Lessons

Lesson Info

Day 11: Adjusting

well hi you're back again that's awesome well of course you are because you're committed to thirty days of this and today we're going to talk about making adjustments to our photos now through some of the previous lessons we talk a bit about working on destructively and the role of camera raw and this is where it starts to come together but when we actually start making adjustments to images now making adjustments khun to me means two very important things different but related one is overall adjustment in other words you want take this overall photograph and say I wanted to be fill in the blank darker lighter brighter more vibrant anything of that nature and then also individual where you say I want to adjust just individual portions a portion of so they're both options that are available and we're going to talk about both of those generally speaking I would do global adjustments first and then localize after that but not necessarily and we always have a couple of options available to...

us it's probably going not surprise you by now to hear me say that I would do as much as possible in camera raw because it's easier and then make other adjustments using adjustment layer so just to clarify let's take a look at the difference here I've got an image open this is a jpeg file and as we've talked about before while all of these commands air okay I would avoid using them because they're very permanent and just in case this point hasn't been slanted your head by me enough times let's make absolutely sure if I went to do levels directly to this image and I made some big adjustment I have to click okay and go back to levels to try and adjust it further press there on keyboard shortcuts you'll see whenever you see a history bam it looks like that that means you've already done something dramatic to its your chances of changing your mind are you pretty difficult now obviously hopefully we wouldn't make an enormously huge adjustment like that but it just makes the point that using those adjustments and clicking ok means we have to make a commitment at some point now again you could of course duplicate the background layer and do an adjustment to that copy but the key point I always make it it still doesn't let you edit it and I want to be ableto edit my settings that's why adjustment layers and or camera raw to me or a better way to go so this is a j pick file I'm already in for a shock if you have anything up to and including photo shop cs six at this point it's too late to incorporate camera raw without starting over again because this image is already open as a j peg file if I had anything to be up to up to and including csx then I would force this toe open in camera ross we talked about earlier lesson that would give me that ability for a shop c c has this wonderful feature it's my favorite feature of photo shop cc which is the camera off filter and that means I can access camera raw from within a document that's already open and that's a huge important change so we'll talk about that in more detail a little bit later on but the other thing we need to take a quick look at is where adjustment layers have their role and how we can use them and the main thing that we're going to talk about is that you always have a couple of options if you just decide add an adjustment layer and let's use level since we just talked about that because I have nothing selected it means the overall image will be affected now I'm going to move this normally I have afflict have properties in here so it's out of my image area I just have to readjust this slightly so again the overall image will be affected so if I decide I want to lighten up mid tones or darken them or do whatever I want I have all those options and as I've said several times before the benefit of using this adjustment layer concept is I don't have to actually click okay so rather than applying it it's just really in permanent preview so I can change make any change that I want so why not have anything selected I've made this global adjustment that says make every pixel in this image be affected by the adjustment layer now the other option is to decide you want to select just an area and you do that by first making a selection I'm gonna use the quick selection tool that we will be talking in a separate lesson maura about selections but for now I just want to get fairly close and we're going to pretend that that's the best we can do for now now when I add my levels adjustment layer it's on ly going to affect this one area on homicide over doing it here but one of things you'll see that's a very common use of adjustment layers is too over adjust something so you can see what you're doing to help paint on the mask and then put it back again now needless to say the accuracy of your selection will help sell the reality of whether this you're making a good adjustment or not if I want to view the mask I op journal click on it and I can already see for example here there are some areas that I don't want so I just switched to my paintbrush tool and I can readjust them paint them away so that that part isn't affected if I go a little closer it starts to show me some areas where I didn't do quite as good a job so I need to add that to my mass take my paintbrush I just have to look I got a soft as broads which should work fine in this case depending on the situation sometimes you want want a hard edge brush in this case I've got a soft hairs brush painting with white and I was going to kind of paint in the areas here that I think I need a little more work on these edges who missed a bit there a swell now as we saw when we were working with mass before I also have the option of adding a little bit of feather if I would that feel that's going to help make the edge look a little more believable that's certainly an option the other great thing about using adjustment layers is you can add more than one of them so if I go back here and I add another levels adjustment layer for example now you can see it's going to on top of what I've already done it's going to make another adjustment affecting everything below in this particular case that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because if I already adjusted