Lessons

Lesson Info

Post Production: Basic Adjustments

I don't think there's enough places out there that exists that cover howto fix little scripts or things that aren't right in the photos and so I'm gonna try to cover a few of them may start with a few simple one, so, um, this photo doesn't necessarily look like crappy light, right? Um, I photographed this recently and ah bridal intensive workshop that I taught and what it is it's window light behind her and there's no light in the foreground so exposed to let a basically overexposed let the light wrap around her okay, what you will find is if you photograph heavily backlit high contrast situations have any of you seen the sometimes pink, sometimes green, sometimes purple hazing around the edges of the high contrast called chromatic aberrations? All right, I'm going to show you real quick how you can get rid of chromatic aberrations and you do need to have shot a raw file and I'm going to drop it into photo shop, which opens up adobe camera this exists in light room as well, but I wante...

d to show it to everybody, so you know you don't need light room to do it and so I'm going to zoom in and I know that I have some aberrations going on right there she doesn't glow pink that is a pretty intense one you can see it pretty clearly we'll write an adobe camera you can correct that very simply so what we're looking for is this one right here lens corrections and you need to go to color when you click on color it gives you the option to remove chromatic aberrations and then it allows you to select what your d fringing so let me let me click remove chromatic aberrations first it did do a tiny bit but not enough so with those sliders aiken tell it what I'm trying to do a mite trying to remove like a lot of times you see green or you trying to remove purple and it's gone so it's very very simple um so any time you have chromatic aberration either go into the light room and you can synchronize photos it won't mess up anything like if you remove the purple here if you have purple in your photo is not gonna mess it up because it's looking for around really intense areas of contrast where chromatic aberration would b says is very, very simple and take a look again before and after and it does it for any of the different color chromatic aberration too might have so uh sure to remember that and again it's under lens corrections and color now while we're here in len's corrections I wanted to introduce you something else there's something called profile lens profiles and actually going toe zoom out of this image let's see how this one does with this? So I actually tested this on another image. All right? So as you know, every lens has a certain type of corn gold distortion either a certain type of compression or you know how like with wide angle lenses of sorts on the edges it floats it out so built into the raw engine they're actually lens profiles. And when you turn on these profiles, if I click this by default it'll automatically detect with the lens was and apply the correction. So for example, some lenses are known to have a heavy vignette around the edges when I apply that it might get rid of the vignette or it might try to reduce some of that distortion so let's see if this one really had much of a difference that's it a little bit you see that all right, but I have another one that I shot from the same workshop take a look here where I was shooting I believe it was with a twenty four to seventy millimeter lens at twenty four lying on the ground so it is definitely a really, really wide lens and so probably it bloats out at the edges, right? So let's go back to my lens correction in abel lenz profile and you see what it does so it makes a pretty drastic change, so notice it lightens the edges because it's getting rid of the mistake of the vignette ing of the lens and then also it's actually nice because she actually well look I mean okay she's a really skinny model but notice how she looks skinnier because the way that was distorting was bloating it out and so when it pops it back into correct distortion or warps it back it actually correct the file and make her look smaller in the center there on and then if you do like the vignette ing and you like distortion I mean you can actually do it by hand and figure out what's appropriate for you um one of the reasons that I wanted to show you this is a lot of our glass that we have it is higher and glass and we do invest in it but I know not everybody has the highest and glass sometimes when shooting in low light conditions you'll see kind of fringing around the edges or you'll see that it heavily vignettes around the edges and if you always just kind of shrug your shoulder and was like oh that's that lens well now right and raw you have a way to combat it and it's actually done for me lately so that you're not just trying to gas and lighting up the ideas or get rid of color or something like that all right so this is definitely a help especially maybe if you took a portrait a little wider than you should have. And it's distorting the face, try this. You'll be really surprised. It kind of compresses it back into place. Stop him from doing that white van yet? Yes, yes, you don't actually overdue that. Yes, absolutely so again. This is under len's corrections profile, and you had enabled lens by default. It will select the one that it reads out of the metadata. You can't actually create your own custom profile if you want. I'm not that talky to do that. All right, let's, take a look at a couple other things. So I thought one thing that I would start with before we jump into photoshopped real quick is to show you where that noise reduction is in