Retouching a conceptual image

- [Chris] Hello friends this is Chris Warwick and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools weekly. In this weeks episode we'll start in Lightroom and finish in Photoshop and here we will look once again at a new feature in Photoshop which is called content aware fill. And this time we're going to use it not to fix a problem really but to create more of a conceptual image. This is a photograph that I captured of this aerialist and you can see the skyline in the background and we can see the support structures right here. And when I photographed this I thought wouldn't it be great if those didn't exist.

And I want to remove those really quickly so we'll do that. So over here in Lightroom we'll just make a few really simple adjustments to the raw image. You want to get all of your color and the overall look of everything just the way you want it before you do anything else, to just making a few light adjustments, temperature goes up, a little bit of boost in exposure and contrast and shadows and darkening up the black and a touch of clarity, maybe some vibrance there to. Alright, well after we've done that, what we do is send this over to Photoshop. The way we do that in Lightroom is go to photo, edit in, edit in Photoshop.

That will then apply whatever settings we've applied to this image and it will send the image over to Photoshop. Now once in Photoshop what we're going to do is some content aware fill. We've seen how we can do this in a previous episode but let me reiterate it here. Use the lasso tool and what you do is you just lasso up a selection, if you want to add multiple selections hold down the shift key and just circle up multiple objects, you can see here I'm just adding multiple things to this. And I also want to get rid of this rope so I'll go ahead and do that over here and then this side over here we have some buildings so I'm going to get pretty close but not to close, and if ever you find that what's happening as your doing this if you're getting sort of too close to go in and add a little bit more of a selection so you can boost out your edge there.

As long as your holding down the shit key so the trick is to hold down the shift key the entire time and if ever you want to subtract something hold down the option on a Mac alt on Windows and do that same exact motion and that will allow you to subtract an area from what you've selected. And basically what you want to do is have a selection which is pretty close to the area or the objects you want to remove but not too close so you have a little bit of breathing room right there around those edges. Next up is to go to edit and here we'll choose content aware fill.

Now with content aware fill what will happen is it will show us our source sampling area that's green it will also do an attempt to show us what this will look like so you can see that it's still rendering it out. And that's part of the reason is because it's a big file there's a lot of edges, there's a lot of stuff to deal with but it did a phenomenal job and sometimes it's helpful to zoom in and then just pan around. Looks like at the top I'm going to need to clone out those it duplicated a building there. Other places over here, this building looks pretty good I might need to just fix up what sort of happened in this area here.

Alright well once we have seen our results and like how they look, next step is to click okay. I should also say we're going to output this to a new layer so we have new layer with this on top of that click okay and what we'll see here is we have all of these areas corrected, go to select and deselect and then we're going to do some clean up work. So our clean up work I like to do with clone stamp and healing so I'll just name this Retouching. And then tap the S key for my close stamp tool to make sure we have that I like to use with the clone stamp a nice soft brush, no hardness.

Opacity we'll leave that all the way up. And up here you probably can't even really see it but let me just zoom way in so you can see this. It just didn't quite remove those edges and I wanted to highlight that because sometimes what can happen is you can think, oh my gosh this is so amazing it saved the day it saved me so much time and energy and then they'll be these other little problems you overlook like right here. I think with this building what I'm going to do is just bring this edge up a little bit more create a softer transition there. This one we could kind of bring this down a little bit further so we could sort of bring down a little bit more of that building here if we wanted to.

Create a little bit of a cleaner line there, of softer line, however you want to do it. So I'm just kind of experimenting with this and sometimes it's helpful to kind of lower your opacity too if you need to do a little bit of blending, but I think because it's out of focus for the most part that's looking great. Press the space bar key to pan around the image and as we do this we'll just keep going in here and we can retouch this away as needed, and just do some quick retouching here get rid of that little building on that edge over there to.

Next we probably want to zoom into the top of this and on the top of this make our brush small by tapping the left bracket key and we're going to bring in some more sky and you can kind of work quickly and then as you get closer to the edge what you want to do is change the hardness of your brush so you have a more defined brush and you want to change the size so you can get a little more precise, so as I get a little more precise I'm going to start to make this look a little bit harder kind of blending it excuse me, not blending it but, having the hardness look a little bit like the actual hula hoop what whatever this is called that the aerialist is using.

And so in this case you can see how just getting it just right there and I think that looks pretty cool. So now without a ton of effort we have a conceptual photograph of this person kind of floating in space. Now that I see this without all the rest of the support structure I realize I want to crop it. So I'll tap the C key in order to access the crop tool. And here with the crop tool, let me just do that again here. I'm going to just bring this one in.

And I also want to straighten out those buildings a little bit and see if we can't come maybe right about there get her a little bit more centered. That looks cool, now I have a gap of some blank content in the background so I'll use content aware and then press enter or return and what this will do for us is it will crop and rotate and it will seek to fill in that gap. Except I have a problem. I did this cropping on my retouching layer.

So what happened is it filled all of that in but it filled it in with sky, let me show you what I mean. And if we go in here can you see how that's like sky color down there, didn't really work. So in order to fix that what we'll do is merge our layers together so we can go click and shift click to select all of them. Command E on a Mac control E on Windows and we can select that area with a lot of different selection tools you could use the magic wand you could use the lasso tool like I'm using here.

And I'm just doing this just to kind of highlight and point out sometimes some of the things that can happen to you when you're going through this workflow, or at least some of the things that happened to me. Now ideally I would have caught that before hand but you know how it is when you're in Photoshop, sometimes your jamming you make a mistake and then you have to say well how do I quickly fix this? Again let's do the same thing, selection, edit, content aware fill. Take a look at it, we'll zoom in here see how it's doing kind of filling in the city and the skyline down there. Yeah it did a pretty good job on that side, over there great.

Click okay, and then now we have that area fixed up down there, and of course if need be we could always go in and we could nudge that around or we could do a little bit more work with healing or cloning if we needed to. But in my case I'm fine so I'm going to merge this down. Layer and then choose merge down, and sometimes when I'm having fun or its a conceptual image and I just want to commit to what I've done, I'll use that merge command and get rid of all my layers like we've done there. Alright well there you have it a little bit of a workflow having fun creating a conceptual image.

I wanted to show you this for the workflow perspective to highlight a few tips and techniques. But I also want to highlight from the perspective of giving you an idea about how you can have fun with some of these retouching tools and how sometimes you're going to use those not to fix things that are broken, but to kind of add something fun to your photographs. So if you haven't ever tried this before give it a try, remove something from your image today using content aware fill, just for the sake of creating something a little bit more conceptual or curious or creative, and sometimes that's a fun way to learn how to use the tool as well.

Alright well thanks for joining me I'll see you next time have a great rest of your day.