just the wall there's really no reason why I'd want to adjust the sky and the wall together one of the advantages of working with layer masses I already have a layer mask that's identified the wall area now if I want to for example only work on the other portions bye hold down the option are all key I can drag this mask on top and say yes I'd like to replace that blank clear mask with this one then I clicked on that layer mass press commander control I for invert now you can see just by looking at the masks this one will only affect the other areas such as the sky so now if I go in I can darken up the sky now that I do this part doesn't look so realistic so I go back here with my paintbrush switch my color the black and now I can paint over these areas that don't look quite as realistic as they did a few moments ago and obviously I'm doing this very zoomed out very quickly but this is just give you the idea of how we can make these kind of a justice now let's just do a quick look at that kind of this is one of the reasons for going and looking at the mass because you can't identify areas that you just miss completely like this and again we would normally make that perfect but now the whole point is now I have two separate adjustment layers this one is affecting just the sky because that's what the mass was and this one is just affecting the wall now that I have made this so I'm asking look a little better and we're going again pretend that it looks much better now you can see this is where I have the ability to go back and tweak each individual one so here's my original photograph and then I've got the one adjustment affecting only the wall and a second adjustment on ly affecting the sky and to kick a dead horse wherever that expression is uh as long as I say this is a psd falling have access to both those adjustment layers because one of things I think you'll find is we have to be careful about making judgments based entirely on we see on the screen and in this thirty days of photo shop I'm not spending time talking about calibrating monitors or anything except to say that calibration of monitors is is a good step it helps but that's still not going to give you a perfect match between monitor and printer for example so you might make an adjustment to something and to your eyes it looks really good and then you print it and you find it's still not quite what you have in mind so this is one of the advantages of using that couple of adjustment letters like this is if you do a test print and go how it's a little darker than I thought you can slow go back and tweak these things if instead I had done anything at all using any of these adjustments that what it meant I really can't change my mind because those adjustments are more permanent so in the non destructive way of working this is the way you can start to make adjustments that are either global and or individual now let's build on this little bit and talk about where camera raw comes into the equation so here's a raw file open it up in camera says okay here's how your photo was as was shot looked a little over exposed to me and the colors aren't quite as contrast to hear vibrant as I'd like and that's why as much as I came to get it right in the camera sometimes like in this case probably on the back of my camera on the a day that I took this it looked ok but I want to make it a little more saturated and vibrant everything and that's these air making my overall adjustments I still have it set to open as an object so here are the things that the reasons why I like using camera raw over photoshopped in some instances and the first one is white balance photo shop while it has how should I say is photoshopped as something that's the rough equivalent of changing the white balance and use for example the photo filter adjustment layer two adjust whether it's warmer or cooler but technically it's not white bounds per se so because this was shot in camera on my camera all the white balances are built in as a menu so I can say well this was shot daylight fact let me put this back for man to the default so let's just look at the white balance options there's daylight and cloudy shade tongue stone fluorescent flash and then we have custom and otto is he with auto white balance does not that big a change I don't really like it in fact let's put it back the way I shot it so you may not find that changing the white balance really gives you the effect that you want but here's the suggestion that I make the people is even though you might have taken it on a really sunny day there's nothing wrong with seeing what it the result you get if you change the white balance too cloudy or shade because you might like the result in this case it didn't really make a significant difference but in some cases it's still a good starting point where now I can say I want to adm or contrast and more vibrant and things like that now there are other there's always multiple ways do things in for a job you can use the custom white balance tool to just click on something I like using this method I love the fact that the sliders give me all these options so any time I came to say let's go back to the way I shot it but I'm goingto adjust the exposure and the other things the way I want to be a bit more in the shadows and the blacks clarity again is something that there's no easy equivalent in photo shop and you can kind of get to it using various methods but I like the fact there's just a slider called clarity and I hit open object and it comes in course you don't see any adjustment here because it's a camera smart object and at this point I can still make further adjustments on top of it so if I wanted to I personally would probably if I need to make a tweet just double click to go back to camera raw but it's also possible to say well let's see what happens on top of that if we add some other adjustments so for example here is something that is not built into camera that I really like all these other adjustment layers well pretty much all of them at least I'll require me to for example say well here's curves now I need to make some adjustment to it to get some result that I like which is fine there's nothing wrong with that but what I like about the color look up