and then we have Auto Tone
| | 01:54 | and Auto Contrast and Auto Color,
and we will be applying those commands
| | 01:58 | to those layers in short order.
| | 01:59 | First though I want you to understand
what's going on, where this image is
| | 02:02 | concerned and so we are going to bring
up the Histogram palette right there,
| | 02:06 | and you can also get the Histogram
palette of course by going to the Window menu
| | 02:09 | and choosing the Histogram command.
| | 02:11 | And here is what I want you to do, if
you are working along with me. I want you
| | 02:14 | to go to the little menu icon right
there in the upper right corner of the
| | 02:17 | Histogram palette and I want you to
choose the All Channels View so that we can
| | 02:21 | see expanded versions of the histogram,
as well as each one of the channels.
| | 02:25 | Now notice the channels are labeled in
a very confusing manner at least on the PC here.
| | 02:30 | Red is too far away from the red one.
This one, if you were looking at the
| | 02:33 | label you would say, oh, this is
the green histogram, this is the blue
| | 02:36 | histogram, and this is the unknown
nameless ghost histogram. Don't know what it is,
| | 02:41 | because the labels are in the wrong place.
| | 02:43 | It'd be really nice if some designer at
Adobe, I'm sure they have a couple who
| | 02:47 | will take care of this problem, it's
been this way forever. But here is a great
| | 02:50 | way for you to take care of the
problem. You just go up to the menu and you
| | 02:52 | choose Show Channels in Color and then
you can ignore the labels and you can
| | 02:56 | see this one is red, even though red
is a mile away from it, and this one is
| | 02:59 | green and this one is blue, and this
one is the Composite view. Now I'm going
| | 03:03 | to switch the Composite view from the
RGB to Colors so that we can see the
| | 03:06 | colors overlapping each other. So we
can see now blue is just shoved up there
| | 03:10 | and moved into this position. I mean,
in other words, we are just taking blue,
| | 03:12 | green, and red, and we are plopping
them on top of each other, and where they
| | 03:16 | intersect we get intersecting colors,
for example, red and green of course
| | 03:19 | mixed together to form yellow right there.
| | 03:22 | So this is the best way to work in
terms of just understanding what's going on.
| | 03:26 | I'm also going to switch Source to
Selected Layer so we are just seeing the
| | 03:30 | selected layer instead of all of the
layers mushed together, which doesn't
| | 03:34 | really help us out at all.
| | 03:36 | And then finally I want you to note,
I can switch between layers. Notice that
| | 03:40 | I'm switching between layers by
clicking on them, nothing mysterious there, but
| | 03:44 | we are not seeing little caution signs,
and this guy isn't becoming active.
| | 03:48 | I'm not having a problem with having to
update the histogram over-and-over again,
| | 03:51 | and that's because I made a little
change to Photoshop's default behavior.
| | 03:56 | I change, I do not recommend you make.
I just want you to know what I have done
| | 04:00 | just in case, for example, you are a
teacher, and you want to be able teach
| | 04:03 | this stuff, and you don't want to
have to go up there and click this little
| | 04:05 | Update icon every ten seconds, every
time you are trying to show off something.
| | 04:09 | This is just an FYI and those of you
who are just using the application for
| | 04:13 | everyday use you might want to know
about this as well. You go to Edit menu and
| | 04:18 | this would be the Photoshop menu on
the Mac. You go down here to Preferences
| | 04:21 | and then you choose Performance, and
then you would reduce the Cache Levels to
| | 04:25 | 1 and then you have to restart the
program. You have to quit it and then
| | 04:29 | restart it, and then this option takes
effect, and this is the way it is for
| | 04:33 | most of the Performance options by the
way. Most of them require you to quit
| | 04:36 | the program and then restart it.
| | 04:37 | And the thing that's going on with
Cache Levels by the way, it's normally set
| | 04:41 | to 4 which means that four different
versions of the histograms are cached in
| | 04:46 | memory which means that things happen
much more quickly, and it's not just the
| | 04:50 | generation of the histograms that
happens much more quickly it's switching
| | 04:54 | between channels which if I were right
now to switch between channels for you
| | 04:57 | would see it's mind-numbingly slow at 1
Cache Level, it's horrible. So this is
| | 05:01 | why I don't recommend you work this way.
| | 05:03 | And also applying color corrections
is a little bit slow; undoing them is
| | 05:08 | mind-bogglingly slow. It takes much
more longer to undo them than it does to
| | 05:13 | apply them in the first place. It
really munches out the program. So I don't
| | 05:17 | recommend you do it.
| | 05:18 | When you are just trying to get a
sense of what's going on with histograms
| | 05:21 | especially inside the Histogram
palette, that does make things better, so
| | 05:24 | that's why I set my number of Cache
Levels to 1. If you want the faster
| | 05:27 | performance, but you are going to
have to monkey around with updating your
| | 05:30 | histograms more often, you can raise
this guy as high I believe as 8, yes, it
| | 05:35 | goes as high as 8, by default it's at 4.
And I tell you what, as soon as I'm
| | 05:38 | done with this exercise in the next one,
I am going to return it to 4 so that
| | 05:43 | the program behaves itself in the
future and I'm going to restart the program.
| | 05:46 | So again, I don't recommend you do
what I have done. I just want you to know
| | 05:50 | exactly where I'm coming from. After all,
I'm showing you what's going on under
| | 05:53 | the hood. It would be unfair to do something
in the background without you knowing about it.
| | 05:57 | So this is what the Histogram looks like.
Just one more thing about this before
| | 06:02 | we move on to the next exercise. I
want you to see how these various channels
| | 06:07 | are arranged. Notice that our shadow
detail right here, such as it is. We have
| | 06:13 | pretty light shadows. This area here
is largely unfulfilled inside of this
| | 06:17 | image. So we have our shadows right
about here, and they are fairly neutral,
| | 06:21 | meaning the shadows kind of overlap
each other in each one of the channels,
| | 06:25 | whereas our highlights are not neutral
at all. We have a lot going on inside
| | 06:30 | green where the highlight detail is
concerned, less going on in red and even
| | 06:34 | less going on in blue. That's why
we have this greenish-yellowish tinge
| | 06:38 | associated with the
highlights inside of our money.
| | 06:41 | So, that is going to affect how these
commands behave, because each one of them
| | 06:48 | is looking at the original histogram
and making decisions about how to fix the
| | 06:53 | image based on that histogram. And
each one is making different decisions as we'll see.
| | 06:58 | All right, so I set the scene. You know
what's going on with Cache Levels,
| | 07:02 | you know what's going on with the Histogram
palette, you have it set up properly.
| | 07:05 | In the next exercise we are going to
actually apply those commands and see what
| | 07:09 | they do and you will -- I swear to you,
you will totally know, you will be an
| | 07:13 | expert on Auto, coming right up.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| How the auto commands work| 00:00 |
For those of you who sat with the
previous exercise, which was all set up for
| | 00:04 |
this exercise frankly, I now reward
you with this exercise, which is all
| | 00:08 |
follow-up from the previous exercise.
I'm actually going to show you how these
| | 00:12 |
commands Auto Tone, Auto Contrast and
Auto Color work. How they look at the
| | 00:16 |
existing histograms for an image
and make modifications based on those histograms.
| | 00:21 |
I have got my Histogram palette, all
set up, ready to go. I'm going to move it
| | 00:24 |
over to the left-hand side of the
screen, get it out of the palette structure
| | 00:28 |
for a moment so that we can see each
one of our images in full. So I'm going to
| | 00:34 |
be starting things off with this guy
right here, which is the Auto Tone layer
| | 00:37 |
right there, so I'll go ahead
and click on it to select it.
| | 00:39 |
Now, I remind you of the histograms
that we have going. Notice that we have a
| | 00:42 |
fair gap over in the highlight side of
the histogram; bear in mind, where the
| | 00:46 |
Histogram is concerned, this is a bar
graph of course of all the luminance
| | 00:49 |
levels inside of the image as you may
recall from Chapter 05 if you watched it, way long ago.
| | 00:54 |
Over here on the left-hand side is
black and over here on the far right-hand
| | 00:57 |
side is white and the other luminance
levels are gray value is in between on a
| | 01:03 |
channel-by-channel basis. So we don't
have much in a way of shadows going on
| | 01:07 |
inside this image, so we are going
to have to correct for that. So the
| | 01:10 |
Histogram is going to get stretched out,
every one of these Auto commands is
| | 01:13 |
going to stretch out this Histogram to
fill in those shadows and increase the
| | 01:16 |
contrast. So they all
increase the contrast of the image.
| | 01:20 |
But because we have different gaps
going on the highlight side of things, a
| | 01:23 |
small gap over here and even smaller
gap for green, which is why the highlights
| | 01:28 |
appears, so very green and a big gap
for blue. Because they are different, they
| | 01:33 |
are going to be accommodated differently
by the various different Auto commands.
| | 01:37 |
So we are going to start things off
with Auto Tone because it's the first
| | 01:40 |
command to appear. I'm going to go up
to the Image menu and I'm going to choose
| | 01:43 |
Auto Tone and I want you to watch not
only what happens to George here, George
| | 01:47 |
Hamilton, I presume because he is on
money after all. Not only what happens to
| | 01:52 |
George, but also what happens to the
various histograms that represent George
| | 01:56 |
in a fairly statistical manner. So
I'll go ahead and choose Auto Tone and
| | 02:00 |
notice, all the histograms get stretched.
| | 02:02 |
So the darkest color in each and
every channel becomes black and a lightest
| | 02:07 |
color in each and every channel
becomes white. So each one of the independent
| | 02:10 |
histograms is stretched differently,
meaning that each one of the channels,
| | 02:16 |
red, green and blue is corrected
differently. And as a result, we have pretty
| | 02:21 |
much made the lightest color white
inside of this image. So what was formerly a
| | 02:26 |
greenish paper has now become a
fairly neutral sort of whitish paper.
| | 02:30 |
Also notice that our blacks or dark
colors here or shadows have gone from
| | 02:35 |
having a fairly greenish tinge
associated with them to fairly reddish now. So
| | 02:39 |
Auto Tone has a habit of
overcompensating for problems inside of the image.
| | 02:46 |
But in our case, these were problems.
We needed more contrast where the money
| | 02:50 |
is concerned but it was green, actual
money; I'm holding a Dollar Bill right
| | 02:54 |
here, it's actually greenish just
like the original scan. It's just that it
| | 02:58 |
lacked contrast, the original version
of the image over here lacked contrast
| | 03:02 |
and so we need more contrast. So Auto
Tone is not what we needed where this
| | 03:07 |
image is concerned. Possibly, since all
we need is more contrast, Auto Contrast
| | 03:11 |
would do a better job, so I'm going to
go ahead and click on that Auto Contrast
| | 03:15 |
layer right there and I'm going to
bring up my Navigator palette because it
| | 03:18 |
gives me a little more control other
than that bird's eye feature for this
| | 03:21 |
specific little diagram that I'm
demonstrating to you, and I'll put the
| | 03:26 |
Navigator palette out of the way, move
the Histogram palette over a little bit
| | 03:28 |
so that we can see the Auto Contrast
Test layer right there on the left-hand
| | 03:32 |
side of the screen.
| | 03:33 |
Now I'm going to go up to the Image
menu, watch the histograms, watch them as
| | 03:37 |
you watch George and I'm going to
apply Auto Contrast. And notice this time
| | 03:43 |
that each one of the histograms is
compensated to the same degree; in other
| | 03:49 |
words, there is a smallest gap left
over here on the right side of the red
| | 03:53 |
histogram, no gap left over here on the
right side of the green histogram and a
| | 03:57 |
proportionally large gap left over here
on the right side of the blue histogram.
| | 04:02 |
As a result, we have maintained the
green, so we have a higher degree of
| | 04:06 |
contrast but we still have green
highlights. So if your color cast was correct
| | 04:11 |
and you just need more contrast inside
the image, then Auto Contrast is your
| | 04:15 |
guy, and notice also that we have
stretched the entire composite histogram
| | 04:20 |
without affecting the overall color
balance. So this is the Control layer right
| | 04:25 |
there. Notice that it's a squished
histogram in this area but we've got three
| | 04:29 |
very distinct peaks of blue, red and
green and this is now the Auto Contrast
| | 04:33 |
histogram which is stretched over
the course of the entire width of the
| | 04:37 |
histogram now, but we still have
distinct peaks at blue and red and green.
| | 04:42 |
All right, now let's take a look at
Auto Color, which is the most complicated
| | 04:46 |
of the gang, and by the way, the one
that's likely to do you the best job for
| | 04:52 |
your standard everyday average image.
So I'm going to bring up the Navigator,
| | 04:56 |
and I'm going to just move over here
to the right a little bit so that we can
| | 04:59 |
see the lower right version of George.
Hide Navigator, move Histogram over so
| | 05:06 |
that we can see him in all of his
splendor. Watch the histograms once again.
| | 05:09 |
Now, I need to set things up a little
bit this time. If you were to select this
| | 05:14 |
region, sort of look at the shadow
region, you will see that we are seeing a
| | 05:17 |
little bit of the shadow region.
Notice here at the far left side of this
| | 05:20 |
shadow region is showing up as Magenta,
showing us that it's a combination of
| | 05:24 |
red and blue working together. So
that might make you think our shadows are
| | 05:28 |
going to be reddish-blue. They are
actually in fact green because the lightest
| | 05:32 |
color in the shadow is green.
| | 05:34 |
So where the shadows are concerned,
they are most bright where green is
| | 05:37 |
concerned, and then of course, where
the highlights are concerned, they are
| | 05:41 |
most bright where green is concerned as
well. Now, what Auto Color is going to
| | 05:45 |
do is it's going to analyze this
highlight information and try to make it as
| | 05:50 |
neutral as it can, and then it's going
to evaluate the shadow detail here. The
| | 05:54 |
shadow information, it may get as
neutral as it can, and then it's also going
| | 05:58 |
to follow things up by trying to
balance out the mid-tones and it does a great job of it.
| | 06:02 |
I will go up to Image and I'll choose
Auto Color, and now we can see, this is
| | 06:06 |
the Auto Colored version of the image
and it's neutral across the board. Check
| | 06:11 |
that out. So it's even more neutral
than Auto Tone is, I'll go ahead and switch
| | 06:15 |
up to Auto Tone. Notice that Auto
Tone over-corrected the image, it
| | 06:18 |
overcompensated by changing my
shadows to reddish and it also made the
| | 06:22 |
highlights a little bit reddish as well,
whereas Auto Color did a great job of
| | 06:27 |
just completely making those central
highlights neutral, those central shadows
| | 06:32 |
neutral and those central mid-tones
neutral as well, by which I mean anything
| | 06:37 |
that really has strong colors
associated with it, like this green over here,
| | 06:40 |
that remains colorful. It's just the
areas that Auto Color determines ought to
| | 06:45 |
be neutral that end up getting
neutralized like these highlights right here.
| | 06:49 |
So we end up having something of a gray-
scale Dollar Bill and you can see now,
| | 06:52 |
this region of shadow pretty much is
balanced between red, green and blue. So
| | 06:57 |
we are not seeing an awful lot of
spikes going on that are either exclusively
| | 07:00 |
blue or green or red, and same with
the highlights. They are also quite
| | 07:04 |
well-balanced. That's very interesting
that that's what happens for money. So
| | 07:07 |
where money is concerned assuming that
you had a scan like we started with, our
| | 07:12 |
best bet would be of course Auto
Contrast that ends up delivering the most
| | 07:16 |
money like money, unless we wanted to
get rid of the previous color balance.
| | 07:21 |
Where Auto pools is concerned --
and by the way these are the corrected
| | 07:25 |
versions of the pool image from a
couple of exercises ago, and I went ahead and
| | 07:29 |
named this image Auto pools.psd. Where
Auto pools are concerned, it's a little
| | 07:33 |
different, it's a little more of a
murky equation here because there is just
| | 07:37 |
more stuff going on, and so we have
very shadowy group of reds going on -- a
| | 07:42 |
very light group of greens going on and
a very sort of mid-tone group of blues going on.
| | 07:47 |
So when we end up switching to Auto Tone,
of course, and this is the Auto Tone
| | 07:51 |
version of the image right there on the
Auto Tone layer of course. I have gone
| | 07:55 |
ahead and stretched every single one
of these histograms across the entire
| | 08:00 |
Histogram palette, across the entire
width of the graph, whereas Auto Contrast
| | 08:05 |
of course, if I go ahead and turn
that on, you can see that it is still
| | 08:08 |
imbalanced, the colors are still of
the same balance they were in the first
| | 08:11 |
place, the entire histogram is
stretched. So it's a composite view that gets
| | 08:15 |
stretched, and then, Auto Color, the
most complicated version but the best
| | 08:19 |
correction of the bunch here and let's
go ahead and take that Opacity value up
| | 08:24 |
to 100%, so we get the best
representation of this modification here, and you
| | 08:29 |
can see what it's done.
| | 08:30 |
In this case, I do have a lot of
colorful spikes going on inside the shadows
| | 08:33 |
versus the highlights versus the mid-
tones, but bear this in mind. This is what
| | 08:38 |
the original version of the image
look like inside the Histogram. So
| | 08:42 |
predominantly red shadows, this region
right here, extremely red, very little
| | 08:46 |
green and blue stuff going on whereas
inside the highlights, extremely green,
| | 08:50 |
less blue and even less red going. We
don't get to any red still about right
| | 08:55 |
there in the graph in the mid-tone region.
| | 08:57 |
So you take a look at the Auto Color
and this region now is balanced, where the
| | 09:03 |
red, green and blue is concerned. So
we have something of a gap over here on
| | 09:07 |
the shadow side of the reds, but
that's because we have this big galumphing
| | 09:11 |
mountain of reds at this location.
So it's really trying to balance those
| | 09:15 |
colors over this entire region, this is
the shadow region that I'm highlighting
| | 09:18 |
here, and it is trying to balance
the various channels over the entire
| | 09:21 |
highlight region as well, and then of
course balance the mid-tones in order to
| | 09:25 |
come up with this beautifully
compensated image right there.
| | 09:28 |
I'll go ahead and move the Histogram
palette off-screen so that we can take a
| | 09:32 |
look at that final correction that
we have already seen of course in all
| | 09:34 |
fairness, but still it's just so good,
Auto Color does such a great job.
| | 09:39 |
So here's how it works. When in doubt,
Auto Color is going to do the best job
| | 09:43 |
for you. If Auto Color doesn't quite
come through the way you wanted to and you
| | 09:47 |
have a very distinct color cast going
on that you're trying to account for,
| | 09:51 |
undo Auto Color, you don't want to
apply two of these commands on top of each
| | 09:55 |
other, that's not going to work for you.
So undo Auto Color and then try Auto
| | 09:58 |
Tone instead. If the color balance was
already good the way it was and all you
| | 10:03 |
wanted to do is increase the contrast,
then Auto Contrast is your guy, and
| | 10:07 |
that's how those commands work.
| | 10:08 |
In the next exercise, I'm going to
show you the mother of those commands,
| | 10:13 |
Levels.
| | 10:14 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| A first look at Levels| 00:00 | In this exercise I'm going to introduce
you to the Levels command and I'm going
| | 00:03 | to show you how to apply all of the
Auto adjustments we have seen so far from
| | 00:07 | inside the Levels dialog box, and
control the behavior of those Auto
| | 00:11 | adjustments. Pretty cool stuff, and
then we will move on from there, we will be
| | 00:15 | applying our own manual Levels and
Curves modifications over the course of this chapter.
| | 00:19 | Let's start off by opening this image.
It's called Max at computer.jpg and this
| | 00:23 | is a photograph of my elder son Max.
Even though I'm very happy with the
| | 00:27 | composition, and gee whiz, my son looks
great here. I'm not so crazy about the
| | 00:32 | color cast and the Luminance levels and
blah, blah, blah, and so I could go up
| | 00:38 | to the Image menu and I could say, you
know, one of these Auto commands should
| | 00:42 | do me pretty nicely because after all
this is a low contrast image and it's got
| | 00:46 | a color cast. So that's perfect, right?
| | 00:48 | So let's go ahead and try Auto Color
and see what happens. Not very satisfying,
| | 00:53 | didn't really work very well there.
So I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or
| | 00:57 | Command+Z on the Mac to undo that
operation. Go back up to the Image menu right
| | 01:00 | there and try Auto Tone this time. And
that's different but qualitatively I'd
| | 01:06 | say it's the same, it's still bad. So
I'm going to go ahead and press Ctrl+Z,
| | 01:11 | Command+Z on the Mac.
| | 01:12 | So that's the thing about the Auto
commands. You try them sometimes and they
| | 01:15 | work beautifully, you try them other
times and they don't do nearly what you
| | 01:19 | hope they would do.
| | 01:20 | And that's when you go ahead and
choose either Levels or Curves. I'm going to
| | 01:24 | go to the Image menu, choose
Adjustments and I'm going to show you Levels and Curves here.
| | 01:28 | Levels is the command you want to try
first, generally speaking. And notice
| | 01:32 | that Photoshop is even telling you
as much because it went ahead and gave
| | 01:35 | Ctrl+L or Command+L, that just
wonderful simple keyboard shortcut to Levels. It
| | 01:41 | didn't give Ctrl or Command+C to
Curves because that's use my copy obviously
| | 01:45 | under the Edit menu. But instead it
gave Ctrl+M or Command+M. Why? Because it's
| | 01:50 | letter after L. So if Levels doesn't
work for you, this is Photoshop talking.
| | 01:54 | Swear to you. If Levels doesn't work
for you, then that's when you bring up the
| | 01:58 | big guns and you try out Curves. And
I'll show you how that works, but for this
| | 02:01 | image Levels is going to work nicely.
Basically Levels gives us three points of
| | 02:05 | control per color channel, so you have
control over the shadows, the highlights
| | 02:09 | and the midtones as you will see.
And you have access to all those Auto
| | 02:13 | functions as you do inside Curves as well.
| | 02:15 | All right, so let's go ahead and
choose Levels, and then in the next exercise
| | 02:19 | we are going to apply Levels as an
adjustment layer. But let's try it as a
| | 02:22 | static adjustment for starters. So go
ahead and choose the Levels command or
| | 02:26 | press Ctrl+L, but of course Command+L
on the Mac. And here is our histogram and
| | 02:30 | all of its glory going from black over
here on the left to white over here on
| | 02:35 | the right. And we are seeing the
composite histogram right here in the center
| | 02:39 | of the dialog. So we have got very
little in the way of shadows and we have got
| | 02:44 | next to nothing in the way of
highlights. So why in the world didn't the Auto
| | 02:49 | commands go ahead and get rid of all
this bad highlight information and expand
| | 02:53 | the highlights to fill in
so we had a brighter image?
| | 02:56 | Well, the reason is we have this big
spike of highlights of whites actually
| | 03:00 | right here on the right side of the
histogram and that prevented the Auto
| | 03:04 | commands from doing their thing. You
may notice though that there is an Auto
| | 03:08 | button right there inside of the
Levels dialog box, and if you click on it,
| | 03:13 | guess what you apply? You apply what
used to be called Auto levels, which is
| | 03:17 | now called Auto Tone for whatever
reason. But you apply the Auto Tone
| | 03:21 | variation, which is to say it goes
ahead and adjust the histogram for each one
| | 03:25 | of the R, G and B channels
independently of each other. So that the darkest
| | 03:30 | color is black and lightest color is white.
| | 03:32 | But that didn't really do much because
we already had a very light highlight;
| | 03:36 | we are ahead of white in most of
these channels. And we have something very
| | 03:40 | close to a black in each of the
channels as well. So it actually made the image
| | 03:44 | a little darker, which is not what
we wanted. But if you go over here to
| | 03:48 | Options, then you can access the whole
shebang here, all of the Auto functions.
| | 03:54 | This is like Auto Control Central
right here, this weird dialog box that most
| | 03:58 | people never go to but it can be
actually quite illuminating, quite helpful.
| | 04:02 | And notice here that we have these
three options, Enhance Monochromatic
| | 04:05 | Contrast, Enhance Per Channel
Contrast and Find Dark & Light Colors. Well,
| | 04:09 | there are three of them. And guess what,
there are three Auto functions, and
| | 04:13 | guess what else, each one of these
corresponds to one of the Auto functions. So
| | 04:16 | if I hover over Enhance Per Channel
Contrast right there, I can see this tip
| | 04:21 | that says Clip color channels
independently to increase contrast and alter
| | 04:24 | color casts (Auto Tone). Did you see
that? I'll hover again. That final item in
| | 04:28 | the tip, in parenthesis says Auto Tone,
to show you that this is the Auto Tone
| | 04:32 | function right there.
| | 04:33 | And if I were to select this first one,
and I'll hover over it. Notice it says
| | 04:37 | blah, blah, blah, blah, Auto Contrast,
that's the Auto Contrast function right
| | 04:41 | there. So if I click on it, I'll get
the Auto Contrast effect instead. And then
| | 04:46 | if I hover over this guy, Find Dark &
Light Colors, that is blah, blah, blah,
| | 04:49 | blah, blah, Auto Color. So I'll go
ahead and select it and that gives me the
| | 04:54 | Auto Color function. Not looking so good.
| | 04:56 | Well, there is one other feature that's
associated with Auto Color. So far what
| | 05:00 | we've done is we've gone ahead and
expanded the shadows and the highlights to
| | 05:04 | the extent that it could, which
wasn't very much where the highlights are
| | 05:06 | concerned. As I was saying before for
the same reason because we have this big shock
| | 05:10 | of white right there. That's in
this lamp in the background up there by
| | 05:14 | the way. So it's gone ahead and
neutralized those shadows and those highlights
| | 05:18 | such as it found them. But it did not
neutralize the midtones. You have to turn
| | 05:21 | on this checkbox as well. And notice
if I hover over the checkbox, it says
| | 05:24 | blah, blah, blah, Auto Color. It's
another Auto Color function. The nifty thing
| | 05:29 | is however, not only can you combine it
with this piece of Auto Color, you can
| | 05:33 | also combine it with this piece of
Auto Levels or this piece of Auto Contrast
| | 05:37 | if you want to. So we have further control.
| | 05:39 | Now it's not actually doing anything
that we wanted to do so far but we can
| | 05:43 | make it do something that we wanted
to do so far. Am I talking properly yet
| | 05:48 | using these clipping functions down
here? And I'm going to show you how these
| | 05:53 | clipping functions work in the next
exercise. So for now I'm just going to
| | 05:56 | cancel out. Goodbye, goodbye. You are
not doing me any good so far. In the next
| | 06:01 | exercise we are going to go over here
to Layers palette and the Adjustments
| | 06:03 | palette. We are going to apply the
Levels command as an adjustments layer and
| | 06:07 | then we are really going to get
into it folks. So join me, won't you?
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Target colors and clipping| 00:00 | We are still working inside Max at
computer.jpg but this time we are going to
| | 00:05 | be applying the Levels command as an
adjustment layer and we are still going to
| | 00:09 | stick with the Auto features but we are
going to mitigate their behavior using
| | 00:13 | the clipping functions, which is going
to go a long way, not all the way, but a
| | 00:17 | long way towards correcting this
image the way I want it corrected anyway.
| | 00:21 | And then because we are working with
an adjustment layer we can come back and
| | 00:24 | change our mind and make some
modifications and get everything exactly right.
| | 00:28 | So as I say I'm working inside Max at
computer, already told you that. So here
| | 00:32 | we go over to the Adjustments palette,
and so make sure you are seeing your
| | 00:36 | Layers palette as well, and
Adjustments palette. Then I want you to click on
| | 00:40 | this little guy, the second guy in
Level. So notice the order here, it goes
| | 00:43 | right in this contrast, we saw that
way back in Chapter 05, it's a good
| | 00:46 | command, it's not good enough for this
image because it just doesn't give us
| | 00:50 | the degree of control we need. I'll go
ahead and show you, I could expand the
| | 00:53 | contrast here and I could brighten
the image up. But it's not a good
| | 00:57 | correction, right?
| | 00:58 | So let's go ahead and get rid of this
layer just by pressing the Backspace key
| | 01:04 | or the Delete key on the Mac, how
easy is that here inside Photoshop CS4. I
| | 01:08 | love that keyboard shortcut. Once
again Photoshop is telling you what to do
| | 01:11 | here, it's saying, okay, try and
brighten this contrast first, if it that
| | 01:14 | doesn't work for your luminance changes,
your luminance modifications then try
| | 01:18 | Levels, and if that doesn't work then
try Curves. And then Photoshop loses its
| | 01:23 | mind and says then try Exposure.
Actually never try Exposure is my
| | 01:27 | recommendation to you.
| | 01:29 | So let's go back to the same
command, these guys right here,
| | 01:32 | Brightness/Contrast, Levels, and Curves.
And I'm going to try out Levels but of
| | 01:36 | course. So go ahead and click on that
puppy right there in order to bring up
| | 01:40 | the Levels functions inside the
Adjustments palette. You may recall that I have
| | 01:44 | set things up so we don't have an
extra layer mask down here that gets added
| | 01:48 | automatically and if you forget how
that's done, let me just show you right
| | 01:51 | here. From the Adjustments palette you
go to the little menu icon there, you
| | 01:54 | click on it and you turn off and it's
missing right now. I always forget about
| | 01:59 | this, you have to go back. I have to
click on this little green arrow here to
| | 02:02 | go back to my adjustment list and then
click on this menu icon and then turn
| | 02:07 | off this command which is otherwise not
available to me, which I would classify
| | 02:12 | as irritating.
| | 02:13 | But anyway, there it is, Add Mask
by Default. You want that off is my
| | 02:16 | recommendation to you because if you
don't need layer masks then its better
| | 02:20 | that you don't see them inside the
Layers palette otherwise it just clutter
| | 02:23 | things up. But there is another
function that I want you to turn on and that's
| | 02:26 | this guy Expanded View, you want to
see the expanded view of the Adjustments
| | 02:30 | palette if you have enough room on
screen. And I do, because I'm working in
| | 02:33 | this wide-screen now, lovely!
| | 02:36 | So it doesn't really add any benefit
to looking at the adjustment list here.
| | 02:40 | But if I now click on the blue right
pointing arrowhead then I go back to my
| | 02:44 | Levels Adjustment because Levels is
active down here, Levels 1. And I'll see my
| | 02:49 | Levels dialog box essentially here
inside of a palette in all of its all
| | 02:52 | blender and the width of the histogram
is 256 pixels which is what I need to
| | 02:57 | represent the 256 different luminance
levels per channel that are available to
| | 03:03 | me in a standard 8 bit per
channel RGB image which is what this is.
| | 03:07 | Now then I go over here to Auto and
click on it in order to apply Auto Tone.
| | 03:13 | Now you are seeing that tip right there,
right? I'll go ahead and apply Auto
| | 03:17 | Tone there by clicking on Auto. But
notice that tip because we are missing that
| | 03:20 | Options button while you use Alt for
Options here on the PC or Option for
| | 03:25 | Options on the Mac, which makes a heck
of a lot of sense I think. So I'm going
| | 03:28 | to go ahead and Alt+Click or Option+
Click on that Auto button in here, are my
| | 03:34 | auto correction features, very,
very useful bunch by the way.
| | 03:38 | So let's go to Find Dark & Light
Colors, which is what I want. And the Snap
| | 03:42 | Neutral Midtones I don't think
really does much for this specific image,
| | 03:46 | doesn't really appear to be doing
anything at this point. But I'll go ahead and
| | 03:49 | turn it off for now. We will see what happens.
| | 03:51 | Now notice down here that we have
Target Colors & Clipping. Now the Target
| | 03:54 | Colors allow you to define what the
color of a shadow is and what the color of
| | 03:59 | a highlight is. So what's the color of
black essentially, what's the color of
| | 04:02 | white, and what's the color of medium
gray. So that means you can essentially
| | 04:05 | colorize if you want to, your shadows,
your highlights, your midtones or you
| | 04:09 | can compensate for your printing
environment. But just to give you a sense of
| | 04:12 | what this looks like if you are trying
to achieve an effect, you would click on
| | 04:15 | Shadows let's say. And you would set it
to a bright red, for example. If that's
| | 04:20 | the effect you want and then the
darkest color inside the image becomes that
| | 04:24 | red. Get the idea.
| | 04:25 | So again it's useful for effects, we
could take that money for example, the
| | 04:29 | George Washington money, the dollar
bill and we could have made the blacks
| | 04:34 | inside the money like red or some
other color if we wanted to. But typically
| | 04:40 | where this comes in handy is the
folks will dial-in a specific CMYK value
| | 04:44 | that's been given to them by their
commercial printer, that is the darkest
| | 04:47 | color that they can render. And I'm
going to cancel out of here, and then for
| | 04:51 | Highlights they would give you a value
like they'd say, you know the lightest
| | 04:55 | color we can really hold on our
press is 3% Cyan, and 2% Magenta, and 3%
| | 05:00 | Yellow, and 3% Black or something along
those lines. Some arbitrary values that
| | 05:05 | they know work, and then you would say,
okay, and even though that looks a
| | 05:08 | little bit dark. So we are darkening
up the highlights, darkening up the
| | 05:11 | whites, that's the lightest color
that's going to survive on this specific press.
| | 05:16 | Anyway, cancel out of there, that's not
what I want to do for this image. What
| | 05:19 | I want to do because I'm just trying
to apply an RGB perceptual modification
| | 05:24 | here maybe I'm sending it to my inkjet-
printer or just emailing it or posting
| | 05:28 | in on the website, what have you, I
want to work with these clip values. Now
| | 05:32 | the clip values allow you to clip
more of these highlights than we are
| | 05:37 | currently clipping them. By clipping I
mean just shave them off, just get rid
| | 05:41 | of those highlights and send them to
white and just get rid of some of the
| | 05:43 | shadows and send them to black.
| | 05:45 | Right now we are just clipping away
0.1% of the luminance levels inside this
| | 05:51 | image, so it's being very cautious
about how many luminance levels of clips.
| | 05:55 | Now if I didn't have this spike of
white, it would dig deeper into this area
| | 05:59 | here and would start clipping the
colors it finds. But it's finding colors of
| | 06:03 | the very, very apex of this histogram,
and so it's not changing anything really much at all.
| | 06:09 | If we raise this value and I want you
to watch the histogram, watch the image,
| | 06:13 | watch the value as well if you have
three eyes that move dependently of each
| | 06:16 | other. I'm going to click inside this
value to make it active then I'm going to
| | 06:19 | press Shift+Up Arrow and that's going
to take that value up by 0.1%. So it's a
| | 06:24 | very small modification but if I were
to just press the Up Arrow to raise it by
| | 06:28 | a hundredth of a percent which isn't
enough to get anything done. So that's why
| | 06:32 | I'm going to press Shift+Up Arrow a
few times in a row and watch what's
| | 06:35 | happening to the image and the
histogram keep going back and forth between the
| | 06:40 | two if you will. Notice the image is
of course brightening up and I'm shaving
| | 06:44 | off the edge of the histogram to a more
reasonable level. I'm actually getting
| | 06:48 | some work done now by clipping 1.6%
of colors, which is a lot by the way.
| | 06:54 | I am going to take that down a little
bit. I'm going to press Shift+Down Arrow
| | 06:56 | for 1.5%, which is good enough for this
image. Actually it does a brilliant job
| | 07:01 | and then I could click inside the
Shadow value right there and I could press
| | 07:05 | Shift+Up Arrow to take it up, a click
as well. And this is the effect I get of course.
| | 07:11 | Now I can experiment with different
algorithms right here, different Auto
| | 07:16 | functions so I could try Enhance Per
Channel Contrast. So that's no good, I
| | 07:21 | could try Enhance Monochromatic
Contrast. No, too yellow. I could go back to
| | 07:25 | Find Dark & Light Colors, that's
better. And then I could Snap the Neutral
| | 07:29 | Midtones and see if that makes any
difference, it still doesn't. And if you
| | 07:32 | wanted to then you could adjust the
color balance of your midtsones, instead of
| | 07:37 | going for gray, instead of trying to
clip those colors or snap those colors I
| | 07:41 | should say, too gray to
snap them to some other color.
| | 07:44 | For example, if I wanted to cool down
this image, I could click on Midtones and
| | 07:48 | I could select a cool color, which
would be something in the blue range of
| | 07:51 | course. And then I would go ahead and
raise its saturation like so, and I'm not
| | 07:55 | getting anything done, and the reason
is if Photoshop were able to find some
| | 08:00 | neutral midtones that we are snapping
at this point, it would go ahead and snap
| | 08:04 | them off to blue. But it's really not
finding anything to work with. So that's
| | 08:07 | why I'm not getting anything done, I'll
just go ahead and turn it off. And this
| | 08:12 | is good though. I dare say I like it.
I'll go ahead and click OK in order to
| | 08:16 | accept that effect.
| | 08:17 | Now it's going to ask me, hey, do you
want to save what you just did as your
| | 08:21 | new target colors? And no, I don't, I
was just goofing off. So we'll say, no, I
| | 08:26 | just want to apply these changes to
this image and this image only. And just to
| | 08:30 | give you a sense of what we were
able to accomplish, this is the original
| | 08:33 | version of the image. If I turn off
this adjustment layer and this is the
| | 08:36 | modified version of the image.
| | 08:38 | Now I say it's modified because I would
not go so far as to characterize it as
| | 08:43 | corrected yet. It's still not what I
want it to be but that's okay because I
| | 08:48 | have applied this adjustment
that's far as an adjustment layer, fully
| | 08:52 | modifiable, I can edit it anytime I
like so long as I save this image in the
| | 08:57 | native PSD format which I'm going to do.
And then I'm going to present it to
| | 09:00 | you in the very next exercise. So stay
tuned, we are going to make this image
| | 09:04 | look perfect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying input levels| 00:00 |
In this exercise we are going to take
a look at ways to adjust the composite
| | 00:04 |
histogram here inside of the
Adjustments palette, and in subsequent exercises
| | 00:09 |
we will take a look at Output Levels,
we will take a look at adjusting the
| | 00:13 |
histogram on a channel by channel basis,
and a few other nuanced modifications
| | 00:18 |
that you might apply.
| | 00:19 |
So I'm still working inside of the
photograph of Max, but I have gone ahead and
| | 00:23 |
saved my progress so far as an image
called Semi-corrected.psd and notice that
| | 00:29 |
I have gone ahead and named this
adjustment layer that I have created. I have
| | 00:32 |
called it Auto Color, Clip 0.2%, which
is for the shadows, and 1.5%, which is
| | 00:38 |
for the highlights.
| | 00:40 |
You would normally be able to
confirm that by going up to the Adjustments
| | 00:44 |
palette here. You just click on this
adjustment layer, go to the Adjustments palette,
| | 00:48 |
theoretically it would be open for you,
and you would just Alt+click
| | 00:51 |
or Option+click on Auto, and that
would bring up your last hue settings.
| | 00:55 |
Now it's working for me because I just
got done applying them. For you however,
| | 00:59 |
when you open up this image, assuming
that you are using the first version of
| | 01:03 |
Photoshop CS4 and they haven't bugged
fixed this yet, it's probably going to
| | 01:07 |
reset everything to Enhance Per
Channel Contrast and the Clip values will be
| | 01:11 |
their defaults of 0.1% apiece.
| | 01:14 |
So it doesn't remember the previous
settings, which is really actually not a
| | 01:19 |
good thing, but anyway you could reset
them just by applying the settings you
| | 01:23 |
see right here on the screen. Anyway
I'm going to cancel out. And tell you what,
| | 01:26 |
this is a pretty good automatic
color correction, I would go so far as to say.
| | 01:30 |
But let's try something different
without completely ruining our previous settings.
| | 01:35 |
So let's just go ahead and turn the
old adjustment layer off, so that it's
| | 01:39 |
sitting there waiting to be used again.
