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Lesson Info

Remove Content Using Photoshop Content Aware Tools

we know how to do this, but let's talk about when to do this, because it's all very well. But like So what? What do I take every photo over to photo shop? Do I only take photos to which I want to add text? Well, no, There actually are a whole rainbow of situations in which you'll want to do what you just learned how to dio. And there is a bonus hand out with this course in which I list off what I think are the most important of those. But I want to actually share a couple of those with you and walk you through them so you can see me do them. And along the way, we're gonna learn some cool photo shop stuff, too. So one of the most common reasons that you're going to want to go through this process, other than adding text or graphics, is when you want to remove content from a photo. I have some photos like that. If I go back into the library module and I go into my, um, retouching folder here, here's one that I took over in Germany somewhere. Let me get this one up into the develop module...

. And just like we did before, I would do my basic edits on this. Let's see here. I'm gonna open up the exposure doing all this in light room. We're gonna do this one real quick. We'll go down to highlights, and we'll make those lower because we want to bring back the beautiful detail on those clouds. Will open up the shadows quite a bit to make the foreground, have more detail in it. And we're going to go to the white slider. And you know, this time I'll just open up the history. Am what? You don't actually have to turn on the clipping warnings when you see the edge of the history ram at the end. That works, too. So I'm gonna take the white cider and move to the right until I just see it hitting the end over there and take the black slider to the left the same way till it hits the end of the history. Ram on the left and I'll add a little bit of clarity. And that's kind of my formula, by the way, for most of the least away I shoot especially landscapes. This sort of a thing. Highlights down shadows up whites to the right blacks to the left, add some clarity and sometimes give it a hit of vibrance or saturation. And that works on many, many images, by the way, so you don't have to sweat too much every time about what you're going to dio. We'll add a little bit of vibrance here. Now, Um, there's one more thing I want to do here. Those buildings look to me like they're leaning back a little bit like I talked about before. That's something you can change so quickly in light room and would be like, Ah, whole to do and photos up. You could do it in photo shop, but you have to know where to go, and there's lots of things you have to do, so we'll do it just with one click of a button. If we scroll down on the right side of light room, we can get all the way down to the transform panel, and we're just going to click on the upright section of the transform panel, Auto and Boom. Everything kind of sits up. I'll do that again. It's off, and now it's auto and not only do everything sit up, but it also rotated horizontally because I see that that photo had been a little bit crooked from left to right as well, and you could try out any of these other options. But many times, auto is all that you need when you're in a hurry, particularly as I am now. So those are all I'm going to do to this photo and light room. And now let's go. But let me ask you this. If you look down here and see, there's all kind of people walking through the photo, is this something you think you could deal with in light room? Could you get rid all those people in light room? Maybe. Maybe there is a tool. It's this tool under the hissed a. Graham called the spot removal toe. The spot removal to a was made really for removing what it says spots spots on your lens or spots of dust on your sensor that make just little spots in your image. It really wasn't intended to be a rial, content, aware tool that can remove large areas and do it efficiently, particularly if you're doing it a lot of it in a single image. So when I know that there are a lot of things that I want to get rid of, like, kind of get rid of most of these people. How dare you walk into my photo All you people, you have to go. So maybe I'll leave these people. I kind of like these kids here, but most of it I want to get rid of. So I know I can do this more efficiently and probably get better results. If I do this sort of work. We call it retouching in photo shop. And not only this sort of an image, but if you were retouching and image like he had an old photo your family that you scanned in it had all kind of creases and crinkles. You're gonna have a much easier time taking that sort of retouching project to photo shop. Then you ever would if you tried to do it in leg room or if you have ah, lot of I must get birds in my photos, drives me nuts. You get away, go out of my photo and if I have a lot of birds and I try to get him all with the spot removal tool. Sometimes lightning will take a performance hit from that sort of work. So all of that kind of content removal we will do instead of in, like, room in photo shop. How do you get the photo shop? You know, command E control E on windows and then switches over to photo shop and I'm going to double click the hand tool so it zooms me in so I can see the whole image filling my screen and photos up, and I'm just going to get to work. Now. You'll be amazed at how fast this goes with my friend. The spot healing brush tool. This is my favorite tool in Photoshopped because it works in so many situations. And I'm not gonna do this very carefully, but I'm gonna move over this person over here on the far left and make my brush tip bigger with my favorite shortcut. Right. Bracket key makes the brush tip bigger left bracket key makes it smaller. The bracket keys are just to the right of the peaky. So right bracket key over this guy by Sorry. Here goes all these people nice to see you buy what else? We have people over here by people over here. Now, you know it doesn't always. Work is perfectly. Is this And you may know that if you are trying to do this and it doesn't work, you have some options. You have some other tools, which is one of the things reasons. I love doing this in photo shop. There are multiple tools for retouching, and if one doesn't work, you can try another. So I next try. If this weren't working properly, would be the healing brush tool works a lot like the spot healing brush, except you get to decide where the good pixels air sampled from that are laid down on top of the thing you're trying to hide. And another thing that I haven't done so far that I normally would do If I were doing this for real, it's I would try to do