option there's almost just effects they're just saying overall globally let me pick something these air all preset there's no other settings you just basically pick a preset so you say well let's just see what under this one under abstract I'm going to say what does it look like with this setting or this one not don't like that at all but that's kind of the idea these air just built in options you say what is looked like as a you know a different effect and you have all these different options and you're just built in pre sets that someone else has created and it allows you to apply them and basically see if you like the results because it's an adjustment layer you can always change your mind not sure why that is doing that so anyone all now course some of the names like edgy horror blue moonlight I don't know what moonlight or sunset does it let's try and see unusual now don't forget with any of these type of adjustments or any adjustment for that matter if you find the result is a little too much we always have those layer options of either a blend mode and or opacity to change it even more dramatically so color look up is kind of neat because it's just a list of options that you picked and you either like it or you don't you can't unlike other presets to give you a starting point this is basically here you go here's your end result but from an adjustment standpoint especially if you're trying to just get some effect you khun do that very easily just by using color look up now let's go back to camera raw for a second throughout this thirty days I'm going to talk over and over again about used the word preset because preset to me equal saving time and making my life easier so any time I can have presets that to me is a good thing so let's say I was out on a photoshoot and the time of day wasn't ideal but it's the only time I could go so all of my photos were just a little bit on the either overexposed or underexposed or something about it I don't like and I use this as an example once I've got it looking the way that I want I come over here and say let's make that a precinct so I'm gonna click on the new preset button and call it huh this case I happen to be in seattle so I'm gonna call it seattle and I went a little too fast there but basically this preset is going to say just save everything that's in there and then I'm going back to my regular image but the reason for doing a preset is now if I'm working on some other image and I feel like it has similar issues right inside bridge I can right click choose developed settings and then look at my presets let's see if I can get this you can actually see it course it's right outside the filmmaker but there's that one called seattle and you see it applied that pre set without me even having to open it yet so if you have a bunch of photographs that were taken at the same time you fix one or I should say adjusted the way you want in camera raw save it as a preset and then in bridge you khun select a whole bunch of them and choose that develops settings and then pick your preset the nice thing about this style of preset unlike color look up that we saw a few minutes ago here now I finally decided want actually look at this one so I double clicked open it and it's gonna open in camera raw with those preset settings applied but if I look at any of them and go on this case may be I want the exposure a little bit and I still want to open up the blacks maybe a little bit more so I'm adjusting from the original and I could do that because the preset really is just that as thie initial pre organized setting or pre done setting that says applied the same thing that you say there's a precept but I can still tweak it because it's camera raw so it's a really nice advanta as you can create your own looks or your own fixes a certain problems here's a typical way that I see people use this camera preset which makes a lot of sense to me I was talking with a photographer who did sports photography and he shoots high school volleyball games every thursday night I think it is and what would happen is you always go to the same gym which was an older jim without wonderful lighting and he was limited based on the amount of light and the geary had at that time we did not have the latest greatest really high iso camera sonar to freeze the action he had to put the values in his camera that meant his photos were a little underexposed and just that just a hair noisy so what he used to do was open all of them and go through the process of making the change now what he does is he doesn't do that anymore because he did this once he opened one of them because they're all basically suffering from the same problem he adjusted the settings and camera ought to say boost the exposure reduce the noise everything you need to do and then say there's a preset now he comes back from his thursday night shoots any opens in bridge all of those images selects them all right clicks on one says developed settings used my pre set and it automatically applies if for some reason some of those images don't look quite so good anymore as we just saw here I guess we'll go in and adjusted it just means the preset is doing the work for now the good news is presets do not on ly appear in photoshopped excuse me in camera raw so let's go back to r j peg here maybe this level's setting I really like and it's just the right kind of adjustment for certain situations well I can come to the pop up menu and choose save levels preset and it's going to prompt me to save it into the uh appropriate folder in photo shop I normally wouldn't call it something like bottles but I want you to see it that's the one I just made so from now on this preset is there but if I went to a complete separate photograph and decided I wanted to use levels not that the's settings will probably make sense but just to show you there's the precept that I just created and now it's applied to this one as well and again the same theory applies even though it was a pre set it means it will apply the settings but they're not permanent so I can go and say well in this case it would look better if I did this or whatever I wanted to so most of the adjustment layers can have presets many of them have some built in already and