Lessons

Lesson Info

Overview of Photoshop Workflow

Welcome to introduction no don't change, please. Um, so today, I'm definitely going to be talking a lot about my world, which is very touching, and we're going to start from the basics in the sense where I don't mean the basics, as in what is a layer and all this nonsense, but what I won't talk about it is not just retouching because retouching techniques by themselves are kind of useless unless you have the principles behind it. I think retouching has a lot to psychology as well, understanding in game plan you know what to do, how making sure not going too far. So there are a lot of settings and little tidbits behind the screen that you typically wouldn't see, and that's something I wanna share with you guys is what is it that I'm doing differently behind the screen that you may not see otherwise because you could follow along with tutorials? But if you don't understand the basics of what are some of the settings that we used to achieve results, sometimes you don't get to the point wh...

ere you want to be, and typically what happens is photoshopped either help you where can hurt you, because things can be done easily or they could be done in a very complex manner. I think my background being artistic has come from very natural and organic work flow, so I'm not so much about the numbers, not more about the technical side, I'm more about the artistic side, so the point of that is, you know, with photo shop you can find so many ways to get to the same point. What I have to show you today is merely an opinion of what I believe is the best way, but doesn't mean it's the only way. So if you find yourself looking at things that I'm doing and you ask yourself, is this really the best way? You don't have to do it the way that I do it? But I do encourage you to try it out and see if you like it, and if you don't and that's totally fine, because at the end of days, art and art is very subjective, so that we're going to get started before we get into actual retouching portion. I'm going to be talking a little bit about my setting and my preferences, and what I do is my tablet and my shortcuts that will help better understand my program going forward and why I do what I do and how I'm going across the screen when you don't understand how do you get to that tool, or how did you get that shortcut? Her option? And how's he getting those really clean strokes what is he doing differently that I'm not doing that is everything I want to show case to you for the first hour so then after that we're going to die right in and go start retouching and again if you guys have any questions as you afford, please feel free to ask which is why we have the full day teo elaborate on every every step of the way cool all right, so the first thing that I won't talk about here is my photo shop menu or having photo shop open you'll notice that typically for shop looks all black um and we're going to be talking about those differences as well but I want you to first look at what it is that I have open what it is that I don't have open number one over on the right hand side I typically keep buy properties open and this is where I have all my adjustment layers and things of that nature the next is my actions that stuff that I use to expedite the workflow I don't use a lot of actions by do use a few of them that I find really important the next is my layers everything else is closed at the moment except for my toolbar now I arrange it this way just so that everything is consolidated and it's in the right place it's not scattered everywhere sometimes people have photo shop open and they have never tampered with any of these, um pallets so for example, if you were to modify your palace you goingto window and you have all of them available to you you have a history, your history grams so forth and so on even my history I don't keep open and the reason for that is I can only hear people crying about this I have the reason I ask the reason I mention it is that the way that I work is in a very non destructive fashion and in a fashion that I can get to any point that I want to in any step of the way I don't have to undo all my steps to get to a particular area. So say you're working in a two hundred steps later you want to go back to that two hundred step you wanna undo everything you just want to undo that two hundred steps you can go back and manu control every single area that you worked on and that's my work for langley showing you today um let's see so aside from that I don't keep history open I don't keep color open window brush anything else it's just these three main areas and if there's anything else that I want to keep open, I could easily go into window adjust accordingly sometimes people have never adjusted anything they just used keep it defaults and you'll have things like timeline at the bottom and you have all these bizarre things that you've never using your life, so close them out get rid of all the clutter because that's not necessary some people like to use uh too screens for that purpose you can have, you know your palates on one screen and then you worked on one. You're just not distracted, but I like to keep my second screen flagged two years only. Typically I work on a twenty seven inch monitor at home, so long as we have enough work space to be able to play on where I choose. So besides that there's, nothing else that's magical about opening up a shop. You may notice, however, that I am using for shops here six it's just because I haven't prayed yet to be honest with you and with four shops see see, I think they're relatively similar so there's nothing in cc that I use or that I would use that would hinder me from teaching you what I'm doing