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Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)

well it's day fourteen and this is the first of our two sessions on retouching I've decided to divide this into two pieces the first one is on retouching in the sense of removing moving that kind of thing altering and then the second one will do specifically on issues with people and faces and retouching in that sense so the first thing I want talk about a little bit is the mind set we have to get into that often people ask us to do things in photo shop and if they don't use the program they'll use terms like take this person out or move that thing over or things that make it seem like we can just pick objects up and move them of course the reality is we can't do it quite that easily if you're starting with a flat photographed with no layers it's not that easy to just pick something up and move it actually in c s six and higher see essex and see see it's a lot easier but there's still some effort required and there's still some work going to have to be done to make that happen so part ...

of the thing is when sometimes when people ask you to do a particular function they say just take someone out again it's not quite that easy now here's a little tip for you if you were a photographer and for example maybe your wedding attire for you're doing some group portrait something like that one of things that you might want to consider doing to give yourself a better chance of success when you're doing this kind of thing of just remove someone is to set up your camera put on a tripod and take a photograph of the setting in other words the background without any people there and that way should you then take a group portrait and then a month later they say you know we've kinda had a falling out with uncle frankly we'd like you to just take him out of the photograph instead of photo shop having to figure out a way to make it look like he wasn't there you have a photograph with the information behind him and then that makes life a whole lot simpler so anytime you khun give yourself a better chance of success by taking a photograph with all the information so if you're doing a studio shoot and you take take a shot of the set without any people in it again that gives you some ammunition too be ableto pull it all together and we'll see more examples of that in future projects but that's certainly a thing to consider is giving yourself a better chance for success now just before we start into this whole thing there's how will we tell the story because I just think it's it's kind of funny how people's impression are influenced by what they see in the movies years ago I had a gentleman came to me and he had a photograph he had taken of the front of his house and he was trying to create a little flyer to help sell his house so he hand me the photo the disk and I opened it on my computer and looked at it it was a decent photograph taken with this digital camera off the front of the house and then he said what I'd like you to do is teo flip it around for me and I thought you looked around like why would you want an upside down photo and he said no to show the back of the house I was like wow that if you have a camera that can do that that would be really cool but the reality is it's like you had a magazine photograph and you flipped it around there be writing on the other side so sometimes we have to help people understand it's not quite that straightforward because we have to think about what we're actually working with so here's an example I look at this photograph and not that I would want to just take out the gondola but for the purpose of demonstration we will and this is an example of you have to determine how you want to do it and it shouldn't surprise you it all by now that I'm going talking in some part of this in terms of doing this in a non destructive manner but as an example we could there's nothing to stop us from using a tool like the clone stamp tool so I click on the tool and I do a quick little checklist of the settings the brush looks like it's a little bigger than a press the left bracket key and the way the clone stamp to it works is you have to hold down option or old and click on an area that you want from which you want to clone so I'm going to say let's clone from here so one click here then as I move my mouse over I've got a bit of a preview if I click and hold the malice if you look really closely you'll see on the left there's a plus sign which is showing where I'm cloning from and on the right is where I'm cloning to and with a couple of quick little bits of work that looks pretty good I mean no one would necessarily know that that godel was ever there personally I would be hesitant to do that this particular way because look at my background layer it's one layer so if I save this the on ly version I would have this would be a safe version with the gondola missing so I'm gonna step backwards a little bit and suggest that it's always what you consider to do your retouching of this nature on a separate layer now there will always be exceptions for example if there was a big speck of dust in the sky of this photograph then frankly I probably would just clone it out directly on the image but generally speaking to give us more options and again this will be even more important when we talk about retouching people I'm gonna add a new layer and the only thing I have to do differently is make sure up here in the options bar for the clone stamp tool that says sample all layers so that's the way of saying when you clone a clone onto this blank player but sample or copy from any layer that's in the document so once again I optional click and then paint over to make it look like it was gone how the clone stamp has been around for a long time and it's a very good tool early days was called the rubber stamp tool not that that means anything but in case you ever hear someone referred to the rubber stamp that means they've been using photo shop for a long time the clone stamp tal the good part of it is it's very easy to use is the on ly perhaps downside is it makes you have to do some of the work you have to click holy down option are all to say let me clone from this location and then I'm gonna clone somewhere else by nature by default and it's one of the settings will look at thee clone stamp tool is always a line there was a