The great thing about the adjustment
| | 01:42 |
layers, as I mentioned this earlier in
my Fundamental Series, but notice down
| | 01:45 |
here in the lower left corner of the
image window, we'll see Doc is 9.79M flat,
| | 01:51 |
and then we see a slash, and
it's also 9.79M including layers.
| | 01:55 |
So the adjustment layer doesn't take
up any room, and when I say it doesn't
| | 01:59 |
take up any room, it takes up a few
bytes of data, and bytes are little bitty
| | 02:04 |
bits of data. They are eight bits of
data a piece actually. But they are
| | 02:08 |
nothing compared to kilobytes and
kilobytes are nothing compared to megabytes,
| | 02:11 |
which are nothing compared to
gigabytes, and terabytes, and all the other
| | 02:15 |
things that will bite you.
| | 02:17 |
So anyway, I'm just saying that these
are really tiny and you might as well
| | 02:20 |
just keep them. So keeping old
unused adjustment layers is just fine and
| | 02:24 |
actually a good practice. So now I'm
going to go back to the Adjustments palette,
| | 02:28 |
this whopping big palette
that is taking up so much space on my screen,
| | 02:31 |
which I resent, by the way,
I should just say this very quickly.
| | 02:34 |
Notice this big empty space down here?
The reason we are seeing this big empty
| | 02:39 |
space down here is because the
Adjustments palette is always set to consume as
| | 02:43 |
much space as the biggest adjustment,
which happens to be Curves. So the Curves
| | 02:48 |
Adjustments as we'll see will take up
this entire region, but Levels doesn't.
| | 02:51 |
I wish this darn thing was smart enough
to collapse if we don't need the
| | 02:55 |
unused space, because Layers are getting
squished down here, and they are going
| | 02:58 |
to get even more squished in just a second,
but not the way things are working out right now.
| | 03:01 |
So I'm going to click on this green
arrow right there, to return to my
| | 03:05 |
Adjustments list, and then I'm going
to Alt+Click or Option+Click on this
| | 03:10 |
little levels icon right there and by
the virtue of the fact I have the Alt or
| | 03:13 |
Option key down, Alt on PC, Option on
Mac, I'll bring up the New Layer dialog box,
| | 03:17 |
and I'll call this Composite
histogram modification, but that's implied,
| | 03:23 |
I'm not going to type that in there.
| | 03:24 |
Then I'll click OK in order to
create this new Composite histogram levels
| | 03:28 |
adjustment and notice that my image
itself is rolled off the bottom of the
| | 03:33 |
Layers palette, because this big
monstrous Adjustments palette is squishing it,
| | 03:38 |
but it's still there of course, it's
still down there. Anyway, got this Levels
| | 03:42 |
adjustment selected, and now let's
focus our attention on this middle region
| | 03:47 |
right here, which contains the
histogram itself, and these three values below
| | 03:52 |
the histogram which are the input levels.
| | 03:54 |
I should say whether you are working
within adjustment layer the way we are, or
| | 03:58 |
a composite levels modification, then
you are going to see a histogram, and
| | 04:02 |
you would see that if you are working
with a composite modification, by which I
| | 04:05 |
mean a static modification, that's
what I meant to say. If you went and
| | 04:08 |
applied, for example, under the image
menu, you went to Adjustments and then
| | 04:11 |
you applied the levels command, which
I can't right now, because I have an
| | 04:14 |
adjustment layer selected.
| | 04:16 |
But if you went that route, you would
still see a histogram inside the Levels
| | 04:19 |
dialog box, and you would see these
three values right here. So everything
| | 04:21 |
works the same, and what we are saying,
this histogram, I was saying way back
| | 04:26 |
in Chapter 5 of the Fundamental Series,
I was telling you that this histogram
| | 04:30 |
is a bar graph, of all the luminance
levels which are the little brightness
| | 04:34 |
values, the luminance levels inside of
the image, from black, over here on the
| | 04:38 |
left all the way over to white, over
here on the right. This graph when you are
| | 04:42 |
looking at the expanded view of this
palette, which we are, and you can switch
| | 04:46 |
between the two.
| | 04:46 |
You can switch between the itsy bitsy
standard view, which is squished. It
| | 04:51 |
unsquishes the Layers pallette, but
squishes the Adjustments palette which is
| | 04:55 |
no good, and of course the expanded
view which is better by clicking on this
| | 04:59 |
little folder icon right there. When
you are working in the expanded view, the
| | 05:02 |
histogram is exactly 256 pixels wide,
which is important, because there are 256
| | 05:07 |
different luminance levels per channel
inside of a standard 8 bit per channel
| | 05:11 |
image, which is the way that JPEG
images for example are saved, all JPEGs are
| | 05:17 |
saved that way, JPEG, RGB images.
| | 05:19 |
Anyway, notice these values underneath
the graph, 0 represents black, and this
| | 05:25 |
first value corresponds to the little
black slider triangle, and this last
| | 05:29 |
value here, the third value,
corresponds to the little white slider triangle,
| | 05:33 |
and it's 255, which is the luminance
level for white. Now I was telling you
| | 05:38 |
there are 256 different luminance levels,
and this tends to confuse people, why
| | 05:42 |
is white 255 and black is zero? 255
plus zero does not equal 256, where did the
| | 05:49 |
last guy go? Well it's black,
| | 05:51 |
So in other words, here's how it works.
One, there is a brightness value right
| | 05:55 |
next door, right, if I were to move
this over just ever so slightly, just one
| | 05:58 |
pixel over, there is the brightness
value of one, which is a very dark color,
| | 06:02 |
not quite black, but very dark. So you
got one going all the way over to 255,
| | 06:07 |
so those are your first 255
different luminance levels, plus you've got
| | 06:12 |
yourself black, which is represented
by the number zero, but it's still a
| | 06:16 |
distinct value.
| | 06:17 |
So you don't add zero, you just add one
more value for black and you would get
| | 06:21 |
256 different variations. So if I were
to work with this graph here, if I were
| | 06:26 |
to drag the black slider over to the
right, until I get an initial input levels
| | 06:30 |
value there of 12, then I'm saying,
anything with a luminance level of 12 or
| | 06:36 |
darker is going to get clipped to black,
and that is going to then spread out
| | 06:41 |
my histogram over the remaining area.
| | 06:44 |
This might make even more sense if I
were to take this white slider triangle,
| | 06:47 |
and notice how it's communicating
its information here with this third
| | 06:51 |
numerical option there. If I drag it
over to 192, let's say, then I'm saying
| | 06:56 |
anything with the brightness value of
192 or brighter is turning white, and
| | 07:01 |
that's going to stretch this
remaining area here, this histogram across the
| | 07:06 |
entire histogram space.
| | 07:08 |
So in other words, we are increasing
the contrast of the image, and you can see
| | 07:13 |
that actually happening here inside the
image window. See this guy right there,
| | 07:16 |
this little option right there; if I
were to click and hold on it, then I'll
| | 07:20 |
see the default version of the image,
with the current adjustment turned off.
| | 07:25 |
So it temporarily turns off the layer,
and then if I release, I'll see the
| | 07:30 |
corrected version of the image.
| | 07:31 |
So in other words, click and hold for
before, release for after, and you'll
| | 07:35 |
notice there's a little keyboard
shortcut associated with it, that's the
| | 07:38 |
Backslash key, and if you press and
hold Backslash, you may have luck with
| | 07:43 |
getting this to turn off for a second
and then release Backslash again to see
| | 07:47 |
the after version of the image.
| | 07:48 |
However, if I were to do it right now,
it would try to enter a backslash
| | 07:52 |
character into this little highlighted
option, and so let me see if I can click
| | 07:56 |
on something else here, like this RGB
Channel option, and then I'll press the
| | 08:00 |
Esc key. Now let me see, if I press
and hold the Backslash key, now it's working.
| | 08:05 |
So I'll press and hold Backslash in
order to see the before version of the
| | 08:08 |
image, so it's press and hold, and
then release in order to see the after
| | 08:11 |
version. So I'm just letting you know
it's there, because you might see the tip.
| | 08:14 |
I don't really think much of the
keyboard shortcut, because it frequently
| | 08:17 |
doesn't work, because one of the
numerical options is highlighted and
| | 08:20 |
it's preventing it from working, and that
can be a pain in the neck, but it's there.
| | 08:24 |
I just want you to know it's there.
| | 08:25 |
By the way, notice that I kind of
moved the black slider triangle to the
| | 08:28 |
beginning of the humpolumpolas of
the histogram here, and then I move
| | 08:32 |
the white one to the end of it. So that
we're tucking right next to the mountainous region,
| | 08:38 |
and that's pretty standard
behavior, that's kind of what you typically
| | 08:42 |
want to do. And when I say kind of
typically, I mean almost always, but
| | 08:46 |
I'll show you a few more nuanced approaches
as we get further into this, but I just
| | 08:50 |
wanted to give you a sense of kind
of what you tend to do when you are
| | 08:54 |
approaching this histogram.
| | 08:55 |
In that way you are just clipping the
dead stuff down here. So you are clipping
| | 08:59 |
away the dead grass, as it were,
down here in the plains, the low lands.
| | 09:04 |
So many analogies I can share with you that
aren't really serving you any good. So now,
| | 09:09 |
in between the white point and the
black point is this gray point right here,
| | 09:15 |
which is the gamma value. Notice that
it's represented totally differently.
| | 09:18 |
It represents that middle gray which if
you divide 255 by 2, you would either get
| | 09:23 |
like 127 or 128.
| | 09:25 |
So you would think maybe that's how
they would represent this value right here,
| | 09:29 |
but instead it's 1.0, because it's an
exponent, and I'm going to explain how
| | 09:34 |
this function works, this gamma value,
because it's very, very important to
| | 09:39 |
correcting your images. We are going to spend
a little time with it in the very next exercise.
| | 09:44 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting the gamma value| 00:00 | Just to bring you up to speed, I'm
working inside the Semi-corrected.psd image
| | 00:04 | and I created a new levels adjustment
layer right here. Turned off the old one,
| | 00:10 | and I went ahead and assigned these
values right here, a black point value of
| | 00:14 | 12 and a white point value of 192,
which means that we are clipping all the
| | 00:20 | colors that are darker than 12 to black,
and we are clipping all of the colors
| | 00:23 | that are lighter than 192 to white,
and we are spreading the remaining colors
| | 00:28 | in between from 12 to 192,
those luminance levels.
| | 00:32 | We are spreading them across the
entire histogram, so 12 becomes zero, 192
| | 00:36 | become 255, and everybody else gets
spread out in between. Now right there in
| | 00:41 | the center is the most important input
levels options of them all, which is the
| | 00:46 | gamma value, and it really is super
important, because unlike the black point
| | 00:51 | and the white point both of which clip
colors, the gamma value refuses to clip.
| | 00:57 | It never sends colors into the
luminance oblivion, the way the others do. So
| | 01:02 | for example, what I mean is if I were
to drag this black point way up to here,
| | 01:06 | for example to 84, then I'm saying,
send any color that has a luminance level
| | 01:11 | of 84 or darker across all of the
different channels, send those colors to
| | 01:14 | black. That's a lot of good data
inside of this image. A lot of very good
| | 01:18 | details would go to black and they
would get clipped away and they would be
| | 01:21 | sent, as I say, to this
luminance oblivion, which is a bad thing.
| | 01:25 | Now gamma can't do that, gamma always
respects what's there, and sometimes you
| | 01:31 | don't want to respect it, you want to
change it, another times you do want to
| | 01:33 | respect it. So when you are in a
respecting mood, and you want to just effect
| | 01:37 | those middle colors inside of the image,
well, gamma is your way to go. Let me
| | 01:41 | show you how it works. If you go ahead
and drag the gamma value over here to
| | 01:46 | the left, you are going to brighten
the midtones inside of the image without
| | 01:51 | clipping anything to white.
| | 01:52 | So even though we are brightening the
heck out of some of the lighter colors,
| | 01:55 | we are not clipping them. If you were
to move this gray slider over to the
| | 02:00 | right, then you would darken the
midtones. Again, you are darkening up some of
| | 02:05 | those dark colors there, but you are
not clipping them the way were just a
| | 02:08 | moment ago, and you will just have to
accept that as being the case, because
| | 02:12 | they do look like they are altered dark
probably on your monitor or inside your
| | 02:15 | video here, but it is true, we are not clipping.
| | 02:18 | So anyway, let me tell you a couple of
things, first of all don't go too far
| | 02:22 | with brightening the gamma value,
especially if your image has a fair amount of
| | 02:26 | noise in it. Notice here inside of this
image, I shot this image with an ISO of
| | 02:31 | 1600, so what that means is that I was
inviting a lot of noise into this image
| | 02:37 | in the first place, and you are really
going to notice the noise inside of the
| | 02:41 | shadow details.
| | 02:42 | So when you start brightening up your
midtones here, you are going to bring out
| | 02:46 | a lot of that noise as you can see me
doing here around Max's collar. So even
| | 02:51 | before I changed the midtone value,
I'll change it back to one here, that gamma
| | 02:55 | value there. We had a lot of noise to
start with. You are just exaggerating
| | 03:00 | that noise as you start to brighten it up.
| | 03:02 | Now when you are darkening colors you
don't tend to exaggerate noise, because
| | 03:05 | you are not going to see as much noise
inside of the highlight detail of the
| | 03:09 | image. So noise is really going to hide
out inside of the shadows. But anyway,
| | 03:13 | just something to bear in mind, my
experiences is that, images tend to require
| | 03:16 | midtone brightening, more than midtone
darkening, especially if you are going
| | 03:20 | to prepress where things tend
to darken up, thanks to dot game.
| | 03:25 | Anyway, I'm going to take this gamma
value up to 1.15 for this image, so just a
| | 03:28 | little bit of brightening going on
there. Now I'll tell you why in the world
| | 03:34 | this value is measured as 1.0, versus
for example, 127 or 128 or something
| | 03:39 | along those lines? But before I do that,
I want you to know that we are going
| | 03:43 | to get into some math. So those of
you who hate math and couldn't care less
| | 03:47 | about why this value is what it is.
| | 03:50 | You just need to know that if you move
the gray slider over to the left, it's
| | 03:53 | going to brighten things, and you move
it to the right, it's going to darken
| | 03:56 | things, and if you make this value
right here, this gamma value higher than
| | 03:59 | 1.0, you are going to brighten the
image, and if you make it lower than 1.0,
| | 04:03 | you are going to darken the image.
And if that's all you need to know, then
| | 04:05 | bye, and I'm just trying to spare
you from the mathematics that's coming.
| | 04:10 | Those people who like a little bit of
math in their copy here, I'm going to
| | 04:14 | share some math with you. Here's
what's going on. Just so you know why in the
| | 04:18 | world this is 1.0? Because you might
think, if zero is black. And 255 is white.
| | 04:23 | You might think. well, right there
smacked up in the center, 255 divided 2
| | 04:27 | would get you to 127 or 128,
something in that range, really 127.5, but you
| | 04:31 | can't do that.
| | 04:32 | So why isn't this value is 127 or 128,
why is it have to be 1.0? Well, it's
| | 04:36 | measured as an exponent. See I told
you that if don't like math you wouldn't
| | 04:40 | want to listen to this. Exponents are
like to the power of. So in other words,
| | 04:46 | if I change this value to 2, let's say,
not 2.0, to just 2, then I'm squaring
| | 04:52 | the luminance levels inside of the image.
I'm taking them to the second power.
| | 04:55 | Which is brightening the heck out of
them. And if take this value, this gamma
| | 04:58 | value to 0.5, it's to the half power,
essentially which is going to darken the
| | 05:04 | heck out of the luminance levels.
| | 05:05 | What that does, it totally respects
black and white. It doesn't hurt black and
| | 05:09 | white at all. And this also
explains by the way, why 1.0 is no change
| | 05:13 | whatsoever, because anything to the
first power is not getting modified. So the
| | 05:17 | gamma value 1.0, which is the default,
is a neutral gamma value. Now those of
| | 05:21 | you who know thing the truth about math
and have struck with the discussion so
| | 05:24 | far, and those of you who
want to skip, definitely skip.
| | 05:27 | But you might say, this isn't really
worked out, Deke, because if white is
| | 05:32 | 255, and you square it, you take it to
the second power right there. Let's go
| | 05:37 | ahead and do that, then that's going to
brighten the heck out of white. I mean
| | 05:41 | with 255 or anything resembling that,
255 squared is going to be like 100
| | 05:47 | million. I mean. It's a really high
number. It's something in the tens of
| | 05:49 | thousands I think.
| | 05:51 | That means that we are clipping colors
like crazy, so how can you say ascending
| | 05:55 | these luminance levels to the second
power is not going to clip white for
| | 05:59 | example. And the reason is these are
normalized value. So in other words, zero
| | 06:03 | is mapped to zero, that's fine. 255 is
mapped to one, so one to any power is
| | 06:09 | going to remain one, so white is not
going to get clipped. And so just the
| | 06:12 | colors between black and white are
going to be effected, then you would say to
| | 06:16 | me, if we are normalizing the colors.
| | 06:18 | And medium gray, which is 127-128,
becomes 0.5 in this environment. 0.5 to the
| | 06:24 | second value is 0.25, so it actually
darkens the colors. What Adobe has done is
| | 06:30 | it actually takes one divided by two.
So that's how the math is done, so it
| | 06:35 | takes the middle gray for example, and
if you square it, you are really setting
| | 06:39 | it to the half power, and if you take
it to the half power, you are really
| | 06:42 | taking it to one divided by the half
power, which is two, so you are really squaring it.
| | 06:47 | So isn't that wonderfully confusing,
but really sufficed to say that, of course
| | 06:52 | what I said in the first place, which is,
you drag it over to the left to make
| | 06:55 | things lighter, you drag it over to
the right, it makes things darker, but I
| | 06:58 | know some of you really get into this
stuff. And by that I mean, I do, and
| | 07:02 | probably nobody else does, but
I just wanted to explain this.
| | 07:05 | Yes, I think by now I have safely
lost every single viewer of this movie
| | 07:12 | successfully awesome, now then having
done that, for those of you who are just
| | 07:16 | kicking back and listening, in the
next exercise I'm going to show you
| | 07:20 | something really great, how to
preview your clip shadows and your clipped
| | 07:24 | highlights right here
inside of the image window.
| | 07:26 | It's a really great technique. All of
you will want to know about this. Of
| | 07:29 | course, nobody is listening to me
anymore, so it's not going to matter, but
| | 07:32 | definitely stay tuned.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Previewing clipping| 00:00 |
In this exercise I'm going to show
you a special top secret trick for
| | 00:04 |
previewing the exact pixels inside of
your image that are getting clipped to either
| | 00:09 |
to black or white. When you are working
inside either the Levels dialog box or
| | 00:13 |
here inside of the Adjustments palette,
when you are working with an adjustment layer.
| | 00:17 |
Now I have gone ahead and saved my
progress so far, and I have brightened the
| | 00:21 |
image up quite nicely actually I think,
I'm starting to bring out some of the
| | 00:25 |
noise in this high noise image in the
first place, but that's okay. It's kind
| | 00:29 |
of artsy, I think it's nice. Now here I
have got the Composite Histogram layer
| | 00:36 |
turned on and selected, the Auto
color clip blah. Blah, blah layer is not
| | 00:40 |
selected and it's also turned off.
| | 00:42 |
And you can compare the two if
you wanted to. Here is the Composite
| | 00:45 |
modification that I have applied so
far. Meaning that it affects all of the
| | 00:48 |
channels at once, that's what I mean by
composite, and I'll tell you what that
| | 00:52 |
means in a couple of exercise. I'll
show you how to adjust an image on a
| | 00:55 |
channel by channel basis shortly. But
anyway, in the meantime I'm going to go
| | 00:59 |
ahead and turn off Composite
Histogram and then turn on Auto color. And the
| | 01:03 |
Auto color modification that we
applied a couple of exercises ago now is
| | 01:07 |
actually a more subtle adjustment,
and I kind of like it better this far.
| | 01:12 |
We'll ultimately be working from it
when we apply our channel by channel
| | 01:15 |
modifications, which will end up
getting us the effect that we are really
| | 01:18 |
looking for. But I just want you to
see that the Auto functions are actually
| | 01:22 |
quite intelligent in many cases. Anyway,
let's go and turn off and go back to
| | 01:26 |
my less intelligent and less subtle
composite modification that I've applied so far.
| | 01:31 |
And I wanted to go ahead and show you
that wonderful trick that I was telling
| | 01:34 |
you about. Here's what you do. So if
you just drag the black slider, notice you
| | 01:39 |
are just seeing the colors change,
and you are just hoping that you are not
| | 01:43 |
clipping anything, and you are just
trying to pay attention to the histogram
| | 01:45 |
here. But if you want to see the
clipping, you can either go up here in the
| | 01:49 |
Adjustment palette to the menu icon
right there, and you can choose this
| | 01:53 |
command, Show Clipping for Black/White
Points, but then you are always going to
| | 01:57 |
see the clippings no matter what. But
I'll go and turn it on, so you can see
| | 01:59 |
what I'm talking about.
| | 02:01 |
And now if you drag this guy, notice
you are seeing the sort of clip preview.
| | 02:06 |
I'll tell you what the clip preview
means in just a moment, for both the black
| | 02:09 |
slider triangle and for the white
slider triangle, and you have no way to turn
| | 02:13 |
it off. You have no way to view the
image naturally and normally, except to go
| | 02:17 |
back to the command and turn this darn
thing off. Whereas, the technique I'm
| | 02:21 |
about to show you is much better in my
opinion, because you can turn it on and
| | 02:25 |
off on the fly just with the help of
the Alt or Option key. So anyway, let's go
| | 02:30 |
and turn this command off, and now
notice, if I don't press any key, I just see
| | 02:35 |
the image change normally like so.
| | 02:38 |
But let's start with white, because it
makes little more sense. If I press and
| | 02:42 |
hold the Alt key or the Option key on
the Mac, and go ahead and keep that key
| | 02:45 |
down and drag that white slider triangle,
and I say keep the key down, because
| | 02:49 |
notice, as soon as I release the key
and start dragging the white point around
| | 02:53 |
a little more there, then I just
see the standard preview of the image.
| | 02:57 |
I have to press and hold the Alt key in
order to see this clipping preview. Now
| | 03:01 |
what we are seeing here is anything
that is black, when you are moving the
| | 03:05 |
white slider triangle with the Alt
key down or the Option key on the Mac,
| | 03:09 |
anything that's black is protected,
meaning it's not getting clipped.
| | 03:12 |
Anything that goes to white is getting
clipped in all three channels. So that's
| | 03:17 |
definitely dangerous. When you see
white that is the danger sign. If you are
| | 03:22 |
seeing some sort of color go on there,
like red and yellow in our case, then
| | 03:27 |
that means it's just getting clipped
in one or a couple of channels. Now see
| | 03:31 |
what we are seeing right here. I'll
just leave the white point alone for a
| | 03:34 |
moment. I'm actually holding my
mouse button down, and holding the Alt or
| | 03:37 |
Option key down at the same time.
| | 03:39 |
So I have got bunch of things held
down, for you I'm doing this. It's quite
| | 03:43 |
painful for me to do this. So notice
where we are seeing red, I just want you
| | 03:47 |
to get a sense what's going on. When we
are seeing red, it means it's clipping
| | 03:50 |
just in the red channel, not in the
green or blue channels. When we are seeing
| | 03:54 |
green, and that's over on the left
side of the screen near the T in the
| | 03:59 |
toolbox, where we are seeing that
little patch of green, that means it's
| | 04:01 |
getting clipped in the green
channel, but not in the red or blue.
| | 04:04 |
If we were seeing blue, that would just
be getting clipped in the blue channel,
| | 04:07 |
but we were not seeing blue. If we
are seeing some other color, like a
| | 04:09 |
secondary color like yellow, in the
case of yellow it's getting clipped in both
| | 04:13 |
the red and the green channel, and
it's only not getting clipped in the blue
| | 04:16 |
channel, which means we don't have
much not clipping going on. So yellow is
| | 04:20 |
pretty dangerous, magenta would be
clipping in both red and blue, and then cyan
| | 04:24 |
would be clipping in both green and blue.
| | 04:26 |
So if you are just seeing one color
like red, green, or blue, then that might
| | 04:31 |
be okay. If you are seeing a dual color,
secondary color like yellow or magenta
| | 04:36 |
or cyan, then that's starting to get
dangerous, and if you are seeing white, my
| | 04:39 |
goodness, you've got major clipping
going on. That's all three channels together.
| | 04:42 |
Also if you are seeing big patches
as we are at this point, then that's
| | 04:48 |
probably not the good thing either. You
don't want to clip red, and especially
| | 04:51 |
in a portrait shot, because that's
where the majority of the information is, is
| | 04:55 |
in the red channel. So what you want is
just mostly black, and if you are going
| | 05:00 |
to have little patches of color show up,
you want them to be sporadic, and you
| | 05:04 |
want them to be pretty
spread apart from each other.
| | 05:06 |
So just little tiny patches, maybe
individual pixels here and there is the best
| | 05:11 |
case. All right, so 191, 190,
something on those lines is going to work out
| | 05:15 |
just fine, and I'm looking at this
value over here inside the Adjustment
| | 05:18 |
palette now. So I'm shifting my focus.
All right, let's do the same thing by
| | 05:23 |
Alt dragging or Option
dragging the black slider.
| | 05:25 |
Now, wherever we are seeing white, in
the case of the black point, wherever we
| | 05:31 |
are seeing white is protected, and
wherever we are seeing black is terrible. I
| | 05:35 |
mean, it's clipping in all three
channels. So black is very dangerous in this
| | 05:39 |
case. So the whole thing gets turned
its head. It really gets turned on its
| | 05:42 |
head though, in the fact that otherwise
we are seeing complimentary colors. So
| | 05:45 |
yellow, means it's only
getting clipped in the blue channel.
| | 05:48 |
Now I know you are sitting and thinking,
why, why is that way? Why they have to
| | 05:51 |
make it that way? Because, think of it
this way. It's turning black in the blue
| | 05:54 |
channel, it's not turning black in
either the red or the green channel, so
| | 05:58 |
black and blue plus white and red and
green gives you yellow. So, it's just the
| | 06:03 |
way it works. So you have
to look for the compliment.
| | 06:05 |
It gets pretty complicated, because
yellow means blue, and magenta means green,
| | 06:10 |
right? And cyan means red, and so
everybody's compliment is, it worked there,
| | 06:15 |
and red would mean that it is getting
clipped in both the green and the blue
| | 06:20 |
channels, because it's an absence of
cyan. So it gets a little topsy-turvy. So
| | 06:26 |
what I'm going to tell you is you want
this, you just want a few speckles for
| | 06:31 |
your shadows. Mostly you want to see
white, just a few speckles in other
| | 06:34 |
colors, and you want to try to avoid
black if you can, and that's going to give
| | 06:38 |
you a good effect. All right, then
I'll go ahead and release, and I know that
| | 06:42 |
I'm not clipping much this way, and
it's just because I want to subtle
| | 06:47 |
adjustment. I'm going to take gamma
down, down to 0.95, so we have a darker
| | 06:53 |
image that work here. And tell you what,
I'm only going to show you one more
| | 06:57 |
thing, that's a composite thing, before
we move on to the channel by channel of
| | 07:01 |
adjustments and that's going to be
output levels here. Very short exercise
| | 07:04 |
coming up on output levels, because
they're not all that useful, and then we
| | 07:07 |
are really going to dig in, and we are
going to see how to correct this image
| | 07:11 |
or any image for that matter, on a
channel by channel basis which is where the
| | 07:14 |
Levels Command really shines.
| | 07:16 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The futility of output levels| 00:00 | In this exercise I'm going to
introduce you to the Output Levels values that
| | 00:04 | are down here near the bottom of the
Adjustments palette. When you are working
| | 00:09 | with the Levels adjustment, they are at
the bottom of the Levels dialog box, if
| | 00:14 | you are applying a static modification,
and they aren't particularly useful. I
| | 00:18 | have to tell you, when adjusting
full color continuous toned photographs.
| | 00:22 | You are not going to use them very
often, but I do want you to know that they
| | 00:26 | are, just in case you are curious and
you want to keep up with all the options
| | 00:30 | that are available to you. I'm still
working inside that Input levels.psd
| | 00:33 | image, and I have made a few tiny
modifications here to my input levels, the
| | 00:38 | guy is directly below the Histogram.
Output Levels control the destination.
| | 00:44 | So in other words, I'm saying that I'm
going to take a Luminance level of 18,
| | 00:48 | and I'm going to map it to 0. So I'm
going to make it black, and then anybody
| | 00:52 | darker is going to become black as well.
And then I'm going to take a Luminance
| | 00:56 | level of 190, and I'm going to map it
to 255 white, and everybody brighter is
| | 01:00 | going to become 255 as well. And then
Gamma is doing its own thing here, we are
| | 01:05 | just, in this case with 0.95 value,
were slightly darkening the midtones inside the image.
| | 01:11 | And that's a purely relative
modification by the way. So let's say we want to
| | 01:15 | map in a brightest value of 18 to
something different. Like I want to say,
| | 01:19 | change everything that's 18 or darker
to a Luminance level of 80, and that
| | 01:24 | means that this whole range, right
here will become a Luminance level of 80,
| | 01:28 | and then everybody in between here and
here, will be mapped from 80 to 255 in this case.
| | 01:34 | But I could also make the whites
darker if I wanted to, and what I'm
| | 01:38 | essentially doing is reducing the
contrast of the image and dimming it. Your
| | 01:42 | question of course, why in the world
would you want to do anything resembling
| | 01:47 | that? Well, it's a real easy question
to answer. Really you wouldn't, you are
| | 01:52 | not going to want to do this very
often if ever. But here's one scenario that
| | 01:57 | I'll sort of toss out there. You
might want to dim the image like so.
| | 02:01 | So you would make the white point 255,
but you make the black point something
| | 02:05 | like let's say 129, which is something
near medium gray and by lightening the
| | 02:11 | image like this, you could set type
over it or create some sort of artsy
| | 02:14 | effect. Now this isn't necessarily the
best way to pull off such an effect, but
| | 02:18 | it is 'a' way to do it, if you want to.
| | 02:20 | Also, you can perform such modification
on a channel by channel basis, in case
| | 02:24 | you are looking for some other sort
of effects, some sort of colorization
| | 02:27 | effect, and check this out, if I move
black and white all the way over to the
| | 02:33 | opposite sides. So in other words I
exchange them with each other, so that the
| | 02:37 | first value is 255 and last value is 0,
then I invert the image, and you can
| | 02:42 | control exactly the degree of inversion
you apply if you want to, and then you
| | 02:47 | could invert specific channels,
like you could invert the Red channel
| | 02:50 | independently, of the Green and Blue channels.
| | 02:52 | And just have a high old time if you
want to, or you could say, another way to
| | 02:58 | work, if you know your press isn't
quite able to retain in an absolute white
| | 03:03 | like that, and let's say something like
250, you know from just experience with
| | 03:08 | working with your press, that an RGB
value of about 250 per channel ends up
| | 03:14 | going to white, and that will allow
you to keep your highlights more easily
| | 03:18 | than you could just go ahead and map
your colors a little differently here.
| | 03:21 | So you can map your shadows to 3, let's
say, and your highlights 2. It would be
| | 03:26 | probably higher than that, probably be
more like 253, let's say. By the way I
| | 03:30 | should tell you, I was modifying those
values from the keyboard using the up
| | 03:32 | and down arrow keys, so you can change
these values across the board using the
| | 03:37 | up and down arrow keys.
| | 03:38 | When you are working with any of the
black or white points, whether input
| | 03:40 | levels or output levels, the up and
down arrow keys are going to change the
| | 03:43 | value in increments of 1. If you press
Shift along with one of these values,
| | 03:47 | you'll change value by increments of 10,
to this Shift+Down arrow and Shift+Up
| | 03:52 | arrow, and then with gamma
you are changing hundreds.
| | 03:56 | So up arrow will increase the value by
hundredth, down arrow will decrease the
| | 04:00 | value by hundredth, and if you add
Shift with up or down arrow, you'll increase
| | 04:05 | the value by a tenth or decrease the
value by a tenth. So just good stuff to
| | 04:11 | know. I'm going to go ahead and restore
my output levels to 0 and 255, because
| | 04:15 | I want to leave them alone, otherwise
I'm happy with this thus far, except for
| | 04:20 | the fact that I really don't like the
effect I have come up with, because we
| | 04:23 | still have this incredibly yellowish
color cast going on inside this image that
| | 04:28 | I want to correct for.
| | 04:29 | So far we have only modified contrast.
When you are modifying contrast that's
| | 04:32 | all you want to do, you can apply a
composite modification to the RGB channel
| | 04:38 | right there, supposedly channel for the
RGB composite image, but if you want to
| | 04:42 | adjust for color cast which is
something that we need to do, then you need to
| | 04:46 | actually look at the individual
channels and apply different modifications to
| | 04:50 | different channels, and that is
something that we are going to do in the very
| | 04:54 | next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Channel-by-channel edits| 00:00 | In this exercise I'm going to show you
how to correct an image from the Levels
| | 00:04 | adjustment layer or the Levels dialog
box, if we are applying a static color
| | 00:08 | adjustment on a channel by channel
basis which is the best way to go if you
| | 00:13 | have some sort of color cast that work
inside of you images, we do. In the case
| | 00:18 | of this one which I have now gone
ahead and saved as Composite levels.psd. So
| | 00:22 | this is my work so far.
| | 00:23 | We have got a three layer image if you
include the Background layer. So we have
| | 00:27 | got Background, which is the original
image. We have this Auto Color layer that
| | 00:30 | is currently turned off, we are going
to turn it back on in a moment, and we
| | 00:33 | have got this Composite Histogram. So
we've made a composite modification which
| | 00:37 | is affecting all of the channels in kind,
but that is not going to allow us to
| | 00:42 | correct for any cast.
| | 00:44 | So I'm just going to go ahead and turn
off this Composite Histogram here, which
| | 00:48 | is showing us the original version of
the image as it was captured, and now I'm
| | 00:52 | going to turn back on Auto Color, Clip
0.20% and 1.5%, because I want you to
| | 00:58 | see something about this layer. I'm
going to ahead and click on it, and by the
| | 01:02 | way notice this art behavior. I have to
show this to you, because it is really
| | 01:05 | strange and it may end up
causing you some degree of alarm.
| | 01:09 | Notice if you have an inactive layer
selected, so I have gone ahead and clicked
| | 01:12 | on this adjustment layer that I turned
off, and mean while the adjustment layer
| | 01:17 | below which is on, which is not
selected, we are going to see the histogram
| | 01:21 | that belongs to the adjustment layer
below, along with the settings that are
| | 01:25 | associated with the active layer,
which isn't going to do us any good, by the
| | 01:29 | way. I just can't believe they have
done that. But any way, it is something to
| | 01:33 | bare in mind, you've to got to watch
which adjustment layer is active when you
| | 01:36 | are working here inside the Adjustment
palette, because you can end up doing
| | 01:39 | this thing where you are trying to
change the settings, and it's like, wow,
| | 01:41 | nothing is happening,
amazing, what's going on here?
| | 01:44 | Well, that's because you are working
with a dead layer and it's very possible
| | 01:49 | that- yup, look at that. It
actually does change the settings. That's
| | 01:53 | ridiculous. Oh my Gosh! Anyway, go
and turn that off, and then click on the
| | 01:59 | right adjustment layer, there we go.
So it's just a precaution. I'm not
| | 02:02 | knocking the software. No, no, not me.
I'm just saying that that's something to
| | 02:06 | watch out for when you are working
inside of this marvelous program.
| | 02:11 | All right, so here -- of course I
love Photoshop, I'm just marking it for a
| | 02:16 | moment here. We've got this Background
layer that's active. This is recovery
| | 02:21 | mode people, and I have got this
adjustment layer that's now active and turned
| | 02:25 | on, so that's good. And this is
accurate, believe it or not. Even though I've
| | 02:29 | got this amazing modification that's
been applied, so I'll turn it off for a
| | 02:33 | moment so we can see. There is the
original version of the image. There is the
| | 02:35 | modified version of the image. Thanks
to this Auto Color combination that I
| | 02:39 | have applied here, and yet if you
look at the numerical values, it's as if
| | 02:43 | nothing has changed. Now look at that
histogram. Something has been done to
| | 02:47 | that histogram, because it's got a
bunch of weird little blades cut into it.
| | 02:51 | Looks like some kind of crazy comb
now, with these little gaps in it. And
| | 02:55 | that's because the histogram has been
spread, but it's been spread on a channel
| | 02:59 | by channel basis.
| | 03:00 | Nothing has been done to the composite
version of the histogram, which is why
| | 03:04 | all of the values are set to their
defaults. However, if you were to switch to
| | 03:08 | a different channel by going up here
to this Channel Option and selecting
| | 03:11 | something like Red, Green, or Blue
inside of this particular image, because
| | 03:15 | it's an RGB image. Then you would see
that work has been done. So there is the
| | 03:19 | unmodified Red histogram with the
values assigned to it. So we are saying,
| | 03:24 | anything with a luminance level of 23
or darker is becoming black inside of
| | 03:28 | this one channel. Anything with the
luminance level 195 or brighter is becoming
| | 03:32 | white inside of this one channel, and
nothing has been done to the midtones at
| | 03:37 | all inside of any of these
channels as you will see.
| | 03:40 | Notice the white points stays 195,
where this specific modification is
| | 03:44 | concerned so whatever reason, whatever
was going on inside of Photoshop's brain
| | 03:49 | when it applied this Auto Color
modification. 195 is always the white point,
| | 03:54 | again, that I want to stress inside of
this specific adjustment. Gamma was left
| | 03:58 | 1.0 throughout, but the Black point
changes from one channel to the next. You
| | 04:02 | can overwrite that of course. You can
change it whatever you want. So the first
| | 04:06 | thing I want you to know is that
you've got keyboard shortcuts to switch
| | 04:08 | between these channels, and I also want
you to notice how they've changed from
| | 04:12 | the old days. So it used to be to get
to the RGB composite you would press Ctrl
| | 04:16 | or Command+~ and now it's Alt or Option+
2, so that couldn't be more different.
| | 04:20 | And it's because a lot of keyboard
shortcuts have been shifted like Command+~
| | 04:24 | on the Mac will switch you between
active windows, and Command+1 or Ctrl+1 here
| | 04:29 | on the PC will take you to the 100%
view. So 1 and ~ are basically taken, so
| | 04:35 | now we are working with 2 through 5,
and you may wonder, why don't they switch
| | 04:38 | from Ctrl or Command to Alt or Option,
and that's because, if we go to the
| | 04:44 | Channels palette here, you'll
notice that Ctrl+2 takes you to the RGB
| | 04:48 | composite, and that would be
Command+2 of course on the Mac.
| | 04:50 | Where as Ctrl or Command+3 takes you to
the Red Channel, and Ctrl or Command+4
| | 04:56 | takes you to the Green Channel, and
we'll see more of this later. Ctrl or
| | 04:59 | Command+5 takes you to the Blue channel.
