Lesson Info
1. Quick Image Tune-Up in Photoshop
Lessons
Quick Image Tune-Up in Photoshop
08:58 2Cleaning Up Skin & Blemishes in Photoshop
16:22 3Brightening Eyes in Photoshop
10:48 4The Patch Tool, Content Aware Fill, and the Clone Stamp in Photoshop
16:53 5Basic Dodging and Burning in Photoshop
08:23 6Real World Teeth Whitening in Photoshop
07:57 7Face Swapping, Flattening, and Merging in Photoshop
19:52Lesson Info
Quick Image Tune-Up in Photoshop
we're gonna be talking about beginning retouching techniques, and I think maybe you'll be surprised because it turns out you can actually use this for all kinds of things. I think when we think of retouching, we think of like what? Lindsay's teaching the fashion retouching, which is really awesome and exciting. But we can actually retouch everyday photos as well. So what we're going to be doing is really more like Image Housekeeping. It's just kind of cleaning up, like, really basic, simple stuff. Whether you are photographing amazing fashion models like Lindsay does or you're just taking everyday life photos, uh, or portrait, it's of, you know, your clients and stuff. So we're gonna get started with a quick image tune up. So we're just going to be talking through tuning up this image really quickly. We're gonna be fixing exposure contrast in color before we dig into the actual retouching. So we'll start with this image here. These are my two little nephews. My husband's, uh, brothers ...
kids, this is Harris and Elden, and we finally got around to doing our own family photos the summer for this fall. If you can believe it, um so that was good, long overdue, of course, and we'll just make some little adjustments here before we dig in and do some other things will do this tune up. So usually when I start with my images, they're usually pretty well color balanced because I do all that stuffing camera so I don't have to do a ton of color balance adjusting. But I do sometimes like to play with levels and boost the contrast a little bit. Some people prefer to do this. The curves. You could do it that way, too. But I just love the levels dialogue like the actual interface of it. So I'm gonna walk you through that really quickly. This image is really pretty close, but we could tighten it up just a little more and just add a little bit of so I'm gonna bring up levels. We have two choices. When we do this, we can bring it up. Of course, from the Image Adjustment menu, the command is right here. The keyboard shortcut is commander control L. Or we can do it as an adjustment layer by clicking the little yin yang here at the bottom of the layers panel and choosing levels. Now, this would be the best practices way of doing it. But I can just tell you right now that I when I'm working and I'm like, I just need a quick levels adjustment. I just do it with the keyboard shortcut because I'm not creating something more complex, like a composite or something where I might end up feeling like, have to go back and edit that later. Uh, in which case I would do it with an adjustment layer. But in this sense, I just want to dio a quick little levels adjustment and, like, I'm done right, So I don't care so much about having the flexibility that the adjustment layer gives me. So we'll just keep it quick and dirty. I'm gonna press commander Control L Maybe there we go and bring up levels. So if you've never seen this dialogue before, let me just quickly explain it to you. What this is referring to is the luminosity levels of our image of the information that's in our image. So you might recognize this even if you've never looked at levels before, you might have bumped into this on the back of your camera for example, this is called the Hissed a gram, and some people get scared of it. They turn it on by accident, and then I see them panic and they say, Oh, what is this thing? How do I get rid of it? You don't have to be afraid of it. It's just a graph. And it's just showing you the pixels that you have in your photo that you just took our whatever photo you're looking at, I guess, And it's showing you where all those pixels fall on a scale of brightness that we call luminosity. So that scale ranges from zero on the left, which is where our shadows are. 2 255 on the right. So that's 256 possible luminosity values that our information can have so we can see the way it's distributed. So this hissed a gram. This graph is gonna look different depending on what you took a photo of. And, of course, on your exposure, if you really botched the exposure, you know, or maybe you leave your lens cap on something. Ah, you're his diagram is just gonna be all shadow information. No matter what you took a picture of. But if you are in a really bright situation and you don't really have a lot of shadows going on, then you're hissed. A gram would be all heavy on the right side over here. So there is no right or wrong hissed a gram. Sometimes people get a little worked up like Is this the up a correct history? Um, well, it's like, What are you shooting? What? What did you want it to be? How are you trying to capture it? Um, so there's not a right or wrong. It's just Are you achieving what you meant to And does the hissed a gram look like that? So, um, if you were trying to take a picture like this and you're history, Ram was just a spike on the shadows. That would be wrong for what you wanted, because maybe you left the lens cap on. So just knowing that I think helps people just relax a little bit. And the other thing is, we can easily adjust this. So this information here we can see the shadow information peters out close to zero, but not quite so what I'm would do is maybe take this shadow slighter. And if we drag it in, we can bump the shadows a little more, so we're deepening them. What's actually happening when we drag this over is we are telling photo shop to take all of the pixels that have in this case now that I've dragged this from 0 to 20 were telling voters shop to take all the pixels that have a luminosity value of 20 or less, and we're gonna reassigned them a value of zero. So where we're making 20 the new zero, like orange is the new black 20 is the new zero. Okay, uh, and we'll see that after we click okay on here. I might also, you could drag your highlights and dragon inward. Teoh, adjust. That way you can drag your mid tones and do some of that. Hopefully, you're not making huge adjustments here. Hopefully, you've come pretty close to nailing this in the camera. That's how I prefer to operate. Um, you know, if you were shooting a raw image, of course he would have even richard Data. But this is already J pegs. So, um, we Then it was shot as a J peg So the dad is not quite as rich, but we can get away with this. Um so I've done just a very small adjustment, and when I'm happy with it, I'm gonna click, OK? And I just want to show you here is the limitation of doing it the way I did with the keyboard shortcut instead of the adjustment layer. If I bring the lich via levels back up, do you see how it's? It's different looking, and now it's all jagged e and such. So it's been adjusted. And with that, you know, we've compressed and lost some information. I'm OK with it. It wasn't a big change, but you wouldn't want to. Now tweak it again. Click. OK, tweak it again. Click OK, Because every time you do that year basically destroying little bits of it and if you do it enough, then your images going T crumble is what I like to say. So how do you know when you use the adjustment layer or the menu command? If you're afraid that you will ever want to go back and be able to edit it, then do it as an adjustment layer. But in this case, I'm good with that, so I'm going to move on. But hopefully that makes sense. So we've done a little bit of, Ah adjustment there. If we wanted to boost the color a little bit, we could adjust the saturation again. Image adjustments, hue, saturation. You got to be careful, though. You don't want to drag it all the way over because that looks crazy. Don't do this and then try to pass it off like, Oh, it's a natural. I've seen that on Facebook when people post photos and they're just like, Oh, here. I just snapped this no filter or whatever and I'm like, Give me a break. That's scary. Okay, so you really can't push it that high. But maybe I just bumped this, like, plus 10 or even less, plus six or something. So just a smidge, just a little smidge just to tighten it up, give it a little bit of pop
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
napa
I am glad I got this course. There was a lot of really good information, and it was really helpful to be able to rewind, pause and be able to study her screen at various points to see what was going on as I was worked on an image simultaneously on another screen.
Student Work
Related Classes
Adobe Photoshop