these presets are provided by adobe my how should I say this my feeling about those pre senses that some of them are not bad was that polite enough I mean honestly there there presets where they've just taken general images to say here's one that lightens the contrast or darkens this and they're okay but some of the times you look at the results gonna go again not so much but the good news is again that keep in mind that all of these presets can be just a starting point with again the exception of that color look up adjustment layer because there's no settings to changes just whatever that pre set is that's what you get but every other adjusting layer that has presets gives you this option of applying the precept and then tweaking it to get the result that you want now what if we want to again as we did with the example of our bottles adjust selectively maybe I want to try and make this door the smaller door a little more vibrant cause I liked the way that garage doors looking but not this one well because I started with camera raw let's first look at that as an option so we go back to camera awe and there is this tool which is called the adjustment brush and I'm going to show it to you but I'm going to suggest that it's not given the fact that we have photo shop as a choice honestly I would tend to do this in photoshopped as opposed to camera for reasons we'll see in a moment so this is okay because what I can do is paint to say this is the area that I want to adjust and I'm going to change my exposure I'll do something dramatic but you see it's it's not terribly accurate based on the way that I brought you mean it worked but you have to be a little bit careful and the fact that it's just a brush means I'd have to go inside okay let me try and a race these parts that I didn't do a very goodjob so well you could do it to me it takes a little bit of back and forth of going back and zooming in and all that kind of stuff so it works and it's okay now if you are used to using light room and this looks very familiar to him to you that's fine but honestly when you see the difference between this and doing something in photo shopped to me I would tend to just say you know what let's just cancel that and not do that there and do it in photo shop and part of the reason is photoshopped has selection tools so very quickly I could make a selection and then do whatever adjustment want whether it's curves or exposure whatever we want now I can say let's just adjust the exposure of this or I could do that a couple steps with my selection say maybe I want to experiment with curves curves is not the most into of thing in the world to use but as you start to drag you can see that's a little more what I had in mind and if unlike the adjustment russian camera raw where frankly it's a little tricky to get it exactly the way you want because this is a selection I can zoom in closer and photo shop and look at my edge and see is do I need to tweet this at all so I could do free transform and look and see are there any parts of this where I need to adjust it now the previous lesson we talked a little bit about free transformed but here's one ex little thing that I neglected to mention the time which would be very useful to know at this point is trans free transformed by nature wants to scale both horizontal and vertical the same time but like in this case I just want to get a little bit more of this blue on the edge of because I'm not straight on I can't really do that in one shot so if I try to tweak it so the way I can do that if I hold down the command or control key and drag on this corner see how I could do it kind of disproportionately if you will so I'm doing both a little bit of horizontal vertical but on my terms not on what photoshopped wants to do and once again probably feather that it's just a little tiny bed so I'm getting the results that I want so making global adjustments with the juste mayors is really easy making selective individual adjustments using a justin layers is is equally easy now there are tools in photoshopped that can make other adjustments for you and I want to talk about this a little bit just so you see the options that are available so we do have this set of tools called the dodge and burn tools which allow me to selectively dark and enlightened by painting but my worry about thes is by nature there very destructive because I have to paint directly on an image there is a method you can use to do this where it's a little less destructive but it's still not very flexible so I'll show you that because you'll probably run into this technique and I want you to be aware of the difference between methods of doing things there's nothing wrong with this technique at all in fact for years before adjustment layers it's the way people recommended including myself recommended using tools like the dodge in bern tools because it was better but what we would do is add a new layer and we're going to fill that layer with fifty percent gray now it's above that's this layer I'll just hide this other one for now this is the one I'm working on and we change the blend mode too either overlay or hard light will do the same kind of thing and then take a paintbrush make our brush bigger and let's just check our settings we want to have a softer edge anywhere that I want to darken I'm going toe paint with black now when I paint with pure black it looks way too dark so instead I lower the opacity way down to like twenty or thirty percent and now even see wherever I paint I'm darkening those areas but ultimately the problem with this if you will is if I were to put this back to normal for second you'll see all end up with is different shades of gray on top of a grey layer so later on if I decided that I didn't really like it really the on ly level of control I have is lowering the opacity a little bit to make it less obvious which again is is okay and that's the way honestly we used to do it because that's still one step better than using the dodging bird tool directly on an image so option number two I suppose would be to duplicate that layer and then use the dodge in bern tools and have make sure this setting is called protect homes it defaults to fifty percent I would tend to go a little