So I would press Ctrl or Command+2 to
| | 05:03 | go back to the RGB view. So we can't
use Ctrl or Command here inside the
| | 05:09 | Adjustments palette, because it's
already doing something here inside the
| | 05:11 | Channels Pallet. All right, I'm going
to switch back to Layers. So that's why
| | 05:14 | it has gotten mapped to Alt or Option.
I hate to belabor this, but I wanted you to know.
| | 05:19 | If you are working with a static
modification inside the Levels dialog box,
| | 05:22 | then you can press either Ctrl or
Command 2, 3, 4, and 5, or you press Alt or
| | 05:29 | Option 2, 3, 4, and 5. So you can
work either way. Either modify your key
| | 05:32 | words, that is, Ctrl or Alt on a PC or
Command and Option on the Mac. So just
| | 05:37 | FYI, more stuff to confuse you. All
right, so I'm going to go ahead and switch
| | 05:42 | to red. I sort of feel like it need to
backed off in the Red Channel a little
| | 05:47 | bit. In fact, here, this is what we
need to do. We don't want to just start
| | 05:50 | racing through the Channels. What you
want to do is you want to look at the
| | 05:52 | image, and you want to evaluate it.
| | 05:54 | And you want to say, okay, what's wrong
with the image? What's the color cast?
| | 05:57 | The color cast is yellow. So how are
you going to fix yellow color cast. You
| | 06:02 | could subtract yellow, which is a
combination of red and green, or you could
| | 06:07 | add the compliment, which is blue.
So what this image really needs is
| | 06:12 | brightening up in the blue channel. So
let's go to the Blue Channel, either by
| | 06:16 | choosing Blue or pressing Alt or Option+
5 there, and notice, of course in these
| | 06:21 | brightening, I mean, look at all these
highlights that are going unused here.
| | 06:25 | So the highlights have really start
till about middle gray actually inside of
| | 06:29 | this histogram, and yet my white point
is away over here. So if I drag my white
| | 06:34 | point closer to the ends of the
mountain range, right there, then I'm going to
| | 06:38 | introduce Blue into my image,
brightening the Blue Channel. So I'm introducing
| | 06:43 | Blue to the highlights and as a
result I'm defeating that yellow and making
| | 06:47 | that yellow color cast go away.
| | 06:49 | Now I have gone too far I think with
this modification, so let's back it off a
| | 06:52 | little bit, and we'll take it to
like something like, I don't know 160 is
| | 06:56 | looking pretty good. May be even
something like -- actually I'll take this down
| | 06:59 | to 145, just so that I have a fairly
even value going on. Then I'm going to go
| | 07:05 | over to the gamma value, and I'm going
to take that gamma value down, because I
| | 07:09 | feel like the midtones and the image
are too bright in general. So I'm going to
| | 07:13 | press Shift down arrow in order to
reduce that gamma value, and I took a little
| | 07:16 | blue out of the equation, and
reintroduced a little bit of yellow. Did you see
| | 07:20 | the difference? So this is the 1.0
gamma value right there. Look at the image,
| | 07:24 | look at Max's face, how it's a little
bit blue. If I take that gamma value down
| | 07:28 | to 0.9 by pressing Shift down arrow,
I'll reduced some of the blue, and give
| | 07:33 | him a more naturalistic yellow flavor.
Just a little bit of yellow in that skin
| | 07:39 | tone. We don't want to make him
jaundiced of course, and then you would go,
| | 07:43 | fool around with the other channels.
| | 07:44 | Now that you have done that and say,
well gosh, at this point I feel like, you
| | 07:48 | know what, I could use a little less
green too, because green is the yellow
| | 07:51 | ingredient. So I press Shift down arrow,
maybe once, maybe twice to take out
| | 07:56 | some of the green, and in this case I
have taken out a sufficient amount of
| | 08:00 | green that I have made the image to
red, so then I could go over to the Red
| | 08:04 | Channel, and I could reduce it's Gamma
value as well by taking it down to like
| | 08:09 | 0.8. I imagine it will work pretty
nicely, and then I'm going to back up the
| | 08:13 | white point just a little bit, so
that I take some of the red out of the
| | 08:16 | highlights, and then actually I'll
brighten this gamma back up just a little
| | 08:20 | bit. So we've got 0.9 for the gamma
and red, and we've got 210 for the white
| | 08:24 | point here inside the Red Channel. 23,
which is the way this was set by default
| | 08:27 | in the first place is fine for the black point.
| | 08:30 | I am not going to adjust the shadows,
because they are already in good shape,
| | 08:33 | but you can if you want to. I'm just
not going to. All right, and then I could
| | 08:37 | either introduce a little more green
like so, in order to yellow up the image a
| | 08:42 | little bit. By taking this white
point value down to 190, I'm just playing
| | 08:46 | around here folks in order to see what
I feel comfortable with, and then if I
| | 08:50 | was to say gosh, I want more green, I
would increase the gamma value like so,
| | 08:56 | and if I wanted less green, I would
decrease the gamma value, and that's going
| | 09:00 | to give me more of sort of a red,
blue, because the red and blue channels
| | 09:03 | haven't been modified at this point,
well, I'm modifying the green channel of
| | 09:06 | course. So that's too far.
| | 09:08 | I would say something, around what I
had is working just fine actually, and
| | 09:12 | then let's go back to the blue channel.
So this is the kind of thing you do.
| | 09:15 | Kind of go back and forth between the
channels just to get a sense of what's
| | 09:19 | going to look best here. And then I'm
going to take this white point value down
| | 09:23 | a little bit further, down to 135 by
pressing Shift down arrow there and I
| | 09:28 | actually thing this is looking pretty
nice. Now I might say you know what, it's
| | 09:32 | still looking a little bit red in
places. And I can go to the red channel and
| | 09:36 | play with that, or I could just decide
this is enough monkeying around. Let's
| | 09:39 | see, yes, definitely ooh, actually
that's pretty nice. 0.8 for the gamma value,
| | 09:44 | or maybe raise it to 0.85. That's good.
| | 09:46 | All right, I'm going to go ahead and
switch back to the RGB version of the
| | 09:49 | image, and then, I want to stress here,
this is the way I tend to work. When I
| | 09:54 | know I have got a color cast associated
with the image, I might start with like
| | 09:57 | an Auto Color adjustment here inside of
the Levels adjustment layer, the way I
| | 10:02 | did a few exercises ago now, and then
I would go to the various individual
| | 10:06 | channels, red, green and blue, before
I apply a composite modification and
| | 10:09 | visit them and get the color balance
right, and then if necessary back to the
| | 10:14 | Composite view and make a couple of
modifications there. So for example, I
| | 10:18 | could say, you know what? I can still
ease off of this white point. I could
| | 10:22 | still make the image brighter. But I'm
not going to, but I could do that if I
| | 10:26 | wanted to and it could also
brighten things up inside the gamma that is
| | 10:30 | bringing the midtones little bit, or I
could darken them. I could just take the
| | 10:33 | gamma value down just ever so slightly
down to 0.97 for example, in order to
| | 10:37 | darken the image just a little bit.
| | 10:40 | Now to give you a sense of what we
were able to accomplish, this is actually
| | 10:43 | really great thing about the
Adjustments palette here. We can now, because we
| | 10:48 | kind of clicked off that adjustment
layer and came back to it and made some
| | 10:51 | modifications. I can not take advantage
of this little revert option here. This
| | 10:55 | Reset to previous state option, and
I can click on it, and I'll see the
| | 10:59 | original Auto Color adjustment right
there. This is what this adjustment looked
| | 11:04 | like before we embarked on this
exercise, and then if I press Ctrl+Z or
| | 11:08 | Command+Z on the Mac,
this is what it looks like.
| | 11:10 | Now when I go ahead and reinstate my
newest modification, so I think this is a
| | 11:15 | heck of an improvement. So this is
where we started, and this is where we are
| | 11:20 | now. Very, very nice modification,
and just to really give you a sense of
| | 11:24 | what's going on. If I were to turn off
this layer by clicking on the eyeball,
| | 11:27 | this is the original version of the
images we saw at so many exercises ago,
| | 11:31 | when we first opened it, and this is
the I think very successful modification.
| | 11:36 | All right I'm going to go ahead and
hide my pallets and zoom in on Max here, so
| | 11:40 | that we can see my boy nice and up close,
and personal, and I think very, very
| | 11:46 | nicely modified. Here using channel by
channel Levels adjustment in Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| When levels fail| 00:00 |
Now as we've seen the Levels command is
terrific in increasing the contrast of
| | 00:04 |
an image, or for modifying midtones,
you can boost the midtones to make them
| | 00:08 |
lighter, or sink the midtones to
make them darker, or adjust shadows,
| | 00:12 |
highlights and midtones, independently
across the different color channels in
| | 00:15 |
order to compensate for color cast.
| | 00:18 |
But what about this image right here.
The name of this image by the way is
| | 00:21 |
High-contrast elephant.jpg, and this
is a fairly low resolution image that I
| | 00:26 |
shot years and years ago now at the
Denver Zoo, for what that's worth. And I
| | 00:30 |
ask what about this image, because it
doesn't really fit into what I said the
| | 00:34 |
Levels command can do. It does have a
color cast. It's far too warm. It's too
| | 00:38 |
yellowy, too orangey, so we could
compensate for that using the Levels command,
| | 00:43 |
but we can't do anything about the
contrast problems here, because the Levels
| | 00:48 |
command is great at increasing
contrast, but it's not good at decreasing contrast.
| | 00:53 |
If you want to decrease the contrast
of an image, that's one of the scenarios
| | 00:57 |
in which you have to graduate from
Levels to Curves, as we'll be seeing. So
| | 01:01 |
what I'm going to do is in this
exercise, I'm going to demonstrate why Levels
| | 01:05 |
doesn't work. So that you can
anticipate when Levels is going to do you a
| | 01:08 |
solid, and when it's going to slip up,
and then we will move on to Curves in
| | 01:13 |
the next exercise. Now I'm going to
approach this color correction, as a static
| | 01:16 |
modification. So that is to say I'm
going to go up to the image menu, and I'm
| | 01:19 |
going to choose Adjustments, and we
are going to start by choosing Levels.
| | 01:22 |
Now the reason I'm working static is
because the Curves command in particular
| | 01:26 |
varies quite a bit. The behavior of
the Curves dialog box is a little bit
| | 01:31 |
different. Actually fairly different
than the behavior of the Curves panel here
| | 01:35 |
inside the Adjustments palette. So I
want to see those differences, and we'll
| | 01:39 |
start static, and then move on to a
Dynamic adjustment layer. So I'm going to
| | 01:43 |
go ahead and choose the Levels command
in order to bring up the Levels dialog
| | 01:46 |
box here. Now, I suppose I might go
ahead and start by increasing the gamma
| | 01:51 |
value in order to brighten the body
of the elephant, and that does help out
| | 01:55 |
this image. But my biggest problem
with this image is the shadows and the highlights.
| | 02:01 |
We almost have clipped shadows over
here in this left hand area going into the
| | 02:05 |
Pachyderm Chamber there, and we
almost have clipped highlights against this
| | 02:09 |
wall. Not quite, but almost, and
there's nothing we can do about that. I can't
| | 02:14 |
recover those shadows, and I can't
recover those highlights inside the Levels
| | 02:18 |
dialog box, because I don't have
control over this region right here, or this
| | 02:22 |
region right here, what are know as
Quarter Tones, by the way, and those are
| | 02:27 |
controls that you have inside the
Curves. Basically inside the Curves dialog
| | 02:30 |
box, you make up your own controls. You
put things anywhere where you want them
| | 02:34 |
to be, but Levels you just got, shadow,
midtones and highlights of course.
| | 02:38 |
So I'm going to go ahead and change
that gamma value back to 1, because it's
| | 02:41 |
really not doing all that much for us
at this point. What I'll do is I'm going
| | 02:46 |
to go ahead and press and hold the Alt
key, or the Option key on the Mac, and
| | 02:50 |
I'm going to click and hold on this
black slider triangle right there. And I've
| | 02:55 |
still got my Alt or Option key down as
I'm just swinging over to this area, so
| | 03:00 |
that we can see that this region right
here is almost clipped. There's sort of
| | 03:04 |
line that is tracing along the
elephants head, it is almost a bunch of clipped
| | 03:08 |
pixels at this point. We have clipped
shadows almost, and I say almost, because
| | 03:12 |
generally speaking they are just
clipped in one channel or other. But if I were
| | 03:16 |
to go any further with this modification,
if I was to move it over just ever so
| | 03:20 |
slightly here, you can see that we
are going to start clipping things very, very quickly.
| | 03:24 |
Our modification is small as moving
this black point slider over to 10, it's
| | 03:29 |
clipping like crazy inside of the image
right there. All right, so obviously we
| | 03:35 |
don't want to do that, because we do
not want to clip those shadows, and then
| | 03:38 |
by contrast we have got the white
slider triangle right here. If I was to Alt
| | 03:42 |
drag it or Option drag it, I haven't
made any modifications so far. You would
| | 03:46 |
notice that we have got a line of what
appear to be clipped pixels right next
| | 03:51 |
to the previously clipped pixels just a
moment ago, over along the left side of
| | 03:56 |
the elephants head, and if I start
moving this slider over, very quickly I
| | 04:00 |
start clipping the heck out
of that wall in the background.
| | 04:04 |
Now what this proves is two things.
First of all it proves that we are not
| | 04:07 |
going to do any good for this image.
Not any real lasting good with the Levels
| | 04:11 |
command. It also proves we're in luck,
we have a prayer, because we are not
| | 04:17 |
starting off clipped, as we can see here.
We have highlight information, and we
| | 04:22 |
have shadow information. We just need
to bring it out, and we can do that using
| | 04:25 |
the Curves command, and we will begin
to do that. I'm just going to introduce
| | 04:29 |
you to the Curves command in the next
exercise, and then we are going to fix
| | 04:32 |
this elephant, stick with me.
| | 04:34 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| A first look at Curves| 00:00 | I am still looking at the High-
contrast elephant.jpg image. In the previous
| | 00:04 | exercise we learned how and why the
Levels command, despite its amazing immense
| | 00:09 | power tool is no match for this
elephant right here. And what you do? When the
| | 00:15 | Levels command fails, you move one
step forward to the Curves command.
| | 00:19 | I'll show you what I mean. I'll go
ahead and cancel all of here. Despite any
| | 00:22 | modifications I may have made, I may
get to this point, so that's looking
| | 00:26 | better I guess, but not better enough,
so I'll just cancel out, because you
| | 00:30 | don't want to heap one color
modification on top of another if you can avoid it.
| | 00:34 | Levels and Curves really overlap each
other, so really no sense in applying
| | 00:37 | Levels and then applying Curves right
afterward. So I'll cancel out of here.
| | 00:41 | I'm going to go to the Image menu,
choose Adjustments and there it is. Levels
| | 00:46 | command. Failure where this image is
concerned, so we move just one step there
| | 00:50 | to Curves. So also notice that our
keyboard shortcuts move one step. Ctrl+L or
| | 00:55 | Command+L on the Mac, for Levels, Ctrl+
M or Command+M on the Mac for Curves.
| | 01:01 | And that brings up this big whopping
Curves dialog box right here, to give you
| | 01:06 | sense of what's going on. Even if you
come to terms with Levels, and you are
| | 01:09 | trying to feel comfortable with it, then
| | 01:11 | seem the Curves command is enough to
panic many people. But it's actually
| | 01:16 | fairly straightforward once you come
to terms with it. So hopefully we will,
| | 01:21 | over the course of these next few exercises.
| | 01:23 | Notice that right dead center in the
middle of this ginormous Curves dialog box
| | 01:27 | here is this Luminance graph. And then
inside of the graph, cutting across it
| | 01:32 | is this diagonal line, which
is the Luminance curve. Now
| | 01:35 | I know that it doesn't make a lot of
sense that I'm calling it a diagonal line
| | 01:39 | or Curve, when it's most certainly not
a curve, but it wants to be a curve, and
| | 01:43 | it will be a curve, the
second you start modifying it.
| | 01:46 | Also notice here inside of this
Luminance graph that we have a Histogram. The
| | 01:51 | exact same Histogram we were seeing
just a moment ago. Now that may puzzle you
| | 01:54 | a little bit, because it looks like
it's squished, and it truly it's not
| | 01:58 | squished, it's stretched,
it's what's going on here.
| | 02:00 | It is still 256 pixels wide, just as it
was inside the Levels dialog box. It's
| | 02:04 | just that, because the Luminance graph
is a square, the Histogram is scaled, so
| | 02:11 | that it's taller. All the bars in this
Histogram graph here have been scaled
| | 02:17 | relative to the height of the graph as it were.
| | 02:20 | So anyway, we know by looking at this
graph here, this Histogram, that we have
| | 02:24 | a lot of shadows over here on the left
hand side, so just this huge peak of shadows.
| | 02:30 | Not too many mid tones, relatively
few, and then quite a few highlights
| | 02:34 | dropping suddenly right there at the end.
And these are the guys we need to fix.
| | 02:37 | We need to draw these
| | 02:39 | highlights down to make them darker,
and we need to boost these shadows up to
| | 02:43 | make them brighter. Then sort of,
monkey around with the midtones until we get
| | 02:47 | rid of the color cast.
| | 02:49 | So how do we do such a thing? Well,
here's how you work inside of this graph.
| | 02:52 | First of all make sure that you've seen
the graph the way I am. This is default
| | 02:56 | RGB behavior by the way, where black
is located over here on the left side of
| | 03:00 | the graph and white is located over
here on the right side of the graph. And
| | 03:04 | that's the way I prefer to work, and
that's the way that it works inside the
| | 03:08 | Levels command. So it's easier to keep
things similar I figure, and also that's
| | 03:12 | the way I'm going to be
working. So I just want to make
| | 03:14 | sure you are too, you probably are.
But just to make sure, come down here to
| | 03:18 | this option that says Show Amount of,
and if can't see it, by the way you got
| | 03:21 | this double arrow icon, you can go
in and click on it to expand the Curve
| | 03:25 | Display Options. Make sure Show amount
of is set to Light, 0-255, which are the
| | 03:30 | luminance levels, of course, as opposed
to pigment, which will flip the graph,
| | 03:35 | notice that. Now blacks are over here
on the right side, and whites are over on
| | 03:38 | the left side, and that's just
confusing as heck to me anyway.
| | 03:42 | But that's the way it is by default
for CMYK images incidentally. But you can
| | 03:47 | always switch it to light instead, if
you want to. You can always work that way,
| | 03:50 | regardless of whether you are working
on RGB images or CMYK image, or what
| | 03:54 | have you. Also notice this output
graph right here, or output access is where
| | 03:59 | it actually is. It's going from black
to bottom, to white at the top. Okay, so,
| | 04:02 | what does all this mean, how in the world
do you work inside this crazy environment?
| | 04:06 | Well, what I suggest you do for this image,
anyway, just for starters, just to get a sense
| | 04:11 | of what's going on is just go ahead
and click right in the center of that
| | 04:14 | diagonal line, and notice I have done
two things. I set a point, and I actually
| | 04:18 | moved it slightly, so I have curved
what was formerly a straight diagonal line,
| | 04:22 | so it is now a curve.
| | 04:23 | Ever so slight, it is not a super curve,
just a very, sort of a subtle curve at
| | 04:28 | this point. But I can make it less
subtle by dragging it. So this becomes a
| | 04:32 | custom point in my graph. I can put as
many points on this line as I like, as
| | 04:37 | many as I can stuff into this graph at
any rate. Typically you work with maybe 4
| | 04:42 | or 5 points, you don't work with a ton.
But you can, you do have that level of
| | 04:46 | control if you need it. Now, in my
case I have only got 3 points. I have got
| | 04:50 | this point in the center, and notice by
the way it's an input level of 128. So
| | 04:55 | thing started here, I'll put it back
where it was, where we've studied originally.
| | 04:59 | Input of 128 and an output of 128,
what that mean is we are starting with a
| | 05:05 | gray. So we are not working with Gamma
anymore, forget the whole Gamma thing.
| | 05:09 | We are working with this Gray point, which
is 128, so it's right there in the center,
| | 05:14 | between 0 for black and 255 for white.
And it's mapping to 128, so in other words,
| | 05:19 | it's not moving at this point. But if I
were to drag it up, I'm going to boost the
| | 05:24 | midtones inside of this elephant as
you can see, because I'm now saying, I
| | 05:27 | moved my input level a little bit,
because when you move that point back and
| | 05:31 | forth, notice that it changes that
input value right there, but that's
| | 05:34 | insignificant at this point.
| | 05:36 | But now it's 124 so it's still right
there somewhere near the center, and I've
| | 05:40 | moved it up to 153 so I'm elevating
those neutral gray values right there.
| | 05:45 | Well, I'm leaving the black point alone,
and I'm leaving the white point alone.
| | 05:49 | So this is just as if I modified the
Gamma value inside the Levels dialog box.
| | 05:54 | I know I told you just a moment ago to forget
about it. What I meant was forget about how gamma
| | 05:57 | is measured as an exponent, but this
is the same thing. This is just like
| | 06:02 | taking a Gamma value that Gray slider
bar and moving it over to left in order
| | 06:07 | to boost the midtones inside the image. And this
is the level of control you are afforded by Levels.
| | 06:12 | Now I can also either just grab this
black point right there and move it
| | 06:15 | around, or notice here, I can actually
drag this black point slider if I want
| | 06:20 | to, so that's analogous to the black
point slider inside the Levels dialog box.
| | 06:24 | And I can move the white point slider if I wanted
to do as well. But both of these guys are going to
| | 06:28 | increase the contrast of said
pachyderm here, and that's not what we want. So
| | 06:32 | I'm going to go ahead and change this
back to 0, and change this one back to
| | 06:35 | 255. Instead, what I probably want to
do is add more points for the quarter
| | 06:41 | tones, that is, for these regions here
inside of the shadows, and well inside
| | 06:46 | of the shadows and the highlights.
| | 06:48 | So for example, I can set a point here
arbitrarily, I'm just clicking, and then
| | 06:52 | I could drag it down to sync those
highlights a little. Now the images aren't
| | 06:56 | looking really great at this point.
I'm just trying to give you a sense of
| | 06:58 | where we might go with it, and then I can
click inside the shadows and I can boost those
| | 07:02 | guys up, and then if I wanted more
control, I can click like right about here,
| | 07:06 | and take that down a little bit, and
take these midtones down. You see, I can
| | 07:10 | just click and drag any points
along this curve in order to modify the
| | 07:16 | luminance levels of the animal here
in the background or the image, more
| | 07:20 | appropriately I think.
| | 07:22 | And notice that as I do, if I drag a
point up where it is going to brighten
| | 07:27 | that region of color, and if I drag it
down it's going to darken it, so that's
| | 07:31 | something to bear in mind as well. And
I could drag upward so that I can bring
| | 07:36 | out those shadows, and you can see now there's
| | 07:38 | like this rock, or this hideous
grotesque form back here in the shadows that we
| | 07:43 | can draw out, we don't necessarily
want to draw a lot of attention to it. But
| | 07:47 | we can if we want to, by modifying the
points on the curve, on this luminous
| | 07:52 | curve, here inside of the Curves dialog box.
| | 07:55 | Now that just gives you a vague sense
of what's going on. Notice by the way we
| | 08:00 | have the show clipping, right there; we
got a Show clipping checkbox, that will
| | 08:04 | show you where the clipping is
occurring, for either the black point or the
| | 08:08 | white point. And you could also
turn Show clipping off, and you
| | 08:12 | could Alt+drag if you want to the
white point or the black point. So you got
| | 08:15 | those same controls, and that's an
option drag of course, of either those
| | 08:19 | slider triangles on the Mackintosh
side of things. So a lot of overlap with
| | 08:24 | those Levels controls as well. But just
a bunch more control inside of Curves.
| | 08:30 | In the next exercise I'm going to
basically sling a bunch of keyboard tricks at you.
| | 08:34 | Just rat-a-tat, and then
you have them in your brain
| | 08:38 | some place floating around. And then
we'll use them, and actually make a
| | 08:42 | better elephant in the near
future. Join me, won't you?
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Static Curves layer tricks| 00:00 | All right. So you see me playing me
with this pachyderm here and the name of
| | 00:04 | the image is High-contrast elephant.jpg,
and I have gone ahead and chosen the
| | 00:08 | Curves command. I went to the Image menu,
chose Adjustments, and then chose the
| | 00:12 | Curves command, or I could press Ctrl+M,
Command+M on the Mac in order to bring
| | 00:16 | up the Curves dialog box, which
allows me to apply a static luminance modification.
| | 00:21 | Now, I stress that because I'm about to
show you a bunch of different wonderful
| | 00:25 | hidden tricks for working inside the
Curves dialog box. They work, as I'm about
| | 00:30 | to show you, when you're applying a
static modification. If you're working with
| | 00:33 | an adjustment layer, things work a
little differently. The secret hidden tricks
| | 00:37 | are slightly different as you'll see.
I say "as you'll see" because you're
| | 00:41 | going to see that in the next exercise.
| | 00:43 | So let me show them to you here, inside
the dialog box first, where they make a
| | 00:47 | little more sense, and then we'll see
them in the Adjustment palette in just a moment.
| | 00:50 | I've already made an adjustment to my
curve, and I've sort of drawn attention
| | 00:55 | to this unspeakable mask back here in
the shadowy background. Although this is
| | 01:00 | an interesting modification, I'm not
sure it's exactly what I'm looking for. So
| | 01:04 | I'm going to reset my curve, my
luminous curve back to a straight diagonal
| | 01:08 | line, by pressing and holding; notice
this Cancel button right here, if I press
| | 01:12 | and hold the Alt key or the Option key
on the Mac, it changes to Reset. Then
| | 01:16 | with Alt or Option down, I'll click
on that Reset button and I restore the
| | 01:19 | original elephant, which is
in very bad shape of course.
| | 01:23 | Now notice, as I gesture at this
elephant, what am I gesturing with, an
| | 01:26 | Eyedropper. So as soon as I move my
cursor out of the dialog box, assuming this
| | 01:31 | tool right here is selected by the way.
You want to make sure the Point tool is
| | 01:34 | selected, not the Pencil tool. Then
when you move your cursor out of the dialog
| | 01:37 | box, you get an Eyedropper, and if
you drag with that cursor, watch in the
| | 01:41 | graph; I want you to watch this area as
I drag inside of the image, you'll see
| | 01:47 | a little bouncing ball that's jumping
up and down all over the place there.
| | 01:51 | It's showing you the location of the
Luminance Level that you're dragging over.
| | 01:55 | So in other words, what is the
luminance of the pixel that's directly under
| | 02:00 | your cursor there.
| | 02:01 | In my case, I happened to have found
the dead center color. But what's more
| | 02:06 | useful is to say, well, gosh, it's
this area right here on the animal's
| | 02:10 | forehead; whether it's a girl or a boy
elephant, I think this is a lady, but
| | 02:15 | right here on her forehead, let's say,
is the area that I want to modify. Well,
| | 02:20 | I can see with the bouncing ball that
that's kind to be in the upper sort of
| | 02:23 | quadrant or upper eighth really or
sixteenth I guess it is of that graph. You
| | 02:28 | can see where the ball is bouncing
around, so in the upper right corner of the graph there.
| | 02:32 | Now, that's very interesting. That
would mean that you'd have to sort of click
| | 02:35 | around and then go back to the graph in
order to set a point to that location.
| | 02:38 | What if you just want to lift a point
by clicking some place inside of the
| | 02:43 | elephant? Well, what you do is you
press and hold the Ctrl key or the Command
| | 02:46 | key on the Mac and then click at that point.
| | 02:49 | Notice what happens when you Ctrl+Click
or Command+click with this Eyedropper,
| | 02:52 | you just go ahead and add the point
automatically. So you don't have to worry
| | 02:56 | about the bouncing ball, you can see
where that point is going to land. Then
| | 03:00 | you know, okay, if I drag this down,
I'm going to make these colors, those
| | 03:05 | Luminance Levels, on that brow darker,
along of course with a bunch of other
| | 03:09 | colors that are getting dragged down
along with it. So that's another way to work.
| | 03:14 | Now, this point is selected so I can
get rid of it by pressing the Backspace
| | 03:17 | key or the Delete key on the Mac. You
can tell when a point is selected because
| | 03:21 | it's black; see that, and the
deselected points are hollow. I'll go ahead and
| | 03:26 | Backspace that away once again.
| | 03:27 | What if you want to add the Luminance
Levels that are associated with a pixel
| | 03:30 | on a Channel by Channel basis? So
you want to add the component Luminance Levels.
| | 03:34 | Then what you do is you press Ctrl and
Shift at the same time, that would be
| | 03:37 | Command and Shift on the Mac, and you
click. Now, what you're going to notice
| | 03:42 | is nothing happened here inside of the
composite graph. That's because I have
| | 03:47 | to go to the individual
channels to see these new points.
| | 03:50 | So notice, I have the exact same
keyboard shortcuts that I have with levels. So
| | 03:53 | I've got Alt or Option+2 for the RGB
composite. Then I've Alt or Option+3 for
| | 03:58 | Red, Alt or Option+4 for Green, and Alt
or Option+5 for Blue. I was telling you
| | 04:03 | that Ctrl or Command work as well
when you're inside this dialog box.
| | 04:07 | Anyway, I'm going to move to Red.
Notice right there, there is the point that I
| | 04:11 | just added. If I press Alt+4 for Green,
there's the point in the Green Channel.
| | 04:16 | Alt or Option+5 for Blue shows me the
point here inside of the blue graph.
| | 04:21 | So I'll go ahead and press Alt or
Option+2 to move back to the RGB composite
| | 04:26 | graph right here.
| | 04:27 | Another thing that you can do. If you
set a bunch of points here, let's say, I
| | 04:30 | go ahead and set many points in this
graph, like so, and move them around a
| | 04:34 | little bit and so on. You can move
from one point to another by clicking on
| | 04:39 | that point, but if you click on a
point to select it, you run the risk of
| | 04:42 | slightly moving it. Sometimes you have
things exactly where you want them to
| | 04:46 | be, and you don't want to go goofing
up your points and sort of messing up
| | 04:50 | their locations ever so slightly.
| | 04:52 | So if you want to switch from one
point to another from the keyboard, in the
| | 04:56 | old days you would press Ctrl+Tab
to move forward to the points or
| | 05:00 | Ctrl+Shift+Tab to backup. That still
works by the way, and that's Ctrl+Tab on
| | 05:04 | either the PC or the Mac, but it only
works when you're inside this dialog box.
| | 05:08 | When you're outside the dialog box,
over here in the Adjustments palette, that
| | 05:11 | doesn't work anymore, because that's
going to switch you between windows on the PC anyway.
| | 05:15 | So I urge you to get in the habit of
using a different keyboard shortcut if you
| | 05:18 | had been in the habit of using Ctrl+
Tab in the past. This is much easier. You
| | 05:23 | press the + key, which is the equals
key of course, so you just press + in
| | 05:27 | order to move forward from one point
to the next, like I'm doing here. You
| | 05:31 | press - to backup.
| | 05:33 | You can cycle all the way by the way.
If I press - to go back to the black
| | 05:37 | point here and then I press - again,
I'll go to the white point and then cycle
| | 05:40 | back around the graph. So that's
just a way to advance from one point to
| | 05:44 | another. Plus or minus are available to you.
| | 05:46 | Then you can either drag that point to
a different location or you can nudge it
| | 05:50 | from the keyboard. Now, I want you to
see what happens when you nudge from the
| | 05:52 | keyboard. Notice we have an Input
Level and an Output Level. So currently for
| | 05:57 | me, this point is set to an Input of
169 and an Output of 162. Meaning, I'm
| | 06:02 | changing everything that has a
Brightness value, a Luminance Level of 169 and
| | 06:07 | I'm changing it to 162. So I'm
darkening up those Luminance Levels slightly.
| | 06:12 | Let me switch to a different point here
so that option is no longer active, and
| | 06:16 | then I'll press the + key to comeback
to that point. I just want to make sure
| | 06:19 | the numerical value is not
active for this technique to work.
| | 06:22 | Notice if I press the Right Arrow key,
I'm increasing the Input Level value,
| | 06:28 | and if I press the Left Arrow key I'm
decreasing the Input Level value. Now,
| | 06:31 | you might say, well, how in the world
are you going to remember right and left
| | 06:34 | for Input? Well, because it's moving
the point back and forth, notice that. If
| | 06:38 | I press the Right Arrow key, watch the
point go to the right. If I press Left
| | 06:41 | Arrow key, you can see the point go to
the left. So that makes sense and that's
| | 06:44 | all that's happening when you're
increasing or decreasing the Input value.
| | 06:49 | If you press the Up or Down Arrow key,
that's going to move the point up, in
| | 06:53 | this case of the Up Arrow key and Down
in the case of the Down Arrow key, and
| | 06:56 | that's going to either increase with
Up Arrow or decrease the Output Level
| | 07:00 | value. So it's just something to bear
in mind if you want to be able to move
| | 07:04 | these points from the keyboard.
| | 07:05 | If you want to move them more quickly
in increments of ten, then you press
| | 07:08 | Shift+Up Arrow or Shift+Down Arrow or
Shift+Right Arrow or Shift+Left Arrow,
| | 07:13 | also available to you.
| | 07:14 | So there you have it, I think that's
basically everything she wrote there in
| | 07:18 | terms of, wonderful keyboard hidden
techniques that are available to you here
| | 07:23 | inside the Curves dialog box.
| | 07:25 | Things don't work quite that way
once we switch over to the Adjustments
| | 07:30 | palette, and work with an adjustment
layer. So why don't we go ahead and do
| | 07:33 | that. I'm going to go ahead and click
the Cancel button to cancel out of the
| | 07:36 | big old Curves dialog box, and then if
you join me in the next exercise, I'm
| | 07:40 | going to show you how things work
when we apply a Curves adjustment layer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Dynamic Curves layer tricks| 00:00 | In the previous exercise I showed you
static curve editing tricks, by which I
| | 00:04 | mean tricks that work inside of the
Static Curves dialog box. In this exercise,
| | 00:09 | I'm going to share with you some
dynamic curve editing tricks, and these would
| | 00:13 | work with a Dynamic adjustment layer.
| | 00:16 | So I'm still working in the High-
contrast elephant.jpg image. Haven't made any
| | 00:20 | changes to it so far, because I've just
been canceling out of dialog boxes. I'm
| | 00:24 | going to go ahead and make sure that I
have made my Adjustments palette up on
| | 00:27 | screen, and I'm going to click on the
Curves Adjustment. So again, if Levels is
| | 00:32 | failing you, this whole notion that
I'm trying to share with you is that, if
| | 00:36 | Brightness/Contrast doesn't work, then
you move over to Levels, and if Levels
| | 00:39 | doesn't work, then you move over to
Curves. Curves is always going to work, so
| | 00:42 | you needn't bother with Exposure.
| | 00:44 | I'm going to click on Curves to
bring up the Curves panel here inside the
| | 00:47 | Adjustments palette. It's very
important when you're working with Curves to
| | 00:51 | make sure that you have the Expanded
View of this palette. So make sure it's
| | 00:55 | nice and big like this. You can confirm
that you have the Expanded View working
| | 00:58 | for you, if you go up to the palette
menu and you check that Expanded View has
| | 01:02 | a check mark in front of it; which it
does for me, so that's good. Because you
| | 01:05 | really want to be able to see the
entire width of 256 different Luminance Levels.
| | 01:10 | If you can't see that, if you're
working in the Small View, like this, then you
| | 01:14 | don't have as much control of your
curve, you actually lose control over the
| | 01:18 | process, because you're going to make
larger modifications. You missed some
| | 01:22 | Input and Output Levels. It's a
terrible thing actually. Really limits your control.
| | 01:27 | So I'm going to make it bigger, and
then I was telling you, how we got the
| | 01:31 | bouncing ball. Remember the bouncing
ball that we saw on the previous exercise,
| | 01:34 | how in the world do we get to it? You
might think, well, you just move your
| | 01:37 | cursor out of the Adjustments palette
and you should get an Eyedropper. Well, you don't.
| | 01:41 | Or you might think, I'll grab one of
these Eyedroppers right here; the Black
| | 01:45 | Point Eyedropper right there or the
White Point Eyedropper, or you could even
| | 01:49 | try out the Gray Eyedropper, which
controls the Mid-tones. But if you do that,
| | 01:53 | notice what happens, if I grab the
Black Eyedropper and I click some place
| | 01:56 | inside the image, I say make the
color that I click on black. That's really
| | 02:01 | going to make a mess of this
elephant. We don't want that.
| | 02:03 | So I'm going to press Ctrl+Z, Command
+Z on the Mac in order to undo that
| | 02:06 | modification. Same with white, it's
also going to destroy the image. I'm not
| | 02:10 | very fond of these Eyedroppers in
general. They also occur inside of Levels
| | 02:13 | dialog box, incidentally. But
I'll just show you how they work.
| | 02:16 | If I click on a color now, it will
change that to white, so again that just
| | 02:20 | makes the image that much worse at this
point. It does automate the process of
| | 02:24 | course. Notice it has just gone ahead
and figured out exactly on a Channel by
| | 02:28 | Channel basis this curve needs to be
modified in order to accommodate this Edit
| | 02:33 | that I have requested there. Of course,
it's a terrible Edit, so who cares. So
| | 02:37 | I'll press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on
the Mac to undo that modification.
| | 02:39 | This one, the Gray Eyedropper is a
little more useful, because what it can do,
| | 02:44 | if you get it, then you just click on
the color and it will neutralize that
| | 02:48 | color and modify all the colors to
compensate. So watch this. If I say gosh,
| | 02:52 | this sort of orangey poo area
right there needs to turn gray. Sure enough,
| | 02:56 | Photoshop goes ahead and does it, but
it comes at the expense of a lot of other
| | 03:01 | colors inside of the image.
| | 03:02 | Now, if you have a Gray Card, like
you've got a Macbeth Card that you've shot
| | 03:06 | inside of your photograph, then you
can use this Gray Eyedropper to click on
| | 03:11 | one of the Gray Swatches on the
Macbeth Card or your Gray Card or what have
| | 03:14 | you, in order to ensure that you have
proper white balance. But unless you have
| | 03:18 | something like that, unless you have
an industry standard Gray Card, I do not
| | 03:20 | recommend this tool, because it's very
difficult to predict what is going to
| | 03:24 | happen to your image.
| | 03:25 | So anyway, I'm going to press Ctrl+Z,
Command+Z on the Mac, and I'm going to
| | 03:28 | click on this Eyedropper again to turn
it off. So none of these Eyedroppers are
| | 03:32 | the Eyedropper we're looking for.