dhobi camera raw, someone open up one of the files that we were working with earlier. This is the one that was shelled, a shot at twelve thousand eight hundred s o of opening up and adobe camera raw and the icon that you're looking for it's underneath the history I'm again this year where all my different options exist, the third one over that looks like a triangle when you see a triangle or pyramid think details sharpening like that's, usually what? Signifying something? Click on that and it's exact same thing as you see. Existing in light room so it's not a problem if you don't have light room I'm you can still do that someone is zoom in to her face and it's the same slider so I could back off of the luminous there pop the sharpening a little bit and fix a nice was even even a little bit more and it can reduce a lot of that nice so again very simple and I can open it up um in photo shop and that will be a applied okay perfect oh I'm feeling good I'm zipping through things excellent all right? So let's take a minute to look at sharpening for those of us who've shot in low light conditions or just messed up the focus for example was talking to one of the people in our audience here and she said, well, what do you do if, for example you focus on the cheek instead of the eye or perhaps you focus on the glasses instead of the ei or further on the nose? Now, of course in some situations it's it's out of focus like if it's severe enough, you're not getting that back but there's a lot of things built into photo shop and then also some plug ins that exist that can help you out so I'm gonna try to treat you several different ways that you could do this so I'm going to open up a photo that we took yesterday, jerome my photograph done yesterday and I'm just opening this up and adobe cameron was gonna open it right up in photo shops. We get to go back in the photo shop. But what? I want you to notices you might not be able to tell their so we missed it a little bit. Oh, that's what? That looks a little sharper on that screen, but the focus is over here. Not quite on his eye. Um, if we had a more severe example, you'd be able to see it, but we'll take a look at this. I'm gonna open up in photo shop. We haven't done anything yet. And let me just clean up your palate from what I want here, okay? Awesome x spend layers is eric's computer she's just making herself at home. Yeah, you could reset your work spaces. Okay, okay, so here we go. Um, I am going tio show you a bunch of different ways to do this. What I found is that all sharpening doesn't work for all types of out of focus pictures. Some work better on others says I'm going to try to give you those tools, so I'm going to duplicate my background and I'm going to show you a super easy one open up navigator and zuman someone a zoom into his eye we're going to take a look and see that slight out of focus area um normally one of the tools you may be familiar with on the toolbar over here on the left is the blur tool okay um were generally told don't use the little no it's destructive and it's not that great for blurring why don't you have more control and go up to you know, causing blur picked the blur okay? We're actually gonna use blur what people don't realize if you hold it down there's another tool there called the sharpened tool previous to see us uh, six this is reno in cc but previous to see a six I believe this too was more or less useless. Yeah, it didn't I mean, it didn't really do you and your good heart if acting after once wife and it was just off all right, so we're painting on focus is what we're doing or painting in sharpness yeah likes it in the past I mean, the artifact thing you know, when something's clue clearly been over sharpened it was instant it's like what facebook does to your photos when you have blown him. Oh yeah crystallized not good, so what I'm going to dio is I'm going to select a brush and I want my strength on fifty percent and I want to protect detail when I'm going to do it, I'm just going to paint over the areas that I want to sharpen and I'm just gonna sweep over them once first slip around the eyelashes and one of looking for areas of high contrast where it would fake sharpness like if I sharpen the skin doesn't do me any good you would notice it in the eyelashes and the iris right? I don't need to sharpen everything something photograph I let mia sharpen the iris of his eye around here so let's just take a quick look sandwich sharper that got and that works a lot better it works a lot veterans let me zoom in so you all can see this is that one hundred ten percent do you see anything objectionable with art effecting their no, I don't I don't see anything that that bothers me now if I keep going I mean if I keep I mean if I keep going there will be a problem but I'm putting on fifty percent and swiping it over once so that is sharpening trick number one because it's super easy and if you have seen us five or are newer it's a great tool all right let's take a look in another one um I like to show everybody tips and tricks that are free, but sometimes the free ones aren't the best ones sometimes there are some amazing plug ins and so here's one of them I know both eric and I use this we love it this has saved both of our butts on a couple jobs where if you notice like one of our favorite lenses that eighty five one point four and it's beautiful when it's in focus but very unforgiving if you miss um and this software plug in we're going to show you we've brought back some pretty far gone photos here like photographing on the tip of the nose or the ears and brought back a usable photo and this goes back to your question about having noise again how much you can