lower than that a little bigger and this is going to give you I think a more accurate kind of color toning but then the same problem applies if later on you look at and there's something you want to tweet oh really the only option you have available be to delete this layer and start again because you still can't edit the intensity of this tool and that's why I tend to always gravitate back towards adjustment layers for this kind of thing so you've heard me say several times before the phrase end up with and this is another example of the end up with slash nondestructive workflow is I want to end up with certain parts of this photo looking darker and more intense well ultimately I wanted to be a fairly subtle change but I wanted to be obvious so if I have any kind of setting where the tools are very low capacity it's kind of hard to see what I'm going to do so this is where I love the fact that justin layers do this the fact that I can over just something so I can see what I'm doing and I kind of foreshadowed this in a previous lesson so let's say for the sake of argument I'm going to use curves and I know if I drag curves down I can make things darker so right now I have taken this curves of justin layer and made the entire photograph look much darker than it was before but remember I only want to dark in certain areas so I'm going to take the mask for this press commander control I to invert it so that means I have this curves adjust where that darkens the photograph and let me pause and say darkens the photograph way more than I really wanted to be but that's just temporary and I have a mask that's hiding the whole effect so now I go back to my paintbrush I'm gonna put the opacity back up I have to just decide on size of brush that I want and now I'm going to start doing some painting with white and at first it's gonna look really really bad because I'm painting the darker areas so that I can see what I'm doing but of course ultimately I really don't want them to look this dark but it's almost like this is letting me kind of map out the key areas say I want to make sure I get the darker areas looking the way that I want now I could leave it that way and be the laughing stock of people who re touch things in for a shock because they say really that's your adjustment that you're making so but the good news is I have a mask that I can adjust but equally important is member I deliberately over dark in this so that I could see what I was doing when I was painting now that I'm happy with the start of where I've got everything I can double click to go back to this adjustment and then pull it back really dramatically and the one of the great benefits of adjustment layers is on the fly you khun turn layers on and off to see the difference so I think I'm gonna just a little more like this and now I still have a couple more levels of adjustment available to me first of all I could try this is going to be too dramatic but if I wanted to I could change the blend mode that's too much I could change it may be too dark and I think normal is probably the best bet in this case I could also lower the opacity to say I wanted to look even less obvious and I feel like some of my brush strokes are just a little bit two obvious so I could go to my mask go back to the properties and adjust the feather just a little bit so I'm softening the effect if we look at our mask you'll be able to see as I do this that it's softening things up which means that the effect I'm getting is even more subtle so this is an example of that end up with expression because I wanted to end up with a subtle change making an adjustment that selective in certain areas but instead of struggling trying to make sure I could see what I was doing with a really low opacity my feeling is why not take advantage of the nature of adjustment arizona really overdo something so you can adjust the way you want and then once you're happy pull the settings back to more normal settings that look the way you want so as it showed you before when we talked about creating a vignette edge effect in a separate lesson this is exactly the same concept here every aspect of this is editable aiken either hide it completely I can edit the curves adjustment to make it lighter or darker and I can adjust the feather on the mask and I could even well throw away the whole thing and start again so lots and lots of levels of eligibility if you do this kind of thing and I wantto stressed the point that I'm doing this in the context of adding some shadow I could do exactly the same thing if I wanted to paint with light so if I have a very dark photo and I want to add a bit more like exactly the same principle the only difference would be I would adjust to curve the other direction to brighten things up and then hide the whole thing and paint wherever I wanted like to appear so this is this concept can be applied in many different ways let's look at one other variation that's really just a variation on a theme I'm just gonna open this directly and photoshopped to begin with let's say I wanted certain parts of this image the colors to be shifted slightly so maybe I want the red in the face of the sun and that ornament to be a slight different shades I'm going to go hugh saturation adjustment layer and I'm going to deliberately pick a huge which is completely different at first same idea though take the adjustment layer masked inverted take my paintbrush and start painting and here I'm going to paint and because I've got such a drastically different color it's really easy for me to see the results of what I'm doing I'm taking advantage of my walking pen by pressing a little lighters I get close to the edge once I think that's pretty good I always have the option of member of looking at the master go oops missed a bit there now that I think ok that looks pretty accurate what I want now let's go back first I'll put it back exactly the way it was now I can adjust very slightly so now see the difference I'm making a very slight adjustment in color but it looks natural because I started off by making sure that my mask edge was the way I want once again I could go in and feather this just to make sure it was blending in better getting the result that I want you'll see me