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Lesson Info

DeSharpening and Healing Brush

We talked yesterday about changing the depth of field. We did it with that siri's of the bride and the bridesmaids in it. This is a kind of a variation on that right here, here's, the original shot that I took up it light workshops plugging in this this week. Here is our glamour one. Now, you guys have to tell me how we took the this shot. Let's close collapse, give ourselves a little room here. Here is our before what is being done to retouch specifically, the skin going on here? What was what did we do yesterday? I don't know. You did a hundred things yesterday waited this skin softening. We did this skin softening. And what were the parameters for the skin softening? It was primarily an anti clarity. We take a look at our masters are mask that we're working on this case I painted in. You can see yesterday if you remember the portrait took up the entire area, so I did this skin softening over everything, and I raised where I didn't want it. In this case, I'm coming up here, and I'm a...

dding this extreme anti clarity just to specific areas that I wanted to soften, okay, we come back and, uh, take a look at the model, you can see what we're trying to do in terms of softening we've got some extreme side light coming on here all the little blemishes are showing up if we come over here to our, um adjustment brush our spot removal tool we do we are I am using that for a number of the larger ones but a lot of the work in terms of the skin softening going on here is being done because of this clarity anti clarity I'm gonna delete that pen so you can see the difference between clarity and non clarity I've got a funny feeling I've got a secondary clarity going on right here so there is without it and here it is where that which is it helps keep doing that I don't turn on the preview so I go yeah you see the difference he could okay so anyway so we're moving of that pen and here it is with the pen so we're definitely doing some significant skin softening using this anti clarity brush in this case we're also of getting quite a bit of texture underneath the model's eyes so here we did an extra hit not only of the anti clarity so we're doubling it up in that area but we're also taking the saturation down we're getting a little bit of color rendition in that shadow area so both of those again take it look att what's being done you can see where the softening is taking place so that's a little review from what we did yesterday I think those were that two pins that's what we did the skin softening for our model the topic is here yes question I was just curious for things like glare is there something you could do to kind of reduced like oily skin kind of glare? Yeah, yeah it's actually, that clarity is exactly it because what's that is doing is reducing edge contrast so that transition between a speculum highlights a you know, an oily skin er is one of the best things you can do yesterday we did it on skin softening for a baby in that case had a little bit of a rash again it has some excessive contrast in there in terms of color and tone but there's two things that you could do if it's a really hot speculum highlight in there you could do the same thing that we would do in photo shop which is actually patch we were doing yesterday we did that circle under the eye where we took on we painted over the circle into the eye it chose a piece of skin right below it in a sense it did a patch a graft of skin above it and then we use that opacity just to bring inasmuch as we wanted to to minimize that it's the exact same concept that you would do on ah, speculum highlight on the skin you'd actually do, like a skin graft. So if you got a spot highlight here, you actually take your tool and I'll pull out a sample during lunch so we can do it. But you would cover up the offending area, completely heal it, use another skin. It would go away completely. You don't want it to go away completely that's actually saying that's showing you where the light's coming from, you just don't want it to be a pure speculum highlight. So you take your passage down zero for that patch, and then you just pull it back in, and basically, what you're doing is you're putting a little bit of makeup, skin tone makeup, just as if you were doing real makeup, so that is a great way to do it. If clarity doesn't do it as a default, it could be that clarity is enough by itself. So very good question the other thing that we did on this file and she's got beautiful here, it's not perfect in the sense of you were tryingto, you know, set it up and have it all laid perfect if this was some sort of add so the one thing that you could do and this works for fly away here in a lot of different situations. That's one of the things especially if you're doing a studio, we've got a black background or something every little stray hair, whether blonde, brunette, redhead, whatever it's all going to show off. So the question is, do you retouch it all or do you somehow minimize that distraction using something else? So again, what we're gonna do is come up here with our adjustment brush, come up, reset our settings by clicking on the minus I'm going to take the sharpness all the way down, I am going to come up here and I am going to because I'm gonna come right up to the edge of the smiles face I am going to use the auto mask I am going to come up