fight optional click here and start painting wherever I move the clone stamp tool the source is going to move in a blind way which a lot of the time makes sense and that is the default it is also possible to click the source start cloning and every time you stop and start again the source stays in the same place which for certain operations would be better but let's go back here for a second I'm gonna delete the contents of my blank layer and look at the one downside to the clone stamped on I'm going to make it painfully obvious by doing a bad thing but needless to say it's up to you to pick the right area so if I optional click up here when I go to paint down here it's not gonna look very good because the colors don't match up so the onus is on me to make sure I'm picking and appropriate a place from which to clone so let's look at what this setting does you'll see up here in the options bar here's the setting that says aligned so what this would mean let me show you example it's on aligned so if I optional click on this boat and start to clone it's gonna clone in the boat but if I keep going it just keeps cloning in alignment so you see it all clone some of the other part if I move over here it's still aligned so if I move far enough over it's still cloning based on that same aligned reference so instead if I uncheck aligned here's what it does I'm going toe hold down optional and click is my reference point and then paint a boat and then pay another boat and then paint another boat which in this case the colors aren't matching up but that's really the difference sweeping a lying and non aligned I would say that nine and a half times out of ten I have it set on a line I just leave it on there and it works really well because that's what I want to have happen now there is one panel that's associated with the clone stamp till it's called the clone source this does a couple things first of all it determines how the clone stamp tool is going to operate but it also allows us do other things for example if you're working on a project he keep having to go back to the same source instead of you having to option are all click you can pick one of five sources here and say here's the source I'm gonna click on a place where I want to clone from in this case let's click on there but you see the other option I have is I can do things like rotate so let's actually switch up but I'm gonna click in the middle of his gondola and if I went to clone over here I would get an exact clone but if I start moving the angle I can say now I'm going to clone you see that gondola's at a slightly different angle let me make it even more obvious so this would be more likely a scenario if you were trying to for example cover up part of a building and there were different angles and you need to flip it over that's a pretty interesting concept but because we're cloning onto a separate layer at least I'm going to recommend that we do for me it makes justus good sense to say I'm going to clone onto that separate layer and then take that layer information and flip it and transform it to fit so there's always a couple of different ways to the end result so the clone stamp tool very useful for lots of situations if you want to you can take advantage of this clone source one things I would suggest that you leave on which is on by default is show overlay in the old days of the clone stamp tal here's what used to happen you had optional click and then you'd have to sort of guess whether it's gonna work or not once you started cloning now by default this overlay is showing so at least you can see is it what I have in mind that reminds me oh wait I still have this angle I should re set it back two zero that looks better so now as you're moving it around you can line things up and this is again particularly useful for example if you're trying to clone along the edge of something you want to make sure that the edges line up having that overlay preview is extremely useful I use that all the time I've met some people that are old school uses of force off because they weren't used to it they found it distracting I guess you could but for me it just makes so much better since to have that preview so I can see is my brush a good size in my cloning from the right place on my lining up all those kind of things that happened with the clone source so that's the comb tool I gotta be honest and say in the early is a fuller shop I lived and breathed the clone stample I use it all the time and the secrets that success with the clone sample I used to say which is still true but I just don't use the tool as much is where you pick your clone source is one of the most important things and don't try to do too much before you pick a new source on words as you moved in different part of the photograph the colors were probably shifting so pick a new source when I am using the clone stamp tool I'm often have my finger poised above the optional key so I can say new reference point a little bit more new reference point clone a bit more into me that just helps kind of mix things up there were still be times and you'll see in some of our future projects where I still jump into the clone stand poofs I just wantto randomize things a bit and pick up a bit of information and cloning over just to make things look a little more natural but from a retouching standpoint I gotta say the tool that I probably used more than any other is the spot healing brush in part because it does everything automatically I don't have to do anything I have to click a source and also it tries to blend in with the surrounding colors so here's the difference that clone stamp tool is literally like copying and pasting pixels it doesn't do anything in terms of blending in so as I show you if your colors the area you're picking is a little off it won't blend it it'll just you'll see this is the part I clone this is the part I cloning to and they don't match too bad thie healing tools there's two of them will talk about do make their best attempt to blend it sometimes frankly to the detriment of the end result because it doesn't really look the way you want but the good news is it's automatic so let's first of all talk about the first one the spot healing brush and you notice there's not a lot of options here other than content aware is an option it's fairly new usedto have these options content aware is the best choice in my opinion