- Let's take a look at another technique that can save you time by quickly softening skin and sharpening eyes and lips. We're going to use the adjustment brush in camera raw, because we want to control exactly where the effect is applied. We'll select both the waterfall and the Icelandic girl image, and then use command r or control r in order to open those files in camera raw. Now if you weren't following along with the last video, and the girl still has some little freckles and moles, if you want the image to look the same as what we're looking at, then scoot over to the snapshot panel and simply click where it says "Spots Removed." Then we'll return back to the basic panel.
Then we'll select the adjustment brush by tapping the k key on the keyboard. We're going to reset all of the other sliders to neutral by clicking the plus or minus button next to clarity. In this case, we'll click minus, you can see all of the rest of the sliders are reset to zero, and then I'm going to increase the negative clarity amount to, maybe somewhere around 60. Now we need to check our brush for a moment, so let's scroll down and make sure that our brush has a large feather on it and I wanna change the flow.
I wanna lower it down so that it takes multiple paint strokes in order to build up the skin softening effect. You might also want to show the mask while you're painting, that's up to you. It'll just show an overlay. In this case I have it set to the default color, which is white. I'm also gonna zoom in once by using the command plus icon, or control plus icon on windows, and then I'll use the spacebar in order to center the girl more closer towards the center of the frame. Now I've got a large brush and every time I paint with a brush you can see what's happening.
I'm slowly building up this adjustment, and everywhere that we see that white, that's the mask that's showing. So again I'm going to slowly build up the adjustment, course I can get a smaller brush here and I can go into different areas and I'm not really worried about whether or not I paint over the eyes and lips because I can always remove that in a moment. So let's say I've got that painted up the way I want, now in order to erase the effect from the eyes all I need to do is hold down the option key.
Now when I hold down the option key my paint brush is too large. So I'll use the left bracket in order to decrease the size of the brush, and I also need to decrease the feather amount. So let's go ahead and drag that feather down to maybe just nine or 10 here. This is gonna give me a much harder edge brush, so again I'll get a little bit smaller brush and you'll notice that when your brush gets really small, when it's smaller than those cross hairs, the round circle part of the brush actually disappears. If we wanted to we could zoom in, we could use command plus, in which case now the brush would appear bigger.
But remember, if you let go of the option key or the alt key you're back to painting with the adjustment brush, not erasing, so don't forget to hold down that option or alt key. And in this case my brush is even still too small, but watch what happens when I start painting over the eye area here. You can see that it's basically cutting a hole in this mask that I've created. And of course if you make a mistake just use command z or control z to undo that, and then remember to hold down the option or the alt key. Or if you don't want to do that, just click over here where it says erase, and then we can paint with the eraser.
Basically again we're just punching a hole in the mask. And I'm gonna paint several times right around the eye area here, maybe also in the eyebrow area to make sure that those eyebrows, all those little hairs stay sharp. And then we can move to the right hand side. Again I'm just cutting a hole in the mask because remember when I started painting here, I was painting with a negative clarity and that's gonna help soften the skin but I don't want to soften her eyes. We can also come down here to the lip area, I probably don't want the lips softened either.
And we'll just paint that kind of a hard edge brush, I'm just gonna continue painting. If I wanted to get a softer edge brush, all I need to do is increase the feather a little bit and then paint. If I've made a mistake here we just need to change from the eraser to the add option, and then we can come in and just add this, and have a little bit more delicately right there. You can swap back and forth as many times as you want of course. Now let's go ahead and hide the mask for a minute by unchecking it, and I'm gonna zoom in one more time using command plus or control plus to make sure that we can see the difference here.
I held down the spacebar in order to move the girl's face into the center of the screen. I'll hold down command and option and tap the p key to toggle off the effects. Command option again with the p key to toggle them on. So the great thing about using the negative clarity is that it works without removing any detail. It's not smudging any pixels or covering up any pixels, it's just decreasing the contrast in those areas. So you can see where there was kind of deeper shadows under the eyes and around the mouth here.
When I hold down the command option key and tap the p key those are hidden. It's almost like someone's holding a little reflector right in front of her and bouncing up a little bit of light into her face making that light a little bit softer. Of course we could also do the opposite effect, if you happen to have a picture of a very weathered looking fisherman or you're looking for that kind of gritty athletic look, instead of decreasing the clarity we can go up here and increase the clarity. And that of course increases the shadow.
Not at all the look that I want for this girl, so I'll leave it back down to a negative 60 or 70 clarity. Course I can amplify this effect even more by creating a new adjustment and loading it with a positive clarity. Now here I wouldn't want to paint in her skin but what I could do is, making sure that my flow is set down, I could simply paint over her eye area and maybe over her eyebrows and you can see that it's helping it to look at little bit sharper, maybe down here in the lip area as well.
It also made it a little bit darker though, so I'm just gonna scroll up a little bit and then maybe increase my shadow slider a little bit to just lighten those eyes. I'll hold down command and option and tap the p key to toggle off the effects, command option again with the p key to toggle them on. We think it's too much of an effect we can decrease the positive clarity, decrease the shadows a little bit and then again use the p key before and after. I should also mention that if you've taken the time to set up a variety of different adjustments here, and you think that you're going to use these adjustments over and over again, you can use the flyout menu here next to the adjustment brush, and you can save these as a new local correction setting.