here and we will turn on that mask so we can see it because this when you do a sharp ej blur where this is going to be blurred, but it goes right up to a range of sharp, sharp edge that you want to maintain sharpness, there's that's where the autumn ask obviously comes in. We did that actually yesterday with the little girl in the flower fields where we were able to do that and actually mask out that hair perfectly, we didn't use it for blurring we used it for tone, but this we're now talking about, you know, stray hairs and again, I'm going to get a little bit smaller with the brush as I go around said sometimes you get a little greedy because we've got brown hair with brown skin this is going to be a little bit more challenging for the auto mask to take care of, but I'm gonna do that same thing that we did before that if I get carried away and it does overlap into the skin, which were getting out just a little bit here right along the edge holding down that option key gives me the eraser and I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to a race and that's going to say ok, skin to oh, I get it skin tone okay? And again I'm going to do that here I'm getting a little bit of the chin now I can go back, let go of the option or all key come up here a little bit of a spill again now I'm going to come up here, you'll notice there is a refresh prom it's got the grab her hand, but I'm actually using the eraser right there so that I believe like I said, oftentimes when you're using a remote video source it confuses the refresh toe holding down that option or old key it was going to be a little bit of a variable because I got hair on here I don't want this hair to be blurred. I only want to blur the background. So this is gonna be a little bit of a challenge here holding down that option or all key. Wait, do you have this cancer at some point? Won't bring up that sample and let's go ahead and we'll do it around the hand as well. Here we've got shadow. I'll do both of these and then all the race come in here. Well, I'm entertaining myself, painting away any questions from either studio audience or the internet. Mmm mmm mmm. Okay, we sure do. S o, uh, gym in virginia. I was asking and we've talked about this, jack a little bit over the last couple days, but like he was a kind of reiterate talk a little bit about your permission to experiment. Jim was asking about you taking artistic liberties and adding, you know, bit of glue to the blue sky and how you feel about that particular subject on that's an interesting way, and that is how I phrase it that way. Permission giving yourself permission to play is a challenging situation, especially if your commercial photographer and you need to balance out getting work done with parting around, we'll say, using the awful expression, um, the couple things going on there one, um, if you're never experimenting then, by definition, you're never going to be stretching yourself. You're never going to be growing your entire life. Your your goal is to make yourself a better person tomorrow than you are today, a richer person, hopefully a nicer person, hopefully a more talented person, hopefully all sorts of other things. Why not? The alternative is to make yourself the same tomorrow as you are today and that's awfully depressing. Um, you know, why would you not want to be nicer tomorrow or smarter or richer or whatever? So when it comes to the creative process, the only way that you're going to become more creative or mohr capable is trying something you've never done before by definition, if all you do is I know it like walk into my studio and I can nail it every single time, and I got my routine down and that's great that's, great on dh that's totally fine. Hopefully then when you get home, you're doing stuff you've never done before, and you're experimenting and your poppies, or where you get that creative liberty toe, stretch yourself and do things you haven't done before, but somewhere in your better life in your life, you'd better be stretching yourself and I would say, if you're within these creative arts there's no reason why not to push yourself but finding that balance between I got to get the work done I can't go down a rabbit hole of experimentation because I got the deadline and well okay, I'll make a snapshot I'm said I've got it I've nailed it I've got five extra minutes maybe I'll try a high key a black and white across process I'm gonna try something I've never done I've never sold across process portrait in my life I've never done x portion I'm going to give you you know priest that so you can fart around really quick awful expression but you can experiment very quick and see where they go and kind of go okay, you know that kind of felt good you know that's that is very creative you your cross processing effect is something that would not be done in camera so I think that ability to give you permission to experiment with your work creatively is twofold one it allow you to differentiate yourself from other people because if you keep doing the same thing at some point you don't have anything to offer especially in this market with his ten billion photographers and everybody in the world's got a camera on their hip and everybody is getting expressive and crazy and wacky because we're all trying to get our creative juices flowing we're all trying to stand out we're all trying to you know and we're all a little bit you know