Which is the Eyedropper we're looking for?
| | 03:35 | The Eyedropper tool. This is new to
Photoshop CS4. This has not been this way
| | 03:38 | in the past. You've got to go get your
Eyedropper tool, and this will allow you
| | 03:42 | to get to the bouncing ball
functionality, and it will allow you to lift
| | 03:45 | points; both on a composite and component basis.
| | 03:48 | So go ahead and get that Eyedropper.
You can get it of course by pressing the I
| | 03:51 | key, if you like. Well, you'd think you
would just drag inside of the image to
| | 03:57 | see the bouncing ball, but notice a
complete lack of bouncing ball over here
| | 04:00 | inside the graph. That's because what
you've got to do, this is totally top
| | 04:03 | secret hidden thing, and even people
who have been using the program for years,
| | 04:07 | it would be no way they know this.
| | 04:08 | You press and hold the Ctrl key or the
Command key on the Mac, which does not
| | 04:12 | change the Eyedropper to any other tool,
so it just keeps it the Eyedropper; so
| | 04:16 | Ctrl on the PC, Command on the Mac, and
now drag inside the image, and look at
| | 04:20 | the bouncing ball, there it is over
there on the right side of your video,
| | 04:24 | bouncing around inside of the luminance graph.
| | 04:28 | Notice it just went ahead and added a
point automatically for me, because I had
| | 04:31 | that Ctrl or Command key down. That's
the other way that of course you add a
| | 04:35 | point. It's just the Ctrl+Click inside
of a region or Command+click inside of a
| | 04:39 | region, it will add the point
to the composite graph here.
| | 04:44 | If you want to add a point to the RGB
components, then you press Ctrl+Shift at
| | 04:48 | the same time or Command+Shift at the
same time and click. You're not going to
| | 04:52 | see that point appear here inside the
composite view, you're going to have to
| | 04:55 | actually switch over to the Channels,
which have the same keyboard shortcuts we
| | 04:58 | saw just a moment ago, in order to see
that new point. So there's one of the
| | 05:02 | new points anyway and there's
another one and there's the third one.
| | 05:08 | I'm switching between these Channels of
course by pressing Alt+3 for Red; that
| | 05:11 | would be Option+3 on the Mac. Alt+4
for Green, that would be Option+4 on the
| | 05:15 | Mac, and Alt+5 for Blue, Option+5 on the Mac.
| | 05:18 | Let's go back to RGB by pressing of
course Alt+2 or Option+2 on the Mac. I say
| | 05:25 | of course for no good reason, because
it doesn't make any darn sense, so me
| | 05:28 | saying of course is totally wrong.
But anyway, those are our new keyboard
| | 05:31 | shortcuts that we have to work with.
| | 05:33 | What else? Oh, we also have, if I were
to just sort of throw a few more points
| | 05:37 | here, we also have the ability to
switch between points, just as we saw inside
| | 05:41 | the dialog box. Now everything is the
same. So you press the + key to cycle
| | 05:45 | forward through the points, or the -
key to cycle backward, like so. Then of
| | 05:50 | course you can also modify the
location of the points from the keyboard by
| | 05:54 | pressing the Up and Down and Right and
Left Arrow keys, and you can press Shift
| | 06:00 | with an Arrow key for a bigger modification.
| | 06:03 | One more thing that I forgot to tell
you inside the Curves dialog box that
| | 06:06 | works both inside the Curves dialog box
and here inside the Adjustments palette
| | 06:10 | is the ability to select multiple points.
| | 06:12 | So for example, if I Shift+Click on
points like so, I'm going to select
| | 06:17 | multiple points as I've done here, and
then I can drag them around as a clump
| | 06:22 | like so. Or I can go ahead and nudge
them from the keyboard if I want to by
| | 06:27 | pressing, for example, the Up Arrow key
or the Left Arrow key or what have you.
| | 06:33 | Now I'm pressing the Right Arrow key.
| | 06:34 | What I want you to notice is now
notice that we're seeing 3 and -3. What does
| | 06:40 | that mean? Well, that's the relative
modification from where all these points
| | 06:44 | started. So if they started at 0,0,
then I have moved them up 3 and over to the
| | 06:50 | left 3 as well, which is presumably
going to go ahead and lighten these colors
| | 06:56 | just a little bit, especially as I
raise that Output Level, that's always going
| | 07:00 | to end up brightening.
| | 07:01 | All right. So that's everybody there.
Those are the secret hidden tricks. Of
| | 07:05 | course, these work by the way when
this Point tool is active. That's very
| | 07:09 | important. I'll show you more, more,
much more. We'll actually correct this
| | 07:14 | elephant and also demonstrate the
behavior of the Target Adjustment tool, which
| | 07:17 | exists both inside the Curves dialog
box and here inside the Curves panel of
| | 07:21 | the Adjustments palette,
beginning in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting the composite image| 00:00 | Now that you know all of the special
tips and tricks for working inside the
| | 00:05 | Curves panel, here inside the
Adjustments palette, let's see how we go about
| | 00:08 | actually correcting this elephant.
| | 00:11 | I'm still working right along here,
inside High-contrast elephant.jpg. Tell you
| | 00:17 | what, we can either just go ahead and
reset our settings by clicking on this
| | 00:21 | Reset button down here next to the
Trash Can, in the lower right corner of the
| | 00:25 | Adjustments palette, and that should
restore my diagonal line here inside of
| | 00:31 | the Curves panel.
| | 00:32 | But if you weren't with me in the
previous exercise, all you need to do is open
| | 00:35 | this elephant right here. I'm just
going to go ahead and Delete this layer, and
| | 00:39 | then by pressing the Backspace key of
course or the Delete key on the Mac, and
| | 00:43 | then go to your Adjustments palette
and just click here on Curves in order to
| | 00:47 | create that new Curves adjustment layer.
| | 00:50 | Then here's what we're going to do.
We're going to start by adding a very light
| | 00:55 | point. We could go ahead and lift it
from the image if we wanted to. Make sure
| | 00:58 | that you have the Eyedropper selected
if you're going to go that route. Here in
| | 01:01 | the toolbox is where you
would select the Eyedropper.
| | 01:03 | Then you would Ctrl+Click or Command+
Click some place in a light portion of the
| | 01:10 | elephant. I'm going to undo the
addition of that point right there. I'm going
| | 01:13 | to recommend that we lift a point
from the wall here. So I'm going to
| | 01:16 | Ctrl+Click or Command+Click on the Mac,
here inside the wall. That's going to
| | 01:20 | add a point, very high, inside of the graph.
| | 01:24 | Notice for me, the Input and Output
values are both 245 right now. They might
| | 01:27 | be something different for you. But
I'm going to go ahead and change my Input
| | 01:32 | value to 250 right here.
| | 01:34 | Now, this is very, very misleading in
my opinion. Even though the Input value
| | 01:39 | is listed second here inside of the
Adjustments palette, it should be listed
| | 01:44 | first. We should see an Input value
mapping to an Output value, that's how it
| | 01:48 | works. So I do not know who in the
world decided that Output should be first
| | 01:53 | and Input second, but that's
absolutely wrongheaded in my opinion.
| | 01:56 | But I'm going to talk in terms of
Input first and Output second, just so you
| | 02:00 | know what I'm up to. Then I'm going to
press Shift+Down Arrow to reduce that
| | 02:04 | Output value to 235. So we're mapping
what were formerly pixels that had a
| | 02:10 | Brightness value, a Luminance Level
of 250, we're now mapping them to a
| | 02:15 | Luminance Level of 235. So
we're darkening those colors.
| | 02:18 | Notice we're sending this graph now on
a precipitous decline. We have this sun
| | 02:23 | cliff here, and then we're blacking
out a ton of colors. Obviously, we don't
| | 02:27 | want anything like that.
| | 02:28 | So I'm going to go ahead and add
another point pretty close. Notice if you get
| | 02:32 | this cursor right there, that looks
like a little move cursor, which is what it
| | 02:35 | is, the little four arrow cursor, that
means you're going to end up moving the
| | 02:39 | points. So you don't want that if
you're going to add another point. You want
| | 02:42 | to make sure that you got the cross,
like this, and then you can click, but
| | 02:46 | notice, anytime we move close to the
line, it wants to move that point again.
| | 02:50 | So I've got to move pretty far down
right to about there, I can get my cross
| | 02:55 | cursor, and that means I can
click to add a point at that location.
| | 02:59 | This time I want the Input Level to be
242, so that means I'm going to have to
| | 03:03 | nudge this point over. I'm doing it
from the keyboard. I'm just pressing the
| | 03:07 | Left Arrow key, in my case, a couple of
times to move that Input value over to
| | 03:12 | 242. This is all trial and error, folks.
I just came up with these values in
| | 03:16 | advance for you, but you could mess
around and find out your own values if you wanted to.
| | 03:20 | But I'm going to take that Output
value to 219 right there. So we're taking
| | 03:25 | what were formerly pixels with a
Luminance Level of 242 and now mapping them to
| | 03:30 | an Output Level of 219. Notice that
sends the graph back up. This is, by the
| | 03:36 | way, this luminance curve right here,
it's a Spline Curve, just in case you're
| | 03:40 | curious. What that means is every point
is redirecting the line in a different
| | 03:45 | direction. So the points act as
directional handles, in addition to making the
| | 03:51 | curve go through the point.
| | 03:52 | All right. So the next point that I
want to add; I want something close to the
| | 03:57 | center this time around, so I'm
going to go ahead and click around this
| | 04:00 | location, right about there. I want an
Input value this time of 146 and I want
| | 04:06 | an Output value of 131 is what I'm
looking for. Again, I'm just reading this
| | 04:11 | off this piece of paper that I have in
front of me; I just went ahead and did
| | 04:15 | this in advance, so it's pre-baked.
| | 04:18 | Next thing, let's add a point around
this location right here. I'm going to
| | 04:21 | move it to an Input value of 54 and
an Output of 76 this time around. Isn't
| | 04:28 | this fun watching me change these points?
It's even more fun if you're working
| | 04:32 | along with me, if you have access to
this file. But if not, you can get a sense
| | 04:36 | of what kind of contributions each
one of these points is making to the
| | 04:41 | condition of the colors inside of this
animal right here. So you can see it on
| | 04:46 | a fly, as it happens. It's as
exciting as watching the paint on an elephant dry.
| | 04:51 | All right. I'm going to go ahead and
add a point. Actually, I'm going to add a
| | 04:54 | couple of points down here, couple of
shadow points. Let's go ahead and select
| | 04:57 | this point right there first. I'm
going to take it to an Input value of 7 and
| | 05:03 | an Output value of 28.
| | 05:06 | Now, watch what happens, notice how
I've got this hump right there in the
| | 05:10 | curve, and it would get worse if I
move this guy farther down. What this is
| | 05:14 | called by the way, when you have a
curve that's going up-down, up-down like
| | 05:17 | this, that's called an arbitrary map.
An arbitrary map will just ruin the
| | 05:21 | appearance of a continuous tone
photograph, as we're seeing right here.
| | 05:25 | The reason that it ruins the
appearance of the continuous tone photograph is
| | 05:30 | because any place where we have
flattening of the curve; we're going to get
| | 05:34 | grays, these weird gray areas inside
of the image. Then of course, if we're
| | 05:38 | going the wrong direction all of a
sudden, we're going down when we should be
| | 05:42 | going up, then we're going to have
colors reversed and invert inside of the
| | 05:47 | image, and that's just not going to look good.
| | 05:48 | Arbitrary maps can be super useful when
you're creating masks; as I explore in
| | 05:53 | my Photoshop Channels and Mask Series,
you should check it out, right here on
| | 05:57 | the lynda.com Online Training
Library by the way, just hours and hours of
| | 06:02 | material available to you there. But
for correcting continuous tone images, I
| | 06:06 | don't recommend arbitrary maps. I
recommend that you keep your curve nice and
| | 06:10 | fluid is the idea.
| | 06:12 | So let's do something about this point
right there. He's in a bad position, I
| | 06:16 | think, so let's make him better. I'm
going to take the Input value to 15, so
| | 06:21 | move it very close to that other point
right there. So we have one Input value
| | 06:25 | at 7 and another at 15, and then I'm
going to take this guy up to an Output
| | 06:31 | value of 43. Notice what a nice
smooth curve we have now and what a nice
| | 06:35 | gorgeous elephant we have as well.
| | 06:38 | Let me give you a sense of the
contribution of this adjustment layer. This is
| | 06:42 | before; this is the image as it
originally appeared, with such a black
| | 06:47 | background, notice that, the interior
of this pachyderm container or whatever
| | 06:51 | it is, this unfortunate cage back here,
is so very, very dark, and with the
| | 06:57 | Curves layer turned on, it is
illuminated, and we can see a little bit of that
| | 07:01 | disturbing form back there, but not
enough to truly be disturbing, not enough
| | 07:05 | to be as icky as it was before. But
we're really bringing in a lot of detail.
| | 07:10 | By the way, really quickly, in case
you're curious here, we have a total of
| | 07:16 | eight points on this curve, which makes
this a pretty point intensive curve by
| | 07:22 | the way. If you're curious what those
points are, I'll go ahead and move back
| | 07:25 | to the first one here. Notice it
starts with Output and Input of 0, and then
| | 07:30 | the next point up, that guy right there,
is Input 7, Output 28. Then we go to
| | 07:34 | Input 15, Output 43. Then we have Input
54, Output 76. I'm just repeating this
| | 07:40 | for those of you who may be struggling
to keep up here. Input 146 for the next
| | 07:45 | one, Output 131. Of course, I'm
discussing them in the opposite order of their
| | 07:50 | listing. The next one is Input 242, we
have Output 219. Then we have 250 Input,
| | 07:57 | Output 235, and then finally we have
the White Point, which is 255, 255, just
| | 08:02 | locking down the whites there.
| | 08:04 | The beauty of it is this elephant is
in much better condition than he was
| | 08:07 | before, but he is too; she, I'm sorry,
I think it's a she, she's too pink, much
| | 08:12 | too pink, she should be more of a
grayish color, and this grass should be
| | 08:16 | greener. You'll see. We're going to
correct it. But we're going to correct the
| | 08:21 | color cast of the animal now using
Channel by Channel modifications here inside
| | 08:26 | of the Curves panel, and we're
going to do that in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Neutralizing a color cast| 00:00 | In this exercise, we're going go ahead
and correct for the color cast of the
| | 00:05 | image, which in my opinion is too pink.
We're going to do that by applying some
| | 00:09 | Curve modifications on a Channel by
Channel basis. Now, we're not going to go
| | 00:13 | as nuts as we went with the Composite
Curve here, because that ends up just
| | 00:18 | getting thoroughly confusing in my
opinion; at least I get confused by it. So
| | 00:22 | we're going to apply a fairly
simple curve modification, as you'll see.
| | 00:26 | Anyway, if you're working along with
me, I still have open-- this is not a
| | 00:29 | catch-up document. It's just the
original High-contrast elephant.jpg image.
| | 00:33 | What you would do, if you just want to
catch up right now, because I want to
| | 00:36 | show you this other thing, I want to
show you how to work with presets, and
| | 00:39 | what you would do is you go ahead
create a new Curves adjustment layer; you
| | 00:43 | know how to do that. You just go here
to the Adjustments palette, and you go
| | 00:47 | ahead and click on this guy right
there to add a new Curves adjustment layer.
| | 00:50 | Why don't I do it with you, so that
we're doing it together, what the heck? So
| | 00:54 | I'll go ahead and throw that one away.
Here is my original elephant. I'll go
| | 00:57 | here, add Curves. Actually, you know
want I'm going do, I'm going to Alt+Click
| | 01:01 | or Option+Click on that icon right there,
and I'll call it elephant correction
| | 01:06 | or something like that, and then click OK.
| | 01:10 | Then notice I have got my flat curve
once again. I don't want to sit there and
| | 01:14 | add all those points; we had like eight
points in that curve just a moment ago,
| | 01:17 | I'm going to go up to the palette
menu and I'm going to choose Load Curves
| | 01:21 | Preset; I invite you to do the same.
Then you would burrow your way into the
| | 01:25 | 13_levels_Curves folder, that's
inside of your exercise files folder,
| | 01:28 | presumably on your desktop or some
place, and then get this guy, Reduce
| | 01:32 | contrast.acv. This will be your points
that will load into the graph as soon as
| | 01:38 | you click on the Load button.
There they are, just like that.
| | 01:41 | Notice this Reduce contrast item now
appears as a preset up here at the top of
| | 01:46 | the Adjustments palette, and you can
see that you've got all these other
| | 01:48 | presets you can choose from.
Photoshop CS4 shifts with a ton of color
| | 01:52 | correction presets you should know,
for all kinds of different commands. Some
| | 01:57 | of them are fairly useful.
| | 01:58 | I'm not sure that you're going to be
applying any of them on a regular basis.
| | 02:01 | What's more useful in my opinion is
just to know that you have them there and
| | 02:04 | that you can use them for your own
purposes. You can create your own presets
| | 02:08 | that you can use over and over again,
like Reduce contrast right there. You can
| | 02:12 | switch between, you could say, hey,
there is Increase Contrast, wow, does that
| | 02:15 | not work for this elephant? There is
Color Negative, ha, ha, ha, not really
| | 02:22 | what we're looking for, but, hey, it
looks about as good as the original did.
| | 02:26 | Then we can come back to Reduce
contrast and go oh, that's better.
| | 02:29 | So how do we compensate for the color
cast? Well, I'll tell you, here is what
| | 02:34 | we're going to do. I want you to switch
to the Red Channel; and I'm going to do
| | 02:37 | it from the keyboard, because I'm
really struggling by the way to come to terms
| | 02:41 | with these new keyboard shortcuts in
Photoshop CS4 for switching between
| | 02:44 | channels, it's just, I got to get this
down. I'm really having problems. I'm so
| | 02:48 | used to the old 1, 2, 3 for Red,
Green, Blue and now it's 3, 4, 5, which
| | 02:51 | doesn't make any darn sense. But anyway,
it's Alt+3 for Red; that's Option+3 on
| | 02:55 | the Mac, there it is.
| | 02:57 | I'm going to click right there in the
center to set a point at 128, 128, and
| | 03:02 | then I'm going to press Shift+Down
Arrow three times to reduce that Output
| | 03:06 | Level to 98. So we're mapping what
was formerly 128 to 98. That means we're
| | 03:11 | really taking the red out of this
elephant and there goes the pink. So that's
| | 03:17 | taking the pink out of
the elephant. That's good.
| | 03:19 | Now, we want to maybe add a little bit
of color to the grass. I'm going to add
| | 03:23 | a little bit of blue and a little bit
of green. So let's go ahead and press
| | 03:27 | Alt+4 or Option+4 on the Mac to get
green. By all means, if any of you come up
| | 03:32 | with a way of remembering these darn
things that I can convey to other people,
| | 03:36 | that would awesome. I haven't come
up with anything, but I haven't really
| | 03:39 | tried, I have to say.
| | 03:40 | Anyway, click in the middle. I did it,
you did it too, if you want to. Press
| | 03:44 | Shift+Up Arrow to raise the Output
Level to 138. So we're going from 128 to
| | 03:48 | 138. Then Alt+5 or Option+5 on the
Mac to go the Blue Channel. Click in the
| | 03:54 | center again. Gosh, I'm good at
clicking in the center, and then press Shift+Up
| | 03:58 | Arrow twice to change the Output
Level to 148, and we have ourselves a
| | 04:03 | beautiful pachyderm here, to
give you a sense of the difference.
| | 04:08 | Actually, the first thing I'm going
to do is I'm going to press Alt+2 or
| | 04:11 | Option+2 on the Mac to return to the
RGB composite, and I just want you to see,
| | 04:14 | isn't that awesome seeing all of those
Curves on top of each other there? So
| | 04:18 | you should see the black composite curve,
which is pretty complicated, and then
| | 04:23 | this simpler red, green, and blue Curves.
Then that gray thing in the middle is
| | 04:27 | just showing you the mean, the
original diagonal line. You can just see where
| | 04:32 | everything ultimately came from.
| | 04:34 | Incidentally, if you don't like seeing
that great diagonal line in the middle
| | 04:37 | there or you don't like seeing
anything; you actually have a lot of control
| | 04:40 | over what you see inside of this
palette, you can go up to the Adjustments
| | 04:43 | palette menu right there, and you
can choose this command, Curve Display
| | 04:46 | Options. Then you can, for example,
turn off Baseline, that will turn off that
| | 04:52 | gray line right in the middle. Did
you see it go away? You can change the
| | 04:55 | number of intersecting grid lines there
by clicking on that little guy, if you
| | 04:59 | want to, or you can click on this
to set it back to the way it was.
| | 05:02 | You can turn off the Histogram, if you
like. I wouldn't do that. I'd keep the
| | 05:05 | Histogram on. Channel Overlays is
something you can turn off too. See all the
| | 05:10 | stuff. Intersection Line by the way,
I'll go ahead and show you what that is.
| | 05:12 | I'll click OK. Intersection Line is
this line that you get when you're moving a
| | 05:16 | point around, like that. See those
lines, the vertical and horizontal lines
| | 05:21 | that are going off to the sides there.
All right. Let's undo that modification
| | 05:24 | though. I don't want that.
| | 05:25 | One other thing; this is completely
out of context, but you can change the
| | 05:29 | number of grid lines just by Alt-
Clicking inside the graph, that's an
| | 05:33 | Option+Click in the Mac. Isn't that
weird? So you can just do that one on the
| | 05:36 | fly if you want to. That is old
school Photoshop I have to tell you.
| | 05:40 | Anyway, I want to show you one more
thing. Let's go ahead and load the preset
| | 05:44 | from disk that goes ahead and creates
the color cast compensation. It's the
| | 05:49 | exact same correction that I have
already applied here, but I want to show you
| | 05:52 | the different between the two.
| | 05:54 | So let's go up to the palette menu,
choose Load Curves Preset. I'm going to
| | 05:58 | grab this guy right here, Pachyderm
protection, and click Load, and this is
| | 06:03 | this Channel by Channel modification
that I have applied. Just so you can see
| | 06:06 | the difference between them. This
is without the Channel by Channel
| | 06:09 | modification. See how pink she is. Now,
you can see, yeah, she is pretty darn
| | 06:13 | pink. She is pretty in pink, but she is
pretty darn pink. She shouldn't be that
| | 06:18 | pink, and she should be like this
instead. That looks more elephantine to me.
| | 06:23 | Just so you can see how far we've come
with this image in general, this is the
| | 06:27 | before version of the image, which has
a startling level of contrast, and sort
| | 06:32 | of has a certain effects quality to it
that you might actually like for some
| | 06:37 | sort of image, but this color
compensation that I have applied there, this
| | 06:41 | adjustment layer, if I turn it back on,
that's a more naturalistic elephant, I
| | 06:45 | think. A better effect all the way
around, thanks to the power of Curves here
| | 06:50 | in Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The Target Adjustment tool in Curves| 00:00 |
In Photoshop CS4, Curves offers one
more big advantage over Levels, and that's
| | 00:05 |
the Target Adjustment tool, which
allows you to click inside of an image and
| | 00:10 |
drag in order to change Luminance Levels.
A really awesome function that makes
| | 00:15 |
Curves considerably
easier to use, in my opinion.
| | 00:18 |
I'm working inside this image called
The surfer who surfed.jpg. Now, you can
| | 00:23 |
get to the Target Adjustment tool
whether you're working inside of the Curves
| | 00:27 |
dialog box or inside of the Adjustments
palette, but we're going to work in the
| | 00:31 |
Adjustments palette, just because
it gives us a little more freedom and control.
| | 00:34 |
I'm working on a flat image, so no
layers here, just a background image. I'll
| | 00:39 |
go to the Adjustments palette and
click on the Curves icon in order to add a
| | 00:43 |
Curves adjustment layer, as we can see,
and switch over to the Curves panel
| | 00:47 |
here inside the Adjustments palette.
| | 00:48 |
Now first, you've got to have this
tool selected right here, the Point tool.
| | 00:52 |
You can't be working with the Pencil
tool, and incidentally, the Pencil tool
| | 00:56 |
allows you to just go through and
actually draw Curves, like this, if you want to.
| | 01:01 |
You can also draw your own crazy
arbitrary maps if you want to. It tends to be
| | 01:06 |
a really useful tool for masking. I
don't use it too often to correct images however.
| | 01:11 |
I'm going to go ahead and reset the
curve by clicking on this little button
| | 01:14 |
right there, and now we get the nice
diagonal line once again. Switch to the
| | 01:18 |
Point tool so that the Target
Adjustment tool right here is available. Then
| | 01:22 |
notice something about this tool that I
want you to see. Watch the toolbox over
| | 01:26 |
here; notice how, currently for me,
my Marquee tool is selected. Well, if I
| | 01:30 |
click on the Target Adjustment tool,
which doesn't call itself the Target
| | 01:33 |
Adjustment tool, and I've heard it
called various things by various people; I
| | 01:37 |
said this way back in the Fundamentals
portion of this series, but I'm going
| | 01:40 |
with Target Adjustment tool because
that's what its called in Lightroom.
| | 01:44 |
Lightroom was the first application to
offer this tool, and I just think that
| | 01:48 |
name makes a ton of sense. You're
targeting Luminance Levels inside the image
| | 01:51 |
and then you're adjusting them.
How much clearer could that be?
| | 01:54 |
Anyway, when I select the tool by
clicking on it, then these tools are no
| | 01:58 |
longer active. No tool in the
toolbox is active. I see my little Target
| | 02:02 |
Adjustment Cursor up here on the far
left side of the Options bar. There are no
| | 02:06 |
options for it, but its something of a
full-fledge tool that is only available
| | 02:09 |
when you're using certain adjustments.
It would be great if it was actually
| | 02:12 |
over here in the toolbox and we
could get to it all of the time.
| | 02:15 |
Anyway, we've got a problem with the
exposure of this image. It's underexposed.
| | 02:20 |
So we have a lot of empty highlights
over here. I'm going to click the Auto
| | 02:23 |
button in order to just apply Auto
Tone to the image. It fixes the highlights
| | 02:29 |
on a Channel by Channel basis. We'll
revisit those Channels momentarily, but
| | 02:33 |
for now, let's stick with the composite image.
| | 02:35 |
Something else to note about this
tool is it changes your cursor to an
| | 02:38 |
Eyedropper, and we can now access the
bouncing ball inside of the Curves graph.
| | 02:42 |
See it bounce around there, without
pressing and holding the Ctrl or Command
| | 02:46 |
key when the Eyedropper tool is selected.
So really super easy function to work
| | 02:51 |
with here. Very tempting to have it
always selected when you're working with
| | 02:54 |
Curves incidentally, because it
does provides this benefit here.
| | 02:58 |
Now, I want to expand the shadows a
little bit. If I click down here in his wet
| | 03:03 |
suit, there are certain areas that I
can click in, that would just completely
| | 03:06 |
lift black. I don't want to see that
happen. I can tell that I should get it,
| | 03:09 |
because right there, that point the
bouncing ball is all the way in the bottom
| | 03:13 |
left corner of the graph. So if I were
to click and drag here, drag up or like
| | 03:18 |
so, I would move that black point up
the graph. I'm decreasing the contrast of
| | 03:22 |
the image in the hideous and
horrible way. So I don't want to do that.
| | 03:25 |
So I'll undo that modification, just
by pressing Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the
| | 03:29 |
Mac. Instead what I want to do is
click higher up on his haunches here, right
| | 03:33 |
at about this location on his glutes,
and then I'm going to drag upward. So
| | 03:37 |
notice, as soon as I click, I get a
point. I just added a point automatically
| | 03:41 |
in the lower left region of the
graph, and now as I drag upward, I'm
| | 03:46 |
brightening that point.
| | 03:47 |
I could also drag downwards to darken
the point if I wanted to, and the cursor
| | 03:50 |
helpfully shows me that I can drag up
or down with those Up and Down Arrows
| | 03:55 |
right there. So it's a very
instructive cursor, to my way of thinking anyway.
| | 03:58 |
All right. So I'll dim him just a
little bit, I don't want to take him quite
| | 04:01 |
that hot, but you can see over there
in the graph, I have changed an Input
| | 04:04 |
value of -- why is it saying its 108,
it's that point right there. Huh, this is
| | 04:10 |
very interesting that I'm seeing
completely the wrong values. Were those the
| | 04:14 |
last values I saw inside the graph? I
guess so. Look at that. That's not what I want.
| | 04:19 |
So I'll press the Plus key to go
forward a point and then I'll press the Minus
| | 04:22 |
key to go back a point, Huh, interesting bug.
| | 04:25 |
So now we can see that this point here,
which is selected, has an Input Level
| | 04:30 |
of 13 and an Output Level of 20. Then
we can track all the other points on the
| | 04:35 |
curve just by moving the cursor around.
It's showing me what has happened to
| | 04:39 |
these other Luminance Levels; what they
were, and this one happens to have been
| | 04:43 |
92 and now its 121. So its way too
bright is basically what it comes down to.
| | 04:47 |
So I'm going to find a fairly dark
color here in his armpit; it turns out it
| | 04:51 |
works kind of nicely, and I'm going to
click and hold and drag down in order to
| | 04:55 |
darken those shadows, that region of
shadows right there. So I'm taking an
| | 05:00 |
Input Level of 31, changing it to an
Output of 38, where before it must have
| | 05:05 |
been much higher that that.
| | 05:05 |
All right. Now, I want to drag in
the waves actually, to darken them up a
| | 05:11 |
little bit, like so. So that we can
retain details in those waves. That leaves
| | 05:16 |
his face a little dark, but I think
actually it comes out fairly nice.
| | 05:20 |
At this point I feel like we
need to make some Channel by Channel
| | 05:23 |
modifications, because I'd like to
warm up his face just a little bit and
| | 05:27 |
brighten it, if I can. So I'm going to
go over to the Red Channel; and I can do
| | 05:31 |
that of course by just pressing Alt+3
or Option+3 in the Mac if I want to. Then
| | 05:35 |
I'm going to click right here on his
forehead and I'm going to drag up a little
| | 05:39 |
bit in order to expand those warm
tones and warm up the image in general.
| | 05:44 |
That's a little too red now, so I'm
going to try to balance that out by going
| | 05:47 |
to the Green Channel. I'll Press Alt+4
or Option+4 in the Mac and I'll drag up
| | 05:52 |
inside this region of waves right there
to add some green. Now, I don't want to
| | 05:56 |
go too far with it. I can green up the
image pretty quickly if I'm not careful.
| | 06:01 |
So I just want to make a tiny
modification here. I'm not even sure where I
| | 06:05 |
started actually, so I'll just eyeball
it in order to get something that looks
| | 06:09 |
pretty good. I feel like
this is a good modification.
| | 06:12 |
Now, the one issue that I have; I
could go through and add some blues if I
| | 06:16 |
wanted to. I might, actually, you know
what, what the heck, it does look like
| | 06:20 |
we've gone too far with the reds and
green. So I'll press Alt+4, Option+4 on
| | 06:23 |
the Mac, and let's brighten the blues.
The most obvious point of blue here is
| | 06:28 |
inside of his wet suit. Although, we
don't have to stick with anything that
| | 06:32 |
appears blue inside the image actually,
I could drag from any point that I want
| | 06:36 |
to. So let's drag back here in these
waves and drag up just a tiny bit, just
| | 06:41 |
add a little bit of blue to the image.
All right. So I think that's good.
| | 06:44 |
My one concern about the image is that
we've lost some color saturation, and
| | 06:50 |
that tends to happen; if I press Alt+2
or Option+2 on the Mac to switch back to
| | 06:54 |
the RGB composite view, that tends to
happen anytime that curve flattens out
| | 06:58 |
even a little bit, it doesn't have to
go totally flat, it can just become less
| | 07:03 |
deep at a certain point in the image.
Because it's less deep for a long period
| | 07:07 |
of time, we are going to lose color saturation.
| | 07:10 |
So the best way to get it back is to
go to Vibrance. I'll click on the left
| | 07:14 |
pointing green arrow here, at the
bottom of the Adjustments palette, to return
| | 07:19 |
to the Adjustments list. I'll click on
the purple cone for Vibrance, and then
| | 07:23 |
I'll go to the Vibrance option and
I'll increase this value, I think, to +30,
| | 07:29 |
actually works out pretty well. That
might be a little high, let's take it down to +25 there.
| | 07:35 |
Then I'm going to increase the
Saturation at least to 5, I think, if memory
| | 07:40 |
serves me from working on this image
before, 5 works out pretty nicely. That
| | 07:44 |
might be a little too hot actually,
so why don't we take it down? I guess I
| | 07:48 |
applied a different Curves
modification this time around. I'll go ahead and
| | 07:51 |
take this value up to +3.
| | 07:53 |
So your specific values, I should
hasten to say, are going to vary depending on
| | 07:58 |
the specific Curves you applied. So
your Curves are going to be slightly
| | 08:01 |
different than mine, undoubtedly.
| | 08:03 |
Just to give you a sense of what we
were able to accomplish using these two
| | 08:07 |
layers right here, I'll go ahead and
collapse the Adjustments palette for now.
| | 08:11 |
I'll Alt+Click on the eyeball or
Option+Click on the eyeball for the before
| | 08:14 |
view. So this is the original version
of the image and this is the new version
| | 08:19 |
of the image with the expanded shadows,
much better exposure, thanks to the
| | 08:23 |
very easy to use Target
Adjustment tool here inside Photoshop CS4.
| | 08:27 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting an image in Lab| 00:00 | Now, the images that we've seen so
far have been in astoundingly wretched
| | 00:04 | shape, quite frankly, and that's
because I want you to have a sense for just
| | 00:09 | how miraculous Photoshop is where
Levels and Curves are concerned. Just how
| | 00:13 | they can produce those
absolutely astounding modifications.
| | 00:17 | But it stands to reason if it can fix
images that are in terrible shape, why
| | 00:22 | then it can fix your images that are
in moderately good shape even better. It
| | 00:27 | is very much to be hoped that your
images will be in better shape. More along
| | 00:32 | the lines of the image that we're
seeing right here on screen. It's called Max snorkels.jpg.
| | 00:36 | Now, it still does need some work,
because I shot this image underwater with an
| | 00:40 | Olympus Stylus 1030 SW actually; a nice
little point and shoot camera that can
| | 00:45 | go 33 feet deep, 10 meters deep, it's
awesome. The thing is of course, once you
| | 00:50 | start shooting underwater, you
typically lose your yellows and your reds very,
| | 00:53 | very quickly, and then you start losing
other colors as you go farther down. So
| | 00:57 | this requires some correction of course.
| | 00:58 | Now, what I'm going to tell you is that,
when I'm correcting images, I tend to
| | 01:03 | work in one of two ways. Either I'll
take my Raw images, that were shot in the
| | 01:08 | Camera's Raw file format, and I'll
process them inside of Camera Raw; and we
| | 01:12 | will learn about Camera Raw, which
is this terrifically powerful sort of
| | 01:15 | subprogram of Photoshop, we'll
learn about it in a future chapter.
| | 01:19 | If I'm working from JPEGs however, and
this particular camera, the Stylus 1030,
| | 01:23 | doesn't allow you to capture raw images,
so if I'm working with JPEG, I might
| | 01:27 | take them in to Camera Raw. You can do
that as we will see later. Or I might
| | 01:30 | take them into the Lab Color mode.
| | 01:33 | What I'm going to do is I'm going to
show you basically how Lab works, how to
| | 01:36 | apply a quick and dirty correction, and
then I'm going to send you on your way.
| | 01:39 | If you're interested in Lab, I've got
a six hour series devoted to the topic.
| | 01:43 | Its sort of a separate discipline
essentially is what it comes down to, and we
| | 01:46 | spend a ton of time in that series on
Levels and Curves inside the Lab Color mode.
| | 01:50 | But here goes. So I'm working with Max
snorkels.jpg, and it's an RGB image. You
| | 01:55 | can see that in the title tab right
there, RGB/8, meaning it's 8 bits of data per channel.
| | 02:01 | All right. So I'm going to go ahead
and go over here to the Adjustments
| | 02:05 | palette, Alt+Click on the little Levels
guy right there, and I'll call this RGB
| | 02:10 | levels, and then I'll click OK. All
I'm going to do is I'm just going to go
| | 02:16 | ahead and Alt+Click or Option+Click on
that Auto button right there, in order
| | 02:21 | to bring up the Auto Color Correction
Options dialog box. I'm going to switch
| | 02:26 | to Find Dark & Light Colors, which
as you may recall is the Auto Color function.
| | 02:30 | I'm not going to Snap my Neutral
Midtones, because notice, this is what happens
| | 02:34 | if you Snap Neutral Midtones for this
image, we end up losing a lot of the nice
| | 02:38 | bright happy pinks, and I want those
bright happy pinks back. So I'm going to
| | 02:43 | turn that checkbox off right there,
and I'll click OK in order to accept that
| | 02:47 | modification. I have to say that is
pretty darn good for three seconds of work.
| | 02:54 | I have no complains really.
| | 02:56 | The thing is it could be better. It
could be better if I started probably
| | 03:01 | tweaking the settings here inside of
my Adjustments palette on a Channel by
| | 03:05 | Channel basis. But it could even be
better still if we apply a quick and dirty,
| | 03:10 | not much more complicated correction
inside the Lab Color mode, because Lab
| | 03:14 | just so happens to be more
powerful and more magical.
| | 03:18 | So here is what we are going to do.