because now it's looking at the surrounding pixels and trying to make a good choice and once again I have sample all layers turned on with the blank layer so let's make our brush a little bigger and expressing the right bracket key and all you do is kind of paint over the area to say this is the part that I want you to hell and then it well it doesn't and sometimes you might go over the same area more than once just to kind of make sure that you randomize enough but honestly to me that's so much quicker than the clone stamp tool and a lot of the time it does a really good job once again I'm still cloning excuse me I'm still healing onto the separate blank layer so if ever decide I changed my mind I still have that information they're available to me so the spot healing brush does a great job for that kind of thing let's look at another example of where I might use this tool openness so this is starting life as a raw file I chose not to open a smart object is to show you that the difference between using spot healing directly on the image or not so in this case I want to try and make it look like this wire isn't was never there remember I should say notice I didn't say remove the wire because technically we're not really removing it although in the net result we are but that's kind of the thought process we have to be always thinking is how can I make it look like something was never there so I'm gonna add a blank layer I'm gonna try to get a brush size which is just bigger than I need and I can probably do it in a couple of pieces rather than try and paint right across here on a straight line and time using a painting type tool in photoshopped you can click once hold down the shift key and click a second time and it paints a straight line and does all the work for me to do the same thing over here and this end I'm deliberately stopping short of this tower because I think this part might be more of a problem even here and here you see it didn't do the greatest job maybe our brush was just a little bit big guy was doing at a resumed out few let's try doing it closer in here and see if we can get a little better that's better but still little glitch here so for a part like this this is where you might have to do a little bit more work and this is where honestly I I probably might consider at this point switching to the clone stamp tool just because I want to be able to adjust it independently and have a little more control so what I would do in this case like this just to give myself full control is I probably add another new layer just so I can I know that this is already looking the way I want and I want to fix these other parts so I'm gonna zoom a little closer in and this is where now it's which the clone staff told s for the clone stamp notice how it still has the gondola that's kind of an interesting sight no that it is actually possible to clone from one photo to another although I think that's more of these days kind of cool to show someone I don't know what I actually do it that way because that would be kind of working too hard my opinion so here on the option all click on this texture and then see if I can't find in a couple of steps get this looking more the way I want that one wasn't very good I got pretty tight quarters here so I may have to do with it have a couple of shots at it to try and get this toe work let's pick this area here little better I still getting a little bit of the roof line but that's not too bad and then I also need to kind of clean up this part where the healing brush didn't do the best job in the world now let's look at this side over here overall it's not too bad except this part's a little funky in this edge here so if we look at it I would say that maybe right in this area would take my lasso tool and just delete this part that I don't think worked very well because it would be easier in this case again to goto our clone stample in this particular instance so here's where we can take advantage of that preview I'm gonna clip right on that line optional click on the line of the building and then as I move up let me make it bigger so you can see see how is I moved that preview I can actually see I should line up right there and then as I move up it's a lot easier to kind of line things up so that's where that preview really pays off is when you're trying to go right up on edge of something to make sure it looks nice and that's why frankly we have the spot healing and the clone stamp too because they both excel at certain things the spot healing tool did a pretty good job overall but for some detail areas not as much so for parts of this image where I'm seeing like the shutter doesn't look quite right that's where I might consider going in and using the clone stamp toe now in typical photoshopped fashion that you probably should be absolutely used to by now we always have multiple choices sometimes if you're trying to cover something up to make it look like it wasn't there the easiest solution is just to use pixels that are already there so for example I'm gonna take my rectangular marquis tool and I'm gonna make a selection like this to say this is the part I want to cover up but I'm going to move it up here a little bit make sure I'm on my background layer and I'm also going to feather the edges a little bit just cause I want to make sure that it kind of blends in nicely and all I do is take the move tool with the option of bulky held down and just drag and then it's on its own layer so I can just nudge it sorry undo that and then all I do is from the background liar press commander control j and that's going to put that on its own layer now I can use my move tool and just kind of nudge it down to the point where it covers everything up and I just have to find the right place I think I probably feather it just a bit too much but you get the idea that now now look at the edge of the building here if I wasn't quite right I can use the arrow keys to nudge left or right so that concept of saying you know what let me just take part of the image that's already there and use it is another very useful command and I probably wouldn't use that especially for situations where you have a very definite edge like this part here remember the spot healing brush didn't do the best job in the world I might consider going in to this part of the image I usually try to take a little bit of a bigger chunk than I need just