very often doing a whole lot of this before and after a kind of turning justin layer on and off because I really want to make sure it's looking accurate of course I would normally look even more closely at it just to make sure everything looks good but that method is something I honestly I can set tell you that I was so happy the first day that this occurred to me because I realized I was taking longer than necessary to do things because I was struggling trying to figure out how can I adjust just this area in such a subtle way but make my life a whole lot simpler but this is where we can start to really just election let's use this image take advantage of camera raw and the smart object ability but in kind of a slightly diff from way so because of the nature of this photograph really I would like to adjust the sky and the sculpture separately and I could do that using adjustment laugh like I showed you at the beginning but let's try and see if we can't achieve the same thing with camera raw because sometimes again we just liked the way camera law camera operates so we're gonna look first of all at just the sculpture itself and not really worry about the sky so we might change the color temperature and maybe open up the exposure and the contrast normally I would be very worried about the fact that my sky is losing every bit of detail but I'm really not worried about that because I'm trying to get just worry concentrating really on the sculpture at this point it's all I'm really looking at and the only other thing I do is make sure that this sizing and everything is the way that I want and I've got open and photoshopped as a smart object so I'm going to open that up and there it is the sculpture portion is looking exactly the way that I want but I'm not terribly thrilled with the sky so now I want to make a second adjustment to just the sky now there's a little bit of a trick here that's very important in coming session in fact it might even be the next one if I remember correctly from talk about smart objects and what they do this is one of the concepts we've been talking a lot about our I've been using the camera smart off a lot in this process and there's one little kind of twist we have to do here because here is the way smart objects and camera smart ideas work if I thought to myself I want to make another adjustment just for the sky if I duplicate the smart object now my first thought as well now I've got two separate things to work on but unfortunately that's not exactly what hap because if I put this back to the default and click okay you will see both of them change because whenever you duplicate a camera smart object or as we'll see any smart object is an exact clone so if you had just one the other one will adjust now in the next session we talked about smart office you'll see how this can be an advantage in this case it's a bit of a disadvantage so I'm gonna undo a couple of times so I'm backto having my first camera raw adjustment the way I want now I want to create a second version of this that I can edit independently of the first one on the command it lets me do that if I right click is choose new smart object via copy and what that means is it looks like the result is the same but because I've said new smart object by a copy it means copy it but make it knew I independent of the first one so I suppose a better name might be independent smart object by a copy because it's still the same pixel information in terms of everything's all nicely lined up but now I can edit it separately so now if I double click I'm going to reset this back to the default and this time I'm gonna look just at the sky say let's make temperature lem or let's change the exposure and pushed the contrast maybe make that's actually use the whites to make the clouds look a little better clarity and I'm perhaps overdoing this a little bit so you can kind of see that I'm losing some of the detail but that's okay because I'm deliberately trust trying to make my sky look better look the way that I want and I click ok and it's gonna update that so now I have two versions of the same image one where the sculpture looks good and long where the sky looks good now I have to combine them together and in typical fashion there are various ways of doing that I'm going to move of the one with the white sky on top just because it'll be easier to see this at first so let's go through some of the ways that I could try to combine these what I really want to do is hide this white sky so I see the other one so the first thing I might try well maybe not the first thing but one method would be to make a selection and then remember the layer masses going to initially make a selection based on what I have selected which in this case is the wrong way around so if I invert the mask now it's saying on the top layer all I want to see is a sculpture on the bottom layer I just want to see through the sky so that's actually worked pretty well if we look more closely the edge actually works quite well so that's one method that would work if you have something if in the process of doing this adjustment your sky ends up being really white like this then we have the option of using the blend if sliders and let's take this layer and as I move it over you see all the white is disappearing and it's showing through so that allows me to do that without making a mask it's still not destructive like look okay this blend of slider will stay that way so that's another option and depending on the circumstances you might be able to get away with changing a blend mode where you khun overlay one on top of the other or something that's probably less likely that will work but it will depend a little bit on the images so the two main choices you probably would do would be use a layer mask or do those blend of sliders now the nice part about doing it this way is both of these camera raw smart objects remain editable so now that I look at it I'm thinking maybe I did go a little bit overboard in the blueness of even the clouds are looking kind of blue so double click to go back to this one and put the white balance too cloudy and maybe just just slightly pushed the vibrance a little more this way I've got some still nice white clouds were also