clean, beautiful, sharp photographs don't have the appeal as a cz they have done in the past storytelling hasn't changed me very quickly say that there's nothing less important about a beautifully shot exposed lit photograph but really what you are selling is a photographer is this story it's that it's the power and the passion of the moment whether it's a person, place or thing you're telling the story and nowadays in the past it could be that if you just took a beautifully lit, sharp, colorful photograph, ninety percent of people on the planet couldn't do that now ninety percent of people people on the planet can do that our cameras basically walk our dogs for us, you know, to clean our windows there so automatic so it really comes down to the storytelling process and that is going to be the moment shaping things like the light and the and your your depth of field and all the things that go into a creative photograph. But these expressive ways of elaborating on a story through darkroom effects is definitely part of that process. And so you do have my permission to play to fool around and to experiment and things that you maybe haven't done before and for some of you that may be very, very uncomfortable because it's a it's a whole genre that you're not you're very very good at what you do and your have not played with this. So why play with something when you're now a beginner when your are actually already at the top of your field? And I would say that's one of the great things about things like the iphone and lets you fool around and you don't feel like you're you're playing, you're obviously playing and basically what I'm saying is that just like you play with your iphone and you fool around and have fun there's no reason for you not to do that with your big boy images, big girl images and experiment with that same sort of thing and and something like adobe camera but you whether you're using it for your commercial thing, whether you're going to use it in your final images or whether you're using it just to experiment and get your creative juices going, you know one thing I'll mention here in terms of a class that I've got coming up, it was going to be december I think it's not going to be the beginning of next year, but it's areas of photography itself, not digital darkroom effects, but I'm going to do a class here single day classes on infrared photography, underwater and above water around water photography, motion blur, photography and freezing of action photography on macro photography, those air four areas, standard areas of photography that a lot of people either knew or seasoned pros haven't given himself permission to play with infrared is using a converted camera but it's seeing an entirely different part of the world we have seen the world is awesome a lot of people have never shot in motion blur in their life and it's a wonderful way of telling a story especially if you can freeze the potent parts of the story and let other parts go blurry now you can get underwater cameras even pocket cameras for dirt cheap and the ability of shoot around an area that you never shot around before you've never done a macro on the surface of the lake you'll never take it into a pool and maybe done a figure or a portrait underwater you know you guys are photographers and yet here's this entire world of you know anti gravity flotation nebulous wonderful mystical world that you can do by going to costco and getting yourself a little water proof you know pentax and that's a hundred whole world and I shoot surfing I should scoob I shoot whales I shoot all that so that all fits into it underwater is a very unique way of post processing the image so that's also will be doing a lot of post processing in that so underwater scoop of photography and macro most every single camera can shoot macron outfits appoint shoot or we have a nice you know macro portrait lens on or sell ours but a lot of people haven't experimented with that so these air things talking about this idea of permission where I'm going to be doing one day seminars tio toe really hopefully stimulate people to play with their photography not just their darkroom work but their actual how they shoot out in the field as well as how they process those things afterwards great so much that'll teach you to ask a question I will go off so you can teach an old dog new tricks you can't teach an old dog new tricks my my if you haven't caught on already you know if you are not maintaining the enthusiasm and um uh being enam arrayed in them memory enamored, enamored with life in general okay in other words, if the world does not just you wake up every day going you know what new can I learn or explore one of the things I love about traveling is new cultures if you're not constantly going on going what can I learn from this culture this religion? This philosophy this whatever you know the fact that you were born in one set a little area of the world and you think that somehow that you just happened to be born and the right area or something like that that's just silly that's just that's crazy talk as jane and firefly said that's just crazy talk okay so well I'm gonna you know I can play a bit more with thiss masking and but we'll do this we'll say that that is good enough for government work and what did we end up with? We ended up with a taking of our background and taking what is this little distraction? We've taken our sharpness down to zero