I'm going to grab this Background layer
| | 03:21 | right there, and I'm going to drag it
on to this little page icon down here, at
| | 03:26 | the bottom of the Layers palette, and
I'm going to press and hold, before I
| | 03:28 | release, I'm going to press and hold
the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac,
| | 03:31 | and then I'll release. What that
does is that forces the display of the
| | 03:34 | Duplicate Layer dialog box and then
you change document from Max snorkels to
| | 03:39 | New right there. So that you're
putting this layer into a new document, and
| | 03:44 | then you just click OK, and notice you
now have a new document, that's called,
| | 03:47 | in my case Untitled 3, its probably
Untitled 1 or something like that for you.
| | 03:51 | But anyway, you should see this
Background layer inside the Layers palette.
| | 03:54 | Then go up to the Image menu, choose
mode, and choose Lab Color. Now, I go into
| | 03:58 | detail in my alternative series,
that is not this series, but it's called
| | 04:02 | Photoshop CS3 by the way, Mastering
Lab Color. It's part of the lynda.com
| | 04:09 | Online Training Library. I may end up
updating it for CS4 later in 2009, not
| | 04:14 | really sure exactly what order we're
going to do things at this point. But I'm
| | 04:18 | here to tell you, even if you're
working in Photoshop CS4, it's totally
| | 04:21 | accurate, so you will be able
to follow along, no problem.
| | 04:23 | So anyway, we'll go to Lab Color, and
the reason I'm mentioning this is because
| | 04:27 | I define in very specific terms what
the Lab Color mode is and how it compares
| | 04:32 | to RGB and CMYK and so on. Anyway,
let's go to Lab. That just goes ahead and
| | 04:36 | converts it to this device independent
wonderful amazing color model here. This
| | 04:43 | time we have three Channels; I'll go
ahead and switch to the Channels palette
| | 04:45 | for just a moment here, which is the
actual luminance information for the
| | 04:49 | image. Then we have a and then we have
b, and they don't look like much, but
| | 04:54 | they're really great.
| | 04:55 | a is the Tint information for the image.
Meaning that, if I go ahead and turn
| | 05:00 | on Lightness and a, you'll see what I'm
talking about. We've got the greens and
| | 05:04 | the pinks essentially inside of the
image. It's more like turquoise to pink is
| | 05:09 | really what we've got going. People
say that it's the greens to magentas, but
| | 05:12 | that's not quite right.
| | 05:14 | Then I'll turn off a for a moment
and turn on b. This is the Temperature
| | 05:18 | information, and it varies from
yellow to blue. Then when you put them all
| | 05:22 | together, why then, you've
got yourself a full color image.
| | 05:24 | All right. So how in the world do you
work with that wackiness? Well, let's go
| | 05:28 | back to Lab. Make sure that the Lab
Composite image is selected there in the
| | 05:32 | Channels palette. Return to Layers.
I'm going to once again Alt+Click or
| | 05:36 | Option+Click on this little Levels icon;
I'm going to call this one Lab levels,
| | 05:39 | but of course. Click OK.
| | 05:41 | Now check this out. I'm going to go
ahead and click on the Auto button in order
| | 05:47 | to correct just the Lightness Channels.
It's not going to do anything to the a
| | 05:50 | or b Channels. It's just changing the
luminance information. So our colors look
| | 05:54 | a little sort of weak at this point,
but we have some sizzling contrast going
| | 06:00 | on, thanks to Auto.
| | 06:01 | Now, you may wonder what variety of
Auto is that, Deke? Let's go ahead and
| | 06:04 | Alt+Click or Option+Click on the Auto
button to see our Auto Color Correction
| | 06:08 | Options, and we'll see, it's not any
of the varieties, it's actually all the
| | 06:12 | varieties. It's actually just plain
Auto Contrast, because Auto Tone and Auto
| | 06:17 | Color, they require three channels of
information to get any work done. So it's
| | 06:21 | just applying Auto Contrast to this guy,
and that's your only option. So don't
| | 06:24 | worry about it, just click Cancel out of there.
| | 06:27 | Then let's go over to the a Channel.
Tell you what I recommend you do. What you
| | 06:32 | want to do is you just want to
symmetrically increase the contrast of your a
| | 06:36 | and b Channels which will increase
the Saturation of the colors inside the
| | 06:39 | image and bring them up to speed with
the luminance modifications right here.
| | 06:43 | So notice this tiny little histogram
right there, that's very typical for the a
| | 06:47 | and b Channels. Don't fret. Just do
this. Click inside this first value right
| | 06:51 | there. I'm going to press Shift+Up
Arrow six times in a row until we get a
| | 06:55 | value of 60, and then I'm going to Tab,
Tab, ignore the gamma value, come over
| | 06:59 | to the white point value and press
Shift+Down Arrow six times in a row. I
| | 07:03 | forgot to count that, so I better count it.
| | 07:08 | The reason I'm pressing Shift+Down
Arrow x number of times in a row as opposed
| | 07:12 | to entering values is it's just easier.
That way I know that I'm getting a
| | 07:15 | symmetrical modification, so I don't
have to do-- Not very complicated math to
| | 07:19 | do 255-60=195, but still, you don't
have to do it. Just press Shift+Down Arrow
| | 07:24 | as many times as you press
Shift+Up Arrow for this guy.
| | 07:27 | Then switch over to b, and notice,
we've still got the same keyboard shortcuts.
| | 07:30 | So we've got Alt+3 or Option+3 on
the Mac for the first channel. Alt+4,
| | 07:34 | Option+4 on the Mac for the second
channel. Alt+5, Option+5 on the Mac for the
| | 07:38 | third channel. Notice there is no
composite. You cannot modify the composite
| | 07:43 | image in Lab, where Levels is concerned.
| | 07:45 | All right. Let's switch to b, do the
exact same thing. Shift+Up Arrow six
| | 07:50 | times. Six is not a magical number,
it just happens to work nicely for this
| | 07:54 | image. However, whatever number you
come up with, like if you press Shift+Up
| | 07:57 | Arrow four times in a row, and then
Shift+Down Arrow four times in a row, just
| | 08:00 | make sure you do the same thing for
the a and b Channels to start with.
| | 08:04 | So then I'm going to press Shift+Down
Arrow six times in a row for the white
| | 08:08 | point, here inside the b Channel. When
I'm manipulating the black point, notice
| | 08:13 | that I'm adding or I'm actually doing;
let's go ahead and take this out, I'm
| | 08:17 | going ahead and adding blue as I'm
taking this value up. So as I'm making this
| | 08:22 | channel darker, I'm adding blue, and
when I make that channel lighter, I'm
| | 08:26 | offsetting the blue by adding yellow.
| | 08:29 | What's happening with the a channel
here is the black point is the turquoise
| | 08:34 | and the white point is the pink,
just FYI. Then I'm coming back to the a
| | 08:38 | Channel here. The reason this
becomes important is because Max's snorkels
| | 08:43 | goggles here, I know that they're
actually yellow, and these are more of a sort
| | 08:48 | of screaming chartreuse at this point.
That's not what I want. So I'm going to
| | 08:51 | black off the green. So black is green,
white is pink, and in b, black is blue
| | 08:59 | and white is yellow. If you
can remember that, that's good.
| | 09:02 | All right. I'll go to a, and I'll
say let's back off the green/turquoise,
| | 09:06 | whatever, press Shift+Down Arrow and
that pretty much takes care of it. And we
| | 09:10 | are done. That's it, folks.
| | 09:12 | Now, it's a little strange, it's a
little peculiar. You sort of have to wrap
| | 09:16 | your brain around the different color
space, but if you can come to terms with
| | 09:19 | it, and believe me, my Mastering Lab
Color series, it's just six hours long,
| | 09:22 | its not hard, its just different,
that's all. Sometimes different is good; in
| | 09:26 | this case it really is good.
| | 09:28 | Anyway, here is the RGB correction.
So not bad, but a little low on the
| | 09:34 | Saturation values, as you can see.
Whereas, my Lab version of the image has
| | 09:39 | some really sizzling Saturation, some
great skin tones, and is quite accurate
| | 09:45 | to the scene that I actually shot. So
again, just for those of you who are
| | 09:48 | interested, Photoshop CS3 Mastering
Lab Color right here on the lynda.com
| | 09:53 | Online Training Library.
| | 09:54 | In the next exercise, we are going
to switch to our last topic for this
| | 09:58 | chapter, which is Shadows Highlights;
just little bit of information on Shadows
| | 10:02 | Highlights, and I'll then send
you on your way to the next chapter.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The Shadows/Highlights filter| 00:00 | In the final two exercises of this
chapter we are going to explore a command
| | 00:04 | called Shadows Highlights, which is an
alternate way to reduce the contrast of
| | 00:09 | an image by elevating the shadows
and reducing the highlights. It works
| | 00:12 | beautifully if the image is under
saturated or if you want to add a little bit
| | 00:17 | of detail and edge.
| | 00:18 | So if the image is super hot like that
elephant, it's not going to do you very
| | 00:22 | good. But if it's a little tapered,
like this scene right here, it could work
| | 00:27 | nicely, put it that way.
| | 00:29 | All right. So I'm working with this
image called Tropical pathway.jpg. Notice
| | 00:34 | what we've got here is a very high
contrast shot. So we're losing the detail
| | 00:37 | underneath the stairs, and we've got
too much flashing on the sides of these
| | 00:43 | railings here. So I want to calm things down.
| | 00:45 | I could do that presumably using a
Curves layer. So I'll go over here to the
| | 00:50 | Adjustment palette, and I'll Alt+Click
or Option+Click on the Curves icon right
| | 00:55 | there. I'll call this like low
contrast or something along those lines. Click
| | 00:59 | OK. Then I could, let's say, go ahead
and lock down the midpoint, and I'd grab
| | 01:06 | my highlights right here and drag
them down a little bit, and I'd grab my
| | 01:10 | shadows and drag them up a little bit,
and we would get a reduce contrast
| | 01:14 | scenes. So we're elevating the shadows,
mitigating the highlights, and leaving
| | 01:18 | the midtones alone.
| | 01:19 | The problem is it's kind of a murky
scene now that we've created, and I don't
| | 01:23 | really particularly care for it.
We're going to get something better and
| | 01:27 | sharper, little more dynamic out of
Shadows/Highlights. So I'm going to turn
| | 01:31 | off this low contrast layer right there.
Switch back to the Background layer,
| | 01:34 | very important. We might as well hide
the Adjustments palette for now because
| | 01:39 | we don't need it up on screen.
| | 01:40 | So I've got the Background layer active.
I'm going to go up to the Image menu,
| | 01:43 | choose Adjustments, and choose Shadows/
Highlights. You may say, Deke , what
| | 01:47 | are you doing, why are you applying a
static modification to this image? Why
| | 01:52 | did we just hide the Adjustments palette,
why didn't you go ahead and click on
| | 01:55 | the little Shadows/Highlights
icon in the Adjustments palette?
| | 01:59 | The answer to that question is; I'll
go ahead and open it up again, because
| | 02:02 | it's not there, there isn't one. We
have got, what is it, I think we have 15
| | 02:06 | different icons here and none of them
is Shadows/Highlights, and the reason is
| | 02:11 | Shadows/Highlights is not a color
correction function in the truest sense, its
| | 02:15 | a filter; more about that much later
when we look at smart filters. But for
| | 02:20 | now, we're going to have to
apply it as a static modification.
| | 02:23 | So we've got to make sure Background
is active. Go up here to Image, choose
| | 02:27 | Adjustments, choose Shadows/Highlights,
which really ought to in the Filter
| | 02:30 | menu, because it's an edge detection
function, as we will learn when we get to
| | 02:35 | Filters in a later chapter. But
I'm going to go ahead and choose
| | 02:37 | Shadows/Highlights here.
| | 02:39 | Here is the Shadows/Highlights dialog
box, and we've got Shadows cranked up to
| | 02:43 | 50; these are the default settings,
and Highlights at 0. So in other words,
| | 02:47 | we're brightening the heck out of the
shadows right here. Way too much in my
| | 02:51 | opinion. These are terrible default
settings I think. We're not doing anything
| | 02:56 | to the Highlights, which need a
little bit of dimming. So notice if I raise
| | 02:59 | that Highlights value,
I'm dimming the Highlights.
| | 03:02 | What I would recommend for this image
is something along the lines of 30, 30;
| | 03:07 | works pretty nicely actually, just 30,
30, and you get some nicely elevated
| | 03:12 | Shadows and some nicely mitigated Highlights.
| | 03:14 | So this is before, if I turn off
Preview, and this is after. Here is the
| | 03:18 | problem though. I look at this
image and I can totally tell that
| | 03:22 | Shadows/Highlights has been applied to
it, because it's got this fake HDR look
| | 03:26 | to it. Don't particularly care for
the specific variety of fake HDR; by the
| | 03:31 | way, I mean fake High Dynamic Range,
and fake HDR can actually be great, I do
| | 03:36 | all kinds of things with it, actually
in once again my Mastering Lab Color series.
| | 03:40 | But this particular approach is not my
favorite, and you may end up being the
| | 03:45 | same way. In other words, after you
apply Shadows/Highlights to few images,
| | 03:50 | over the course of like a couple of
months, let's say, because at first it just
| | 03:53 | seems like this miracle command, it
doesn't wear well. My guess is you'll kind
| | 03:57 | of tire of it. At least, you'll tire
of these very few options, just Shadows
| | 04:02 | and Highlights, these very simple
sliders right here, what you'll want to do is
| | 04:06 | turn on Show More Options, which
makes the command fantastically more
| | 04:09 | complicated, but check it out, it
gives us a lot more control as well. I'm
| | 04:13 | going to show you how to work with
these additional controls in the next
| | 04:17 | exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Radius and tonal width| 00:00 |
All right gang, let's review. We have
this image right here called Tropical
| | 00:03 |
pathway.jpg. The Background layer is
active. We go up to the Image menu, we
| | 00:07 |
choose Adjustments, we choose Shadows/
Highlights. Just a couple of sliders is
| | 00:12 |
what we see, so I'm going to turn off
Show More Options for a moment. We'll
| | 00:15 |
just see these two, Shadows Amount,
Highlights Amount. Just horrible defaults
| | 00:20 |
settings here, creating this
dreadful effect that we're seeing on screen.
| | 00:24 |
So I would go ahead and take this
Shadows value down to 30%, better, and
| | 00:28 |
elevate the Highlights value to 30% as
well, to drop the highlights a bit. It
| | 00:33 |
looks okay, but as I say has Shadows/
Highlights written all over at this point.
| | 00:38 |
I don't like that. I can mitigate the
affect of the effect by turning on Show More Option.
| | 00:45 |
The reason this is just screaming
Shadows/Highlights, I'm going to go ahead and
| | 00:48 |
zoom in on this a little bit, is
because if you look closely you can see these
| | 00:53 |
weird edges sort of showing up around
the steps and around other details inside
| | 00:59 |
the image. Let me see if I can point out a few.
| | 01:02 |
Notice this shaded portion of the
railing right here, and notice this darkness
| | 01:06 |
right there, how there is this abrupt
darkness at the beginning, and then it
| | 01:10 |
tapers off and becomes less dark,
that is a function of Shadows/Highlights.
| | 01:15 |
Detecting this edge and sort of
scrubbing into the edge, a little bit, but not
| | 01:20 |
going all that far into it.
| | 01:21 |
All right. So we can disperse the
effect a little bit, so that we don't have
| | 01:24 |
these weird edges showing up. It's
another one of things where you can take a
| | 01:28 |
look at the image and go, yeah,
this is it, this is exactly where it's
| | 01:31 |
happening, or you can just take any
entire image at a time and go, something is
| | 01:36 |
wrong here. That's the impression it
creates over time is just like, ha, this
| | 01:40 |
doesn't look write.
| | 01:42 |
All right. So turn on the Show More
Options checkbox. Now you've got Tonal
| | 01:46 |
Width and you've got Radius for
each of these options, for Shadows and
| | 01:50 |
Highlights. So Amount is just how much
lightness you're adding to the Shadows
| | 01:54 |
and how much darkness you're adding to
the Highlights. Tonal Width is what is
| | 01:59 |
Shadows and what is Highlights.
| | 02:01 |
So in other words, at 50%, we're
treating 50% of the image as Shadows, and then
| | 02:06 |
of course down here for Highlights,
we're treating the other 50% of the image,
| | 02:09 |
that's 50% lightest colors in the
image as Highlights. They actually drop off
| | 02:14 |
of course. They drop off
gradually over that 50% range.
| | 02:18 |
But if you wanted to incorporate more
colors into the Shadows, then you would
| | 02:23 |
increase Tonal Width. If you want to
incorporate fewer Luminance Levels into
| | 02:28 |
the Shadows, then you would reduce the
Tonal Width here. I'm going to take it
| | 02:31 |
down to 40%. That might require a
little bit of an increase in the Amount
| | 02:37 |
value, which I think it does. So I'm
going to take the Amount value for Shadows
| | 02:40 |
up to 40%, and I'm going to leave 30,
50 for Highlights, because that looks
| | 02:44 |
pretty darn good. You can play
around with them if you want to.
| | 02:46 |
Now, Radius is a little harder to
understand, but Radius, it's that thing I was
| | 02:51 |
telling you about, that extra bit of
darkness at the edge right there. It's
| | 02:55 |
because Shadows/Highlights is an edge
detection filter, and this Radius value,
| | 03:00 |
which we'll see a lot when we look at
Filter, such as Unsharp Mask and Gaussian
| | 03:03 |
Blur and those guys, Radius is all
about evaluating and emphasizing or
| | 03:09 |
de-emphasizing the edges. So it's
doing this sort of scrubby thing that's 30
| | 03:15 |
pixels big, along this edge right here.
| | 03:18 |
If you've got some tight details, like
if you're applying this to a portrait
| | 03:22 |
shot, and you've got an iris or
something that you're trying to brighten, then
| | 03:25 |
you want to bring this Radius value
down. Otherwise, unless you've got some
| | 03:30 |
tight little detail that you're really
trying to nail; and usually it's going
| | 03:33 |
to be an eye, usually it's going to be
that kind of detail that you really want
| | 03:37 |
to narrow in on, but if you're
looking at a landscape shot like this, you
| | 03:40 |
probably don't have that kind of
detail that you're trying to isolate. So
| | 03:44 |
increase the Radius value. I would
say you can take it as high as like 100.
| | 03:49 |
I'll go ahead and take it up to 100 in
fact. You want to make it big enough so
| | 03:52 |
that you're not seeing those edges
anymore. There is a little bit of darkness
| | 03:56 |
still here. Anything that's left is
going to be natural darkness that was
| | 04:00 |
actually part of the scene.
| | 04:01 |
So I'm going to take the Highlights
Radius value up to 100 as well. If you pay
| | 04:06 |
close attention to what's going on
inside the image, you're going to see the
| | 04:08 |
effects get dispersed.
| | 04:10 |
You can sort of safely ignore these
last options. Well, at your peril actually,
| | 04:17 |
we should talk about them, but the
thing is the defaults are okey-dokey. I
| | 04:20 |
would prefer that Color Correction by
default was set to 0 and Midtone Contrast
| | 04:24 |
of 0 is good. But what that means
is that we're not elevating -- Color
| | 04:29 |
Correction by the way is just Saturation,
it's just another one of Photoshop's
| | 04:33 |
many words for Saturation. If you
decrease the Color Correction value, you're
| | 04:37 |
going to decrease the Saturation of the
overall image, and if you increase the
| | 04:42 |
Color Correction value, you're going to
increase the Saturation of the overall image.
| | 04:46 |
Now, this particular image, most
images don't want any modification to Color
| | 04:51 |
Correction, in my opinion, most images
want that left alone. This image, it's a
| | 04:55 |
tropical scene man, we want some heavy
vegetation saturation. So I'm going to
| | 05:00 |
take this up to 60 and then Tab.
| | 05:03 |
Now, Midtone Contrast is going to
emphasize the Midtones, which normally get
| | 05:08 |
kind of lost in the shuffle where this
command is concerned. If you want less
| | 05:13 |
contrast, if you want to sort of send
the Midtones away, then you would reduce
| | 05:18 |
this Midtone Contrast value right there,
but that ends up creating sort of a
| | 05:22 |
leached effect that doesn't look very good.
| | 05:27 |
Most images I think want a Midtone
Contrast value of 0, but if you're feeling
| | 05:32 |
like you're losing a little bit of
contrast there in those middle colors, those
| | 05:36 |
midtones, then go ahead and raise that
value. You can take it really high, as
| | 05:41 |
high as 100. I'm going to
take it up to 10, like so.
| | 05:45 |
Then Black Clip and White Clip, this is
all about, if you also want to apply a
| | 05:49 |
levels adjustment on top of things. So
you're trying to make your blacks darker
| | 05:53 |
and your whites lighter. So in other
words, you don't quite have blacks or
| | 05:58 |
whites inside the image, then you would
start clipping colors. You could raise
| | 06:01 |
this value like to 2%. Notice I'm going
to clip away a lot of blacks now, which
| | 06:06 |
is exactly the opposite of what I want to do.
| | 06:08 |
So I'm going to send that back to
0.01%, just leave it set to its defaults.
| | 06:13 |
I wouldn't monkey around with these too
much, because they're just kind of weird.
| | 06:15 |
If you need to regain your blacks and
whites, then you should use the Levels
| | 06:19 |
command to do it and you should
use Levels before you come into the
| | 06:23 |
Shadows/Highlights command in the first place.
| | 06:25 |
All right. These are the settings I'm
going to apply to this image. Click OK.
| | 06:29 |
Let's go ahead and zoom out a little
bit, so that we can take in the entire
| | 06:33 |
scene, like so. Just to give you a
sense of what we were able to accomplish,
| | 06:36 |
this is before, this is the original
image. This is after, brighter, more
| | 06:41 |
vivid. We've got some more detail down
here in the shadow areas, and a little
| | 06:45 |
less heat associated with
these highlights on these railings.
| | 06:49 |
Just to give you a sense of how that
compares to the Curves Adjustment, I'll go
| | 06:53 |
ahead and press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z again;
this is the original image now. Turn
| | 06:56 |
on low contrast. So that's what the
Curves version of it looks like. Now
| | 07:01 |
certainly, I could have done
better than that, but you know why, when
| | 07:04 |
Shadows/Highlights is so easy to use.
| | 07:05 |
So I'll turn off that layer and then
press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac to
| | 07:10 |
regain my Shadows/Highlights function.
You can do that, isn't that amazing?
| | 07:14 |
This is the corrected version of the image.
| | 07:17 |
We have now discussed in great detail
Levels and Curves and Shadows/Highlights
| | 07:22 |
here inside Photoshop. Tell you what,
every once in a while I'll do this. I'll
| | 07:25 |
ask a question of the Peanut Gallery here.
| | 07:27 |
Here is my question, would you like
to see a Photoshop CS4 Color Adjustment
| | 07:31 |
series, that would just be devoted to
the myriad Color Adjustment functions and
| | 07:36 |
we would take a look at not only all
the adjustment layers that are available
| | 07:39 |
to us, all the Color Adjustment commands,
but also a little bit of Lab, thrown
| | 07:44 |
in for good measure probably, and some
Camera Raw correction as well, and I try
| | 07:49 |
to sort it all out. So I prioritize
which things you really want to use and
| | 07:52 |
which stuff you can ignore, and that
would be the series. That's what I'm
| | 07:55 |
thinking. It would be late 2009, mid
to late 2009, but just let us know what you think.
| | 08:00 |
I send you on your way to Chapter 14,
in which we discuss Filters; those very
| | 08:05 |
filters that I was telling you are
coming up, and we're going to learn how to
| | 08:07 |
sharpen details. Stay tuned.
| | 08:10 |
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|
|
14. Sharpening DetailsEdge-enhancement tricks| 00:00 | When an image is formed by the camera
lens, its focus is defined. The moment
| | 00:05 | you press the shutter release, you
accept that focus and store it as a
| | 00:08 | permanent attribute of the photograph.
| | 00:11 | If the photo is out of focus,
guess what? It stays out of focus.
| | 00:15 | No post-processing solution can fill in
missing or blurry detail. But while
| | 00:20 | Photoshop can't reach back into your
camera and adjust the lens element for a
| | 00:24 | better shot, it can simulate the
appearance of enhanced focus by comparing
| | 00:29 | neighboring pixels and increasing the
amount of contrast between those pixels
| | 00:34 | that trace the already existing edges.
| | 00:37 | Your eyes think they see a more sharply
focused image, but really, they see an
| | 00:41 | exaggerated version of the focus that
was already there. In other words, it's a trick.
| | 00:47 | So? Digital photography is a
trick that simulates reality very
| | 00:52 | specifically geared to human eyes and brains.
| | 00:55 | If Photoshop sharpening augments that
trick, more power to it. I just want you
| | 01:00 | to know what you are doing. After all,
the magician who truly understands his
| | 01:05 | bag of tricks is better equipped to
perform magic, and sharpening ,agic is what
| | 01:10 | this chapter is all about.
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| How sharpening works| 00:00 |
In this exercise, I'm going to give you
a sense of how sharpening works inside
| | 00:04 |
of Photoshop. I'm working inside this
image called Orange on blue.jpg found
| | 00:09 |
inside the 14_ sharpen
folder, if you've access to it.
| | 00:12 |
This image comes to us from
photographer Andrea Gingerich of iStockphoto.com.
| | 00:17 |
Let's learn how to sharpen. Something
that's really important to note here is
| | 00:21 |
that this image is a little bit
soft in terms of its focus quality,
| | 00:26 |
especially when we were zoomed in.
But it is by no means blurry, it is
| | 00:29 |
ultimately a focused photograph, and
that's very important, you've to have your
| | 00:34 |
photos in focus in order to sharpen
them inside a Photoshop, because Photoshop what?
| | 00:38 |
Cannot make up detail. It can't
make up detail when it's upsampling an
| | 00:42 |
image. It can't make up detail
when it's sharpening the image.
| | 00:45 |
So we are not really sharpening the
focus of the image, we are essentially
| | 00:49 |
sharpening the detail inside the image,
or at least creating the effect of
| | 00:53 |
enhanced detail. So how do we go about
doing that, and what does it look like?
| | 00:58 |
Well, I'm going to go up to the Filter
menu. In the Filter menu by the way is
| | 01:01 |
this big hotchpotch of more than a
hundred different completely unrelated
| | 01:07 |
commands, but those filters that are
good, tend to be edged detection filters
| | 01:11 |
and there is a variety of them that can
look for edges inside of an image, and
| | 01:15 |
what's an edge? An edge, where a
photographic image is concerned, is an area of
| | 01:20 |
rapid contrast between neighboring
pixels, and we'll see what that looks like
| | 01:25 |
over the span of these many
exercises inside of this chapter.
| | 01:29 |
But anyway, the last filter I chose
was the Sharpen Filter and I'm just going
| | 01:32 |
to apply it again. I'll tell you about
it in the next exercise along with some
| | 01:36 |
of the other sharpness, filters
inside the software. So, I'll go ahead and
| | 01:40 |
choose that command, and notice what
just happened, the image appears to have
| | 01:46 |
become more sharply focused. This is
before, and this is after, and I'm doing
| | 01:51 |
the before, after just by
pressing Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac.
| | 01:54 |
I am going to zoom in another click for
you all here, so that we can see it in
| | 01:58 |
better detail, here's before and here's after.
| | 02:02 |
After is more of a high impact snake,
and what's really happening though, how
| | 02:07 |
is it working this mysterious magic,
how is Photoshop doing it? I'm going to
| | 02:12 |
zoom in even farther. Well, it's
looking at the edges as I said inside of the
| | 02:16 |
image, the areas of rapid contrast,
and it's enhancing that contrast. So this
| | 02:22 |
is before, this is the prior to
sharpening the snake; this is the unsharpened
| | 02:27 |
snake, and you'll see for example,
around the eye is a good example of an area
| | 02:32 |
of rapid contrast. So this would
qualify as a nice edge inside of this image,
| | 02:37 |
and notice right here along the inside
of the eye gets dark, and then it starts
| | 02:41 |
lightning up as we go farther in. On
the outside of the eye it's lighter.
| | 02:45 |
All right, so if I were to apply
sharpening, I'll go ahead and re-apply by
| | 02:49 |
pressing Ctrl+Z, Command+Z again. You
can see what it's done is it's made this
| | 02:53 |
dark edge even darker, and it's made
this light edge even lighter. So basically
| | 02:59 |
traces halos around the edges, so it's
kind of carving a little bit of a line
| | 03:03 |
drawing on top of the original
image in order to create the effect of sharpness.
| | 03:09 |
So it's not just increasing the
contrast of the image, this is important; it's
| | 03:12 |
not just increasing the overall
contrast. It's increasing the contrast
| | 03:15 |
specifically along the edges. So it
finds an edge, increase its contrast of
| | 03:19 |
that edge, and we are going to learn
more about how that works in subsequent exercises.
| | 03:24 |
But I just want you to know the primary
thing that I want you to walk away from
| | 03:28 |
this exercise is that you have to
start with a focused image in the first
| | 03:32 |
place, and then you sharpen it
inside of Photoshop in order to create the
| | 03:36 |
effect of enhanced detail. And as I say,
we'll see exactly which commands you
| | 03:41 |
apply, and which ones are good and
which ones are bad, and so on, and how you
| | 03:45 |
used the good ones in the following exercises.
| | 03:48 |
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| The single-shot sharpeners| 00:00 |
In this exercise I'm going to
introduce you to the single-shot sharpeners,
| | 00:04 |
which are three sharpening
functions that will sharpen your image
| | 00:09 |
automatically. They are not smart
or intelligent or anything like those
| | 00:12 |
auto-commands that we saw in the
previous chapter, auto-tone, and auto-contrast
| | 00:16 |
and color. Those guys are intelligent
commands. These single-shot sharpeners,
| | 00:20 |
they are dumbbells. I actually don't
even begin to recommend them, but in the
| | 00:26 |
name of comprehensive covers,
I want to show them to you.
| | 00:28 |
We are working inside of the Orange on
blue.jpg file, and I have gone ahead and
| | 00:32 |
restored the original version of
the snake, of course, found inside the
| | 00:35 |
14_sharpen folder.
| | 00:37 |
You go up to the Filter menu, as I was
telling you a hotchpotch of different
| | 00:41 |
command activity here. The best of
which are the edge detection functions, and
| | 00:46 |
many of the edge detection functions
reside right here inside the Sharpen
| | 00:50 |
submenu, and we have got Sharpen,
Sharpen Edges, and Sharpen More. Along with
| | 00:55 |
two commands that have ellipsis after
them, thereby indicating that they will
| | 00:59 |
bring up dialog boxes, and these guys
are by far the better commands, they are
| | 01:03 |
much better than the
single-shot dudes right there.
| | 01:06 |
They include Smart Sharpen. It's just
kind of a super sharpener, it just gives
| | 01:10 |
you more control over the sharpening
process, and then we've got Unsharp Mark,
| | 01:14 |
old schools, it's from the old days.
Smart Sharpen is more recent command, I
| | 01:18 |
think it came around in Photoshop CS2,
and Unsharp Mark has been around since
| | 01:23 |
Photoshop was a baby, and I'll tell
you all about how those commands work.
| | 01:27 |
But let's start with these, because
they'd seem like when you are first playing
| | 01:31 |
around with Photoshop and you
discovered sharpening, which is really a nice
| | 01:35 |
day. These commands are
the ones that you lied on.
| | 01:38 |
But after a few weeks, you discover, I
want you to discover right now that they
| | 01:42 |
are no good, but anyway, sharpen, I'm
going to apply the sharpen command, and
| | 01:46 |
that's the degree of sharpness that
is applied. We saw in the previous
| | 01:49 |
exercise, we used sharpen, and by the
way, whoever you choose from the Filter
| | 01:53 |
menu, goes up to the top of the Filter
menu, so you can repeat it if you want
| | 01:56 |
to. Don't do that though with the
single-shot guys. Don't say, well gosh,
| | 02:00 |
that's not sharp enough. I'm going to
go ahead and apply some more sharpening.
| | 02:04 |
Then you are going to start really
ruining your image if you go that route.
| | 02:07 |
You are going to make it more tactile
though, but you are also bring out the
| | 02:10 |
green behind the snake here, so this
would be the digital noise inside of the
| | 02:16 |
photograph that's showing up in this
plain blue background. So everything ends
| | 02:21 |
up getting sharpened inside the image,
well, good detail and bad detail, that's
| | 02:25 |
just something to bear in mind as
you are working with the sharpening functions.
| | 02:29 |
All right, so just a little bit of
sharpness gets applied. I'm going to go
| | 02:32 |
ahead and back step, Ctrl+Alt+Z, Ctrl+
Alt+Z a couple of times. That would be
| | 02:36 |
Command+Option+Z, Command+Option+Z on the Mac.
| | 02:38 |
Go to Filter menu. Let's try this
time Sharpen More, which is third in the
| | 02:43 |
list, but second in terms of its
behavior here. And that's going to apply more
| | 02:48 |
sharpening at a time, than the sharpen
function does, but how much? Basically,
| | 02:52 |
the problem here is you have no control.
You are just accepting this default
| | 02:56 |
setting, and by the way, as I said
not a smart command, not an intelligent
| | 03:01 |
command, isn't making any decisions
based on the composition of the image. It's
| | 03:05 |
just doing its thing, same thing to
every single image out there. So that's horrible.
| | 03:10 |
Anyway, let's go ahead and undo, that
and if you really want hoard, I mean in
| | 03:14 |
terms of, it just not really doing
what you wanted to do. You can try Sharpen
| | 03:18 |
Edges, and the point of sharpen edges
is to avoid sharpening the digital noise,
| | 03:23 |
and sharpen just the good
details inside the image.
| | 03:25 |
Well, if I choose Sharpen Edges, notice
almost nothing happens. I'm going to go
| | 03:30 |
ahead and zoom in on the snake, so
this is before, notice that, and this is
| | 03:36 |
after. So just a little bit of
activity on the top of this eye and around the
| | 03:39 |
snout and so on. So basically
according to Sharpen Edges, there really aren't
| | 03:44 |
any good edges inside of this image.
| | 03:47 |
It's prejudice against snakes, that's
what I think. So I'm going to go ahead
| | 03:50 |
and undo that badness that we just
applied, and just to make sure that I'm not
| | 03:56 |
leaving any residual sharpness, any,
because I can't even tell whether that was
| | 04:00 |
applied or not. I'm just going to go
down here to the Revert command under the
| | 04:02 |
File menu, and revert to the
original version of my image.
| | 04:07 |
All right, so those are the single-
shot sharpeners, I don't recommend them.
| | 04:10 |
It's not necessarily because they are
going to hurt your image or anything like
| | 04:14 |
that, it's just that you have no
control, that's my point. Whereas, you have
| | 04:17 |
lots of control if you choose one of
this commands, and we are going to start
| | 04:22 |
with the old school command, Unsharp
Mask, and it's going to become your
| | 04:25 |
friend, even though it has a
strange name inside the next exercise.
| | 04:28 |
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| The Unsharp Mask filter| 00:00 |
In this exercise I'm going to introduce
you to really a great sharpening function
| | 00:04 |
that has a really crazy name,
and that's Unsharp Mask.
| | 00:08 |
Now I'm still working inside Orange on
blue.jpg found inside of the 14_sharpen
| | 00:13 |
folder, and I want you to go up to the
Filter menu, choose Sharpen, and there
| | 00:17 |
is Unsharp Mask. Now notice, if you
loaded my Deke Keys, way back near the
| | 00:21 |
beginning of the previous part of
the series Photoshop CS4 One-on-One
| | 00:26 |
Fundamentals, then you have access to
a handful of keyboard shortcuts for the
| | 00:31 |
best of the filters.
| | 00:32 |
So I have got Shift+F5 for Unsharp Mark,
Shift+F6 for Smart Sharpen, on and on
| | 00:37 |
all the way up to this guy right here
Shift+F10 for High Pass, which itself is
| | 00:44 |
a sharpening function.
| | 00:45 |
Now I should say before I go any
farther, that you can learn more about
| | 00:48 |
sharpening. If you start getting into
this, and you find it to be interesting,
| | 00:51 |
and it really is important stuff,
especially if you do a lot of output work,
| | 00:56 |
meaning you print a lot of your
photographs, you really want to know the ins
| | 00:59 |
and outs of sharpening.
| | 01:00 |
I had explained how sharpening works in
glorious detail, all kinds of different
| | 01:05 |
sharpening scenarios for output, for
effect, for detail, and for acquisition
| | 01:11 |
too, for input, inside of my series
Photoshop CS3 Sharpening Images. Sharpening
| | 01:17 |
technology really hasn't change here
inside CS4, so all the information inside
| | 01:22 |
the CS3 Sharpening images series is
accurate, except for the part where I rail
| | 01:27 |
against the screen resolution or the
zoom ratios, and that has actually been
| | 01:31 |
resolved in Photoshop CS4, and I'll
explain that more in detail as we get into
| | 01:35 |
it. But I just want you to know,
there's a whole series about sharpening there
| | 01:39 |
available to you in the lynda.com
Online Training Library, so check it out at your leisure.
| | 01:43 |
Unsharp Mask, it also tells you why
Unsharp Mask is called Unsharp Mask. It's
| | 01:47 |
based on an old traditional camera
technique, and the idea is that you are
| | 01:51 |
using blurring, because you can't
really sharpen something imposed, it's really
| | 01:55 |
pretty much impossible. You can't blur
detail imposed, and so Unsharp Mask uses
| | 02:01 |
blurring and actually blurs the edges
and then masks them in order to create
| | 02:05 |
the appearance of sharpening. Is that
not weird? And in fact, down to the last
| | 02:09 |
pixel, you can mimic the effects of
Unsharp Mask using just Gaussian Blur if
| | 02:14 |
you want to. True story and I'll show
you how to do it, if you want to geek out
| | 02:18 |
inside that sharpening images
series I was telling you about.
| | 02:21 |
But for now, I just want you to know,
it's got a crazy name but it's a great
| | 02:24 |
function. It is the Premiere
Sharpening function inside a Photoshop, and then
| | 02:29 |
it got updated for Smart Sharpen.
| | 02:30 |
All right, so I'll go ahead and show
you this command, here it is, brings up a
| | 02:33 |
dialog box. Let's go ahead and zoom
out, a click for the snake for the in
| | 02:37 |
dialog box preview. You also have an
out of dialog box preview, so you'll see
| | 02:41 |
the image change on the fly as long
as the preview check box is turned-on.
| | 02:45 |
Now in the old days you really had to
watch your zoom ratios, when I say old
| | 02:48 |
days, I mean Photoshop CS3 and
earlier. You had to watch your zoom ratio,
| | 02:51 |
something like 67% would be bad, it
would be just dropping pixels, and you
| | 02:56 |
wouldn't really be able to
accurately gage the sharpness of the image.
| | 02:59 |
Now, assuming that you have an OpenGL
compliant video card inside Photoshop
| | 03:05 |
CS4, you are going to be able to gage
good sharpness at pretty much any zoom
| | 03:10 |
ratio, and definitely the standard
ones are just fine. So these ones that you
| | 03:14 |
get by clicking the minus and plus
buttons work out beautifully. And I'll show
| | 03:17 |
you how to make sure you have got an
open OpenGL compliant card in just a
| | 03:20 |
couple of exercises here, when I show
you how to measure screen resolution.
| | 03:23 |
But in the mean time, let's discuss
Unsharp Mask, it has three sliders, and at
| | 03:27 |
first they are little daunting, but
once you learn how to used them, it all
| | 03:30 |
make sense, really easy to use this command.
| | 03:33 |
The first one I think is really easy
right out the gate. It's just the amount.
| | 03:36 |
How much sharpness do you want to apply?