sharpen and get away with it also depends on viewing distance because you can have a little bit more forgiving would be more forgiving of artifact ing if you're not gonna be seeing in this close so maybe if I see a little bit art effecting here but it's going to be on the web you will notice you don't notice it but it is going to be a large print you would so the plug and that we both love is nick sharpener pro I mean it is awesome all right, so we won that I would want to select in this case is the output sharper? I'm gonna open that up and I'm gonna move it over to his eye okay? You want to take a look at his eye here and how this this plug in works all right see what says view in the top left and then there's one that looks like it's cut in half you actually get a line that when you drag it back and forth you can see before and after okay so you can see the change that way and you could also if you do the side by side I let you see your change is all right so we're not looking at this um there's a lot of different sliders and I can't I can't give you a formula because it depends on what the image looks like and how it's out of focus exactly you know, maybe if it was motion blur it's going to be different than if you focused in the wrong place? Um what I've found for me personally is I like pumping up local contrast because for me it's it's a mix of it's not quite like clarity where things get uh sharpen you maybe you see art effecting it's not quite like structure which structure is is it's pulling out detail instead? I just wanted to pop um on areas of bright country are areas of stark contrast like, for example, eyelashes area of a lot of contrast, so I'm going to pump up local contrast and pump up my focus and I'm going to drag this over now as you can see this is probably a little overdone because you can see a little bit of that artifact ng there, but I pumped it up so you could see really far I mean, I can back off of this and I'll fix something there help me do my slider again wearing clean his glasses so there's only one place to layer that you're working on or is it implied to the great question can be masked and robin cassidy example exactly and so what it does is it supplying this to whatever lair your select on so I could just select the eyes in this case I selected the whole thing because what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to be okay and you can tweak around um just know I don't like um when I just pump up like output sharpening an adaptive sharpening, I definitely will do tweaking with local contrast and focus and sometimes even back off on structure just a little bit to try to get rid of some of the noise that was created from sharpening but I would say that's pretty good no one's going to complain about that and it looks pretty sharp so when head okay and notice how maybe now those eyebrows are a little too sharp. Okay um let my eyes probably going somewhere around there and so what I can do is just what you said someone had okay and it's going to apply it and if you don't understand adjustment, layers, lair masks and things like that, I'm not just doing a plug for myself. I mean, feel free to watch photoshopped week, for example, toe learn those things because this will completely change how you work in photo shop, but I did dio one day. Um, uh, photo shop we can then a three day for creative live where I did cover this, but I'm gonna gloss over now don't worry, think of it like a racing but nondestructive okay, so what I'm going to dio is right now. It tells me which layer the sharpener pro wasn't even click it on and off. If I hold the command key and click, it gives me a white mask, which means that effect is applied everywhere, anywhere the eye paint black on that mask is equivalent of a racing, but unlike a racing, you can always go back. Okay? Well, and here I actually just want to selectively painted in certain places instead of erasing in certain places. So actually hit command z. And if I hauled alter option, is that what it said on your wrist? Pulled option production, old option. Okay, perfect field all option, it gives you a mass it's filled. So I don't have to look at it if you guys have done it work by default, it fills white and then you go out and paint it takes too long, so just hold your altar option. All right? So now, when I grabbed a white brush, I consent my capacity and aiken slowly paying in what I want and focus based on how I sharpened it before. So now I can just have the eye and focus and that maybe if I want to zoom out and like, uh, sharpen his glasses of sharpen the tip of his nose or whatever I wanted and it's applied, and I could also sharp into this I over here. This is great to the way it comes in as a mask, because you could process it again with another layer for the other eye, which is since he's turned away from the camera this one's even more out of focus. So rather than a global adjustment, like a smart shopper on sharp mass, this is allowing you to go fix that I've painted in a certain capacity, fixed the other eye and painted in a swell so you could really get detailed is nice and something that I do want to warn you about, since these eyes are different amounts out of focus, what you don't want to dio is sharpen a lot for the out of focus I and they're only partially painted on the less out of focus I because they need to be sharpened different amounts it's actually require different places your place the slider and just backing off the passenger painting in part way is not the same as doing two separate ones and just applying it to each eye so just keep that in mind all right? I'm warning everybody so it's a little more advanced if you're beginner and