and even these little hairs that air front on her head here next to this head here is actually staying sharp and here and this is going out of focus. Okay, now this I've been mentioning that you can do this in different versions of a cr adobe has continued to refine this anti sharpness as a lot of you know, people like myself and other instructors and just other people on general gone toe adobe you are so close this is so great, but it never really quite worked. They have continued work very hard to make this tool actually usable for something like what we're doing here, where you can actually minimize some distractions and that's it sharpness all the way down if you want to just soften a little bit I mentioned anything below fifty percent is kind of like a soft diffusion you see very minimal work. I have it at thirty percent here I take it up to like, you know, forty nine percent you'll notice that it's still sharp, okay, settle softening to it as soon as I take it over to fifty percent it's now actually starting to do a real blur and as I come up here getting closer to one hundred it's more significant and again you can max it out at a hundred but of course you can't max it out of one hundred because now we were told that remember you can right click on a pin and duplicate it and get two hundred percent but that's being greedy but yes that was that was that was really cute little response there okay, so anyway that is one were softening our skin tone just like yesterday and we're also using the auto mask in concert with the anti sharpness setting in the new dhobi camera c c again the quality on this is definitely better in this anti sharpening than what we've done in the past. What are we imitating as if we're shooting with a much more open f stop the one area where you may want to use something like this using that duplicate is if you really were trying to do with your shooting with one eight lens and you wantto have the isar and focus noses out of focus the heirs are out of focus like you're just you know your depth of field is inches you could play around with that but also that maybe something you play around with photo shop because photoshopped really has there let's blur gallery now they've had lens blur for a while but the land's board gallery extends that even more so and it gives you even mohr control in terms of how you do blurring but this for a lot of things like simply doing a flyaway hair see if I've got another shot here great model thank you so here I did it for exactly that reason where we've got the model we do the tango okay, we've soften the skin tone and here you can see everything is razor sharp going all the way out to the end I could re touch all these but to be honest, I would much rather make it look like it's a little bit more shallow depth of field. Okay, so that again is a use of this um d sharpening feature within um why don't we came around and leg room? We're gonna end off with that photo shop one this again are wonderful model here here is our before here is our tango with a little bit of work into it this is again a czar glamour this when we went into our hi ki think we did this yesterday and then we did a high key with an anti clarity and a high key with plus clarity to exaggerate that and then we even did a little across processing effect back on our tangoed image what I wanted to do here we just touched really briefly on this concept of using this case this was done prior to the new adjustment brush where you couldn't draw a line so you'll notice if we come up here and actually this area here I did do that, but that's what I wanted to show it was basically one more time talk about this concept of using they um what they're now calling the advanced healing brush to get rid of things like circles under the eyes I did it just briefly with our bride yesterday, so I'm going to take just these components here and do it again because that is something it is one of the major things related to retouching that now it's possible much simpler to do than in previous versions so that again we have our healing and clone for the most part, the healing is great. I'd leave it at one hundred percent to start off with the feather because it's healing remember the blending of the brush is built into the brush itself so you can get away with much less if you want, you can start off with zero or you could give it a little bit of a feather to hide that edge, but it is going to do a good job I typically don't take it too far up that's the opposite if you're using clone, you're gonna have to rely on that feather quite a bit I'm going to come up here and we're going to basically looking at the transition here, okay? And I'm gonna be covering up that transition and then when I come up here and drag out my line it's going to automatically choose a spot it's choosing that again not my favorite area you want to try and find something that shares the same texture of that skin as much as possible we use this one here I don't need it to actually do the texture list half that wiki okay again work doing that show over late we have to we wanted to hide your supposed to hide we're definitely getting a refresh problem should hide not only the pin but the area as well and see if we just do some work on it so now it's working so um the pen is still active, so we've taken the opacity down to zero and then basically you just bring up enough two minutes minimize the distraction