to make sure we're gonna feather it a little bit this on I'm feathering by right for control clicking off quite as much this time on my background brown layer duplicate take the move tool and trying move it into position overall it's covered things up pretty well it looks to me like it's lined up pretty well and this is right this moment down in history just kidding but this is one of the few times I'd say and now I would take my eraser tool yes you heard me say it because now that I've got most but working I know this part doesn't look right so I can actually a race any little part that doesn't look good but you see how that looks a lot better and frankly it was a whole lot easier than either cloning or he'll sew in a simple project like this if you try to do the whole thing with the spot healing brush it probably wouldn't work if you try to do the whole thing with the clone stamp tool it would be too much effort so the reality is we're going to do spot human as much as we can and then pull back a little bit the parson didn't work so well maybe clone little bit and then this method of copying part of a layer and moving it is almost like the clone stamp book separate unit by selecting some pixels rather than painting with the tool but in each case each scenario I'm still saying let's put on a separate layer just so I have the chance of moving around and making it match up so that's kind of the basic concept of using these particular tools now let's go back here for one second and hide these other layers in fact let's just delete everything I've done so far since I'm just plain making new layer the other thing I wanna talk about little bit is the difference between the healing brush and the spot healing brooks were I was using the spot healing brush here because it doesn't require any work now when we talk in the next session about re touching people's faces this comes into play even more in this particular case because there was just all this sky everywhere it was absolutely not a problem to use the spot healing brush and just go paint over this and have it do its thing that's what the killing brushed up she's me the spot healing brushed the healing brush operates very much like the clone stamp tool in terms of you have to click a reference point but then it does a better job than the clone stamp tool of blending things in with the background so I still would go in and decide I want to make a sort of a semi hard brush I'm going optional click and make sure that I'm using this part of the sky before I go over and heal this other area you could still have sample all layers turned on you can decide whether it's a line or not but the big difference between this and the clone stamp tool is it does a better job of blending things in so the question that comes up well then why would I use the clone stamp tool because sometimes you don't want it to blend in for example with the gondola and the water what might happen is it would try to blend in with the existing texture and not look quite as good so sometimes you actually do want to covered up completely so that's why we have both tools I would be honest and say my use of the clone stamp tool has decreased dramatically from probably five or six years ago when the the healing type tools were introduced that meant that the need to use the clone stamp tal has decreased but there are still times where it makes sense and again tomorrow when we talk about the re touching people's faces its going to still be a combination of all those kinds of things okay so let's look at another example here what do you do and someone says something like we'll just take this person out of here well one of the technologies that any time you hear about something in photo shop that has the phrase content aware attached to it that's usually a very good thing content aware is a technology it started with content or scale and then content where phil announce progress into some other tools and it means it does a better job of looking at the surrounding pixels and trying to see and try to intelligently to some degree phil things with the appropriate kind of pixels now what's interesting about to me is that sometimes it's absolutely outstanding I mean it does an amazing job other times you kind of wonder why did it do that now the only downside about content aware phil is that you cannot do it to a blank letter on the words off the other tools I've been showing you where it's a sample all layers I was able to in effect say put the results on that separate layer in here it's a matter of me saying I want would like to do that with content where phil but I can't so my auction be either work directly in the background there which I would be hasn't to do or duplicate the layers of commander control j will duplicate now I make any selection all I'm just gonna make a very rough selection to say this is the information I want to get rid of cover up to make it look like it wasn't there and I go to edit phil and you'll see one of the options in the field command is content aware when I click ok it does its best attempt to fill things in and overall it's not bad have a shadow left so I would go back and do the same thing contests alright phil and then content aware okay and overall it's pretty good there's a few little ear's apart here that looks a little odd so I might do that again phil another are shortcuts for all these things of course and it's not perfect especially down here but overall it's pretty good and that's the cool thing about content aware is it just does the work for you so you don't have to worry about any picking a source or anything like that it just does it automatically as they said the only downside to it is that it does not allow me to do this to a blank layer so in this case I had to do the entire layer which is not a horrible thing but what I would do instead now because the didn't happen in this case but sometimes when you content aware fill it picks the wrong area I've used this photograph before in demonstrations and sometimes I do exactly what I just showed you I hit content where phil and down in the sand a mountain appears it's kind of like wonder why it chose to use a mountain this time well that's part of the issue with content where philip is somewhat random and how it works so instead what I might do is use the patch tool now had a new layer their new layer there we go the patch tool has been