today. Um, cs sixthree much has everything I need. I didn't even see us for three has everything I need in regard to my work for you know, the retouch is typically what happens is when we're when we're set in a really good work flow all these other tool that come into play don't really influence us as much, so the best thing about that is whatever I teach today can be applied a matter whatever version of photo shop using she's letting fantastic because it makes things easier I don't know about you guys but I like maybe he's as easy as possible my work was based on number one getting really good results but number two not spending the hours and hours you need to get there right like I but I still want good results without taking any shortcuts so that's kind of where my philosophy came from I started learning all these techniques and I decided which ones were the easiest use and which one's felt more intuitive I don't like things that are not very intuitive that don't get to get to the point I don't how much patients in that regard so same thing photo shop which is kind of ironic since I'm a re toucher and I work with patients but I think the works those as fast as they can get without spending so much time so I guess the carry away there is efficiency that so my intention is on dh the way they discover these techniques and I think people are always asking how do you learn the way that I learned personally is when I first began teaching I never really felt I had anything to offer to anybody and so what happened was I began teaching people on a one on one basis just to see if they kind of like, what I had to show them. I got some good reviews and they said, yeah, you know, this is actually really informative, and I thought I knew something that I picked up something that didn't know before, and they told me that this was something I think people want to learn, so I just start developing smaller classes, you know, two people, three people, and then I started be beginning learning something that I didn't expect. I started learning from my students, I began picking things that I never knew before. Also, I started learning things that no one else had known before, either because the students came to with the solution that no one had ever figured out before, and that was amazing, and so we all collectively learn together, so in my classes, I always have this thing about being in keeping an open mind never feel like you know everything because I sure don't and I worked with this program like eight to ten hours a day sometimes there's no way to know everything photo shop is very fun and easy to get started with, but it is extremely difficult to master, I don't think anybody and completely knows everything about the program. And that's why I say keep an open mind today because, you know, there may be things that you may not know there may be things that you do know, but I may do them differently when I get people saying, yeah, I know how to retouch, so I don't really need to know what you do. I just need to know one thing I say, well, it's not the one thing that matters it's about all the other things I'm doing differently to get to that one thing. So that's why I keep an open mind and I hope you guys take away something from this and lastly with photography, we all should different things, and mostly what I do is portraiture. A lot of the techniques and work for that I used today is something that you can carry over twitter is that you shooting sufficiency models or portrait's, airhead chancellor actresses and anything you'll carry over, which is why we also decided to use an actress yesterday because it reflected the fact that we were in the high fashion type of environment with the lighting at the same time she was this another person that you could see applicability, any situation, so the work for will apply to whatever it is that you're doing okay? So aside from that and aside from going over what it is that I have open you'll notice that with mac specifically if you're in a mac and not on windows there's this gray box behind photo shop and what this is is under window an application frame, this is a lot for a shop typically looks like when you open it up and the reason I don't have this open is any time I opened up a window could be very distracting, but how about background showing up you picking on my background and disappear is very annoying, so I basically turn that off, michel in a window application frame just so that looks very clean and simple. I'm focused on what I'm doing, I don't worry about anything this even before going to full screen. Okay, great. Now let's, talk about our preferences and settings now underfoot a shop you notice that you have a preference is tap and under preferences in general, is we're gonna get started. The first thing that I want talk about is this image interpellation image interpolation is essentially essentially what photoshopped does when you re size photos. So if you're enlarging or downsizing, what happens for shop applies a particular little sharpening or doesn't imply a particular level of sharpening based on the setting that you put, I think I found out through personal experience and just talking to colleagues like felix and joey l and a lot of other people who mentioned this and actually learned this from joy all he was the first one who brought this to my attention when we start working together and partners work flow and so I thought this is amazing when I first discovered because for the longest time under this default setting, I always used to have by cubic automatic and what that basically does and by cubic sharper and all these other ones is that when you re size an image photoshopped ten supply sharpening effect and the reason for that, I