Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Cleanup Selections

Sometimes, there's gonna be instances, like we saw in the example image, where we don't have necessarily a tool that can grab from one side of the image and replace the other side of the image. In that case, we can use what we call custom cleanup tools. And the custom cleanup tool is, I guess, maybe it's something I just made up. But it's custom, because we're using a certain area of the photograph to replace another area of the photography. And it can really help, especially with things that are symmetrical. If we go to our example image, it's right here. I love this photograph. I absolutely love this photograph. It was a complete accident. I walked into, this is at the Lackawanna Station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, walked into this train car and I took the picture, and I had my exposure compensation way off. But what happened was, it made it look like this really blowing highlights coming in from the sides and I did some really artistic work with this image. But before I could do any ...

artistic work with this photograph, there's something that's glaring at me that's saying, "You just gotta go." And that is this little box right here. You probably saw it right off the bat. So what I need to do in order to fix that box, there is no tool that I can use that is gonna really help me grab from another area of my photograph like the clone stamp tool or the healing brush. Any of those tools would just make that all messy. So what I need to do is literally grab a selection from somewhere else in my photograph and replace that other area. So if I were to go ahead and grab something like the rectangular marquee tool, I'm gonna marquee right around the area that I want to replace. Think about this kinda like we're using something like the patch tool. I want to replace this area. After I select that, you can see that there's a little move tool with a little rectangular box inside there? If I click and drag over to this side of the image, I can now get an exact replica of what's happening on this side of the photograph. If I press command or control J, I can duplicate that area. Control T gets me into something called free transform mode, and with that free transform mode, if I right click inside here, I can say, "Flip horizontal." So now I've got an exact replica of the other side of the train car that I can then move over to this side of the train car to replace that area. Press enter. It's not gonna look right, right? And that's okay. We have a lot of different tools that we can use. First of all, we're gonna add a mask to this. We're gonna press B for our brush tool. We're gonna make our brush a little bit smaller. Make sure it's got a really heavy feather on it. And just start painting around that area. Feather it in. Notice how when I grab that toolbox, I grabbed a big selection around it. I didn't just grab the toolbox, because then as I'm painting this in to try and make it blend in, if I grab too small of an area, I don't have a lot to work with to mask out or I'm gonna start seeing that box underneath. So then, we have our curves adjustment layer. Alt or option to clip it in, so now this curves adjustment layer is only affecting what's happening with that chair. And I can make that lighter or darker to help it blend in a little bit better with the rest of the background. If it's got a color cast in it, just go in, it looks like it's got a little bit of blue in it, just make it a little bit more yellow. Maybe in just the dark areas a little bit there. A very little bit goes a long way here. And that looks like there's a little bit of green in there. Maybe add a little bit of magenta to it. Again, a little bit goes a very long way. So you see now that that's much more better blended in. And that's a custom selection tool. There's no selection tool, there's no cleanup tool I should say. It's a custom cleanup tool. There's no cleanup tool in there that is really gonna give you the same desired result with that kind of speed. Grab another area, especially in symmetrical images, it's a no brainer. Just grab the other area. Bring it on over and blend it in. So let's go ahead and bring all of this together in this practical application image here. So we've got a couple different areas here. And this kinda goes into play where we were talking about the chandelier that was in that first image, it's from the same house, from the same real estate shoot. If I were to go ahead and zoom into this area, this is a very tricky area to try and patch up, right? So I need to find different areas. There's certain things in here that I really don't like, that I would really want to replace. One of those is gonna be this, it looks like, I don't know, what is that? Exhaust fan or something like that? I don't really like that. Maybe it's part of the furnace, I don't know. This area right down here with the chair that's peeking in. I don't wanna crop in too much, though, because if I do, I lose this closet door, which is actually giving me a nice little reflection in here. And I wanna get rid of this area up here. So what