Wouldn't it be great for new people if
| | 03:41 |
they just made a command instead of
having sharpen that just has, you know, the
| | 03:45 |
static group of these three options
that it applies? Wouldn't it be great if
| | 03:50 |
you had sharpened dot-dot-dot, and
all it gave you is amount? At least you
| | 03:53 |
could control the amount of sharpness
and then the newbies would be satisfied,
| | 03:56 |
it'd be awesome.
| | 03:57 |
But we don't have anything like that,
but you could just apply this amount, and
| | 04:00 |
notice, if I apply a higher amount
value, I get more sharpness on screen.
| | 04:05 |
Great, that's too much sharpness. I'm
over sharpening the image, but still, you
| | 04:09 |
know I can gauge the difference here,
and I can go as high as 500%. That just
| | 04:12 |
controls how much sharpness you want.
| | 04:14 |
Then let's go ahead and crank it up
actually, I'll set it to 250, so we can
| | 04:17 |
really see what we are doing. Radius,
defines the thickness of the halos. Now
| | 04:21 |
it's telling you Unsharp Mask is using
a blurring technology in order to create
| | 04:25 |
the appearance of sharpness, and I
was also telling you in the previous
| | 04:28 |
exercise, it's enhancing the contrast
around the edges, right? So it's making
| | 04:33 |
the dark edge darker, and the light
edge lighter. So look at the snout up here.
| | 04:36 |
See how you can see a little bit of
dark edge at the top? I'll go and zoom in,
| | 04:40 |
and I'm doing this by the way by
Control+Spacebar+Clicking. That will be
| | 04:44 |
Command+Spacebar clicking on the Mac.
So you can't zoom even though you've got
| | 04:48 |
a dialog box opened. Now you can't
zoom by pressing the Z key, as you can't
| | 04:52 |
when the dialog box is close, but
you can use that old technique of
| | 04:55 |
Ctrl+Spacebar or Command+Spacebar+
Clicking, and you can also just press
| | 04:59 |
Ctrl+Plus or Ctrl+Minus, Command+
Plus or Command+Minus on the Mac.
| | 05:02 |
All right, so see that little edge
there, little dark edge above the snout,
| | 05:05 |
light edge below the snout. Watch it
gets thicker as I change the radius value.
| | 05:10 |
So notice there is more of a pop now,
more of a blur, bigger halo expanding
| | 05:15 |
outward and expanding inward.
| | 05:17 |
So if you go with high radius value,
you can get big thick goopy edges like we
| | 05:21 |
are seeing here, and if you go with a
low radius value, you are going to get a
| | 05:24 |
nice crisp exacting edges, which
would make you think you always want a low
| | 05:28 |
radius value, but I'll tell you why
that's not true in future exercises here.
| | 05:32 |
Anyway, let's change this to radius
of 2, and then we have this threshold value.
| | 05:38 |
Now edges are areas of rapid contrast
between neighboring pixels. You've got
| | 05:42 |
basically 2 pixels that are right next
to each other, let's say, anywhere in
| | 05:46 |
the image. Threshold value is saying,
all right, if there are at least 0
| | 05:51 |
luminance level different from each
other, I'll sharpen them. So in other
| | 05:55 |
words, it's going to sharpen everybody
inside this image, because everybody is
| | 05:57 |
at least 0 levels different than each other.
| | 05:59 |
However, if you've raised that value
to let's say 20, okay, then it's only
| | 06:05 |
going to sharpen 2 neighboring pixels
where they are at least 20 luminance
| | 06:09 |
level different from each other,
bearing in mind of course, that there are a
| | 06:12 |
total of 256 luminance levels in an 8
bit per channel image, and even if you
| | 06:17 |
are working in a 16 bit per channel
image, threshold is just imagining you're
| | 06:22 |
working with 256 levels. You can
only go as high as 255 levels there of
| | 06:28 |
difference and that, of course, is
going to illuminate all sharpness from the
| | 06:31 |
image, because no two pixels can be 255
different from each other, unless they
| | 06:36 |
are white and black. I guess might be,
but I'm not seeing any neighboring
| | 06:40 |
pixels that are white and black. Then
if you sharpen them, you couldn't create
| | 06:44 |
more contrast between them, then
black and white, so anyway, no sharpening occurs.
| | 06:48 |
The problem with this function here,
and the reason I don't use it, I actually
| | 06:51 |
don't use it at all, some people use it
sparingly, and I'll tell you how to do
| | 06:55 |
that. But if you take it up to
something like 30 levels, notice you get this
| | 06:58 |
pock marking effect, and that's because
it's an on/off proposition, either you
| | 07:02 |
are sharpening 2 neighboring pixels,
because they are at least 30 luminance
| | 07:06 |
levels different from each other, or
you are not, because they aren't, and as a
| | 07:09 |
result you get this weird, the sun
sharpness inside the image, and it usually
| | 07:14 |
does a really great job of picking out
bad detail like pock marks, and moles
| | 07:19 |
and zits. And it's horrible.
| | 07:21 |
However, if you keep it low, you can
get half way decent effects, something
| | 07:25 |
like 3 to 4 for a low-noise image,
this is a pretty high-noise image, so
| | 07:28 |
threshold value of about 8 level works
pretty nicely for avoiding sharpening
| | 07:33 |
the noise in the background, behind
the snake there. But we still are getting
| | 07:37 |
that pockmark effect, that on/off
propositions, so we are drawing at some
| | 07:40 |
details and not others, which is why
my favorite threshold setting is 0.
| | 07:44 |
Anyway, that gives you a sense.
There is your three sliders. In the next
| | 07:47 |
exercise, I hope to help you make you
sense of the most mysterious and the most
| | 07:51 |
important of these three sliders,
the radius value, coming right up.
| | 07:55 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the Radius value| 00:00 | All right, now you have a sense of
how these three options work. Amount
| | 00:03 | determines the amount of sharpening,
Radius determines the thickness of the
| | 00:06 | edges, and Threshold determines who's
in edge and who is not in edge. Who gets
| | 00:10 | sharpened, and who gets ruled out.
| | 00:12 | Now, Amount is ultimately a personal
decision on your part, and it's pretty
| | 00:15 | easy to understand how the feature
works. I'll be providing you with a little
| | 00:18 | bit of guidance in the next
exercise. Threshold is a little harder to
| | 00:23 | understand, but it doesn't work all
that well. I don't like the way it's put
| | 00:25 | together, because it has no
fuzziness built into it. It's just an on off
| | 00:29 | proposition, and therefore it doesn't
work as well. So could, if you are going
| | 00:32 | to use it at all, then use it
very sparingly, just a few levels.
| | 00:37 | And then finally we have the Radius
value, which is the hardest one to
| | 00:40 | understand. The most mysterious of
the bunch and the most important to the
| | 00:43 | Unsharp Mask process, because it
defines the size of the halos and those halos
| | 00:49 | are what generate the sharpening effect,
or what our eyes read as sharpness. I
| | 00:54 | really want you to have a very keen
sense of what the Radius value does. Let's
| | 00:58 | go ahead and cancel out the Unsharp
Mask dialog box. I'm still working inside
| | 01:01 | Orange on blue.jpg, found
inside of the 14_ sharpen folder.
| | 01:06 | I am switching over to the Channels
palette, already did it in fact, and I
| | 01:10 | could get to that palette of course by
going to the Window menu and choosing
| | 01:12 | the Channels command, were I of a mind
to, or just clicking on that Channels
| | 01:16 | tab right there. Notice this is an RGB
image made up of a Red, and a Green and
| | 01:22 | a Blue channel. The reason I'm showing
you this is because Unsharp Mask like
| | 01:26 | all the filters in Photoshop, and
just about all commands in general inside
| | 01:31 | Photoshop, when you apply a filter to
the RGB image, you are actually applying
| | 01:36 | to the Red, Green and
Blue channels independently.
| | 01:41 | So every one of the channels get
sharpened to the same degree, and that can
| | 01:45 | create some artifacts and weird
problems as we will see in the future exercise.
| | 01:49 | But for now, I'm just going to go
ahead and switch over to the Red channel,
| | 01:52 | because it's the one that has the
highest degree of contrast between the very
| | 01:55 | bright snake in the foreground, and the
dark background here, and that kind of
| | 01:59 | contrast is going to help us understand
what's going on with the Radius value.
| | 02:03 | Radius is a concept that makes most
sense in gray scale, as you will see.
| | 02:06 | There's something about gray scale that
just makes the most sense when you are
| | 02:09 | trying to learn it. So I'm going to go
on to the Filter menu, choose Sharpen,
| | 02:13 | choose Unsharp Mask once again, and
this time we are only affecting the Red
| | 02:16 | Channel, because Green and Blue are not
selected. And you will never do this. I
| | 02:20 | mean, you don't just go around, "hey,
I think I'll sharpen the Red Channel,
| | 02:23 | leave the other two alone."
That's not a recommended practice.
| | 02:26 | We are just trying to learn how the
function works. I'm going to take the
| | 02:28 | Amount value up to something like,
let's say 350%, something arbitrarily high
| | 02:34 | there, and then I'll scoot down to the
Radius value by pressing the Tab key.
| | 02:38 | Notice my guys are a little off-kilter
here; I could of course drag him around,
| | 02:41 | or check this out. You move your cursor
outside of the dialog box; this is true
| | 02:45 | of all of the best filters ones that
preview the effect in the dialog box and
| | 02:50 | outside the dialog box.
| | 02:51 | You can just click outside the dialog
box in order to extensively center that
| | 02:56 | location inside of this square region,
and I guess this is the center point. I
| | 03:01 | guess if I wanted, and be scooted it
over to the right a little bit, I would
| | 03:04 | click more like here or something, and
that looks pretty good, or I could just
| | 03:07 | drag in inside. Just want you to know
that that's an option also, by the way,
| | 03:11 | when you are trying to get a sense of
how the effect works, what it looked like
| | 03:15 | before? Do a little bit
of a before after preview.
| | 03:18 | You can turn off the Preview check box
to see the before view of the image in
| | 03:21 | the background. Turn it back on, to
reinstate that preview. If you want to see
| | 03:25 | a before and after inside the dialog
box and you click and hold on that preview
| | 03:30 | like so, that's your before view, then
release for the after view. Just stuff
| | 03:35 | to keep in mind.
| | 03:36 | All right, the Radius value. I'm going
to take it down to something pretty low.
| | 03:40 | Now notice, if I press the Down arrow
key, I'm reducing the value in increments
| | 03:45 | of 0.1 pixel. So you do have pixel
fractions to choose from here. And that's
| | 03:50 | because it is a soft radius effect.
All right, I'm going to go ahead and take
| | 03:54 | it down to 1 pixel to start with, so
that we can see we've got a very thin
| | 03:58 | amount of blackness above the snake's
snout, and a very thin edge of whiteness
| | 04:05 | below the snout or
inside the snout I should say.
| | 04:07 | Now I want you to keep your eyes on
that snout, and now I'm going to press
| | 04:11 | Shift+Up Arrow, in order to raise that
Radius value in whole pixel increments,
| | 04:14 | and notice how the edge is getting
thicker right there, and I'm going to keep
| | 04:18 | pressing Shift+Up Arrow, and watch
that edge grow. See that big thick goopy
| | 04:23 | edge that I'm tracing around that snake
now here at a radius of -- I'm going up to 12 pixels.
| | 04:29 | So we have 12 pixels of dark edge up
the top and 12 pixels approximately, not
| | 04:34 | exactly, approximately of light
pixels down below, and notice it is a soft
| | 04:39 | effect, so it's sort of blurring away.
It's a nice soft halo that's getting
| | 04:42 | drawn around the snake. Now why is it
only getting drawn around the snake? How
| | 04:45 | it is that Unsharp Mask is smart
enough to trace this big thick gooey outline
| | 04:50 | here, just around the snake? Well, as
I was telling you a few exercises back,
| | 04:54 | Unsharp Mask is looking for areas of
rapid contrast in increasing the contrast
| | 04:59 | at those points. It's all in
proportion to the original contrast inside the
| | 05:04 | image where it finds low level edges.
It applies a low level effect. It just
| | 05:09 | slightly increases the contrast.
Where it finds big edges, it thoroughly
| | 05:14 | increases the effect.
| | 05:15 | So that's why we are seeing the big
thick edge drawn around the area of most
| | 05:20 | obvious contrast here, but it's
happening all over the image. So remember that
| | 05:24 | the Radius value is all about the
thickness of that edge, and that thick edge
| | 05:29 | is what translates in our eyes and our
minds as sharpness inside the image. So
| | 05:34 | notice, if I break it down to a radius
of just 1 pixel, that actually resembles
| | 05:38 | real sharpness on screen,
instead of just big thick gooey edges.
| | 05:42 | So this would be before, and this
would be after, and reason that this works
| | 05:48 | for us is that our eyes are looking
for edges when we are trying to discern
| | 05:54 | focus inside of an image. So anything
that has a lot of rapid contrast, lot of
| | 05:59 | rapid transition from light to dark,
that's in the area that we read as being a
| | 06:04 | nice crisp edge, a tactile edge, inside
of that image. All right, I'm going to
| | 06:09 | cancel out yet again, because we really
want to apply this effect to the entire RGB image.
| | 06:14 | The question you might have at this
point is how do I actually sharpen an
| | 06:17 | actual image? And I'm going to show
you that in the next actual exercise.
| | 06:21 | Please actually stick with me.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Gauging the best settings| 00:00 | All right, so how do we go about the
gauging the best sharpening settings when
| | 00:03 | we are applying the Unsharp Mask filter?
Well, first of all you go ahead and
| | 00:09 | zoom your image to whatever zoom level
you want, and pretty much anything is
| | 00:13 | okay these days.
| | 00:13 | Now let's make sure everything is
okay. Let's make sire it is on your own
| | 00:17 | computer, and my computer here. What
you do is you go up to the Edit menu and
| | 00:20 | you choose Preferences, and those of
you who are working on a Mac, you go to
| | 00:23 | the Photoshop menu and you choose the
Preferences command, and then choose
| | 00:26 | performance, and you should see right
there, this enable OpenGL drawing check
| | 00:32 | box not only available to you, but also
turned on. So make sure it's turned on.
| | 00:35 | It should also tell you the video card
that it detected. Now if you can't turn
| | 00:40 | on this check box, if it's just
completely unavailable to you, one of two
| | 00:44 | problems, either you don't have an
compatible video card and you can check out
| | 00:50 | the documentation that came with you
the computer to find out what kind of
| | 00:52 | video card you have, and then you can
search the video card and find out if
| | 00:55 | it's OpenGL compatible or not.
| | 00:58 | If it is OpenGL compatible, and it
probably is if you spent thousand bucks or
| | 01:03 | more on your computer, but if you
bought a really inexpensive computer like a
| | 01:06 | $500 computer something like that,
probably not, it probably isn't OpenGL
| | 01:11 | compatible. But if it costs thousand
bucks or more, probably it is, in which
| | 01:14 | case, and if you look at your
documentation and find out, hey, I got an OpenGL
| | 01:17 | card, then what you want to do is you
want to go on line and see if you can
| | 01:21 | download a more recent video driver.
Make sure to quit Photoshop, make sure to
| | 01:25 | quit everything, install the most
recent video driver that's offered by your
| | 01:29 | manufacture, restart your computer,
definitely do that, and then start back up
| | 01:34 | Photoshop, and then it
should be back in business.
| | 01:37 | But sometimes all you got to do is
restart Photoshop, by the way, I have had a
| | 01:39 | lot of issues with Photoshop, just kind
of checking out on the old OpenGL, and
| | 01:44 | you just restart the program, and it
gets back with the program, worst case
| | 01:47 | scenario, you have to restart your
machine. All right, so anyway, cancel out of
| | 01:50 | there, I'm in a good shape. Now the
reason I went on about that is because
| | 01:55 | OpenGL support is very important to
gauging sharpening in Photoshop CS4. It
| | 02:00 | means that you can gauge sharpening at
any zoom level essentially, otherwise,
| | 02:06 | if you can't get OpenGL support to
work you can only gauge your sharpening at
| | 02:10 | 100% and higher, 100%, 200%, 300%, so
even zoom levels, or you can go down to
| | 02:17 | 50%, down to 25%, or down to 12.5%,
nothing else, under 100% is going to work
| | 02:23 | for you, that's why OpenGL support is
so important for gauging sharpening. So
| | 02:26 | that's step one. Step two, obviously,
go to the Filter menu, choose Sharpen,
| | 02:32 | and choose Unsharp Mask. Okay, I'm
going to zoom out to click to 67.5%, I'm
| | 02:37 | going to center the zoom on the
snake's head, more or less, and when you are
| | 02:40 | gauging sharpening, always best to
look at the heads. If it's an animal, you
| | 02:45 | want its head in there in some place.
If it's a human being, the eyes, baby,
| | 02:49 | watch those eyes. Then if it's some
other kind of image, whatever you think is
| | 02:53 | important, in order to bring out.
| | 02:55 | Like if it's a landscape, you might
have different areas inside that landscape
| | 02:58 | that you want to sort of focus in on.
All right, the thing I next do is I'll go
| | 03:01 | ahead and crank this Amount value just
through the root, to 500%, that's way
| | 03:05 | too much sharpening. This is called
over-sharpening the image. It can be very
| | 03:09 | damaging to an image if you do it, if
you over sharpen it. Also big FYI, big
| | 03:14 | note here, sharpening is one of the
last things you want to do to an image,
| | 03:18 | even though we were certainly
discussing it in the middle of things here,
| | 03:20 | because it's very difficult to edit the
image after you get down sharpening it.
| | 03:25 | Other edits will start falling apart if
you've already sharpened the image. So
| | 03:28 | you can get most of your color
corrections out of way. And good thing we
| | 03:31 | already discussed color
corrections before we embarked on sharpening.
| | 03:34 | Also, if you are applying a big old
sharpening effect, or even a multi-pass
| | 03:39 | sharpening effect, which sometimes
works, as I explained inside my Photoshop
| | 03:42 | CS3 sharpening images series, then you
might want to go ahead and run a Save
| | 03:46 | As, so you don't save over the
original images, just save it as a separate
| | 03:49 | image, and then finally you can apply
non-destructive sharpening effects. By
| | 03:54 | non-destructive, I mean that you can
change your mind later, you are not
| | 03:59 | actually sharpening the pixels, you
are not doing any damage to them upfront
| | 04:02 | using Smart Objects and Smart Filters,
and I'll be showing you that very
| | 04:06 | smartly in the final part of this
series, when we get into the super
| | 04:11 | sophisticated Photoshop stuff. But
anyway, here I'm just trying to gauge how
| | 04:15 | much sharpness I want to apply. I'm
going to crank that Amount value up to 500%
| | 04:18 | for starters. Then I'm going to take
this Radius value down. Now here's the
| | 04:22 | rule of thumb for Radius, where just
straight everyday sharpening is concerned.
| | 04:27 | If you go on the screen, if you're
sharpening with the screen output in mind,
| | 04:31 | in other words, for the web, or for
kiosk or for presentation or something
| | 04:36 | along those lines, then you probably
want to be looking at the image at here in
| | 04:41 | the image window. I'm looking at it at
200%, 100% is going to give you a even
| | 04:45 | better idea of what the image is really
going to look like. So I'll take it out
| | 04:48 | to 100%, and you want to go with the
low Radius value, because that's going to
| | 04:52 | give you the crispiest edges,
basically a high amount combined with a low
| | 04:56 | radius value, and just because we do
have some noise going on in the background
| | 05:00 | there, I'm going to take this
threshold value up a little bit, to about 4
| | 05:03 | levels, it's starting to look pretty
good to me. Okay, so this is a nice
| | 05:07 | sharpening effect for screen. Problem
is it ain't going to work for print. So
| | 05:12 | if you're hoping it will sharpen the
image, and have the sharpness survive the
| | 05:16 | print process, forget about an ultra
low radius value like 0.5 pixels. It's
| | 05:20 | just is not going to live.
| | 05:22 | And let me show you what I'm talking
about. I'll zoom out to 50%, which is
| | 05:25 | fairly indicative of what your print
image is going to look like. And if I
| | 05:29 | click in hold in dialog box preview,
you can see a little bit of a change, so
| | 05:34 | this is before, and this is after,
just a little bit of a change. Now if you
| | 05:37 | were to print to the very low
resolution, 50% might give you an idea, 33% is
| | 05:41 | going to give you a better idea, and
25% is going to give you possibly a better
| | 05:46 | ideas as well. And I'll show you
how to gauge exactly what your screen
| | 05:49 | resolution is and what your print
out is going to look like in the next
| | 05:52 | exercise. But as I was saying, 25% is
fairly indicative, so I'm going to go
| | 05:56 | ahead and click and hold, so we see
the before view of the snake, and now
| | 06:00 | release, so we can see the after view.
No perceivable change, even in the
| | 06:05 | Amount value, crank through the root,
at 500% I cannot see the effect of the
| | 06:09 | sharpening, that's because
of my radius value is too low.
| | 06:12 | So think about it, you are actually
seeing those halos, even though they are
| | 06:16 | super thin, it's blurred across half a
pixel essentially. So it is showing up
| | 06:21 | at screen resolution, but once you
start increasing the resolution, the image
| | 06:24 | shrinks it down on the page, that
edge is going to grow so thin that it
| | 06:30 | ultimately goes completely away, that
it's disappear from view. So what I'm
| | 06:35 | going to recommend you do is take this
value up to about 4 times its Radius, to
| | 06:39 | something like 2 pixels, and if you're
really serious about this concept, and
| | 06:43 | you want to come up with some
great Radius values for specific print
| | 06:46 | resolutions, then again check out my
Sharpening Images series. I have charts
| | 06:52 | even that tell you exactly what values
go with what resolutions and so on. So
| | 06:57 | there's a ton of information available
to you there. But even though it look
| | 07:00 | likes it's completely over sharpened now,
here inside the 100% view, check out
| | 07:05 | the 25% view, this is before, and
this is after. So we can now see the
| | 07:10 | sharpening effect, and it looks very
crisp. It's over sharpened, but it looks
| | 07:13 | nice and crisp. Whereas at 100% it
looks pretty gooey, and not all that sharp.
| | 07:18 | Then you will take this amount value
down to something reasonable, and what I'm
| | 07:22 | going to tell you is something like
200% is probably going to work up pretty
| | 07:24 | nicely for this image. Radius of 2
pixels is fine, in the threshold of 4
| | 07:29 | levels. You can of course go your own
way, but these are the values that I'm
| | 07:32 | going to accept, and I'll click OK.
| | 07:34 | All right, so how do we know? Is this
going to print good or is it not going to
| | 07:38 | print good? I'm going to show you, so
that we can see exactly how it's going to
| | 07:41 | print, or more less exactly we can get
a soft preview of how's it's going to
| | 07:45 | print in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Previewing how sharpening will print| 00:00 | All right. So here I'm looking at the
sharpened version of the snake. I've gone
| | 00:03 | ahead and saved it off as a separate
file called Sharp snake.jpg, found inside
| | 00:07 | the 14_sharpen folder.
| | 00:09 | Now, how do you get a sense of
whether this image is really going to print
| | 00:12 | sharply, whether it's going to look
sharp after you print it? Well, the best way
| | 00:16 | to get a sense of how the image is
going to print is to print it. Just go ahead
| | 00:19 | and print it to your local Inkjet
printer, that is the Inkjet printer inside of
| | 00:23 | your home or office, or to a network
laser printer or whatever, that's the best way.
| | 00:27 | But what if you don't have a printer
available to you, or what if you're at the
| | 00:30 | airport or something, and you still
want to get a sense of how the image is
| | 00:33 | going to print, or you just don't want
to waste a bunch of paper, there must be
| | 00:36 | a way to soft-proof the image on screen,
and there is. It's gotten better much
| | 00:40 | better inside of Photoshop CS4, thanks
to OpenGL support. So you need to make
| | 00:44 | sure that you have an OpenGL
video card for all this stuff to work.
| | 00:47 | Then there is this command, up here
under the View menu, that's called Print
| | 00:51 | Size. Now, it didn't use to be very
good at all inside Photoshop CS3. In fact,
| | 00:54 | it was a dangerous command, because it
dropped pixels and that meant that the
| | 00:59 | image was going to appear more
jagged than it actually was, which might
| | 01:03 | translate to you thinking it was
sharper than it actually was. Now it works,
| | 01:07 | thanks to OpenGL, which is why I've
gone ahead and given it a keyboard shortcut.
| | 01:10 | If you loaded Deke Keys, then you
have a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+0
| | 01:13 | or Command+Option+0 on the Mac, which
I hope you find useful. I'm going to go
| | 01:17 | ahead and choose the command, and
that's how big the image is going to print,
| | 01:21 | or is it? Well, let's
think about this for a second.
| | 01:24 | In order for Photoshop to know how big
the image really is going to print, it
| | 01:28 | needs to know two different resolution
values. It needs to know the resolution
| | 01:32 | of my screen and then it needs to
know the resolution at which the image is
| | 01:36 | going to be output, and it has to
compare the two to figure out how big that
| | 01:41 | image should be here on screen.
| | 01:42 | Well, notice how big it's going to
output. It knows that size because we set
| | 01:46 | that up inside of the Image Size
command, here under the Image menu. So you
| | 01:51 | could go up to the Image Size command
and right now I've got it set to 5 inches
| | 01:55 | wide, a little more than 5 inches tall,
and Resolution to 276 pixels/inch,
| | 02:00 | which is great. Your Resolution
should be somewhere in the neighborhood of
| | 02:03 | 240-360 in order to print a nice
smooth image, and certainly, I'm in that
| | 02:09 | ballpark, so that's nice.
| | 02:10 | Now, if I wanted to change it to a
different resolution, if I wanted to print
| | 02:13 | it smaller, for example, then I would
make sure Resample Image is turned off,
| | 02:17 | so that I don't end up changing the
number of pixels inside the image. Then I
| | 02:22 | would just change that Resolution
value to, let's say, 300 pixels/inch, and
| | 02:26 | then I click OK in order
to accept that modification.
| | 02:29 | Then I'll go to the View menu and
I'll choose Print Size again, and it will
| | 02:33 | grow smaller, because I'm now
packing more pixels onto the page, so that
| | 02:37 | results in a smaller image; both on
screen of course, subject to the Print Size
| | 02:43 | command there, and of
course when we print the image.
| | 02:45 | Now, I don't want that, so I'm going
to go back to the Image menu. Actually,
| | 02:48 | all I've got to do is go to the Edit
menu, choose Undo Image Size. I just want
| | 02:52 | my original image size restored.
| | 02:54 | Notice that doesn't do anything to your
screen image automatically. You have to
| | 02:58 | go back up to the View menu and choose
that Print Size command again in order
| | 03:03 | to invoke the print size.
| | 03:05 | However, this is inaccurate. This isn't
right. If you were to print this image
| | 03:09 | right now; which I invite you to do if
you like, if you were to print it and
| | 03:12 | bring it back here, the printed image
is actually going to print bigger than it
| | 03:16 | looks on screen, and that's because
Photoshop does not know your screen
| | 03:20 | resolution and has set your screen
resolution by default to something too low.
| | 03:25 | So that's the Print Size command. A
little preview of what's going on. In the
| | 03:28 | next exercise I'm going to show you
how to make that Print Size command
| | 03:31 | accurate by evaluating and entering
your screen resolution information.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Measuring and setting screen resolution| 00:00 | In this exercise, I'm going to show you
how to measure the size of your screen,
| | 00:04 | believe it or not, the physical size of
your screen. You need to do that. Then
| | 00:07 | how to use those measurements to figure
out your monitor's resolution, and then
| | 00:12 | how to tell Photoshop what that
monitor resolution is, so that this command
| | 00:16 | right here is accurate, because
right now it's totally inaccurate. It's
| | 00:20 | absolutely random.
| | 00:21 | The reason being, that Photoshop
thinks the resolution of your screen is 72
| | 00:24 | pixels/inch, by default it
thinks that. You can change it.
| | 00:28 | Now, you'll sometimes hear that
bandied about, that that's typical everyday,
| | 00:32 | average screen resolution, 72 pixels
/inch, and I'm here to tell you, if
| | 00:35 | somebody who presumes to be a
computer authority shares that little bit of
| | 00:39 | information with you, then please do me
a favor and ignore everything else they
| | 00:43 | say because that is complete
malarkey. There is no such thing as a
| | 00:49 | 72-pixel/inch monitor. There was once
upon a time. Back in 1984, they had the
| | 00:54 | thing called the Macintosh computer.
That was just a little box with a little
| | 00:57 | screen in it; those things were 72
pixels/inch approximately. But ever since
| | 01:01 | we've departed from that style of
computer, which was a long time ago now, like
| | 01:06 | a couple of decades ago, we have not
had 72 pixel/inch monitors. We have much
| | 01:11 | better monitors in fact, much higher
resolution monitors than that. They tend
| | 01:14 | to vary between 96 and 120 pixels/inch.
| | 01:18 | But you can figure out exactly what
yours is pretty simply. So you start by
| | 01:23 | getting yourself a ruler or a tape
measure or some physical measuring device.
| | 01:29 | Then I want you to measure the width
of your screen; we're working in inches,
| | 01:32 | those of you who are working in
millimeters will have to interpolate this
| | 01:35 | information, the width of your screen
in inches is what we'll start with. When
| | 01:39 | I say the screen, I mean the
imageable area, the part of the screen that's
| | 01:43 | showing you bright pixels. The dark
stuff at the outside, don't measure that
| | 01:47 | and do not measure the frame of the
monitor, because that doesn't enter into
| | 01:49 | our equation at all. Enter just the
imageable area right there is what you want to measure.
| | 01:53 | Then measure the height value as well.
We're just using the height as a backup,
| | 01:57 | just for conformation's sake. Write
those two values down on a piece of paper
| | 02:03 | using a pen; is the best way, or if
you prefer a pencil so you can erase,
| | 02:07 | that's fine too, but get some good measurements.
| | 02:09 | Now, I found out-- I'm working on an
Apple Cinema display, even though its
| | 02:13 | hooked up to a Windows Vista machine,
and it works. Why not? And what I found
| | 02:19 | is that the width of my screen is 19 1/
2 inches and the height of my screen,
| | 02:24 | the imageable area once again, is 12 1/
8th inches and I want you to be accurate
| | 02:29 | to the nearest eighth of an
inch, if you will, for me.
| | 02:31 | All right. Then I'm going to
collapse Photoshop. Make sure I've got a
| | 02:35 | calculator open in the background.
You'll need a calculator and you'll need
| | 02:38 | some open screen real estate here just
to right-click on. If you're working on
| | 02:41 | the Mac, you may have a little monitor
icon up there on the right side of the
| | 02:45 | menu Bar, and click on that and you
should see the height and width of your
| | 02:49 | monitor in pixels, because now we've
got the inch information, we need the
| | 02:53 | pixel information.
| | 02:54 | So if you can get it that way, that's
great, otherwise you're going to have to
| | 02:56 | go to your display settings, you can
right-click some place in an empty portion
| | 03:00 | of your screen to get the shortcut
menu and choose Display Settings or
| | 03:03 | something along those lines. Or if you
are in Windows Vista, you have to choose
| | 03:07 | Personalize. I don't know who in the
world thought this was helping us out in
| | 03:11 | order to create this weigh station that
gets in our face on our way to going to
| | 03:16 | Display Settings, and when you click
on Display Settings, stays in screen.
| | 03:21 | So go into Display Settings right here.
I can see that my Resolution is set up
| | 03:26 | to 1280 by 800. Now, this is
pretty low resolution for this monitor.
| | 03:30 | Resolution, in core figures, this is
a different kind of resolution, real
| | 03:33 | resolution is so many pixels per inch
or per millimeter or per some unit of
| | 03:38 | measure; not just pixels per nothing,
pixels per monitor is not a resolution, technically.
| | 03:42 | But anyway, that's what they call it;
they call it that on all the Operating
| | 03:45 | Systems. Mine is set pretty low,
that's because I'm recording video for you
| | 03:48 | good people. The reason being, we
don't want to take up your entire screen. I
| | 03:52 | don't want to record the entire screen
resolution I can, because it wouldn't
| | 03:55 | play very fast, we'd have all kinds of
problems. It might be too big to even be
| | 03:59 | on your monitor, and it would hide
everything that you've got going in the
| | 04:01 | background. But you presumably are
using the highest resolution available to
| | 04:05 | your monitor. You ought to be. There is
no reason to work lower. You can always
| | 04:09 | make things bigger in other ways
if you're having problems reading.
| | 04:11 | But anyway, let's say you're working
at reasonable resolution like 1920 by
| | 04:14 | 1200. So that's what I'm doing, let's
say. You are trying to figure out the
| | 04:19 | pixels/inch, and think about the way
pixels/inch is written. Its pixels/inch,
| | 04:25 | and that / is divided by, pixels
divided by inch. So you need to take pixels
| | 04:30 | and divide them using this
little divider guy by inches.
| | 04:34 | So in our case, in my calculator, I
do 1920; we'll do the Width first, 1920
| | 04:39 | divided by, so pixels first divided by
right there, 19.5 inches, equals, and
| | 04:46 | then write this down, because this is
your first resolution value, 98.46. All
| | 04:49 | right. Now, you'll get a different
value if you're working along with me and
| | 04:53 | actually doing the work, you'll get a
different resolution, that's fine. So
| | 04:56 | 98.46. Now, I'll write that
down on a piece of paper. Good!
| | 05:00 | Then I'll figure out my Height, just as
a conformation, just as a backup. 1200
| | 05:05 | pixels, so 1200 pixels. We start with
pixels, which is the larger number too,
| | 05:09 | so that's another way to remember that.
You start with it. Divided by 12.125,
| | 05:13 | and .125 is an eighth. Then I click
equals, and then I get 98.96, really 98.97
| | 05:22 | pixels/inch. So let's round it off.
Given the numbers we're getting here, I
| | 05:28 | would say we round it upward, and we
say 99 pixels/inch is the resolution of the monitor.
| | 05:33 | All right. Let's go to Photoshop. Here
is how you make Photoshop aware of it.
| | 05:37 | You go up to the Edit menu and you
choose Preferences command. That would be
| | 05:39 | Preferences under the Photoshop menu
on the Mac. Then you choose Units &
| | 05:43 | Rulers, and there is your guy right
there, Screen Resolution. Notice its set to
| | 05:47 | 72 improbable pixels/inch. Go ahead and
change that to whatever your value is.
| | 05:51 | As I say, it should be somewhere in the
96-120 range, most likely. Set it to 99
| | 05:57 | pixels/inch and click OK.
| | 06:00 | Now, go up to the View menu and choose
the Print Size command, and the image
| | 06:05 | will grow larger. Now, why in the
world did it grow larger? When we increase
| | 06:09 | the Image Size Resolution and chose
Print Size, the image grew smaller, but
| | 06:15 | when we increase the screen resolution,
we make the image bigger. Why does it
| | 06:19 | happen? Well, because we've told
Photoshop that we're actually packing more
| | 06:22 | pixels on screen than it though we
were. So we're closer to the final print
| | 06:27 | resolution than it thought we were. So
it needs to provide less compensation.
| | 06:30 | So it needs to zoom out less. So it
makes the image bigger. So we have a higher
| | 06:34 | Zoom ratio available to us.
| | 06:36 | All right. Now, what you would do, just
to make sure you got it right, what you
| | 06:40 | would do is you would go ahead and
really output this image. Go ahead and print
| | 06:43 | it, and then bring that sheet of paper
back to your screen and then compare the
| | 06:48 | two. Make sure they're the same size.
If they're not quite the same size,
| | 06:52 | that's okay. I'm going to show you how
to tweak things in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tweaking the screen resolution| 00:00 | Okay. So you've worked along with
me. You've figured out your screen
| | 00:02 | resolution. You worked through the
calculator. You were a little confused by
| | 00:05 | what was going on, but you came up
with a number, and you entered it into the
| | 00:09 | Preferences dialog box there.
| | 00:10 | Once again, you've got to go up to the
View menu, after you get done setting
| | 00:13 | the screen resolution there inside
Preferences, choose Print Size command in
| | 00:16 | order to update the Zoom ratio. Then
you go ahead and print the image, bring it
| | 00:22 | back to your monitor here, and you
compare the size of the two. If you have a
| | 00:25 | bright enough monitor and thin enough
paper, you should be able to even put the
| | 00:28 | printed snake over the screen snake
and see how they align with each other.
| | 00:31 | Let's say they're not quite right.
What do you do? Because the likelihood of
| | 00:35 | getting it exactly right in the first
try is fairly low. So if you don't get it
| | 00:40 | quite right, you can go through the
numbers again. You can say, oh, I must have
| | 00:43 | made a mistake, I'll get my calculator
back out. You can do that, or you can
| | 00:47 | just tweak it on the fly.
| | 00:48 | Here is how you tweak it on the fly.