adding some saturation to the sky click okay and then we'll update but it will still preserver address whatever mask that we have applied there so this is very similar in principle in fact is exactly the same concept to saying at two different justin layers that affect to different areas using a mask the only real difference is that I'm taking advantage of some of the camera raw sliders and settings for making adjustments like white balance and clarity and things that aren't so easily created in photo shop so that's kind of the overall concept I would suggest that suggests that you want to look at when you're doing things making adjustments is think globally first and then make individual adjustments as you go now where this the part that's so wonderful about this I think is that even at this point I'm looking at this and going okay it looks pretty good I've got the two camera adjustment layers the way that I want and then but even now I'm thinking but I might still want to try something else so adjustment layers can also be applied on top of that maybe add either hugh saturation or photo filter or maybe even one of those color look up let's just go with hugh saturation and say overall I want tojust a hue of the entire photograph not that I would do it like in this case was to show you that I still can make little tweaks or aiken lower the saturation or maybe now that I've got the color is looking really good I want to go on ad a black and white and I love when that happens I say black and white but I let go and pick the wrong one as they always say first a photo shop is not voice activated you have to actually click on the thing that you're saying out loud like black and white can just look the way that I want but then also say well let's just lower the opacity of this so now we're taking that and kind of tweaking a little further this still has a mascot for so I could still say I don't really like this part or that partner aiken still paint on the mask myself manually I don't have to always be making selections I could just say let's paint this but this to black and I'm going to say I don't really like this area here being quite so de saturated so I was going to make a kind of a rough bit of painting in a couple of places and then take advantage of our properties panel and feather it ah whole lot so it just kind of blends in so just add in just that little added effect now at this point I feel compelled to use one of my favorite expressions and it's a joke but it's not a joke and that is the great thing about using this kind of editing method is that you're never finished the downside to it is that you're never finished and you could go on forever go or I could do this or I could do that and that's kind of the downside is you have to put the brakes on a certain point go that's what I want to to the result that I want to do so if you're working with hundreds of images then take advantage of things like the camera raw ability to adjust a bunch of images including creating presets ifyou're doing individual once you want to tweet then it makes a little better sense to say let me take an extra time moment to do this kind of multiple cameras smart object now I'm deliberately not going to talk about hdr in this class because to me that's sort of a different topic area but the one thing I will say is that this method I just showed you is kind of like bake hdr the fact meaning you can go in and say I want to try to do different exposures after that when combined together is just not really hdr but honestly I like this even better than hd arc is my one worry with hdr as a art form is my personal opinion is a lot of the time hdr to me just goes a little too far into the not like in this case the clouds would be angry and purplish as opposed to just looking realistic but that's just my personal preference if you love hdr go for it do hdr this is just another method kind of gives me hdr ish abilities after the fact now I mentioned a moment ago that you can have this situation of adjusting a bunch of images a tte the same time using preset here's another option I want to show you so here's a different approach that if you don't have a preset I've got a bunch of images here that well I'm gonna be honest with you and say I deliberately chose the wrong white balance because I wanted to show this example which was kind of funny because I was at a workshop with other people in my head I was thinking oh let's let me shoot the wrong white balance and exposure so I have something to fix and I realised afterwards the people stand behind me we're probably looking at me looking at a pretty poor looking image on like and they're like really so I feel like saying it's for a workshop but I didn't anyway it is so here's what I would do in this particular case I say let's pick one and these air again let me sorry pause interrupt myself and say this only works this concept if all of these photos were taken at the same time with the same settings probably shooting either manual or aperture priority if it was set on some kind of auto setting it probably wouldn't work very well because things will be changing but if I looked out all of these images they pretty much have exactly the same camera settings including the wrong white balance so that all of the problems are the same we're very very close to being the same so and this works with j pegs or ross doesn't really matter it gives you a bit more room to play with raw files so I opened one of them in camera raw and I'm going to adjust it overall and say let's take the white balance tool let's say I want that to be white I wantto increase the exposure ttle bit maybe make it a little higher contrast and again as is always the case I'm not deliberately not trying to make it a perfect exposure and trying to make it different enough that you can see that I'm doing something different so I'm probably going to do a couple things I wouldn't necessarily do here all the time but I want you to see that something is happening here let's even expose a little war I'm obviously just eyeballing this but I'm just doing this so you can see the result now I don't hit open because all I want to do is tell a photo shop and camera well in fact bridge to that this is the setting