It's almost like you're saving a preset for the brush. So in this case I might want to save this as Add Clarity and Increase Highlights. And when I click Ok, you'll notice that the next time that I select that list, you can see that preset. So this way I don't have to go in every single time and adjust all of my options. If I use the same options over and over again I would simply save a preset. Before we wrap up, I'll just move over to the waterfall image for a minute. I just want to point out that you can also apply a positive or negative clarity slider to an entire image.
So, I'll put back the brush by tapping the k key, now I'm back to the basic panel here, and I can use my clarity slider to either increase the clarity in order to add contrast in that mid-tone area, or I can use it to decrease clarity, softening the whole image and giving it kind of a dreamier look. But since I typically like more control over the areas that have this decrease contrast applied to it, I'll typically use the adjustment brush in a selective adjustment as opposed to the clarity slider here as a global adjustment.
Author
Updated
10/6/2014Released
6/17/2013- Using Bridge to batch rename files and add keywords and metadata to photos
- Viewing, rating, filtering, and creating collections to isolate your best work
- Comparing raw and JPEG file formats
- Retouching and automating workflow with Camera Raw
- Navigating documents and the Photoshop interface
- Understanding file formats, resolution, canvas size, and print size
- Cropping, straightening, transforming, warping, scaling, and resizing images
- Selecting, stacking, aligning, and grouping layers
- Making precise selections using the Marquee, Lasso, and Brush tools
- Using Refine Edge, Quick Selection, and layer masks to isolate soft edge objects
- Improving tone, contrast, and color selectively
- Converting to black and white and tinting images
- Retouching blemishes, smoothing skin, whitening teeth, and brightening eyes
- Retouching with the Liquify, Content-Aware Fill, Healing Brush, and Patch tools
- Merging multiple exposures
- Making nondestructive changes with Smart Filters
- Adding texture, edge effects, and drop shadows with blend modes
- Working with type
- Creating, modifying, and combining shapes using the Shape tools
- Adding layer effects
- Saving and sharing images via contact sheets, web galleries, and Save For Web
- Editing video and audio clips
- Panning and zooming still photos
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
Views
Q: This course was updated on 01/16/2014. What changed?
A: When Creative Cloud applications are updated, we refresh our training to make sure it covers the latest features and interface changes from Adobe. This update covers changes to Camera Raw, including nondestructive cropping, workflow and output settings, and the ability to save multiple files automatically.
Q: This course was updated on 6/18/2014. What changed?
A: In June 2014 Adobe released new features for Photoshop CC and added enhancements to several existing features. We added movies to introduce the new Focus Mask and Blur Gallery features, and changed several movies to reflect updates to instant type preview, font search, Typekit, Liquify, Content-Aware Fill, Adobe Camera Raw, and Smart Guides.
Q: This course was updated on 10/06/2014. What changed?
A: We updated this course to reflect the October 2014 changes to Photoshop CC. There are 16 new movies, which are indicated by the "(CC 2014.1)" tag that appears next to their names.
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Adobe Photoshop
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What is Photoshop?1m 42s
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Introduction
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Welcome1m
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Installing Adobe Bridge1m 23s
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What's new1m 26s
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1. It Begins in Bridge
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What is Adobe Bridge?3m 3s
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2. Whittling Down to Keepers
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Saving images in collections3m 52s
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Rating and labeling images4m 31s
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Using smart collections3m 39s
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3. Camera Raw Essentials
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Choosing output settings3m 34s
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4. Fixing Common Problems Quickly with Camera Raw
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Fixing blown-out highlights5m 42s
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Correcting lens distortion5m 17s
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Sharpening details7m 23s
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5. Retouching and Using Creative Techniques with Camera Raw
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Adding a radial gradient6m 35s
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6. Automating Camera Raw
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7. Photoshop Interface Essentials
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Managing panels5m 1s
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8. Documents and Navigation
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Arranging documents3m 37s
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9. Digital Image Essentials
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Understanding file formats8m 26s
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10. Cropping and Transformations
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Using crop options4m 20s
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Warping images4m 48s
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11. Working with Layers
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Exploring layer basics13m 25s
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12. Selections and Layer Masks
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Combining selections6m 40s
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Selecting with Focus Mask3m 10s
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13. Tone and Color Correction with Adjustment Layers
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Starting with a preset2m 36s
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14. Additional Options for Tone and Color Correction
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15. Retouching Essentials
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Taming flyaway hair4m 53s
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16. Combining Multiple Images
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17. Essential Filters
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Overview of filters3m 3s
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18. Essential Blend Modes
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19. Type Essentials
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Exploring character (point) type11m 58s
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Adding type on a path7m 3s
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Warping type2m 36s
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20. Basic Shape Layers
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Using the shape tools13m 45s
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Custom shape layers6m 15s
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Adding a keyline to an image4m 13s
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21. Essential Layer Effects and Styles
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Adding a drop shadow effect8m 57s
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22. Sharing Images
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Creating contact sheets4m 29s
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Creating PDF presentations3m 25s
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Saving for the web3m 49s
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23. Video
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Working with video clips12m 14s
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Conclusion
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Next steps1m 4s
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Video: A quick portrait retouching technique using Clarity (CC 2014.1)