You go up to the Edit menu, Photoshop menu
| | 00:51 | on the Mac. You go to Preferences,
and you go to Units & Rulers once again,
| | 00:54 | which I believe, if I'm not mistaken,
that's Ctrl+K, Ctrl+7. That's Command+K,
| | 01:01 | Command+7 on the Mac. If you want to
do it from the keyboard, there is your
| | 01:04 | screen resolution.
| | 01:05 | Let's imagine -- here's the deal, if
the snake is too small on screen, so it
| | 01:10 | needs to be bigger, then you need to
increase your screen resolution value. If
| | 01:15 | the snake is too big on screen, you
need to make it smaller to match the Print
| | 01:18 | Size then you decrease the screen
resolution. There is no inverse relationship
| | 01:22 | in other words. It's just the way it
seems like it ought to be. You decrease
| | 01:26 | the resolution to make the snake
smaller, you increase the resolution to make
| | 01:30 | the snake bigger. So exactly the
opposite of what we encounter when we're
| | 01:33 | changing resolution per output.
| | 01:35 | So let's say my snake isn't quite
big enough. He just needs to be ever so
| | 01:39 | slightly larger. Well, what I tend to
do when I'm trying to work this out is
| | 01:43 | for starters I'll work in increments
of 5, for small changes. If it's a big
| | 01:47 | difference, then it's more like
increments of 10. But even working through
| | 01:51 | increments of 5 can't hurt you. So
that way you'll get some work done fairly
| | 01:54 | quickly, but you do have to do a lot of
back and forth in here. So 104 would be
| | 01:58 | an increment of 5. I'd go ahead and
set that value and then click on the OK
| | 02:03 | button, if I can get it on screen. There we go.
| | 02:05 | Now of course, you need to go to the
View menu; don't forget the step, and
| | 02:08 | choose Print Size again, you have to
choose that command over again, and then
| | 02:11 | it's going to grow slightly. Then if
you went too far, you want to back off
| | 02:15 | that screen resolution value.
| | 02:17 | If you didn't go far enough, you want
to increase it. Let's say I didn't go far
| | 02:20 | enough, I'll press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+7 again,
Command+K, Command+7 on the Mac and
| | 02:24 | I'd say, okay, you know what, this
time I'll try an increment of three. Let's
| | 02:27 | say 107 pixels/inch. You can even by
the way do one of these numbers here. You
| | 02:32 | can enter quite accurate values if
you want to and click OK. If you're just
| | 02:36 | trying to make last minute tiny little
tweaks, you probably wouldn't want to go
| | 02:40 | that accurate, because that's not
going to result in much difference, but you
| | 02:44 | could do like 107.5 pixels/
inch let's say, click OK.
| | 02:47 | Then go up to the View menu and choose
Print Size and that's going to grow ever
| | 02:52 | so slightly. Once again, just compare it,
do it till you've get it right, keep
| | 02:56 | working at it if you've got to. Ctrl+K,
Ctrl+7, Command+K, Command+7 on the
| | 03:00 | Mac. Once you do get a value that's good;
I'm just going to cancel out of here
| | 03:03 | and assume that 107.5 is good enough
for my purposes, then what you would do,
| | 03:09 | go to File menu and quit the program;
either choose Exit here on the PC or Quit
| | 03:13 | on the Mac. That forces Photoshop to
save your Preference Settings, so that's
| | 03:17 | what it's doing.
| | 03:18 | Then you would go ahead and relaunch
the program and from that point on your
| | 03:22 | screen is not going to change. Your
screen is going to remain the same
| | 03:24 | resolution from that point on. Your
image resolutions are going to change all
| | 03:28 | over the place, but Photoshop will
figure that out for you. You don't need to
| | 03:31 | do anything there. So you will be set.
Even though it takes a while to get that
| | 03:35 | screen resolution setup in the first
place, once you've got it, you're golden.
| | 03:38 | So anyway, that's how you do it.
| | 03:41 | Then of course, what you would do at
this point, now that you've got it exactly
| | 03:44 | at the right resolution here, is
you would see whether you've got the
| | 03:48 | Sharpening Settings the way you want
them. I'm going to go up to my History
| | 03:51 | palette right there. Click on that
little guy, or I could choose History from
| | 03:54 | the Window menu as well if I wanted to.
| | 03:56 | Then notice that Unsharp Mask was my
last step. So if I click on Open, that
| | 04:01 | will show me the previous version of
the snake, the unsharpened version of the
| | 04:05 | snake. Then if I click on Unsharp Mask
once again, I see the sharpened version
| | 04:08 | of the snake, and yes, he looks very
nicely sharpened in print there according
| | 04:13 | to my proof that I'm seeing here in
Photoshop, now calibrated to the proper
| | 04:17 | screen resolution of course.
All right. So there you go.
| | 04:19 | In the next exercise we'll go back to
creative techniques here, and I'll show
| | 04:23 | you how to limit your sharpening to
just the luminance information inside an image.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sharpening the luminance data| 00:00 |
In this exercise I'm going to show you
how to limit your sharpening to just the
| | 00:03 |
luminance information inside of an
image and why you'd want to do that. As it
| | 00:07 |
so turns out, you almost always want
to do that. It's just that you'll notice
| | 00:12 |
the problem for some
images much more than others.
| | 00:14 |
For example, this image right here,
we're really going to know there is a
| | 00:17 |
problem. It's called The dragon.jpg.
This is a Komodo dragon. This Komodo
| | 00:22 |
dragon, he is so pimply and there is
so much rippling information, detail,
| | 00:28 |
wonderful stuff going on inside of
this animal's flesh, that I really want to
| | 00:32 |
bring it out that much more. I really
want to call attention to it with the
| | 00:35 |
Unsharp Mask filter.
| | 00:37 |
So if I go to the Filter menu, you
will notice that the last filter I applied
| | 00:40 |
is Unsharp Mask, and its right up
there at the top of the menu along with the
| | 00:42 |
keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+F, Command+F
on a Mac. If you choose that command or
| | 00:46 |
press that keyboard shortcut, you will
reapply the last settings. So you won't
| | 00:50 |
get a dialog box at all.
| | 00:52 |
Watch, I'll just go ahead and do it.
You'll just sharpen the image the same way
| | 00:55 |
you sharpened it last time. All right.
That's not what I want, so I'll press
| | 00:58 |
Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac to Undo.
| | 01:00 |
Instead, I want to bring the dialog box
back up on screen. So I press and hold
| | 01:04 |
the Alt key or the Option key on the
Mac. Go to the Filter menu and choose
| | 01:07 |
Unsharp Mask, or you can press Ctrl+
Alt+F, Command+Option+F on the Mac, and
| | 01:13 |
that will bring up the Unsharp Mask
dialog box, complete with the last settings.
| | 01:17 |
Now, I really want to exaggerate the
effect that we're going to get here. So
| | 01:21 |
I'm going to keep my In dialog box
preview at 100%, and my Out dialog box
| | 01:25 |
preview here is at the 50% Zoom level,
for what that's worth. I'm going to
| | 01:29 |
increase my Amount value to 500% and
I'm going to take my Radius up to 4
| | 01:33 |
pixels. Now, this is totally over
sharpening this guy, but I'm trying to
| | 01:38 |
demonstrate to you this problem
that we're going to see here. I want to
| | 01:42 |
exaggerate the problem for your viewing
pleasure. Then I'm going to reduce the
| | 01:46 |
Threshold value to 0.
| | 01:47 |
All right. So the problem is we've got
these weird color artifacts. Can you see
| | 01:52 |
them? There's all these little weird
blue spots that are showing up, and
| | 01:55 |
elsewhere inside of this eye in
particular, we're seeing a bunch of yellow
| | 01:59 |
spots that are showing up as well.
We've got some sort of aberrant magenta and
| | 02:04 |
green and orange tones going on. I
mean, this guy is really very close to
| | 02:09 |
monochromatic and all of a sudden he
has developed colors all over the place.
| | 02:13 |
Now, if I click-and-hold on this eye,
you'll see that those colors I guess are
| | 02:17 |
there, those aberrant colors are there
to some extent, but they weren't this
| | 02:21 |
bad until we decided to sharpen the image.
| | 02:25 |
All right. So why in the world is
this happening? I'm going to go ahead and
| | 02:27 |
click on the OK button to accept that
modification, and I'm going to Shift+Tab
| | 02:32 |
my palettes back on screen. Let's go
ahead and move this guy over so that we
| | 02:35 |
can see all of what's out there. The
problem comes because we're sharpening an
| | 02:39 |
RGB image and we're sharpening all of
the channels at once, and each channel is
| | 02:45 |
getting sharpened
independently, but to the same extent.
| | 02:48 |
So we've got a sharpened version of the
Red Channel and a sharpened version of
| | 02:51 |
the Green Channel and a sharpened
version of the Blue Channel. Now, if any of
| | 02:54 |
these channels contains a lot of noise,
and the Blue Channel does; you can see
| | 02:58 |
that its a total mess, and it
contains disproportionate amounts of noise
| | 03:03 |
compared with the other two channels,
which is what we're getting right here,
| | 03:07 |
the Blue Channel is much more noisy
than either Green or Red is, then we're
| | 03:11 |
going to start seeing colors pop
-up out of nowhere essentially.
| | 03:15 |
This all makes sense. We're getting
blue and yellow spots, and the blue spots
| | 03:19 |
are caused by light noise inside the
Blue Channel, and then the yellow spots
| | 03:23 |
are caused by black noise inside the
Channel, which is leaving Red and Green,
| | 03:27 |
which makes the form yellow. However it
happens, it's just a big huge problem,
| | 03:34 |
and what we need to do is we need to
sharpen that Luminance information only
| | 03:38 |
and leave the Color
information alone. So how do we do that?
| | 03:40 |
Well, let's go back to the RGB image,
two ways that we can approach this. Of
| | 03:44 |
course, we undo this command right
there and I'll go ahead and do that. One is
| | 03:49 |
to convert the RGB image, before you
sharpen it, to the Lab mode. We saw a
| | 03:54 |
little bit of Lab back in the previous
chapter. We're going to see a little bit
| | 03:57 |
of Lab again by going up to the Image
menu, choose mode, and choose Lab Color
| | 04:01 |
right there, and that will convert
this image to a Lightness, a, and b image right there.
| | 04:07 |
I should say that you'll hear people
sometimes call the Lab mode, L-A-B, but a
| | 04:12 |
and b don't stand for anything, so
this isn't technically like, RGB, that
| | 04:16 |
stands for Red, Green, Blue.
| | 04:17 |
Now JPEG stands for Joint Photographer
Expert Group or something along those
| | 04:22 |
lines. It stood for something as well,
but people pronounce it JPEG, people go
| | 04:26 |
ahead and pronounce it the way it's
spelled essentially. So sometimes you do
| | 04:29 |
letters, sometimes you don't. But in
the case of Lab, a and b just don't stand
| | 04:33 |
for anything. They're just random
letters that have been assigned to the Tint
| | 04:38 |
and Temperature information right here.
L stands for lightness or luminosity if you prefer.
| | 04:42 |
All right. So what you do at this
point is don't have all the channels
| | 04:46 |
selected, because if you have all the
channels selected and you go ahead and
| | 04:49 |
apply Unsharp Mask again, same
settings as before, you are going to bring out
| | 04:53 |
that bad color information once again.
So Lab by itself doesn't solve the
| | 04:57 |
problem. Go ahead and press Ctrl+Z,
Command+Z on the Mac. What solves the
| | 05:00 |
problem is clicking on the Lightness
Channel to make it active, here inside the
| | 05:04 |
Channels palette, and then click in
front in order to turn on its eyeball so
| | 05:07 |
that you're seeing the composite color
image. But only the Lightness Channel is active.
| | 05:11 |
Now, go up to the Filter menu, choose
that first command, and notice that, even
| | 05:16 |
though I've sharpened the holy heck
out of this image, its way too sharpened,
| | 05:21 |
it's over sharpened at this point.
But even so, we do not have any problems
| | 05:27 |
whatsoever associated with those colors,
they are not coming out like they were
| | 05:30 |
before. We don't have colored dots
all over the place. So that's one way.
| | 05:33 |
I would recommend this way strictly if
you are already working inside Lab. If
| | 05:38 |
you've already decided to visit the Lab
mode in order to tweak some colors and
| | 05:41 |
do some of the stuff I was telling
you is possible back in the previous
| | 05:44 |
chapter, well then, might as well
sharpen inside the Lab mode as well. But you
| | 05:48 |
don't have to go to Lab just
for the sake of sharpening.
| | 05:50 |
So I'm just going to go ahead and
press the F12 key in order to revert the
| | 05:54 |
image. You can also choose the Revert
command from the File menu. All right.
| | 05:57 |
Here inside the RGB mode, we can still
accomplish our goal. By going up to the
| | 06:01 |
Filter menu, choosing Unsharp Mask, Ctrl
+F, Command+F on the Mac, that's going
| | 06:05 |
to make the image look awful, of course,
as we saw before. Let's go ahead and
| | 06:08 |
zoom in so we can see it in
all of its beautiful awfulness.
| | 06:12 |
Now, you will immediately follow
Unsharp Mask with the Fade command. Go to the
| | 06:17 |
Edit menu and choose Fade. So you need
to choose this before you perform any
| | 06:20 |
other operation, because Fade can only
operate on the last pixel modification
| | 06:26 |
that you just applied, and if you do
anything else; like you select a region or
| | 06:29 |
something like that, the command dims
on you, and then you're going to have to
| | 06:32 |
back step and reapply and so on.
| | 06:34 |
So anyway Fade, Ctrl+Shift+F, Command+
Shift+F on the Mac, so it even has a
| | 06:38 |
keyboard shortcut that resembles the
Filter shortcut we just saw a moment ago.
| | 06:42 |
All right. So I'll choose that command.
You don't need to change the Opacity
| | 06:44 |
value, although we will because we need
to back off this effect, it's over the
| | 06:47 |
top. But what you really need to do
is change the mode and we're going to
| | 06:51 |
change it to Luminosity. That way we're
only affecting the Luminosity and we're
| | 06:55 |
not affecting the color. And we'll
learn more about blend modes later, but
| | 06:59 |
Luminosity is the way to go.
| | 07:01 |
Now notice that those color problems
went away just like that. It looks much,
| | 07:05 |
much better now. It's not an identical
effect. You're not going to get exactly
| | 07:09 |
the same thing out of sharpening just
Lightness and Lab and sharpening in RGB
| | 07:14 |
and then fading it just in Luminosity
mode. They are two distinct operations,
| | 07:19 |
but while you could compare them and
figure out exactly what the differences
| | 07:21 |
are, they aren't qualitative differences.
In other words, one isn't necessarily
| | 07:25 |
better than the other.
They're just different ways to work.
| | 07:27 |
All right. So I change mode to
Luminosity. Now, just in the name of coming up
| | 07:31 |
with a better setting here, I'm going
to back off my Opacity value here to 65%.
| | 07:38 |
So essentially what we're doing is
we're treating this filtered version of the
| | 07:42 |
image as a temporary layer and then
we're fading it to 65% and applying the
| | 07:47 |
Luminosity blend modes to merge the
before and after versions of the filtered
| | 07:52 |
effect. Click OK, and we get this much
better luminance only sharpening effect.
| | 07:57 |
Now, as I say, this is the kind of
thing that you're going to notice on some
| | 08:01 |
images but it's happening to some
degree or other on all images. So if you want
| | 08:07 |
to be very careful in your imaging
life here, after you apply Unsharp Mask or
| | 08:11 |
one of the other sharpening filters,
you will always fade it to the Luminosity
| | 08:15 |
mode, as I've done here.
| | 08:16 |
All right. In the next exercise we are
going to transition from Unsharp Mask to
| | 08:20 |
Smart Sharpen. Stay tuned.
| | 08:22 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| USM vs. Smart Sharpen| 00:00 | In this exercise I'm going to
introduce you to the Smart Sharpen filter, and
| | 00:03 | show you how it compares to Unsharp Mask.
We're going to see how these filters
| | 00:07 | work as applied to this diagram right
here. It's called Big brushstrokes.psd,
| | 00:12 | found inside the 14_sharpen folder.
That is actually how they were created,
| | 00:16 | by brushing a path outline. But what we
have and what we're going to be able to
| | 00:20 | work with here is this very obviously
dark sort of serpentine shape right here.
| | 00:25 | Against a light background with
some even lighter circles on the inside and
| | 00:29 | throughout we have some textures,
some noise, sort of a bump map texture
| | 00:33 | here that will give the filters
a lot to grab on to, essentially.
| | 00:38 | By the way, notice that each one of
these guys, and there is four versions of
| | 00:41 | this artwork in all, all arranged on
independent layers as you can see here
| | 00:45 | inside the Layers palette.
| | 00:46 | All right. So I'm going to go up to the
Filter menu, choose Sharpen, and choose
| | 00:49 | Unsharp Mask, or you could press Shift+
F5 there if you loaded my Deke Keys
| | 00:54 | of course. Just for the sake of
comparison, I'm going to change the Amount
| | 00:57 | value to 200%, the Radius value to 20
pixels. I want you to note this by the
| | 01:03 | way; typically we're going to with high
Amount values and low Radius values in
| | 01:07 | order to create tactile sharpening effects.
| | 01:09 | But if you just want to enhance the
contrast of the image to create this things
| | 01:13 | that's known as clarity inside the
image, just bolster the edges ever so
| | 01:18 | slightly, then you can combine a low
Amount value, let's say 50%, with a high
| | 01:23 | Radius value such as 20 pixels. Notice
that just goes in there and applies some
| | 01:27 | deep shading and some highlights as
well in order to define the object,
| | 01:32 | sometimes add a little bit of volume
to your objects as well. So it can work
| | 01:36 | out very nicely, by the way, it's not
strictly speaking a sharpening effect,
| | 01:40 | but it's a pleasing effect nonetheless.
| | 01:42 | I am not going for pleasing. I'm going
to take this value up to 200%, 20 pixels
| | 01:47 | of Radius, 0 for Threshold. Very
important for our comparative test here that
| | 01:51 | the Threshold value stays at 0,
because there is no equivalent for the
| | 01:55 | Threshold option inside
the Smart Sharpen dialog box.
| | 01:58 | All right. Now, I'm going to click OK
in order to accept this modification.
| | 02:02 | Now, let's move down to this layer
that's called Gaus Blur. I'm going to
| | 02:05 | go up to the Filter menu. This time,
I'm going to go ahead and choose the Smart
| | 02:10 | Sharpen filter, but you know what?
Before I do, because this is a whopping big
| | 02:13 | dialog box, I'm going to go ahead and
press Shift+Tab to hide my palettes for a
| | 02:16 | moment and I'm going to move my window
over to the right side of the screen;
| | 02:19 | I'm working in an independent image
window here as you can see.
| | 02:23 | That way I'll have space for the
ginormous Smart Sharpen dialog box.
| | 02:27 | I'm going to go to Filter menu, choose
Sharpen, choose Smart Sharpen; if you
| | 02:30 | loaded Deke Keys, you've got a
keyboard shortcut of Shift+F6, just the
| | 02:33 | next one in line right there. Brings up
this big old dialog box, and notice we
| | 02:37 | got an Amount value, we have a Radius
value. Now, by default, I believe these
| | 02:41 | values are 100 and 1, something along
those lines, with Remove set to Gaussian Blur.
| | 02:46 | Now, that may seem like a weird thing,
but we do have the option of specifying
| | 02:50 | what kind of blur we're trying to
compensate for and really what we're doing is
| | 02:54 | we're telling Photoshop which kind
of blur to use in order to correct the
| | 02:59 | image. So as I was telling you a few
exercises ago, Unsharp Mask actually uses
| | 03:04 | Gaussian Blur to create
the effect of sharpening.
| | 03:07 | In fact, if you check out my Photoshop
CS3 Sharpening Images series, you can
| | 03:12 | find an exercise that tells you how to
build your own Unsharp Mask using just
| | 03:16 | Gaussian Blur. These other options,
Lens Blur and Motion Blur can be built with
| | 03:21 | those filters, as it just so happens,
but they have very specific effects, and
| | 03:26 | they have very specific uses, as you'll see.
| | 03:29 | So anyway, I'll leave that set to
Gaussian Blur. I'll go ahead and raise the
| | 03:32 | Amount to 200%, and take the Radius up
to 20 pixels, just like I did inside the
| | 03:37 | Gaussian Blur dialog box. Leave More
Accurate turned off. We don't need the
| | 03:41 | Advanced settings here. So this is the
effect we're looking for, we're done.
| | 03:44 | Just go ahead and click OK in order
to accept that modification, and then
| | 03:49 | compare these two visually on screen
there. They appear to be very, very similar.
| | 03:55 | Well, they're not very, very similar.
They are absolutely pixel-for-pixel
| | 03:59 | identical. That's because Smart Sharpen
does allow you to mimic the effects of
| | 04:05 | Unsharp Mask, when you set it to
Gaussian Blur, provided that Unsharp Mask
| | 04:09 | obviously has a Threshold of 0,
because there is nothing like that inside the
| | 04:12 | Smart Sharpen. But that's just where
things start. It only gets better from here.
| | 04:16 | You have more options available
to you in Smart Sharpen, as I'll explain
| | 04:21 | in the very next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Smart Sharpen's Remove settings| 00:00 | In this exercise I'm going to
demonstrate the other Remove settings inside of
| | 00:04 | the Smart Sharpen dialog box, which
include Lens Blur and Motion Blur. Both of
| | 00:08 | which deliver markedly different
results as you'll see. We're going to continue
| | 00:12 | to see the effects of this filter as
applied to this diagram, to image right
| | 00:16 | here. It's called Big brushstrokes.psd,
found inside of the 14_sharpen folder.
| | 00:21 | I am going to move my image window over,
again, to the left hand side of the
| | 00:25 | screen, because I'm going to have to
put the Smart Sharpen dialog box over here
| | 00:29 | in the right hand side of the screen,
and I'm going to press Shift+Tab to bring
| | 00:31 | back my Layers palette, Click on Lens Blur.
| | 00:34 | Now, we can't see that Lens Blur layer
right there. I want to show you the way
| | 00:37 | I've got this illustration setup.
I've gone ahead and scaled by floating
| | 00:41 | independent window here. So then I can
just press the End key on my keyboard in
| | 00:45 | order to scroll down to the end of the
image, and then I can press the Home key
| | 00:50 | to scroll back up to the top of the
image, and I've scaled the window so that
| | 00:53 | all of my diagrams are exactly aligned
with each other, so that we can do some
| | 00:57 | speedy comparison work here.
| | 00:59 | All right. So here is our Gaussian
Blur sharpening effects. One that was
| | 01:03 | applied using the Unsharp Mask filter,
and the other that was applied using the
| | 01:07 | Smart Sharpen Filter. They are pixel
for pixel identical. However, our next
| | 01:11 | effects won't be.
| | 01:12 | So let's go ahead and scroll down by
pressing the End key in my case, you can
| | 01:15 | scroll down manually if you want to,
and the Lens Blur layer is selected.
| | 01:19 | That's very important.
| | 01:20 | The last command that I applied,
from the Filter menu anyway, was Smart
| | 01:24 | Sharpen. So to once again display the
Smart Sharpen dialog box, I could just
| | 01:27 | press Control+Alt+F, Command+Option+
F on the Mac, and I'll move my Smart
| | 01:32 | Sharpen dialog box over to the right hand side.
| | 01:34 | Now, one of the things about Smart
Sharpen is that it has a gargantuan preview
| | 01:39 | that takes up a lot of room, and then
it also does preview in the background. I
| | 01:42 | wish its preview wasn't this big. I
don't actually care for the magnitude of
| | 01:47 | this In dialog box preview. I'm
perfectly happy with the smaller one. Since we
| | 01:50 | can preview in the background, what's the point?
| | 01:53 | Anyway, Amount is 200%, Radius is 20
pixels. I'm going to leave that as is and
| | 01:58 | I'm going to change the Remove
setting from Gaussian Blur to Lens Blur, and
| | 02:02 | you're going to notice immediately a
big difference here. This is a much more
| | 02:07 | distinct effect that we're applying.
It brings those halos and calculates the
| | 02:11 | halos much differently than the
Gaussian version of the filter does.
| | 02:16 | Theoretically, here is how it looks,
you get a sense of what's going on, but
| | 02:19 | that doesn't really help you
understand what you're supposed to do with these
| | 02:21 | options. Here is what you're supposed
to do with these options. Gaussian Blur
| | 02:25 | is a great setting if you're trying
to compensate for the fact that you
| | 02:28 | downsampled an image, or you're
trying to compensate for glass distortion
| | 02:33 | that's associated with the scanned
image. So if there is a little bit of
| | 02:36 | blurring that was introduced by the
scanner as you scanned an image, then you
| | 02:40 | can offset that blurring, you can
sharpen it using the Gaussian Blur setting right here.
| | 02:45 | Lens Blur is specifically designed for
accommodating images that are captured
| | 02:50 | with digital cameras, that never
went through a secondary interpolation
| | 02:54 | process, whether downsampling or
whether scanning the image. So it's direct to
| | 02:59 | digital, you use Lens Blur instead,
and you're going to get much sharper
| | 03:03 | effects, more pinpointed
effects, as you will see.
| | 03:07 | Leave More Accurate turned off for now,
and we'll go ahead and click OK in
| | 03:10 | order to apply those exact same settings.
So exact same numbers, 200%, Amount,
| | 03:15 | 20 pixel Radius, just like we did
before, but because of the different remove
| | 03:19 | settings, here is the difference;
I'll press the Home key so we can see the
| | 03:23 | Gaussian Blur version of the Smart
Sharpening effect, and by pressing the End
| | 03:27 | key, here is the Lens Blur
version of that Smart Sharpen effect.
| | 03:32 | All right. So now let's switch over to
Mo Blur right there, which is short for
| | 03:36 | Motion Blur, and it's this guy right
there is our final version of the image.
| | 03:40 | Let's do the old Shift+Tab away the
palettes once again, and drag the old image
| | 03:45 | window over to the old right hand side
of the old screen, and then, oops, I'll
| | 03:48 | just press Ctrl+Alt+F, Command+Option+F
to bring up the good old Smart Sharpen
| | 03:53 | dialog box. Move this guy over so that
we can see the entire width, more than
| | 03:57 | the entire width. It doesn't need to
be this big of this image right here.
| | 04:02 | Then I'm going to choose Motion Blur.
Now, Motion Blur is going to apply
| | 04:06 | completely different sharpening effects.
This time what we're doing, notice, is
| | 04:10 | we're creating a directional
sharpening effect. So it's almost like we have
| | 04:14 | drop shadows, we have dark drop shadows
on the interior of the dark portion of
| | 04:19 | the line, and we have light drop
shadows inside of the circles and out here
| | 04:24 | inside of the background as well.
| | 04:26 | You can change the Angle if you want to.
So right now I have a 0 degree Angle,
| | 04:30 | which means it's scrubbing back and
forth horizontally, and that's the Angle of
| | 04:33 | our shadows and our glows. If I wanted
a 45-degree angle, I could enter that
| | 04:37 | and notice that changes the angles like so.
| | 04:39 | Now, why in the world would you want an
angled sharpening effect, angled halos
| | 04:44 | here? Well, if you're trying to
compensate for some sort of motion inside of
| | 04:49 | your image; whether somebody is moving
slightly inside the image or whether you
| | 04:54 | have, what's called camera shake, where
you shot the photo and it's your fault;
| | 04:59 | you shook a little bit, you moved a
little bit when you shot the image, it had
| | 05:02 | a high exposure, the shutter was open
for a moment and therefore you've got
| | 05:06 | motion that shouldn't be there. Then
you would apply this Motion Blur variation
| | 05:11 | of the Smart Sharpen effect.
| | 05:12 | I'll go ahead and click OK, in order
to apply this particular variation. Now,
| | 05:17 | just so you can see the difference here,
I'm going to, once again, press the
| | 05:21 | Home key. So this is the big old
blobby Gaussian Blur version of the Smart
| | 05:26 | Sharpen effect, and of course, Unsharp
Mask, which always uses Gaussian Blur.
| | 05:31 | Then if I press the End key, here is
Lens Blur over here in the left and here
| | 05:34 | is Motion Blur over here in the right.
| | 05:36 | Now, at this point you may think, well,
that's all good in theory and stuff,
| | 05:39 | it's nice to see you diagram those
filter so beautifully, Deke, but how in
| | 05:43 | the world do these settings behave in
the real world? I'm going to tell you
| | 05:47 | that, starting in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| High-resolution sharpening| 00:00 | In this exercise, I'm going to show
you some great settings using the Smart
| | 00:04 | Sharpen filter for sharpening the
detail inside of a high frequency, high
| | 00:09 | resolution image. Now, by high
frequency I mean that the Luminance Levels are
| | 00:16 | changing quite rapidly inside the image,
so that there is a lot of detail to
| | 00:19 | work with. So this would be a
landscape or a cityscape or a shot of multiple
| | 00:24 | people, typically like what we have here.
| | 00:27 | If you're sharpening a portrait shot,
which would be a low frequency image,
| | 00:31 | meaning that we have more contours
going on, more slow transitions, that kind
| | 00:36 | of thing, then you tend to be better
off where sharpening is concerned using
| | 00:40 | the high pass filter, and I'll show
you how that works later in this chapter.
| | 00:44 | But for now I have opened this image
called Cheerful girls.jpg, and this image
| | 00:49 | comes to us from fellow trainer and
great guy here at lynda.com, Chris Orwig, a
| | 00:55 | real super dude. A good photographer as
well, as you can see here, beautiful shot.
| | 00:59 | Anyway, let's say I want to sharpen it
using Smart Sharpen. Why then, I would
| | 01:02 | go up to the Filter menu and Smart
Sharpen was the last command I applied so
| | 01:06 | what the heck, I'll just press Ctrl+Alt
+F or Command+Option+F on the Mac. You
| | 01:11 | know what? This darn dialog box is so
gargantuous that it's covering up the
| | 01:16 | girls in the background. Also, you know
what I'd like to do is I'd like to see
| | 01:19 | the girls at 100% inside the dialog box, since I
have this generous In dialog box preview to work with.
| | 01:25 | I would like to see them at Print Size
in the background. You can do that, you
| | 01:30 | can go to the View menu and choose
Print Size, even though you have the Smart
| | 01:33 | Sharpen dialog box up on screen, and
that will go ahead and send the image to
| | 01:40 | hopefully what is now an
accurate Print Size for you.
| | 01:43 | Also, by the way, what I could do,
because I have a keyboard shortcut, because
| | 01:46 | I loaded my own Deke Keys here,
I could press Ctrl+Alt+0 or
| | 01:49 | Command+Option+0 on the Mac, and it
just sort of ever so slightly zooms in
| | 01:54 | right there, as you can see.
| | 01:55 | So now what I'm going to do is I'm
going to leave that Amount value set to
| | 02:00 | 200%, actually that works out nicely.
You could if you're just investigating
| | 02:04 | what -- some amount of sharpness to
apply, you could go ahead and take this guy
| | 02:07 | up to 500% and check out all of the
color artifacting that's been happening on
| | 02:13 | the middle girl's shirt there, the red
wagon with a dog in it, we've got all
| | 02:17 | kinds of blue stuff going around in
that wagon. It's going at a little bit of
| | 02:22 | an angle, and that's because, oops, I
still have Motion Blur active, I don't
| | 02:26 | want that, I want to switch to Lens
Blur. This is a digital photograph. I
| | 02:29 | haven't really done much of anything
to it. I just opened it from Camera Raw
| | 02:33 | essentially and saved it out as a
JPEG file. I haven't even bothered to
| | 02:36 | downsample it or anything like that.
This is a 12-megabyte plus image, and I've
| | 02:42 | got its size to 364 pixels per inch I
believe. Anyways, I think it's 8 by 12 inches.
| | 02:50 | So it is a high resolution image.
They get higher. There are 21 megapixel
| | 02:54 | cameras as I'm talking to you right
now. I'm sure there will be something
| | 02:57 | beyond that by the time you're
listening to me. But anyway, when we're working
| | 03:00 | with digital photographs, we typically want to work
with Lens Blur, and that's what I'm going to do here.
| | 03:04 | Now, that's just ridiculous at this
point, and the reason its ridiculous is I
| | 03:09 | have my Radius value set way too high.
Now, I was telling you, if you're going
| | 03:12 | to go with a high Radius value, then
you can investigate a low Amount value
| | 03:16 | sometimes in order to get the
heightened contrast effect that's known as a
| | 03:19 | Clarity effect, because its still edge
driven. This is what the image looked
| | 03:23 | like before. If I click and hold here inside the
preview, this is what the image looks like after.
| | 03:27 | So we're bringing out some of that
volumetric detail a little bit. I might
| | 03:31 | even, if I were going this route,
bring the Radius value even higher, to
| | 03:35 | something like 50 pixels, and
maybe even take that Amount value down.
| | 03:38 | But tell you what, I want a really
high Amount value, I'm going to take this
| | 03:41 | guy to 200%, or wait a sec, wait a sec,
we were working with 500%, right, just
| | 03:45 | so we can get a sense what's going on.
Doesn't look too good with such a high
| | 03:49 | Radius value, so let's take that Radius
value down. I was telling you, you can
| | 03:51 | reduce the Radius value in one pixel
increments by pressing Shift+Down Arrow,
| | 03:55 | like so. That's not going to get us
very far very fast though, because we have
| | 03:59 | such a high Radius value right now.
| | 04:01 | You can also scrub, notice that, if you
scrub on the word Radius, you're going
| | 04:05 | to reduce or enhance the value in
increments of .1 pixels. If you want to move
| | 04:11 | faster than that, you Shift+scrub so I
can take it down in whole pixel values
| | 04:16 | hereby, Shift+scrubbing over to left.
I'm going to take that value down to 4
| | 04:21 | actually for this image.
| | 04:22 | The Amount value is way too high at
this point, however the Radius value is
| | 04:26 | looking pretty good. We have a nice
amount of Radius. It looks like too much at
| | 04:29 | 100%, but it looks really good back
here at the Print Size resolution.
| | 04:34 | So that's a nice thing.
| | 04:36 | I'm going to go ahead and back off
that Amount value to something much more
| | 04:39 | acceptable, such as 200%. I sort of
already gave that part away earlier, but it
| | 04:44 | looks pretty darn good.
| | 04:45 | Now, to get a sense of the before and
after inside the dialog box, at 100%,
| | 04:49 | we'll click and hold, and that's before,
then release, that's after. So she is
| | 04:53 | oversharpened inside of the dialog box
at 100%. So this would be too much if I
| | 04:58 | were going to the web, but I'll tell
you what, I'm not going to post a 36
| | 05:02 | megabyte file to my website. That
would be ridiculous. So I'm not going to do
| | 05:07 | anything resembling that. This is
definitely sharpening for output at this
| | 05:12 | point. I want it to look
nice and tactile on that page.
| | 05:14 | Also, you should know, when you're
going to print; whether you're printing
| | 05:18 | locally to your Inkjet printer, or
you're sending it out to a commercial
| | 05:21 | printer for commercial reproduction,
then there is a little bit of softness
| | 05:26 | that occurs as a result of the print
process. So you're trying to anticipate
| | 05:31 | that when you're sharpening your
image for output, and that is why we've
| | 05:34 | applied this Amount and this Radius,
and just to get a sense of what it looks
| | 05:37 | like, really when it prints; so we're
soft-proofing here, I'm going to turn off
| | 05:41 | the Preview checkbox. I want you
to keep an eye on that image in the
| | 05:44 | background. This is what it looked
like originally, a little bit soft really
| | 05:48 | when taken in the context of what
we're seeing right now. Little bit soft
| | 05:51 | before and now, nice and sharp and tactile after
the sharpening, without over sharpening that image.
| | 05:59 | All right. There is one other option
that I've pretty much just ignored so far
| | 06:03 | inside of this dialog box, and that's
that guy right there, More Accurate. I'm
| | 06:07 | going to explain how it works and
why most of the time you do not want to
| | 06:13 | select it, in the next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| When to leave More Accurate off| 00:00 |
All right, I'm still looking at this
Cheerful girls.jpg file that I've opened
| | 00:03 |
from the 14_sharpen folder. It
comes to us from fellow trainer here at
| | 00:07 |
lynda.com, Chris Orwig, and leave it to
Chris to inspire this kind of response
| | 00:12 |
from his subjects, don't you think?
| | 00:14 |
And More Accurate? It seems like, what,
we want less accurate, Photoshop? Pardon me.
| | 00:20 |
Why would you ever turn it off, would
be my question, if what it really does is
| | 00:25 |
lend accuracy to the sharpening process?
Then by all means, turn it the heck on.
| | 00:30 |
That's not what it does.
| | 00:31 |
What it does is it applies a second
pass sharpening, sort of this granular
| | 00:35 |
sharpening. In many ways it's the
opposite of that threshold setting that were
| | 00:38 |
you seeing inside the Unsharp Mask
dialog box, which rules out the low level
| | 00:43 |
detail inside of an image. More
Accurate attracts more attention to it.
| | 00:47 |
So notice I'm going to zoom in another
click inside the dialog box right here,
| | 00:52 |
so that we can see this middle girl's
face that much more clearly. And I'm
| | 00:55 |
going to turn on the More Accurate
checkbox, and did you see that? It went
| | 00:58 |
through and did a second level of
scrub to this image right here and it's
| | 01:03 |
bringing out two things. It's bringing out
surface detail in the girl's skin and
| | 01:08 |
their fabric and
everything else inside of this image.
| | 01:12 |
It's also bringing out any sort of
noise or artifacting inside of the image,
| | 01:17 |
and it's almost as if we have some
JPEG compression artifacts going on.
| | 01:20 |
I don't, you might, because I did save it
as a JPEG file for you, but I have not
| | 01:24 |
closed the file and reopened it, so I'm
not seeing any of the JPEG artifacts.
| | 01:28 |
I opened this directly and saved it
out from Camera Raw, from the digital
| | 01:32 |
camera's raw file format. I believe
this is an .nef file to start with. So it
| | 01:36 |
came from a Nikon camera.
| | 01:37 |
So that means that there was no JPEG
applied. So what we're seeing here is a
| | 01:42 |
de-mosaicing artifact. It's a
function of the fact that the camera's chip
| | 01:46 |
is filtering red, green and blue pixels,
and then trying to invent full color
| | 01:52 |
from that filtered,
actually gray scale information.
| | 01:55 |
So anyway, it's bad. We don't want to
bring out compression artifacts and
| | 02:00 |
we sure as heck do not want to bring
out skin surface details, because even
| | 02:04 |
though these are little girls and they
can stand up to it, because young people
| | 02:08 |
have not been fortunate enough to
suffer the ravages of age, as those of us
| | 02:14 |
who are older have.
| | 02:16 |
So inside of an older person, my gosh,
you should just see the wonderful things
| | 02:20 |
that More Accurate does to their
surface details. It's a sight to behold.
| | 02:24 |
I'm telling you though, it's
probably not a good thing. If you care for
| | 02:27 |
the subjects of your photographs, then you'll
care enough to turn More Accurate the heck off.
| | 02:34 |
So if you have any form of portrait
shot going on, you definitely want to turn
| | 02:37 |
that checkbox off. You don't want to
be doing a double scrubbing sharpening
| | 02:41 |
effect. You want to save that kind of
stuff, save More Accurate for your still
| | 02:45 |
photography, if you will, especially
for fabrics, and grains, and that kind of thing.
| | 02:50 |
It's just for the little details that
you want to bring out. It's great. But for
| | 02:53 |
portrait shots, it's not. So in other
words, the settings I've applied right
| | 02:57 |
here, 200% Amount, Radius at 4 pixels,
Remove set to Lens Blur, More Accurate
| | 03:02 |
turned off. That's totally great.
I'm now going to click OK in order to accept
| | 03:07 |
the effects of my sharpening, and just
to give you a sense of what we were able
| | 03:11 |
to accomplish here, this is the before
version of the image and bear in mind
| | 03:15 |
we are seeing the image at that
Print Size zoom ratio right there.
| | 03:19 |
So this gives us a chance to see
what's really going on and how the image is
| | 03:22 |
really going to print, more or less.