I would do is I would start looking at the image to access what tool would be the best tool for the job. So to get rid of this chair starting out would probably be the clone stamp tool. I'll just move down. Alt or option. Click right here. And then just start painting away that area right there. Notice how I'm taking a part of the door and replacing the other parts of the door. Grab something like right here to maybe fill in some of that area. Go around like this. Grab right here. Paint in right here. Boom, oh yeah, that's so awesome. I can't help it. You gotta do that while you're doing this. And if you don't have fun while you're working, there's no point. And then zoom out a little bit. Again, I'm teaching you bad habits. I'm doing this on the background. Why don't you throw an apple at me? And so we're gonna go ahead and, I've got a story about that. I'll tell you that story later. We'll go ahead and press this little layer here. And we'll go ahead and zoom into here. And we'll alt or option click around here, and start to remove this exhaust fan or heater or whatever it might be. It's an older house, so it could be anything. And then fill that. Okay, that looks good. I like the chandelier in this case, so I'll leave the chandelier there. But again, this one back here, I don't necessarily want, so I'm gonna get really small. Use the clone stamp tool and just rebuild everything that we see from down here up to here. Alt or option. Click right here. Paint away. Paint away. That needs to go away. And then alt or option here. Paint all that away. Oops. It's a tedious thing. Being an art major, you get to see a lot of really cool things when people are working really hard on something, typically something that art majors would do while they're working like this is they stick their tongue out. I'm telling you, step into an art studio. Half the people have their tongues sticking out. (laughter) And then we'll go ahead and zoom in over here. (talking from audience) And then we'll look at this area from right here. Maybe alt or option click right here. Start filling in this pattern here. Here we do want a repeated pattern. See that? Just take from here, stick your tongue out. Take from here. Okay. So close, so close. We're gonna take from here. And right here. Boom, got ya. That looks pretty good. And then, there's this little highlight here that just throws the whole image off. And what do we do about that? Well, there's nothing we can do. I'm just kidding, so we come here and we go ahead and take our polygonal lasso tool, grab around it. We can try using something like the patch tool. That seems like a good tool to use here. Let's see what we get. We can patch this with, again, we have to do that on the literal layer, because it's the patch tool. We'll go in like that. Does a pretty good job filling in that space. And then we could just go back in on our layer up here, use the clone stamp tool to maybe fix some of those patterns that we see there. Get it to blend in a little bit better. Trying not to repeat any patterns. And this is the challenge. This is another challenge image that you guys can play around with when you download the course. You will get really good. Zoom out a little bit. Hmm, looks alright. If we were to make a bigger brush though, we might be able to select from over here maybe, on a new layer. Alt or option, click here. Maybe smaller brush. Oh nope, that won't work, because the perspective doesn't work. There we go. Looks pretty good without getting too tedious. I challenge you to do it better. How bout that? And if we look at the rest of this image, it looks like everything else looks pretty good to me. If we look at our overall before, this was just a practical application to use multiple tools to fix areas in your image. And if I look up here, that's really going to annoy me, so I've gotta fix that. I'm gonna press alt or option on the clone stamp tool and just clone that right out. Boom, there we go. So here would be our overall before on this image. You know? And it's a pretty cool little room, but looks even better now when we get some of those distractions. And no one would ever know. You don't have to tell anybody, okay? It can be our secret. So I know we talked about a lot of stuff in this lesson about cleanup tools. We introduced the reason why we clean up. Again, it's to maintain our integrity while we do it. And just make the image look overall better for the end user or the end viewer. We talked about Adobe Camera Raw with spot removal. Those dirty sensors. The best thing to do about a dirty sensor is clean it. But if you don't have the option to clean it, and you already took pictures with it, you're changing lenses out in the field, it's gonna happen. Use the spot removal tool and really look at those areas. Especially areas of skies. Skies are really gonna be the ones that pop out the most. We talked about the healing tool, the spot healing tool, the difference between the two. The healing tool is where you select the area and fill in. The spot healing tool is more like Adobe Camera Raw where it finds another area and fills it in for you. But it doesn't show