around for a while but now it's much better because it has this option called content aware so if you're looking at your patch tool and you see this normal I would suggest you very quickly run to this command and change it so says content aware and again I have sample all there's turn on so the difference between this tool and content where phil I get all of them in here is that now I've got a preview so as I go to drag I can say would that make sense not really how about over right about here somewhere and you see how I can I can line up the line of horizon when I let go it doesn't much job better job of blending that in then I can pick this part and again choose an area obviously you pick one that makes sense and in a couple of quick clicks to me looks pretty darn good and the results are on that blank layer now there's one thing about this patch tool that's quite unique and it's one of only a couple of tools and photoshopped that does this is a new thing that is new to photo shop early on in our thirty days I talk to you about best practices and get in the habit of that checklist idea of looking at the options bar the patch tool and one other tool will talk about a minute are two of the only tools and photo shop where you can use the tool and then change a senate usually with the exception of type tool you have to pick the settings for the two on the options bar and then use it if you don't like the results you have to undo enough times or step backwards enough times to be able to redo it but the patch tool is an exception and in this example I'm not sure how well you're going to be able to see it I'll try do it that's the second time in a row that I meant to click on a new layer and I clipped on a new group instead all right this is setting I'm talking about adaptation very loose to very strict on this particular photograph we may or may not see it let's see if we can get it to work you see it's making a bit of a change but the main thing I want to show you is that because I haven't done any other step I have the ability to go back on you and see what would it look like if I changed this adaptation setting and that the only reason this is working is I haven't done anything else in other words if I tried to use the patch tool and then clipped somewhere now this is all bets are off it's too late now so this ability to move something and then change the adaptation on the fly is really very useful because honestly there's no easy way to say well in this case I assume like should use an adaptation of a very strict sometimes very loose it really varies a lot with the photo that you're working on so whether using the content where phil or the patch tool we're still putting on a new layer and the advantage of the past tool is again that you get that really nice preview or you can position something and say that's exactly where I need to put it when you let go it calculates and does the patch on that separate layer that's assuming I have course sample all layers turned on now here's the other similar kind of tool this one is really interesting because this saul's on issue that people used to say and also people used to ask me this I was just kind of heavy sigh because again people have this expectation I blame hollywood mostly because people see things in the movies and people just go let me fix that change that move that and for example look at this photo right here there's a couple of standing in front of a brick wall and they look at it and they say oh that's that's really nice but can you move it over a bit well that sounds so easy doesn't it just use the words move us over a bit well in photoshopped terms that means pick us up and put us on our own layer move that layer over and then somehow cover up where we used to be to make it look like we're not standing there anymore which is a whole lot harder than just saying move the people over thankfully as a photo shop cs six there's a tool that was introduced that actually does a remarkably good job most of the time now before I show this to you let me mentioned a couple things about it's called the contents were moved tool and it will attempt to both move and cover up using content aware technology where the pixels used to be and I got to say even when it fails it's still a better start than me doing the whole thing by myself and I gotta say most of time it doesn't really fail as much as you think oh that wouldn't been my first choice but it's still pretty darned good so here's how it works I've got a new layer set up and I'm gonna take this content aware move tool now just so you know I could also make a selection with any selection tool first and then switch to the tool but you'll notice I am not attempting to make a perfect selection by any means I'm not tryingto be bang on effect I find it works better when I don't and in the options bar here for this tool I've got it set on move and the adaptation is medium which is kind of halfway through and very important of course sample all heirs so now I decide I want these people over say here and now when I let go it starts to do some calculations and you see very quickly look what it's done if I d select that overall it's pretty good this part here is a little distracting so I will talk more about what's happening here a second but in this case I might so you know what let's just take this patch tool and see if we can't find a patch that looks a little better and I also look for repeating information like here it looks a little too much of a repetition so I might try and mix that up a little bit but again I would say if someone walked into the room right now and said let me take a look at this I doubt anyone would say oh I can tell you move them over because you probably couldn't so here is the original here is now and what it did was it made move them over and you can see it automatically patch the areas that it need two which is frankly this this tools still amazes me sometimes when I use that I'm I shake my head and think wow when I think about what I used to have to go through to do this it's pretty amazing so let me go back a step here and talk about one other operation I'm going to go back to the content of where moved tool again make my loose selection onto his dragon around them and I'm trying to get a little bit of the stone as well but this time just to show you I'm going to set this adaptation on very loose I drag him over once