think is that whenever you resize an image for a shop has to re render the photo when he's throwing away pixels and so typically tries to redefine what image looks like in the mount of sharpness that it should have to compensate for the missing pixels that's my understanding, but I didn't want that level of shopping applied automatically, so what I did was I used by cubic smoother, and even though I'm downsizing, what happens is photoshopped wounds apply any little scharping's you can manually collect the taste that you like afterwards, which is really useful for stuff like facebook uploads and anywhere on the web where I can manually control shopping when I'm resizing for uploading somewhere so since then I was hooked and I kept it up by cubic smoother um the only other things on this menu that I adjust is animated zoom uh and the reason for this when you zoom in on a zoom in and out of an image what typically happens is it tends to have this really smooth fact and it's just something that's graphical take up a lot of you know and it was very intensive with your graphics card or things like that, so I turned off all these fluff cities and I realized I think when photo shops he has five was introduced they applied all these new things that made it look really pretty, but it really didn't do anything for my work flow or especially here where it says enable flick panning so enable flick panning essentially when you have your mouthful and you dragon image across the screen it tends to float away that was really knowing so I turned that off so again personal preference it may be useful if you if you have a slow computer if you're this little laptop and basically just these little things help speed up your performance my neatly but noticeably so sometimes now under interface is where I changed my black to my gray and the reason for this is pretty simple when you're framing a photograph when you print it out for a gallery either a choice of white black you decide on either white or black based on what's going to happen to the photo and it interferes with your reaction how you look at the photo for some reason, right, same thing with your website when you look at a photo on your website, a white background it's going a different if you have something that you're working, which black um, I think neutral gray is a color that doesn't really interferes what you're working on and when you have an image open and you have a black background and you finish working on that image and exported somewhere else with a white background has a different play. So basically the black interfered with how my colors a rendering just because my eyes were being where eyes were averaging the whole screen as I was working, and I found that neutral grey was a good color to oracle because it doesn't interfere with your photograph. You stay, you stay focused on what you're working and the results were much more accurate when I exported to whatever background I was trying to use so that's basically why have it as neutral great? And you can always change it back to black or anything like that, whenever you'd like and you should remember before for shop, I think cs five, they had a program back in anyway, and so I just got back to his principles now over here, there's nothing else that I changed and for shop does give you a lot of options to play around the next thing is under file handling this is one of the reasons I love first up six and above is because you can save recovery information if you've ever been working image and had a crash you know how frustrating it is and use hours of work right hours literally I can tell you how many times of that has happened to me uh this has saved me so many times during workshops so you'd probably see me working like today and if it cautious I'll be all right because it does save that any time you have an issue even when the even when your computer shuts down by accident a power surge or something I reboot it in the fucking back up it's fantastic but don't depend on it obviously getting habit of stating often which is something I preached by don't practice as much as I should be doing more often but by default it's always set to five minutes so said it to ten because I'm sorry it's by default setting ten minutes said it's a five knot the warehouse was like what are you crazy said the five minutes I don't know I think even option front you know other ones because five minutes I would have unsavoury one minute if I could to be honest with you in five minutes of work sometimes too much so she had three in the morning when you're working in a shop just crashes master this time it's over again um let's see now with performance this is something that's kind of subject subjective based on whatever it is that's open whatever it is that you're working on a shared capture on open if you have any other program that's open, you probably want you probably don't allocate all of your am for this I said keep it at around ninety percent or so just because I don't have much open aside from photo shop by default I think it's a lot less than landing presenting like seventy years sixty five or something I don't know why that is I think you know, pushing as much as you can be applicable and also is based again how much else have load on your computer now with my history states this is something that can take up a lot of cash in your system, meaning it holds and retains a lot of information so pretend you know pretend photo shop is like a little waiter waiter you delivering food and he's being a plates history love history states is are basically like place individual plates the more history states you have, the more load for the shop will accumulate onda slower typically tends to run at least from