if it's at one hundred it's completely going to replace this skin with that one and that oftentimes is not going to be natural looking especially when we do have a different type of skin underneath the eyes is opposed it toward the cheek, so you're just putting in enough there to get rid of that distraction of the area that you're working on there's a little transition here? Maybe I'll do that as well skin and then move to another location it's at this roughly fifty percent capacity so once I've determined how much that opacity is being used it could be that I can use that same one that's gonna be sticky so it's going to use that area that capacity for all it's work against if we can do we can we're having that it'll refresh problem there I think I'm gonna take that even down mohr people do have eyelids upper and lower just trying to minimize that they're so here is what we're you know minimizing so again I'm not completely getting rid of it I am just minimizing it I'm not going to get too carried away with that so it is a drawing on it it is a significant reduction in terms of what we're able to do with it but I'm not in this case doing a glamorous touching with this particular one and again why you're doing that over there um by the way there is a little feature a little hidden feature and that is if you tap the forward slash key and I'm doing this as a pre emptive strike is I know some smarty pants are going to tell me by this feature and if I don't mention it and what it does is it goes through and you're asking madobe camera would you please choose a different source because I don't like the one you just chose each one of these is going way outside I'm not sure why none of them are getting closer but you'll notice by tapping the forward slash key it's jumping to a different area that one is not bad but um and of course the reason is is that brother than you hunt around if you just go forward slash tap tap tap until you get something better move on oftentimes it just happens to grab a texture that's right by it that's using the same one so just a tap is going to be a benefit for um you getting a better fix for it okay, so that is the forward slash key that is the forward slash key on the mac and the forward slash key that's a little bit better on that one there. Okay, so that is that in this case because it's also darker more matching that that could be where if we want to um it may be useful to come up here and do a little bit of dodging and burning, you know something instead of a plus fifty which is a default using something that is going to be, you know, much less so little dodging burn is also something that could be done question quick what you sir phil birdie wants to know does the advanced healing tool work the same way as the patch tool in photoshopped the patch tool in photo shop would be yes and no there's more intelligence to the patch tool in terms of how it's going to bring in the image it's the same concept the hell and clone that we're getting with this is similar to the healing brush in photoshopped a cz example I mentioned yesterday the healing brush and photoshopped now has content where as an option where it's not just borrowing from something it will actually created from scratch that when it comes to speed of retouching is actually nice because you're not worried about where is it going to grab from? It actually will try and heal it by recreating using the surrounding textures um the patch tool is also smarter at blending in the area with what's next to it as opposed to this one. The only thing you have in terms of things like clone is you have a feather slider here that's going to allow you to blend it into the background but there's really no intelligence and it um the patch tool one of the cool things about the passion is the new content aware option within the patch tool so again that's going to use this ability to recreate information that wasn't even there before as an example if we were doing a photo shop retouching class, the content, the patch tool and content where you can actually say I want to take select this item, move it over here and it will recreate the background where that thing wass even though we're dealing with two dimensional photography, it will try and recreate let's say ah when I typically teach this I have a sample of model on a wall you actually select the model, move it over two feet it will recreate the wall from scratch and blend the model into the new wall. So that is the freaking cool stuff about content where technology content where technology is not in the dough became were all yet but it's a very good point because that's exactly what we're talking about here and at what point do you use photo shop and is it better or quicker or easier than it is in adobe camera and sometimes things like this circles under the eyes it can be faster to stick with it here and it all became a wrong I got the brush click changed the opacity move on sometimes it's like no, this is but the keeper job this is the magazine cover I'm going to do what I can in a double cameron, but I'm going to polish it flutter shop and you should you should really go in and because you want to do what's known as pixel peeping you want to edit at a pixel level you can't edit at a pixel level in a doe became a wrong school, is it? It is it's. A procedural processor. It's, not a pixel pusher. If you want to get down to a pixel level. That's photoshopped.