again and it does the calculations now let me also add the bigger the file the longer this would take so we have a very high quality file you would let go with the contents were moved to and then you would see a dialog box saying analyzing and it would take a little bit longer but listen let's look at this example you say it's perfect except for her face which is like yikes in her leg what happened here well that's because the adaptation on very loose clearly is not a good choice but as I mentioned with the patch till a moment ago all I had to do is long time do anything else I can say well maybe medium would it better and then it kind of re calculates and redraws the screen that's a lot better let's see what very strict looks like it's gonna redraw that that's weird because it made her look better but look what happened to his head so that's why I'm telling you you can't just automatically assume I should use strict or very strict medium seems to me to be the whoa that was weird that doesn't normally happen interesting I'm getting some really interesting results here and partly that's because I'm doing too many steps in rome normally you would pick one adaptation and then choose a different one to see if it looked any better because I was flipping around it's got a lot of weirdness going on here and in some cases if you if that starts to happen where every time you change it you start getting really bizarre things happen like she looked like she was bald for a second or their faces are are way off at a certain point you may have to kind of an effect aboard and say let me try that again because something about the way I did this is not working very well but again except for situations like this where I kind of went a little bit wonky because I was trying to do too many operations to show you it's a pretty powerful operation to be able to say pick this thing or these people up move them and make it look realistic and again when you compare it to what we used to have to do to go through that it really is pretty amazing technology and again it's my one of things that you mentioned way at the beginning was having realistic expectations about fulla shop and this is one of them as much as I would love every time it was perfect sometimes it's not but because I'm doing it on separate layers and because I have a room to tweak my expectation is a lot of the time it'll be very good other times it'll all have to work a little bit harder to get to the result that I want believe if this content where move gets me closer that's still a good thing because it still means that I got a lot of the work done automatically now I'm kind of tweaking it myself a little bit all right let's close some of these many files we have open here and take a look at another a portion of the content aware moved tool is if you want to extend the background so this photograph are looking at right now is one that I shot many years ago when I was first getting back into photography and I went to a workshop landscape workshop and we were out shooting and I took this photograph and when the instructor looked at it his reaction was he said something like I think he actually just used the phrase target practice and years later I've heard people call this the bull's eye and that means the main object is positioned dead center in the image and although that there's nothing really wrong with it from a composition standpoint it's not terribly interesting so his suggestion was next time try positioning that leaf so it's not dead center but a little off center so my thought was well maybe I could at least try to get to that result after the fact in photo shop so I take my crop tool and I'm gonna crop it first of all like this so the leaf is closer to one edge hit enter but then I want more so I'm gonna take that same cropped will but this time drag it back out so I'm effectively making it back to roughly an eight by ten and I got all this extra cannabis now but I would like to extend this photograph to make it look like there's more of it here so one of the ways that I could do that is to make a selection and I have found when I've played with this command that I like taking a basic selection like this which is not quite as much as I need but it's a good start but then also randomize ing in a bit I'm using the lasso tool of the shift key held down and I'm selecting a bit more because I want even more of an overlap and in here I'm just kind of making so it's not just a a very straight edge so now I add a new layer because I want again to have that control I go to the content of where move tool but this time I change the mode of the tool from move to extend and I'm going to start off with medium because I'm not really sure which one to use sample all layers have turned on and I have a blank layers that's my little in this case checklist to make sure everything is the way I want it I start to move it and I move it as much as I can something like that and then it does its calculations and when I d select that's pretty good except for this that looks a little bit obvious there but we'll get to that in a second now I could make another selection knows I got a little bit of ah ah bit the tip of the maple leaf I need to fix up but again this is just kind of the first step let's drag this out now and in this case it see what happens if I change the adaptation will bed think I like that one better now overall it looks pretty decent and it's done most of the work and interestingly you'll see it's gone pretty far into where I made my original selection but in order to fool people's eyes into thinking I actually took the photograph this way I still have a bit of work to do but the point of this is that content aware move with that extend feature got me way closer to the result that I want now on this blank layer for example first of all I would take my spot healing brush say I don't want three of the same thing that's very obvious nor do I want things in here so I'm just kind of dragging trying to randomize that a little bit and this is where now I would finish it with the clone stamp tool because in the clone stamp to like and say all right let's take an area like this I'm gonna lower the opacity down so it's not a hundred percent and I'm going to paint something different so my goal is to say let's take for example this edge right here and put it in here this is where I could you take advantage