my interpretation. So with a history states because I'm really not having to go back in time like a traditional work fluids or wass I don't even have that made history states just because I don't really need them but I'm going to keep that, you know, thirteen or ten for just in case purposes, in case have to eat my words later on, but history states typically about thirteen, cash levels or something that I'm playing with you, but usually it's between four to six, I found that when I kept my cash levels much higher, what would happen is for shop would slow down and felt like it didn't react properly to how it was working over extended period of time. But it's, just something that I've been playing with, um, but my cash levels have stayed between four to six same thing with cash italicize, I've been looking at a few charts online and what they basically stays with cash italicize, or how much information flower shop is also holding, and the way it renders, um, ten twenty four seems to be the best solution for at least mac users. Now. Also, if you don't have your graphics processor checked, be sure to do so if you don't have the option of enabling your graphics processor upgrade to a graphics card because it makes a lot of difference. Photo shops are using graphics memory a lot more than before, so this has helped quite a bit thankfully, these days a lot, because they're quite fast before just you know, three, four years ago I'd have to teach more teach people how to improve the performance on the back end because it just couldn't keep up with photo shop anymore but most computers these days come with profits, carbs and things like that that enable you to just out of the box for shop amazingly fact the other day I saw someone run photoshopping a macbook air that thing was like a piece of noble paper I was surprised because I couldn't we could never get that back then you know you in ten years ago we'd have these clunky desktops that could even compete with the macbook air it's amazing necessary for scratched discs I typically you know if you have a slow computer if you want to make four shot run faster it be cool to connect a thunderbolt connection with the external device that you can take temporary files and lead for shop essentially using to process faster um and whenever you insert an external hard drive will pop up right here where you can use a scratched disk and again if you want to learn more about these things, you can always look them up because they're always so many things with a shop that you can get involved in and I don't want to you know damn for the whole class just on individual settings so that's basically in regard to my preferences with my cursor and other things it's really not telling that I tamper with very much the's are all things that would be applicable to people who do graphic design or if you want to change over and adjust what your rulers look like, you know, color options, all the stuff fund export but not necessary for my need, which also raising the point that photo shop is used by so many people he's by graphic designers, artists, researchers, painters, you know, drawers, whatever and photoshopped will account for everything, even videographers and people who do, um what is it three d rendering their starting to include a lot more tools that we don't need. So, like I said, I don't know everything about your shop anymore either, which is okay and that's a good thing and so don't let all these other a lot of options fool you and trick you that you have to know everything about it because you see as I go along that the two threes are very simple, a simple I was going to get now let's talk about the next important thing and you think these things aren't important till you start being seen what my work floors and then you realize when it all comes together now I'm going to go in and quickly open something this is my keyboard shortcut way out, I'm going to go and open it up hit afghani goes my full screen and command zero will fill up the screen just in case anyone's when we hide that um basically I used to be a game before I so love computer games and a half people cross world price smiling um I still play counterstrike and things like that and I've realized in the gaming world you have to be efficient if any part of your work for is not efficient use period if your point one second too slow he lose that's the difference between top level and average and I was I kept wondering what makes that so why is it that they're so good is it are they better than me the reality was they had the configuration set for efficiency and then that makes sense because I use for the shop and the same keys they use we use so I brought that over to the photo shop world and having interest in all these other areas this is how it influences you in your industry because you can take cues from everybody else and what they do well and put into what you do and do something different and no one else does or that less people do their few main things that I use all the time and I'm going to show you how to map these as well but before I do let's talk about it number one I change my brush size all the time in increments not grand changes so for that purpose q and w adjust my brush size consistently my hand stays on the left side of the keyboard consistently I don't feel around I don't keep looking at my keyboard like a kid look like a mom looking for a kid in the mall right? Like I'm always thank you I know some of you guys are laughing I just I just felt like a complete idiot forever like taking my head off my welcome to reach for my bragging he's like just when that popped up I'm like I really really like why all this time seriously like I said this whole days and we fill with small