Obviously, the best test is to ahead and
| | 03:26 |
print the image and see how it
printed. This is the after version of the
| | 03:30 |
image after I applied just a small
dose of sharpening there, using
| | 03:35 |
the Smart Sharpen filter.
| | 03:36 |
So that's how you go about approaching
high resolution, high frequency images.
| | 03:40 |
In the next exercise we'll take a
look at another high frequency image,
| | 03:43 |
but this time we're going to attack
it with More Accurate turned on.
| | 03:48 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| When to turn More Accurate on| 00:00 | In this exercise we're going to take a
look at when the More Accurate checkbox
| | 00:04 | comes in handy as in the case of a
still life, something that doesn't involve
| | 00:09 | portraiture, for example, no people
involved, possibly animals, maybe up to you,
| | 00:14 | but definitely things like this
waffle right here, which is about the
| | 00:18 | stillest life imaginable,
once again from Chris Orwig.
| | 00:22 | The name of this image is Breakfast
explains itself.jpg, and we've got all
| | 00:26 | kinds of texture to work with inside
this image, and that's when the More
| | 00:30 | Accurate checkbox really comes in handy.
So we've got wood grain, and all these
| | 00:34 | little cut marks, presumably this is
the cutting board or some sort of counter
| | 00:37 | that gets a lot of attention from axis,
for example, and then we have this
| | 00:41 | Waffle of course, which is just full
of Waffle texture, and then we have the
| | 00:45 | scrabble tiles that have their own wood
grain associated with them, as well as
| | 00:49 | these little numbers and the beveled
edges and all that wonderful stuff there.
| | 00:53 | So I'm going to go the View menu, and
I'm going to choose Print Size in order
| | 00:58 | to zoom out to something that is
simulating the size at which this image
| | 01:03 | actually will print. This image is set
to 300 pixels per inch, by the way. I'm
| | 01:08 | going to move it up a little bit so
that we can see those tiles while I'm
| | 01:11 | working inside the Smart Sharpen
dialog box, and here it is now. I'm going to
| | 01:15 | press Ctrl+Alt+F or Command+Option+F on
the Mac to bring up the Smart Sharpen,
| | 01:18 | because once again it
was the last filter I used.
| | 01:21 | Then I'm going to click on this E
right there in order to center it inside of
| | 01:25 | the in dialog preview. Now I want this
to be ultra sharp, so I'm going to take
| | 01:29 | this Amount value up to 300%, and
that might give us a little too much
| | 01:34 | sharpness, but you're sharpening for
print, you want to go about 50% higher
| | 01:39 | than what looks exactly right on screen,
just so you know, and this would be
| | 01:43 | when you're looking at the image of
the Print Size zoom level as we are now.
| | 01:47 | Now, I have the Radius value set
pretty high for a 300 pixels per inch image,
| | 01:52 | our last image was 360 pixels per inch.
So it was the higher res image. This
| | 01:56 | one is slightly lower res, 300 pixels
per inch. So I say hardly low res, of
| | 01:59 | course. But I'm going to leave that
Radius value set to 4.0. If I was working
| | 02:04 | with Gaussian Blur, I would reduce
that Radius to somewhere between 2 and 3.
| | 02:08 | Well, because the Lens Blur radius is
more focused, more concentrated, we can
| | 02:13 | go with a higher value, and it works
actually really nicely for this image. I
| | 02:16 | mean you can experiment of course, to
your heart's content, but what we really
| | 02:19 | want to do is we want to turn on that
More Accurate checkbox, and I want you to
| | 02:23 | see what it's going to do to these
Waffle holes right here, the Waffle
| | 02:28 | indentations, it really does an
excellent job with them. So I'll turn on More
| | 02:31 | Accurate, keep an eye at, look at how
it just focuses the image on a molecular
| | 02:35 | level there, just going in there and
showing you where every single little
| | 02:40 | detail is. It's pretty amazing!
| | 02:43 | Then out here you can actually tell the
difference in the Print Size version of
| | 02:46 | the image as well. So keep an eye upward,
I'm going to turn More Accurate off,
| | 02:49 | I want you to just watch the Waffle
indentations right there, the Waffle holes.
| | 02:53 | So here is before, and then I'll turn
it on again, and there is after watch it,
| | 02:58 | and did you see that what has just
happened? Isn't that nice? That's a really
| | 03:02 | nice job, and then it also brings up
the detail inside of the scrabble tiles,
| | 03:07 | very nicely as well.
| | 03:08 | Okay. So those are the settings I'm
going to apply. Then I'm going to click OK,
| | 03:12 | and I'll tell you what, the next thing
we should do, I believe, with everything
| | 03:16 | in me, and we should have probably
done this on all the images that we've
| | 03:20 | sharpened so far. We should have done
it on the previous one too. But this one,
| | 03:23 | we're really starting to bring out
some color artifacts. Notice that really
| | 03:26 | bright blue edge there on that
scrabble tile, and we have a few other little
| | 03:30 | colors that are popping up here and there.
| | 03:32 | So let's take care of that by going up
to the Edit menu and choose Fade Smart
| | 03:35 | Sharpen, and of course, I'm going to
change the mode to Luminosity, and that
| | 03:41 | should get rid of some of the colors
that were going over the top a little bit
| | 03:44 | there. Then if you feel like you've got
too far with the sharpening effect, for
| | 03:47 | whatever reason, you can back it off
here, I'm going to reduce mine to about
| | 03:50 | 85%, and then click OK.
| | 03:53 | All right. Then I'm going to go ahead
and zoom out. Actually, what I should
| | 03:57 | zoom to is that Ctrl+Alt+0 once again,
or Command+Option+0. Again, that's if
| | 04:03 | you loaded my Deke Keys,
otherwise you're going to have to go up to the
| | 04:05 | View menu, and choose Print Size
manually. There we have it; the Waffle is
| | 04:11 | screaming Waffle at you in a sharp
degree of focus just beautiful detail that
| | 04:17 | works inside of this image.
| | 04:18 | In the next exercise, we're going to
take a quick look at the advanced options,
| | 04:22 | stay tuned.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The advanced options| 00:00 | In this exercise I'm going to introduce
you to the advanced settings inside this
| | 00:03 | Smart Sharpen dialog box. And then
we'll see how to save out our settings in the
| | 00:06 | next exercise, and pretty much if you
are going to start wandering down advanced
| | 00:10 | settings route, you definitely want
to save out your settings, because
| | 00:13 | otherwise you can truly mess things up
inside this Smart Sharpen dialog box.
| | 00:17 | Just a little bit of an FYI from me to you.
| | 00:19 | Now I'm working inside of an image
called No tresspassing.jpg. I'm going to
| | 00:22 | move No trespassing over just a hair
bit so that we can take in the histogram
| | 00:27 | palette. So I'm going to start by
collapsing these palettes around the right
| | 00:31 | hand side, and then bringing up the
Histogram palette right there, and I have
| | 00:35 | got to move my image over a little bit
again. And the reason I'm showing you
| | 00:38 | the histograms is because I want you
to see what's going on inside of this
| | 00:43 | image on the channel by channel basis.
Notice that we are clipping here in the
| | 00:47 | Blue Channel and we are okay over here
on the right hand side. We don't have
| | 00:50 | any clipping going on in white, and we
have a little bit of clipping going on
| | 00:54 | in the blacks and the Green Channel,
but not the whites, and we are pretty safe
| | 00:58 | in the Red Channel.
| | 00:59 | But the thing is once you start
applying a heaping helping of sharpening
| | 01:03 | inside of an image, and particularly
with the Smart Sharpen function, you are
| | 01:06 | going to clip blacks and whites,
because you are sending the darkest colors to
| | 01:11 | black, and you are sending the
lightest colors to white on an edge basis, so
| | 01:15 | they are appearing all throughout the
image. They are not in big clumps the way
| | 01:18 | they might be with the Levels command.
But you still might not want that. You
| | 01:21 | might not want to clip your
highlights and shadows, and inside of a cruddy
| | 01:24 | little image like this one, it's very
helpful to have that kind of control. So
| | 01:27 | I'm going to press Ctrl+Alt+F or Command
+Option+F to bring up the Smart Sharpen
| | 01:32 | dialog box once again and notice all
the clipping that's occurring. Look at
| | 01:35 | that huge line over their on the black
side of the Red Channel, and over here
| | 01:40 | on the white side of the Red histogram
as well. And we have got the same thing
| | 01:43 | going for green and for blue. So just a
ton of clipping happening all over the place.
| | 01:47 | All right, I'm going to drag over the
No Trespassing sign so that we can see
| | 01:51 | just what a rich job it's doing here
inside the blacks. It's just making a mess
| | 01:55 | of things, and notice how it's
clipping the heck out of the top of the sign,
| | 01:59 | and it's setting that fly on fire,
pretty much I think. So we need to calm
| | 02:03 | things down. We need to temper it.
I'm going to start it by making it less
| | 02:06 | calm. I'm going to raise that Amount
value to 400%, so we can really see what's
| | 02:10 | going on. Making absolute mess of this
image, and raise the Radius value to 3 pixels.
| | 02:15 | Remove, we do want to set
the Lens Blur, but we sure as heck
| | 02:18 | don't want More Accurate. In fact, if
anything I wish we had a less accurate
| | 02:21 | checkbox right here to you know get rid of bird poop,
get rid of flys. Just don't sharpen those kinds
| | 02:27 | of disgusting little items there. But
More Accurate in general we definitely went off.
| | 02:31 | But that didn't resolve our problems
like those weird sharpening artifacts here
| | 02:36 | inside this black region of the sign,
and of course our overly hot highlights
| | 02:40 | are still a problem. So what you do
is you come over here to this advanced option.
| | 02:44 | Now, everything that I have shown
you so far, I'm a big fan of how it's
| | 02:48 | put together. I love the Amount value,
I love the Radius value, I lover Remove.
| | 02:50 | In a couple of exercises we will see
Remove set to Motion Blur, so you can get
| | 02:55 | a sense of how that works. And I love
More Accurate. Even though you just have
| | 02:58 | to watch it. Sometimes it's
great, sometimes it's not.
| | 03:01 | What I'm about to show you-- we start
going down into, gosh, I'm not really a
| | 03:05 | fan of how this is designed territory.
And I wish to heck they would fix it, but
| | 03:10 | Adobe has a terrible, terrible habit of
never going back and revisiting filters ever,
| | 03:16 | and so once the filter is made,
that's pretty much the way it stays for
| | 03:20 | the rest of time, essentially. So
anyway, we'll probably have to put up with
| | 03:24 | this one the way it is, but it is useful.
I have shown it to you, but I'm going
| | 03:28 | to complain every ones in a while, to
some you should know upfront. All right,
| | 03:31 | so I'm going to turn on Advanced and
now you get two extra tabs right here. So
| | 03:35 | I'm going to switch over to highlight,
we'll switch the highlights first,
| | 03:37 | because the highlights are the
worst defenders in terms of having
| | 03:40 | blown highlights for example.
| | 03:41 | First of all you should know you are
not going to see anything. If you change
| | 03:44 | these two values Total Width or Radius,
you are not going to see the effects of
| | 03:47 | those until you increase the Fade Amount.
So I'm going to take that Fade Amount
| | 03:51 | up to 100, and I want you to watch this
area right here. Did you notice how it changed?
| | 03:55 | So this was a Fade value of 0,
some very hot highlights, and also you
| | 03:58 | can watch the histograms over here,
and if I take that value up to 100%,
| | 04:03 | we completely fade out those highlights
now, so that we don't have any blown
| | 04:07 | highlights at all. No highlight
clipping occurring whatsoever. We do have much
| | 04:11 | more shadow clipping going on now, but
we'll resolve that in a minute. Now we
| | 04:15 | have Total Width, remember the Total
Width value inside the shadows highlight
| | 04:18 | dialog box? Exactly the same. How much
of the image is devoted to highlights,
| | 04:23 | how much of the image is
devoted to shadows and so on.
| | 04:25 | And I'm going to say 75% of the
luminance level should be treated as
| | 04:29 | highlights. Should fall into the
range of colors that are getting mitigated
| | 04:33 | here. And that's of course being
treated to as slow and subtle drop off. So the
| | 04:37 | lightest highlights like white, and
the ones very near to it. So the hottest
| | 04:41 | highlights like white, and those
highlights that are very near to white, they
| | 04:44 | will be faded the most, and then the
colors that are closer to the midtones
| | 04:48 | will be faded less and so on. So it's
not an on off preposition the way it is
| | 04:52 | with the threshold options inside the
Unsharp Mask dialog box. It is gradual
| | 04:55 | and beautiful and wonderful.
| | 04:57 | This next option essentially doesn't
really function is when it comes down to.
| | 05:01 | It's again another Radius pass just
like we saw inside the Shadows Highlights
| | 05:05 | dialog box, and if you have to get
inside small details, and you want to keep
| | 05:09 | this value very low. But inside
this image, I dare you to see anything
| | 05:14 | happening. I'll move the image down a
little bit, so that we can see the top of
| | 05:16 | this sign way better. If I crank it all
the way up to 100 pixels, there's very
| | 05:20 | little in a way of change happening
inside the image, the visual change. You
| | 05:24 | will see some stuff happening to the
histogram here. But what I'm going to
| | 05:27 | recommend is that we keep this value
higher than your core radius value, the
| | 05:32 | one that you are using for sharpening
the image. So I'm going to take it to 10
| | 05:34 | pixels. Again, it's not going to make
much of a difference. I don't think I saw
| | 05:39 | anything happening in the way of a
change to the histograms here. Just a little
| | 05:44 | bit of tapering off from 10 to 100.
| | 05:47 | But anyway, that will distribute
whatever effect we are applying in terms of
| | 05:50 | fading this. Actually I don't want to
fade it to 100, I want to take this back,
| | 05:53 | and I'm going to take it down to 35%,
which still keeps most of the colors from
| | 05:58 | clipping. We have just a little
tendency of clipping over here in red, but this
| | 06:01 | is pretty much the way that
histogram is looking before over here on the
| | 06:04 | highlights side. So it's not too
different than it was before we brought up the
| | 06:07 | dialog box. All right, these values
35, 75, and 10. Just for the sake of
| | 06:11 | simplicity I'm going to reapply them
to the shadows, and I want you to watch
| | 06:15 | what happens inside these sort of
swarming details here inside the blackness of
| | 06:20 | the sign. If I raise the Fade value
just to 35% that goes away. Good-bye. Also
| | 06:25 | no clipping occurring anymore. Let's
just go ahead for safety sake, take Total
| | 06:29 | Width up to 75%, that looks better and
I'm talking about the histograms here,
| | 06:33 | and we'll take the Radius value up to
10. Let's see what kind of difference
| | 06:36 | that makes for the histograms. None,
there is no difference at all there, just
| | 06:40 | tiny slight difference.
| | 06:42 | All right, anyway it's hard to get this
to really contribute to the action, but
| | 06:47 | overall we do have some contributions.
Now at this point you might go, why were
| | 06:51 | you complaining about this Deke?
I mean these seem to work just as well as
| | 06:55 | many other settings inside of
Photoshop. They are little strange. But well,
| | 06:58 | here is the deal. If I turn on Basic
right now, you would think, that I just
| | 07:03 | reset those options back to their basic
functionality. No, they are staying the
| | 07:09 | way I just set them, and they will stay
that way for all time now, even if you
| | 07:14 | never selected Advanced again. If you
click the OK button, you will save over
| | 07:17 | your defaults settings right here, and
that's how you can really mess things up.
| | 07:21 | You go to Advanced and now it's like,
oh yeah, those advanced weird settings
| | 07:25 | that I applied are still there. No
wonder the filter is not working right any
| | 07:28 | more. So that's why I think it's really
patently bad design. But also, why you
| | 07:34 | need to save out your settings, if
you're going to go down this Advanced
| | 07:37 | territory, so that you can
distinguish your default from whatever else you
| | 07:40 | decide to do here. And then you are
going to have to turn around and reset your
| | 07:43 | Default settings. As I'll show you,
this really gets strange in my humble o,
| | 07:49 | and I'll show you everything about it.
All the strange things, all the goodness,
| | 07:53 | everything it has to offer
in the very next exercise.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Saving Smart Sharpen settings| 00:00 |
All right, I'm still looking at the
No tresspassing.jpg file and we have
| | 00:04 |
managed to apply some Advanced settings,
just by turning on Advanced and then
| | 00:08 |
going to Highlight for starters and
entering 35, 75 and 10, and then doing the
| | 00:12 |
exact same thing for the Shadow
settings as well. But we are way to just go
| | 00:17 |
ahead and click OK. We would save over
our default settings, mess everything up
| | 00:21 |
and forever more we might end up with
these messed up settings that don't work
| | 00:26 |
for every image. It just happens to work
quite nicely for this image right here.
| | 00:30 |
So here's what I recommend you do.
You've got to kind of work in this order. So
| | 00:34 |
bear with me. First of all you go to
your little floppy disk icon, because by
| | 00:39 |
all means, when you think save, you
think where is my floppy disk? I want to
| | 00:43 |
save a file to it. So go ahead and
click on that and then I'm just going to
| | 00:47 |
call this guy Advanced
settings like so and click OK.
| | 00:51 |
Okay, so where did my Save settings go?
Well they are here inside the Settings
| | 00:56 |
menu. They are down here, but Smart
Sharpen did not care to go ahead and select
| | 01:02 |
them automatically for me. So if I
already click OK it would save over my
| | 01:05 |
default settings and I would have two
copies of these messed up settings. One
| | 01:10 |
called Default and the other called
Advanced settings. It's ludicrous, it really is.
| | 01:14 |
So what you need to do, you need to
choose it's a two-step operation. First
| | 01:19 |
save with your floppy disk and then go
ahead and choose Advanced settings, in
| | 01:24 |
order to make it active. And then when
you click OK it's actually saving over
| | 01:28 |
these Advanced settings and it will do
that every single time it will save over
| | 01:32 |
them. So check it out, I'll go ahead
and click OK and I went ahead and applied
| | 01:36 |
those settings, brilliant. Now Ctrl+
Alt+F or Command+Option+F on the Mac to
| | 01:41 |
bring back the Smart Sharpen dialog box,
and I want to demonstrate now how we
| | 01:45 |
preserved our defaults, at least
where the Advanced settings are concerned.
| | 01:49 |
So just by choosing Default I went
ahead and reinstated the old Shadow and
| | 01:53 |
Highlight settings, good. And if I now
choose Advanced settings everything is
| | 01:58 |
working the way it should, excellent!
But now we should really take a moment to
| | 02:02 |
reset those defaults. So go ahead and
click on Default, and notice, by the way
| | 02:06 |
if I go back to Sharpen and I select
Basic just to get everybody reset, notice
| | 02:11 |
these are my default settings I don't
think so. These just happened to be the
| | 02:14 |
last settings I applied when default
was active and that's why Photoshop kept
| | 02:18 |
saving over default. Highly irritating
that it does this. Anyway turn off More
| | 02:23 |
Accurate. Let's re-establish
the actual real defaults here.
| | 02:26 |
Gaussian Blur, a Radius of 1 and an
Amount of 100%. I believe memory search me
| | 02:31 |
right. Those are the default settings,
and then you would click OK in order to
| | 02:36 |
accept that modification. Now you just
sharpened over sharpening. So you don't
| | 02:39 |
want that. You go up to the Edit menu
and choose Undo Smart Sharpen. We'll
| | 02:43 |
press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac.
But watch this .We have done our deed so
| | 02:48 |
every thing is good. Press Ctrl+Alt
+F or Command+Option+F on the Mac.
| | 02:51 |
Default is now set to 100, 0, Gaussian
Blur, excellent, and Advanced settings
| | 02:56 |
are now set to 400, 3, Lens Blur, width.
Some nice Advanced settings. Settings
| | 03:00 |
that are waiting for us and if we go
back to Default, those Advanced settings
| | 03:04 |
are nicely wiped out, good. Back to
Sharpen, yes, everything looks glorious.
| | 03:10 |
Click on Basic, click Cancel.
| | 03:13 |
We don't need to do anything else
because we've got good defaults and we've got
| | 03:16 |
good Advanced settings. But what does
this mean, from now on if you want to be
| | 03:20 |
judicious and you don't want to mess
things up and you want to careful then
| | 03:24 |
anytime you make some big changes to
your settings here you should create a new
| | 03:28 |
settings file. It could just be
something like here. I'll tell you what. We'll
| | 03:31 |
go ahead and create some different settings.
| | 03:33 |
250 and 4 pixels and Remove, set to
Lens Blur, More Accurate turned off,
| | 03:39 |
something just like that, and I'll
click on the floppy disk, and I'll just call
| | 03:42 |
this one Random settings like so, and
now I'll click OK and then I'll go ahead
| | 03:47 |
and select it. And that way we'll
protect the defaults, we'll protect the
| | 03:50 |
Advanced settings, then we'll have
this Random settings sort of bucket here
| | 03:54 |
that can get replaced over-and-over
again without us caring about it. And then
| | 03:58 |
I'll click OK and we are in good shape.
Of course I over-sharpen the image
| | 04:02 |
because I just applied another
sharpening paths but then all you got to do is
| | 04:05 |
choose Undo Smart Sharpen again Ctrl+Z,
Command+Z on the Mac and life can be
| | 04:10 |
beautiful but not in this image.
| | 04:13 |
But anyway it is better we have
sharpened it. That's awesome! In the next
| | 04:17 |
exercise I'm going to show you how to
account for camera shake using the Motion
| | 04:22 |
Blur setting.
| | 04:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Accounting for camera shake| 00:00 |
All right, now I'm going to show you
the final Remove setting inside of the
| | 00:04 |
Smart Sharpen dialog box which goes
by the name Motion Blur and it actually
| | 00:07 |
uses Motion Blur in order to sharpen
the image. Thereby permitting you to
| | 00:12 |
account for a small degree of camera
shake. If you've got a ton that's a
| | 00:15 |
problem, but if you have just little bit,
it's great or if you have just a tiny
| | 00:19 |
bit of motion inside the
image, it can work as well.
| | 00:22 |
The name of this image is Great
Expectations, and this image comes to us from
| | 00:26 |
photographer Rasmus Rasmussen of
iStockPhoto.com and I'm going to go ahead and
| | 00:32 |
zoom in on this dude so that we can see
that this image was shot under natural
| | 00:36 |
light and probably a little bit of a
prolonged exposure there because there is
| | 00:42 |
no strobe or any artificial lighting
going on. We are just taking advantage of
| | 00:45 |
natural lighting. So while the
colorings are really beautiful, we do have a
| | 00:49 |
little bit of blur going on, a
little bit of camera shake, and it's most
| | 00:55 |
important that we get the eyes
resolved because you may have heard that the
| | 01:00 |
eyes are the window into the soul
and we really want to take that very
| | 01:02 |
seriously when we are trying to
sharpen portraiture here inside of Photoshop.
| | 01:07 |
The eyes are the parts that should
be in the highest degree of focus, if
| | 01:11 |
possible, unless you've got some
creative refectories for doing lights.
| | 01:16 |
But the best way to gauge the degree of
camera shake is to look at these little
| | 01:19 |
hair right here. The hair in his unibrow,
which are going to reveal the camera
| | 01:24 |
shake to its best. And I believe
we've got to figure out an angle and a
| | 01:28 |
distance when trying to resolve camera
shaking. It looks to me like the angles
| | 01:32 |
basically like this. If you are looking
at the angle I'm moving my cursor back
| | 01:36 |
and forth here, and I don't know what
that is. What is that, 75, 70 degrees?
| | 01:41 |
Something along those lines.
| | 01:42 |
Also, it appears to be about three
pixels worth of movement. I'll go ahead and
| | 01:48 |
bring up my Info dialog box, and I'll
draw a tiny little selection outline
| | 01:53 |
that's about 3 pixels high, as you
can see right there in Info that's all I
| | 01:58 |
needed to know, so it's now 3 pixels
high. And I can move that over the hair
| | 02:03 |
and that looks like that's pretty good,
that's about the amount of camera shake
| | 02:06 |
we have going on. It might be closer
to 4 pixels what have you, but I think
| | 02:09 |
this is going to work out nicely.
We'll see. All right, if you are working
| | 02:12 |
along with me, definitely, click off
that selection in order to de-select the
| | 02:15 |
image because no surprises here but if
you have a selection going, you are only
| | 02:18 |
going to sharpen the area inside the
selection, you are not going to sharpen
| | 02:21 |
the entire image.
| | 02:22 |
So if you want to sharpen the entire
image, it needs to be deselected or
| | 02:26 |
entirely selected.
| | 02:27 |
All right, now zoom out to 100%, and
notice that I'm not going to print size
| | 02:32 |
this time around because when you are
accounting for camera shake you don't
| | 02:35 |
care the size at which the image is
going to print. You are just trying to get
| | 02:39 |
rid of that camera shake. So all
you need to do is press Ctr+Alt+F,
| | 02:44 |
Command+Option+F on the Mac to
bring up the Smart Sharpen dialog box.
| | 02:48 |
Now, notice my Random settings have
been saved in the previous exercise are at
| | 02:52 |
work here. Fine, it means we've got
some fairly over the top settings for this
| | 02:56 |
particular image. Let's go ahead and
change Remove from Lens Blur to Motion
| | 03:00 |
Blur, and then we want to get the
angle of the Blur setup right. So I'm going
| | 03:05 |
to take this upward. I'm going to
press Shift+Up Arrow, like so a couple of
| | 03:09 |
times until we get that angle where we
want it. Something like 75 degrees is
| | 03:13 |
probably going to work out pretty nicely.
Looks like it's having a nice effect.
| | 03:18 |
And then I'm going to go ahead right
now actually and take up the Amount value
| | 03:22 |
to 400% just so we can see what's
going on nicely. And finally we want to
| | 03:26 |
adjust the Radius value so that we
are accounting for the distance of the
| | 03:31 |
camera shake, that's what this is all
about as measured in pixels as we saw it
| | 03:35 |
just a moment ago. So what I typically
do is I reset this value to something
| | 03:38 |
like a Radius 1 pixel and then I press
Shift+Up Arrow and see whether I've got it right.
| | 03:43 |
Notice the image kind of tends to move
back and forth on you. Then I'll press
| | 03:47 |
Shift+Up Arrow again and it comes down
the other direction and that's 3 pixels,
| | 03:51 |
press Shift+Up Arrow again for 4 pixels.
That actually looks pretty good, but I
| | 03:55 |
might split the difference between 3
and 4 by taking this value down to 3.5
| | 04:00 |
pixels which is entirely acceptable of
course, when you are working with Radius
| | 04:03 |
value. Now don't turn on More Accurate.
More Accurate is never your friend when
| | 04:09 |
you are working with Motion Blur
because it starts bringing out a lot of noise.
| | 04:12 |
Motion Blur already has a tendency to
bring forward noise inside of an image
| | 04:17 |
and really exaggerate it, and More
Accurate is going to even make it worse. In
| | 04:20 |
fact, why don't we try it just so you
can see it happen? Look at that. Is that
| | 04:24 |
better? I don't think so. So I'll go
ahead and zoom in and click so we can see
| | 04:28 |
the difference. Look at those hairs,
for example. They are riddled with color
| | 04:32 |
noise, just terrible. So this is
before and this is after turning on the More
| | 04:37 |
Accurate checkbox which is better
before, so let's turn it off, leave it off, in fact.
| | 04:41 |
And then what we want to do is we want
to make sure that we are getting that
| | 04:44 |
eye nicely focused and it's doing a
brilliant job on that eye which is the most
| | 04:48 |
important part. So this is before, it
appears to be a little fuzzy. This is
| | 04:52 |
after, nice and crisp. Now you are
never going to get it exactly right. You are
| | 04:56 |
never going to completely eliminate
the effects of camera shake, but Smart
| | 05:00 |
Sharpen combined with Motion Blur here
does a very nice job of compensating.
| | 05:04 |
All right, let's go ahead and back
off the Amount value and I'm going to
| | 05:07 |
suggest we take this down to about
250%, which looks pretty good. So we are not
| | 05:11 |
over-sharpening the image, don't you know.
| | 05:13 |
Then finally, do we want to save it as
something different? Most certainly, we
| | 05:17 |
do not want to save over Advanced
settings and we don't want to save over our
| | 05:19 |
defaults because these are some weird
settings we are applying here. Random
| | 05:23 |
settings I created as a bucket to
accept whatever settings I was working on. If
| | 05:27 |
you want to setup something that's
sort of the backbone of a future camera
| | 05:32 |
shake compensation, then you might
want to go ahead and click on your floppy
| | 05:35 |
disk icon again, and let's call this
one Camera shake or something along those
| | 05:39 |
lines and then click OK and then of
course, make sure to select it. That's very
| | 05:44 |
important unless you want to
save over your Random settings.
| | 05:46 |
We would go ahead and select Camera
shake and then click OK in order to apply
| | 05:50 |
our effect, and there it is, and just
to give you sense of what we've managed
| | 05:54 |
to accomplish here, let's go ahead and
press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac to
| | 05:58 |
see the before version of the image
and then Ctrl+Z again to see the after
| | 06:02 |
version of the image. Once again,
that's Command+Z on the Mac. And then if you
| | 06:06 |
want to try to downplay some of the
color noise that's appearing inside the
| | 06:09 |
image, I'll go ahead and zoom in, and
you can see that there is a world of
| | 06:12 |
color noise in this region. And as
you know, it's always a good idea to do
| | 06:16 |
this, to follow up Smart Sharpen by
going up to the Edit menu and this works
| | 06:19 |
very well for Unsharp Mask by the way
as well. Choose Fade Smart Sharpen and
| | 06:24 |
then set the mode from Normal to
Luminosity and see if that doesn't help
| | 06:28 |
resolve the issue and it
resolves it beautifully.
| | 06:30 |
Notice we no longer have all that
color noise inside the Shadow detail inside
| | 06:35 |
of this image and go ahead and click
OK, and our eye is still very nice and
| | 06:39 |
sharp. So just to make sure, I'll
press the F12 key in order to revert to the
| | 06:45 |
original camera-shaky version of the
image. So this is before and this is
| | 06:50 |
after, this is uncorrected Rasmus
Rasmussen and this is corrected said
| | 06:56 |
gentleman and we've got a
darn nice image as a result.
| | 07:00 |
In the next exercise, I'm going to show
you how to sharpen portrait photography
| | 07:04 |
using the High Pass command.
| | 07:06 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sharpening with the High Pass filter| 00:00 | For this final exercise, I'd like
you to open this image right here. It's
| | 00:03 | called water woman.jpg and it comes to
us from photographer Catarina Govorova Shenko
| | 00:08 | of iStockPhoto.com.
| | 00:10 | Now, this is obviously a portrait shot,
and I'm here to tell you that it's a
| | 00:14 | low frequency portrait shot.
Meaning, that they're gradual luminance
| | 00:18 | transitions from one pixel to its
neighbor, which gives us rich volumetric
| | 00:23 | detail inside the image, typical of
portrait shots. We have very few areas
| | 00:28 | where we have rapid luminance
transitions; inside the hair, for example, might
| | 00:32 | be one of them. Down here inside
certain areas of the skin, along the teeth,
| | 00:35 | and so on, in the eyelashes, but mostly,
just nice rounded sculptural contours.
| | 00:41 | Compare that to a high frequency
image, which would be something like a
| | 00:44 | landscape or a cityscape or a still
life, that thing with the scrabble tiles
| | 00:48 | and the wood grain and all that jazz,
or even an image of multiple people
| | 00:52 | sometimes falls into the high
frequency or middle frequency territory.
| | 00:56 | Now, when you're working with a high
frequency image, Smart Sharpen is a great
| | 01:00 | tool, but when you're working with a
low frequency portrait shot, High Pass
| | 01:04 | tends to be the better way to work, and
I'm going to show you High Pass in this exercise.
| | 01:08 | Now, let's start things off by
collapsing my right side palettes and bringing
| | 01:12 | up the Histogram palette, and if
necessary, go ahead and update the Histogram
| | 01:16 | by clicking on that little Yield sign,
because I want you to see exactly what
| | 01:19 | clipping is going on inside this image.
| | 01:22 | So notice here inside the Red Histogram,
no clipping whatsoever. Here inside
| | 01:26 | the Green Histogram, we have a little
bit of clipping and shadow detail. You
| | 01:29 | can see that because we have that spike
all the way over here on the left side
| | 01:32 | of the histogram. In the Blue Channel,
we also have a little bit of shadow
| | 01:37 | clipping going on. Compare that to the
degree of clipping we're going to have
| | 01:41 | in just a moment.
| | 01:42 | Now, the last filter I applied was
still Smart Sharpen. So I'm going to press
| | 01:45 | Ctrl+Alt+F, Command+Option+F on a Mac
to bring up the Camera Shake settings.
| | 01:49 | I don't want those so I'm going to
switch over to Random settings here, which
| | 01:52 | will set Remove to Lens Blur.
| | 01:54 | Let's go ahead and click on her eye,
so we can see her eye, big and beautiful
| | 01:58 | here inside of the image preview. We
don't want More Accurate turned on, that's
| | 02:02 | not going to do us any good.
| | 02:03 | It's a little bit amusing though. Here,
I'll go ahead and switch over to her
| | 02:06 | nose, because the thing about this
woman is she is absolutely gorgeous, she is
| | 02:09 | impeccable, and yet she doesn't hold
up to More Accurate. If I turn on More
| | 02:14 | Accurate, we're starting to trace the
little tiny hairs on nose. The thing is,
| | 02:17 | of course, we all have that kind of
stuff. We just don't want to emphasize it.
| | 02:21 | So turn More Accurate the heck off.
| | 02:23 | All right. Let's go back to her eye
and her eyelashes, and I'm going to crank
| | 02:27 | this Amount value through the roof to
400%, and I'll leave the Radius value of
| | 02:30 | 4 pixels, and Remove is set to Lens Blur;
that's great. We're not interested in
| | 02:34 | the Advanced Settings. I want you to see
the clipping that's going on; clipping
| | 02:38 | in Red on both sides, clipping in
Green on both sides, clipping in Blue even.
| | 02:42 | We didn't have any highlights in
Blue and they're still clipping.
| | 02:44 | Click OK to accept that modification.
Now, it's going to look like the
| | 02:47 | histogram clams down there, but
that's because it suddenly became less accurate.
| | 02:51 | Let's go ahead and update the
histogram by clicking on little Caution icon,
| | 02:55 | little Yield sign, and ooh, ooh, major
clipping going on in Red, especially in
| | 03:00 | the highlights. Some clipping going
on in the highlights in Green, major
| | 03:04 | clipping going on in the shadows.
Huge clipping going on in Blue in the
| | 03:08 | shadows, and a little bit of clipping,
which is mystifying, because as I said
| | 03:12 | there were barely any highlights
there in the first place, a little bit of
| | 03:15 | clipping going on in the Blue channel.
| | 03:16 | Oh dear, let's undo that, we don't
want that, obviously. Also, we're kind of
| | 03:22 | over sharpening her in general. So
let's go ahead and undo that modification
| | 03:26 | and here is how I recommend you work
instead. Now, it's going to seem patently
| | 03:30 | absurd at first, like we're using the
absolute worst filter we possibly could
| | 03:35 | be using, one of those filters that's
just mystifying inside of Photoshop, but
| | 03:39 | it's really great.
| | 03:40 | So go to the Filter menu, choose Other,
and choose High Pass. I think it's so great,
| | 03:43 | I gave you a keyboard shortcut of Shift+F10,
if you loaded my Deke Keys way back then.
| | 03:47 | So I'm going to choose High Pass.
Don't pay any attention to the Histogram
| | 03:51 | right now, because it's just going to
look like little volcanoes here. Notice
| | 03:56 | what the High Pass does. High Pass
goes ahead and turns everything that's not
| | 04:00 | an edge, this horrible gray, there's
just this medium gray, and then tries to
| | 04:05 | keep color and luminance in
the areas that represent edges.
| | 04:09 | So notice, right around the teeth,
for example, where we had the starkest
| | 04:13 | contrast between the black inside of
her mouth and the white of her teeth, we
| | 04:16 | have some black and some white left
in the form of 10 pixel halo. So think,
| | 04:23 | that's got to be a sharpening
function with a halo like that going on, and
| | 04:26 | that's what High Pass is. It's just a
strange little weird sharpening function.
| | 04:31 | When I'm thinking of Unsharp Mask, I
like to think of Gaussian Blurs being the
| | 04:35 | grandparent of Unsharp Mask. Right
there in the middle, the parent, is High
| | 04:41 | Pass. High Pass falls in between there.
| | 04:43 | So anyway, I don't know if that helps.
I'm going to change the Radius value to
| | 04:47 | 4 pixels, just to match what we saw
in Smart Sharpen, so that we have these
| | 04:50 | very thin precise edges to work with.
Then I'll click OK. Then you go, okay,
| | 04:56 | well, Deke, if you were worried
about your histogram, buddy, that's one of
| | 05:00 | the worst histograms I've ever seen.
That's like a needle of a histogram right
| | 05:04 | there. You could hurt yourself on it.
| | 05:06 | I'll go ahead and update it. It's
still bad. You wouldn't hurt yourself quite
| | 05:09 | so badly on that though, it's more of
a volcanic sort of thing. All right,
| | 05:12 | though, what we need to do is we need
to say goodbye grays. Make the grays go
| | 05:18 | away, make them transparent, and keep
those other edges and sort of burn them
| | 05:23 | in to the original image. We can do
that using a blend mode. So go up to the
| | 05:28 | Edit menu and choose Fade High Pass
right there. Very important. Ctrl+Shift+F,
| | 05:32 | Command+Option+F on the Mac.
| | 05:34 | Now, just so that we have an over the
top effect, you can go with Overlay. All
| | 05:37 | of these contrast modes right here
will make gray neutral and drop the grays
| | 05:42 | out. So if you choose Overlay, you'll
drop out the grays and you'll keep the
| | 05:48 | shadows, you'll go ahead and burn in
the shadows, and you'll dodge away the
| | 05:51 | highlights, and you'll give
yourself a nice sharpening effect.
| | 05:55 | Now, it doesn't look like it's done
much at all. In other words, it doesn't
| | 05:58 | look that different than the original
image before we applied High Pass, but it
| | 06:01 | is. It is different. But if you want
to get something stronger, something way
| | 06:06 | over the top, like we were applying
400% inside the Smart Sharpen dialog box,
| | 06:10 | we want to match that, then you advance
a few modes to Linear Light. Don't use
| | 06:14 | Soft Light; that will give you a
lesser effect. Hard Light will give you a
| | 06:17 | bigger effect and more intense effect,
if you want to try it out. Vivid Light
| | 06:21 | will just give you a bad effect. You
don't want that. It's going to be weird
| | 06:24 | colors. Linear Light though is going
to give you the ultra amped up effect.
| | 06:29 | Then Pin Light, don't even touch it.
Hard Mix, bah. So this is the one you
|
|
|