of the clone source to kind of rotated a bit fix what I'm trying to do here that looks better because my goal here is I don't want the edge to look exactly the same that wasn't great choice because it can see it kind of cut off there so that probably go the other direction instead let's pick another one there anytime you can pick us a different source like I'm seeing this same thing repeat several times so let's grab a piece here and try and cover that up just randomized it a little bit so it doesn't look quite so obvious that the same thing is repeating over and over again and when you the down one danger and having a really big clone tool like I do with a soft edges that very quickly you might clone the wrong party have a little bit too much now there's nothing to say that you have to on ly use the information that's there I could clone the darker parts because again I want to make it look so it's not quite so repetitive anytime I see a real repetition that's the part that I want to fix what again let's let's do this let's say now we're going to work on this project you're not really all I'm doing is taking your focus away from that for a second because here's the thing that I find when you do any kind of retouching where our own worst critics because we've been staring at a photograph for so long that you're trying to clone and adjust in fix you're being really picky as you should be to a degree but sometimes I think to a point where it's too much so what I suggest you do is that as you're working on a project do as much as you can save it has a psd of course and then move off and do something else later the same day the next day then you come back and look at the photograph with fresh eyes and see does something jump out of you this still jumps out at me a little bit here so let's take our clone stamp tool and clone from here I'm gonna put this back make sure it's back to zero again and I just want to cover up that part that looks just like the other ones that see that repetition but you I find at least when I move away from a project and come back I look at it with almost like a fresh set of eyes admire actions often see that's what I thought of us I tend to get so caught up in something like that doesn't look good that doesn't look good the other thing that I would suggest you do is that we also have to keep things in context of what we're going to do so for example in reality may be the reason why I might want to extend this photograph is to put another photograph on top of it or put some text on top of this so for example maybe ultimately I would do this I'd make a new layer that I make a big rectangle that I'd fill with white and then lower the opacity and on top of this do a big paragraph of type make a little smaller something that just for the purpose of demonstration so now any worry I had about well that doesn't look so good now it actually looks fine because I'm covering it up so when you are jumping into a project of saying I need to adjust this then at some point you have to make a judgment call to say if I'm just trying to make it look like something was never there I'm extending the campus to try and change the photograph that yes you do want to make sure every little detail looks great but when we do projects for example like extend to photograph so I had just enough information if I paste another person on top of it it looks natural than what's underneath them really isn't all that crucial anymore the other thing that is a sort of a general hint that I always give any time talking about retouching is the temptation is to just show before after photographs and the problem with that is that when you show someone the before photograph and then the afternoon there how good you're a retouching job is people tend to be able there I just kind of go to the difference I always compared to the in the old days they probably still are but I haven't read a newspaper in a while but the newspaper used to be those little spot the difference cartoons where you have to try and circle things that were different most people are pretty good at those they looked back and forth they can see the difference so if you show someone show someone before photo and they look at the after and they go up my approach is instead if you feel really compelled to show someone before and after show them the after first because if they look at that after photograph let's put it this way if they look at an after photographing go what's with this high that's not good because that means they're seeing something weird if say I opened this photograph I didn't say this was an after photograph and they looked at it hopefully if someone says that edge looks a little bit repetitive well yeah that that's a good indication but hopefully you'll get to the point where you'll show them the after photograph not just talk well that's nice and they won't see the difference uh the other thing that I would suggest and we'll talk about this and uh more detail winkle retouching people but the same theory applies one of things that we have to try to do is educate people that is good a tool is photo shop is I mentioned this earlier is that things still take time so when the best things I ever saw was someone was showing they're retouching services and they had before and after slideshow which is what many people do because it was impressive to see before or after now they were doing retouching dramatic retouching photographs and also restoring old photographs and what they did in their slideshow that I thought was brilliant because it helped people realize what's really involved is they would show the before photo and then in the out under it so before and then it would say after but the difference was they would say after eight hours after six hours after four hours so they were putting a timeframe that people doesn't think oh that took them ten minutes because I think people have this perception and polish up that everything takes ten minutes where really it doesn't it takes a lot longer than that because the reality is yeah it's going to be some effort to get in some cases in some cases you'd look out you go content aware patch tool get done but there's other times where is just going take effort this example here of my may believe I'm not happy with it yet I want to do more work on this edge to try and make a look a little better and maybe on the texture up here