you what it's filling in with. Talked about the clone stamp tool, the patch tool, content aware move tool, which is kinda cute, but kinda fun to play with. And then the custom selections where you grab something symmetrical on the other side or something very similar on the other side and replace that area. And then we also did a practical application to wrap everything up and show how we can use multiple tools at the same time and not any one tool is a better tool than the other. So do you have any questions on cleanup tools? [Audience Member 1] A question I have is you said use Camera Raw as a filter on a couple applications. How do you go into Camera Raw as a filter? That's a great question. We're gonna talk about that during filters, but I'll answer that really quickly. There's a hotkey called control or command shift A that will automatically take you into Adobe Camera Raw as a filter on whatever layer that it is that you're working on. But at any time, if you click on any pixel based layer, go to filter, and go to Camera Raw as a filter. You can see right there the hotkey is control shift A, command shift on a Mac. And I noticed that you were clicking a lot of times when you're using the clone stamp tool. And then sometimes I noticed that you weren't clicking and just following through. When do you click all the time and when don't you click all the time? Yes, so the question is when do you click and when do you not click with the clone stamp tool? Any time you click, you are resetting the clone stamp tool sample. If you click and drag, even things that you've already covered up, will appear on the other side of the image. So if you click, and then stamp, click, stamp, click, stamp, click, stamp, click, and you're clicking as you do it, it's always resetting the sample. Where as if you just click and drag, it samples the whole time, even though it might've covered something else up. It's remembering what was underneath that canvas and putting it somewhere else. [Audience Member 2] When you have a photo, I went to Costco for example, and I had a photo that was completely the wrong size, couldn't make it the wrong size, and had a bunch of, I was able to go in and figure it out, but can you use content aware to add to that photo to make it a size so you can get it printed, like when you go to Costco? You could. You could definitely sample other areas. What I would say is if you're trying to expand your image using content aware fill, there's no problem with that, you just have to make sure that when it does fill in those areas, it doesn't have any repeated patterns or look funky. You could expand that image to the size that you need it to. Do content aware fill on the outside. If it does some really weird things, then you would just go in with the clone stamp tool and fill it in. I tend to do that when I'm doing gallery wraps, so if I'm doing a gallery wrap, which is a gallery wrapped canvas, I will make the image size larger for whatever the border is gonna be around the edge of it. And then I will actually select that, go content aware fill so it grabs all of the area on the inside and fills that border with the rest of the image, and then I clone stamp around to fix it up. When I send it off, perfect gallery wraps. [Audience Member 2] Awesome, thank you. So when you're cleaning your sensor, any tips or tricks? Absolutely, there's a video on Youtube or somewhere, I think it's on Youtube, of a guy that takes his camera, takes his sensor off and then just dunks it into a sink, and then you're good to go. No, don't do that. (laughter) There are sensor cleaning swabs that you can get. You can do dry sensor cleaning or wet sensor cleaning. I do a combination of dry and wet, depending on if I need it. And I've done a whole Youtube video on that on my own personal channel on how to clean your sensor without damaging it and without fearing it. 'Cause at first I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can't "believe I'm sticking something into my sensor." But your sensor, it's not just an exposed sensor. It's got some coating on it, so you don't wanna go jamming anything in there. You wanna use the proper tools, which are on that Youtube video, but yeah, don't go sticking a toothbrush in there to clean it. There's very specific tools. Or a mop. They make a brush that's a really nice brush that I always carry with me that is basically a synthetic bristle brush, and when you blow your rocket blower air blower through it, it charges it with static electricity so that if you barely move that brush along the top of your sensor it will static electricity grab all of the dust off of your sensor. Which that's how I start my sensor cleaning. And then if I need to go any further, I do wet sensor cleaning, and there's actual sensor swabs that are for micro four thirds, APSC and full frame. So depending on the sensor that you have, you're gonna wanna get the appropriate sensor swab. Alright, so that concludes our lesson on cleanup tools. If you wanna learn more from me, you can go ahead and follow me at f64academy.com, f64.co/cl. And in our next lesson, we're gonna be talking about shapes and text.