points that seems kind of obvious to people but when it builds up and you see a war puts based on this it cuts your time down so much which is why you wonder how I get an image is so quickly like how you've been managing to finish beauty that fast apparent this thing about the more time the more prestige you have with retouching world but I don't think so I would rather spend less time touching to banish you um so again q n w a breast size is the reason for this is I'm always moving my hand across the tablet away from one point to another and as I'm going to change my breast size without thinking and with four shop when you're working as you remove blemishes and things of that nature, you have to have brushed size that's accurate the blemish you're moving, otherwise you're displacing way too much texture, which is why increments matter. Everything you do is built on step by step a retouched images, an accumulation of thousands of steps if each step isn't as efficient as clean and what's gonna happen is your end goal is goingto awful thing getting a line on your car just because you're a few cars tilted just a little bit, you're gonna hit traffic, right? You're going to have an accident and you have to keep readjusting every second, and what happens is, yeah, go for it many of these common functions on the buttons and of your walkman on the stylist? No, because what happens is my hand on my stylist there's going to be set to just retouching? I'm not going to be accessing any of the controls here, and everything on my keeper is going to be set to my controls and that way I don't have to use this because what I found was that if I had my button said to all these keys, I'll still need to go back to cuba for particular menu options and short so actually considered that route and some people do is just totally fine and, you know, it's great if you used to but from the get go what happened was I start doing it on my keys but when I went back I still fiddle on my keyboard I said I still don't like it so he still doesn't fit right with me and then I jumped to my keyboard and just kept everything that I needed there there's still some things that would be great to keep on your tablet which gives you an option to ex cycling layers and things like that may be but for the most by tricky of the majority of my functions on my on my keyboard for that purpose and again like this one of those things I say individual practice is coming so keep this as an opinion don't think of it as a fact because this is the way I like it I know there's so many right ways like calm many right ways no wrong way so q and w we'll just my breast size by increments my healing in clone brush what I use a majority of the time retouching so you're going to be very comfortable it after you see this for like eight hours so healing clone code a m s now zoom is something that I used to go in another image to go from one area to another I either hit zeki and scroll with my pen left to right or just hit the sneaky and tap who happened to zooms in consumes out and z or alter option goes back out invert is used for things like mass masking going from white mask to black bhaskar changing your wife brushed a black brush which comes in play when you're dodging her burning or lightning or darkening thinks that major okay uh my space bar when I hold the space bar it turns into this hand tool what happens with this hand tool you can easily move your image around the canvas and c is my brush I know be typically brush I just kept it to sea because I'm a stickler I keep everything causes possible uh for the zoom cue when you're clicking is it that you're uh where you click exactly where it zooming into okay exactly um and then the keys my ro take e so the key is actually the rotate functions actually really interesting and what happens when I hit the rotate function you can rotate my canvas like this and this reason is very simple when you re working on angles or on corners of people's faces the way that the hand typically works it's very hard to get a perfect circle just based on the angle of your hand and I think women will understand is when you do make up on one side of the I on the other side of the eye doesn't typically match perfectly as the other one did you have a good side a bad side so to speak and so that's why essentially rotate because I want to get the angle that's easiest for my hand to work in so if I have a corner and angle that I have that's really difficult from one edge of my hand I'll rotate it and get it perfectly this much macaw fieldwork on and my angle is that I do want to be moving my hand so much across my tablet and really straight myself because again I am working for many hours a day and if you feel a lot of strain was your working chances are there's something wrong with how you're either sited seated or how you're working sometimes I go to studios and I see people working really uncomfortable chairs or really buy barstools maybe and with no back support and they wonder why their back is hurting and having all these issues the first thing please get a nice chair okay um at least like something with the good lord back support at home I had this really nice office should I put like a pillow behind it? So you had this back support you know what? Slouching the whole day? Well, typically I think that's a really important point because it, uh, really safe from a lot of problems and again with this rotate key you can always hit reset view and it goes back to whatever it is that you've been working on now, let's, go and talk about where you go in, adjust his tools or jesse shortcuts really quick. Now, under edit, you see that there's men call keyboard shortcuts with keyboard shortcuts by default will shave shortcuts, but