but overall it's very close and it didn't take me that long to get to that point now sometimes when we're talking about removing information making it look like something it's not there we have to take a different approach so here's an example it I'm telling you our was mentioned for this is thie after photograph that I'm showing you right now before photograph look like this had a big overhanging shadow and I wanted to try to remove that shadow or word it better make it look like that shadow wasn't there so I would always try a couple different approaches but sometimes along with just saying used the pixels that were already there we can also use the commands that are built into photo shop so I've made just a very quick selection off my that shadow and I'm going to use a levels adjustment layer and at first and this is just meet eyeballing it I'm moving this slider to the left to the point where I go right about maybe there may be a little more that looks pretty close it's not perfect but it's pretty close now what often happens is thie edge doesn't look very good because really hard to get a clean edge so I would make a new layer and this is where I would take it to a like the spot healing brush he said even though they used the quick selection tool the spot healing brush I wish for osaka just get around and be voice activated already so I'm trying to do is get rid of that very noticeable edge that's there and already we're pretty close I mean that's a really good start however if we get a little closer you can see one of the problems if you start to really do a dramatic just of levels is you might lose there's some texture and hear that I'm not seeing any more still want to get rid of a little bit of this edge so what I might decide to do on top of this is just do a little bit of a texture kind of a thing so let's add a new layer I'm going to fill this layer with fifty percent grey now the reason for doing this any time you want to have something I want to create a bit of a texture but haven't still look at the underlying picture I can't just paint it with a texture I want to put the texture on this layer there really was a blend mode to make it look the way that I want so give myself options as we saw in the last couple of classifying convert to a smart object so that I can have it as a smart filter so we're going to do let's do sandstone is good I have no idea what scaling to use or relief to use yet so we'll just put something in there and change the blend mode to hard light now that's too much but it's not a bad start and I'm going to take advantage of this laywer maskell down optional and just drag it on top of this layer so now the texture will only appear in this area now that I've done that now I could go back and say all right we've got way too much this needs to be much much lower that's better and then let's lower the opacity a little bit and again I'm just eyeballing this teo to kind of get the effect that I want but overall I'm pretty happy with that now from the last time I did this I did some other things on top of this and continue to work on it but part of the reason I want to show you this is it's not retouching in the sense that yes I used a little bit of the healing brush but in this case it was more look at the problem and the problem is I want to make it look like that shadow wasn't there the information is still there it's just a shadow it's a darker one so I thought maybe if I use on adjustment layer with a mask I'll get a really good start on top of that a little bit of retouching so there's always lots of ammunition available to you in terms of tools to use but the key things that I want to touch on this first segment on retouching is that yes you have a variety of tools and it's unlikely you'll ever used just one the content aware options are always a good one to start because as I said before you know if they don't to even when I should say because it's not if even when they don't do a perfect job it's still pretty good and that's why the patch tool with content aware to me is one of the most significant additions in the last two versions of foolish up because it's the one content where tool where I can control it but it's a pic from that area and put it on a blank layer and again content where phil tools are just part of the equation on top that bit of cloning a bit of healing and maybe even this example where you add justin layer and tweet the settings and whatever you want thinking of ways where you could make it look the way that you want so I'm going to post this photograph it's a challenging one no question about it but if you kind of follow through these few steps my suggestion would be and then they go back and kind of review what happened here let's actually delete the hidden layer so this is what you will get is a photograph that looks like this so I'm going to start off by using the correct tool tool like the quick selection tools that when I would use because it just looks for that edge all the way across we're going to add a levels adjustment layer which will only affect that area and it's a matter of finding the right position to make it look the way you want on your monitor once I've done that then new layer and I'm gonna go around the edge to make sure I'm not seeing an obvious edge and then once I've done that yet another new layer which we fill fifty percent gray and use this filter gallery texturizing tto add some texture and then copy the mask optional drag and tweaked the results and deliberately kind of zipped through that because hopefully you'll have watched this first but this is just a little assignment that's going to give you a bit more work to do to try and come to a result that you're happy with your going toe save the psd file I would suggest you work on for awhile save this psd quit leave it alone get away from it for a while and come back with a set of fresh eyes and see where do I need to fix us up a bit and since I want to give you lots of stuff to play with also upload that photograph of the leaf so you can have that available to is another one to play with so enjoy this kind of experimenting tomorrow we'll talk about some variations same kind of tools but how specifically we do things to retouch people's faces and also additional things we can do such as whitening teeth whitening eyes and all that kind of stuff so have fun playing with this and we'll see you tomorrow