this sort of work we're doing on a separate layer in Photoshop, giving you more flexibility if you change your mind about it. And so, for both the spot healing brush tool and the healing brush tool, they both give you the option in the options bar for that tool up here to sample not only from the current layer, but to concern ample from all layers or current and below. So what I could Dio if I were doing this really properly is move over to the Layers panel, go to the bottom and make a new layer. There's my new blank layer. I'll double click its name, and I call it my healing layer. And now I would make all my spot healing and healing changes on that layer so I could throw away the layer if I wanted her make it less opaque or something. So and I make sure up here in the options bar for either tool or both tools, I haven't set to sample all the layers. Now when I use healing brush or spot healing brush, let's use healing brush this time because we haven't done it. I'll make my brush tip bigger. This time I hold down the option key or the altar key on the PC to sample to set the sample location from where the tool is gonna pick up good pixels and then ah, click and drag over this fellow, and that puts good pixels on top of him. Actually, I don't like what it did because I see it added some garbage cans back there. But we'll just go with it. For now. I'll option Click again to sample and get rid of some of this stuff. Option Click again. Drag over these people. You know, I'm not really liking this, so I'm gonna undo. And when I get to a situation where I get kind of blur like you just saw when you zoom in and show you that better, it's hard to see. Look, if I use this tool the healing brush tool option, click and go over these people. I'm getting a little bit of a dark blur at the edge of where I covered them up. So I undo, and I take advantage of the fact that there's yet another tool here. There is the Let's go With what? Why don't we try this one? The clone stamp tool, the clone stamp tool, has been around for longer than the healing brush is. What it does is it just picks up pixel and plops them down. Doesn't try to blend them in nicely like the healing brush is. So maybe that will help us in a situation like this, where we're getting kind of a black. At the top of our sample are retouch option or I'll click with the clone tool. And what did I do wrong? Ah ha! Something that if I forgot, you're likely to forget. I did not go to the options bar for this tool and set it to sample all layers. You have to do that if you're working at a brand new healing layer is I'm doing so now. When I do option are all click, it should lay down a sample it's taking from the layer below the background layer, and I think that's doing a little bit better job. So this is kind of the way that I would approach this now. I'm not going to spend all of your time today carefully doing the retouch, but that's the waves done. Now there's one more thing I want to retouch away, using a great tool that I think a lot of people don't use very much. I'll double click the hand tool to go back. I want to get rid of this big tree and because it's such a big area instead of trying to deal with it with those little brushes, I'm gonna use the patch tool. The patch tool is located behind the spot healing brush on the healing brush. It's right here. The patch tool uses a selection and then allows you to just drag, and it will fill in the selection with good pixels. Pretty amazing. I'm gonna try it without changing any of the options up here first. So if I click and drag around this little bushy thing that's hanging in the middle of my photo, I'd like to leave a little space around it. So Photoshopped can see, has some context for what it's going to dio. I get a selection notice. I didn't have to take any of the selection tools to do that. I just used the patch tool. It's like a lasso tool of its own. And then, with the patch tool, I click inside of the selection I made. I make sure I'm on the layer that has the photo jan from the background layer. In this case, I was up on the healing layer, and there's nothing on the healing layer. So except for a few little healing patches, we go to the background layer. We go inside of that, um, selection and we move and it is giving me a preview of what it's going to put into the area where I started CIA's. I moved. Look, I'm gonna move over here, See? It's gonna put clouds, and now that's not right. So I need to get a big area where there's only sky and then release my mouse and it patches over that whole tree. And not only does it slam the patch down like Clone Stamp would dio it tries to blend in like the healing brush is would do. And if you get a result you don't like, you have some other options here. So if I undo, if you go upwards, says Patch, you can set this to use content aware technology rather than just be a normal patch. And sometimes that if you don't get a good result, the first time tried content aware option in the Patch Options bar and then we'll see. Maybe this time we'll get a better result may well get a worse result. It's thinking it's thinking, and there we go looks good That way to now. Whenever you have a selection, you need to get rid of it. You can go up to select and de select or use command D or control de on PC. There we go. A lot of people are gone. A lot of kind of creamy look and stuff in the front and that great big tree. And that's how wonderful a job Photoshopped could do with retouching. Just one example. So I urge you to do your retouching and photo shop. Is I just it. Now I want to save this back to light room. You already know how to do it. It happens to be a raw file. It's ah, raw file taken with the Fuji cameras. So it has the extension r w two. That is the raw extension for Fuji. Remember said every company as their own. And so we're going to do file save or command s Control s on a PC that will give us a copy. That is a tiff, because all our copies will end up being tiffs, puts the edit text in the name. So when you get back to light room, you know which one has come from Photoshopped? Let's go back to light room. There we have our two images. Now, first glance, it may be hard to see what's happening here in the thumbnail. So if you click on the first you see oh, that must be the one that I did in photo shop because I don't see the big tree there and I don't see the people. And when I hover over it, it says it's a tiff, and the one next to it is the raw file. So that's how you do it pretty easy. But I wanted to give you a real world example. Want to do another one? Something else? It's really common. Ah, lot of people, not so much straight photographers, but people who like to get experimental. But they're photography and designers love to make composites.