application in use with shortcuts for application menu. These are the shortcuts that you would find appearances, file, edited image and so forth. Now you want to go to shortcut for tools now under shortcut for tools, about a third of the way down, you'll start to see are being tools, for example, spot healing brush set a to adjust it, you can click on it and said whatever letter you like if you said it to a letter that's already being used by something else, it'll give you some time warning sign that says, you know, this has been used by something else and that's okay, you can hit accept, can you hit, accept and go to conflict? You can come here on the right and it except, and it'll apply that letter to that particular tool and the tool that it was a science or previously will be left blank. So people was asking, well, isn't a sign of something else? Well, I don't know, do you use it for something else, and if you told in this final however, you could always go and reset default win for the shop by the top options here where you can go and say, you know I'm going to go and reset everything or save the shortcuts of necessary um or use default right here so the good thing is you have to be married to this if you just try it out like a loner cards goto you take a test drive and see if you like it if you don't necessarily find I think house people who typically tried us like it and they get used to it and they stick with it but the other half say, well, I'm going to stick to what I do just fine ah let's see you have a as your healing brush and here's the brush tool about a third of the way down in your healing brush in your brush tool set to and see you ever close temple which is by default said to us and then going further down have you rotate will hear about a third of the way down and let's see the little ones are here is decrease brush size and increase brush size and again it's not hardness some people mistake brush size for hardness and that is basically a softer harder brushes does that also work as the with the uh modifier key to change the hardness then or do you have to also change those if you're modifying keys yeah you can use a modification harness so the shortcuts for the hardness will then b q and w with the modifier key or do you have to also change those I believe the change those too and so that's basically it from my shortcuts I mean there's not a lot but they're very useful especially you can save five minutes here and there it really adds up to hours it really adds up to hours this alone had saved me so much time that it was you know priceless when I got everything together now so we're going to go on so you don't have a taco layer short cut no oh it's one of my favorite oh that's fine. Did you have any question before going by? There are a lot of questions that are covering things that I know we're gonna be talking about later later okay so, uh hold off on a lot of them one person a couple different people were asking about bring up those brush size he's bi like clicking and dragging to change the breast size what your thoughts on that that is something that the reason I don't do that is every time going from one area to another when you try to zoo make your brush has much larger and smaller really rapidly what happens is you it takes a while to get exact increment the flower shop is extremely precise I don't want an average I want an exact because does it go from blemish to blemish my brush size, as you know, is on the screen, we'll increase or decrease by just this much, and I don't wanna hold multiple keys to increase or decrease my brush size what happens? This keeps my hands free, I can increase and decrease on the go as I work, and that way, I'm not even looking where I'm not even having to hold few keys down, hold short cuts and and things like that, so it is an option. I know people do that, but I really I really don't, because I found by practice that it took a lot longer to do the same thing and that's basically always and then right along the same lines. Bruce f why not use a pen pressure to adjust brush size? Because I know that I'll get the next okay, last perfect, okay, we'll hold off on that very quickly, then one other fort tests, uh, test, janey says, I wonder what he would recommend for lefties. You have any thoughts? I mean, you're not left handed yourself, but do you have any thoughts on left? I do, I move everything to left side of the keyboard side, the right side, I'm sorry, yes it seems pretty straight board but apparently you can't put him on the number he's no which seems like it would be you know nothing of my keys I think he may be on a pc if he's on number trackpad however I would keep it all a letter side so it works yes someone had that question and funny enough I told them to actually I said the keys that he was left hand he's like struggling teo retouched something gone societally for tell you good questions you guys have any questions before we go forward? Okay great. And one of the guests and somebody else were wondering how you had your hand tooled by pressing the space bar they were saying that there was some issue with changing the space bar is a shortcut oh, that should be by default actually by default flower shop will come with space bar by with a handle if it doesn't then chances are you they may have tampered with the funny thing about this is I have a joke about this that every version for his english because sometimes I would congress problem that no one else has but they think it's a common problem and I don't know why that is uh I just think maybe it's something to do with how it interacts with an offering system but it does happen which is kind of something to remember in case you freaked out about something