I want I don't want to bother saving a preset because kind of a one off deal but now I just hit done now when I go back to bridge what happens is the first one is updated and the rest are as they were shot so whether I have fifteen more or one hundred fifty more I click on the next one hold down the shift key and click on the last one that will select the rest of them then I right click or control click on any one of them and choose develop settings previous conversion I don't want to use a preset cause I didn't make a preset but this is telling bridge whatever you just did do the same thing to all of these and it goes through and adjust them all and much like when we talked about presets the advantage of this method is it applies the exact same settings I just did all the subsequent ones but none of them are permanent that's the nature of camera wrong so if I look at for example let's just pick one say this one when I look at it I'm not quite sure it still opens with all these settings but then I could easily go and say I would like to tweet the temperature or the explosion or whatever it is or even to sayyou know what in this case I'm going to just make this a grayscale image that's completely up to me I had done and again now back in bridge you will see this one is separate and that's again my reminder of why cameras such a powerful tool because I can do things like pre sets our previous conversion make a whole bunch of changes with knowing I'm not by nature doing anything permanent I could also go in as we saw previous lesson I can crop it temporarily I can make an adjustment what I am when I am happy with it I'm going to say all right let's open that in photo shop and then as I'm working further this files the one I'm going to save us my psd fall so I still have that same structure of psd is my working file in this case my psd contains a camera smart object so I could go back to camera raw and edited and at any time I always have the ability to build on top of this with adjustment layers now the one area of photo shop see see that's different is that camera roth filter that's built right into photoshopped so let's go right back here save some of these other ones or close them I should say it only need these open all the way back here and let's get rid of what we did here so here's a j peg that I opened in photo shop and now I decide I wish I had access to my camera raw editing abilities well in a very short soon try that again very soon very shortly any time now that's what I really meant to say any time now we're going to talk about smart option smart filters but just as a quick preview and touched on this briefly we talked about non destructive I'm choose convert for smart filters then camera raw filter again this is exclusive to photo shop cc so if you don't have this you would have to start from start opening in camera first which I'll remind you up in a second but now I have all these nice abilities of working in camera even though I didn't start that way I can make all these adjustments click okay and you see now it shows up as a filter if I did not first convert for smart filters this would be the same as if I went image adjustments and it said camera raw filter because it would still be a one shot deal so by converting for a smart filter this is the equivalent of that open and photoshopped as a smart object check boxes on in the bottom of the camera raw dialog box this way I have the ability to either hide this completely or double click to edit it if I wish to make any change which is kind of the same as me going doing that camera smart object let's close this for a second and just remind you that if you don't have photoshopped sisi then the way we would do this you say here's r j peg file if I double click on it it'll just open in photo shop if I right our control click I can tell it open in camera raw I've got this ah smart object thing on here so now I could make whatever changes I want and click open object and now it's the same end result the on ly differences in order to go back to camera we double click here instead of being lucy camera off filter on here but not that I could think of to any reason do is but be kind of cool to do the camera filter on top of camera raw smart object down that's too much too too much but so here's the decisions you have to make when you're trying to adjust an image then you have to decide which approach to I want to take so I want to make global adjustments first which I would recommend you do and if so where do I wanna do that camera raw or some of the adjustment layers that built in the photo shop let me quickly say could you use the commands under the image adjustment menu yes you you could certainly but remember those are the more destructive permanent methods now let me also add have there ever been times where I just open a photograph and use levels direct on the background absolutely often not very often it's maur if I someone hands me a really old faded photograph or something I might try and rescue it using levels or I am taking a photograph of something to use as a brush and I want it very quickly make sure it's black and white that I might use levels directly on the image but anything else I try as much as possible to use these methods just in case and then we talked about why work not destructively it's not just about changing her mind it's also being able to replicate the same look in different images so do your global adjustments first when you when it comes to doing selective adjusting I would suggest that you still want to use adjustment layers and make selections and or paint on the mask as soon as you do any of these other tools like dodge and burn you are going mohr into that territory of making more permanent justin's we don't want to do it again nothing wrong with it just not the way I was just in the long term is going to serve you best so I'm going to pick a photograph I haven't picked it yet but I note to self take a photograph for this lesson I'm gonna pick a photograph or two that you'll be able to download and like you to just go in and try and make some adjustments to make it look the way you want it to look so you get used to the idea of making both global and selective adjustments see tomorrow