Using Photoshop Fix for detailed edits

- I talked a little bit about Photoshop Fix when we were playing around with Liquify in Photoshop CC. Photoshop Fix takes powerful retouching tools from Photoshop CC and it brings them to Android, the iPhone, and the iPad, and it isn't just a matter of bringing those tools over, it's re-imagining them. It's a really fun way to use retouching tools, it's very approachable and intuitive. Let's take a look and I'll show you how it works, it's fun, I think you'll like it. Okay, so let's jump into Photoshop Fix here, and the first thing that we notice is that we've got a couple of tutorials here to get us started, but we can also access our files wherever we want to.

We can get to our Creative Cloud files, most importantly we can get to our Lightroom files. I see Facebook and Dropbox local files here, but Lightroom is really the undercurrent of everything we've been doing. Because we've always started and ended in Lightroom, that means that all of these files are available to us here in Fix. All of those files from Ojai, all of those files from Modern Photo, and they're full resolution files. Fix actually supports files up to 50 megapixels, so no data lost, really great way to interact with your files, and there's a lot of functionality in here as well.

So let's go ahead and we'll grab this image that we looked at earlier, and let's talk about some of the localized adjustments we can do. We have some global adjustments that we can apply here. If I wanted to just warm this image up a little, that's really easy, if I wanted to saturate it, maybe bump up the shadows I can do that, but I also have those really precise selective tonal edits that we applied in Photoshop. So let's say we want to zoom in here, I'm just pinching to zoom that, and we come in here to Light.

If I want to lighten something, I'm just going to choose my brush size, the hardness of my brush, and the opacity of it, and if I want to make the lights a little brighter, I'm just going to drag my finger over them and release it. You're temporarily seeing a green overlay as I do that, where it shows the area that I'm scribbling, but then it's going to brighten up. If I want to brighten up the grill, let's turn up the opacity a little bit, drag my finger over that, and now that's opened up and brighter.

Just to make it obvious, let's apply it to the license plate here. There you go, it's almost like we're washing it. So really nice way to interact with that. The more I zoom the more precise that gets. I can always hit restore if I overcooked it, and I want to bring an area back in. It is using layers underneath the hood, which is really great.

I can come back and revisit any of these, and change them after the fact. So let's go ahead and zoom back a bit. I could also burn areas, let's say I wanted to darken this. I could come in here and burn the bright area in the windshield just to make it a little less obvious, and if you want to come back and look at that all before and after, upper left-hand corner, I can see before and after.

Nice, subtle, direct tonal adjustments, all totally non-destructive. So if I come in here and I say, "You know, "that looks great, but the windshield looks a little weird." I can come back into Light, I can hit restore, I can scrub over the window and return that to how it was. Okay, there's a lot of other really neat things that I can do here. One of the things you would expect in Fix is retouching, and you can do a great job of retouching and removing things, so let's just open this image here, and get rid of the KEEP OFF sign there.

I like this image, but let's make it look like we were supposed to be as close to it as we were. I'm simply going to scrub over whatever area I want to get rid of, and we're using Cutting Edge Healing Tools, same as found in Photoshop. This can be used to remove distracting elements, pick up litter, remove lens flare, whatever you might have. What's neat about it, again, these are layers so I can come in and I can say restore, and I can just paint that information right back in there. Now with any of these, if I come here to the upper-right and I choose to send this out, I have a couple of options.

I can save it to Lightroom so it'll be available to me throughout my workflow, or I can send it to Photoshop, and that's really magical because it comes into Photoshop as a full resolution layered, masked file that just does the right thing, which is to say that if I applied healing I'd have a dupe layer with the healed content. If I did a tonal adjustment, it would be a curves adjustment layer with a mask, it just leads you down the right path. Even something like vignetting in Fix here is really nice because it can be applied off-center.

That's something you can't even do in Lightroom, and I'm just dragging that around, it's really, really intuitive. The last example I'll show you, something we talked about earlier in Photoshop CC, but that started here in Fix, good old Steve here, we're going to use Steve to look at Liquify, and Liquify is just a lot of fun in here. Come in, it automatically knows his face, I touch on his eye, we can adjust the size of his eyes, the tilt of his eyes, the width of his eyes, come to his nose here, make that a little wider, his mouth a little wider, and let's give him a little smile.

Really easy to do that right there. I can even do face-aware skin smoothing, so the way skin smoothing works in Fix, this is a tool that's not even available on the desktop, I come into Smooth and all I have to do is touch the Face button in the lower-right, and it just smooths Steve's face. It's almost like rubbing Vaseline on his skin. Here it is before, triggering that in the upper-left, and after. Before, and after, and let's look at the overlay. You see that there's a mask that's been built automatically, but it's left the mask off of his eyebrows, his eyes and his mouth.

It's only smoothing the skin, and as with everything we've done here, it's non-destructive. I can go back and change it. This is all project-based, I can revisit these projects from my phone or from any other device, I can continue editing them, I can send them to the Desktop, and I can access other files. Fix is a really fun to use app, very easy to pick up, and it's a great inroad to the Desktop products, and it's very well integrated with the desktop products. I think you'll like this one a lot.