photoshopped do not expect to follow this morning you all right? Here we go, buckle in if you're advancing, then this is cool. Um, anybody know, like high pass filters and things like that? Okay, I'm just gonna do my version of it. Um, if you've seen my creative, live, photoshopped weeks and photoshopped classes, I taught something called frequency separation. Like I said, yes, oh, you like that? Good, awesome! You can use frequency separation to sharpen the eye and selectively sharpen areas to the focus. Um, so I'm going to do is duplicate the background twice the middle layer medical low top player I'm going to call high. All right, this is what super high end retouch er's dio because what I'm going to do in this process is actually take like the skin tones, the skin color and put that on the low lair and then actually extract out that skin detail and put it on the highly, which means somebody has watching skin for example, I can smooth that out underneath and then it won't affect the detail at all, which is awesome. Okay, well, that's the basics of it, but I'll show you how I can use it for sharpening in a minute, so let me run you through that again if you're not advance it's it's followed the steps exactly, and you'll get it. But iet's not something that everyone needs to dio and actually I'm going to ignore that right there when we do it the way that I usually do this, okay, so I'm gonna grab the low lair and you actually want to blur it, so I'm gonna go to filter blur, goshen blur so the reason trying to blur it is since this is going to be the tone and color lor I don't want detail, so I have to blur detail. All right? So, um, you don't want to blur anymore than to I'd say between point five and one point five somewhere in there um usually the rule of thumb is that you want to blurt toe where the eyelashes become unsure aarp with their argument sharp, so I'm just going to kind of arbitrarily pick by one point one something like that okay, cool now I'm going to select the hyler and to get it to do what I'm looking for it's a few steps click on the hyler go to image apply image and we've got a click on a bunch of things here okay it's the first thing that I have to do is I'm applying right here the layer I'm applying the this high image and low image together so because I'm on the highlight I need to select low I have no idea why I promise you I don't know like the back end of what exactly happening I know it works it's beyond me so just I know that I'm selecting the low they're here I need to select ad I'm it's like in verse and I need to select two so if you need to screen grab this right now we'll remember this this is what you need is going to have a screen grab it guys isn't seen this one yet okay uh so what you want is laire low click invert blending should be ad scales should be to offset should be zero I don't know why this is what works what no this these are the numbers for sixteen bit a bit and sixteen but are different numbers I always work in sixteen for sharpening and uh what I'm trying to save a crappy file so we're giving you more doubt it'll work giving you more data to work with. So if I know that, I'm gonna have to do a lot of fixing. I'd rather work on it and a sixteen filed and convert later. So that's why I switched it to sixteen to show you how I would normally do it. So can they click? Okay, um, this looks wrong, but I'm going to zoom in and you'll be able to see the detail. You see the date there, so essentially would have done if if you've done high pass holders before, you know that that's, basically what this looks like. The last step to get this to make a little more sense is you have to change your blend modes and if you don't know, blend modes, blend modes are how you change the layer that selected interacts with the layers below it and there's tons of different blend modes and all the different things I taught hours and hours and hours upon this, but there's only one that works for this solution and its linear light because it works, so we're gonna go to linear life. So right now, when I do my before and after zero has changed, I haven't done anything but separate the detail on the top of her. And the tones and textures on the middle there so it's what I have what's great about this now is my lovely friend john here has extremely minimal things that I need to correct about him but let's say for example, that I wanted to smooth out some pores or something like that I'm gonna grab my clone stamp on a low capacity let's take a look what's your brush set out right now for soft really sounds all right, so now if I go ahead and kind of fill in some of these little spots it's not actually getting rid of any texture it's just filling in the dark spots so if I look at it like it was a little bit darker there on his nose right now where I'm cloning I'm not cleaning out the texture I'm closing out the darkness, so if you zoomed in, you still see the texture just wouldn't be any darker um so maybe I did we're just over here like that that's fine again, I said he doesn't have really anything to retouch, but this is nice because I can smooth out under the eyes without worrying that I'm overlapping on the er the glass is there because I'm not getting rid of the detail, so I made us get rid of a little bit over here all right? So let's take a look I'm able to keep all the texture here's where the sharpening comes in, after all of that sharpening comes into play because that top layer is essentially detail, and every time you duplicate it, the picture will get sharper, so by zoom into his eye and I click and duplicated, I'm dragging it to the icon just the left of the trash can. The picture looks a little bit sharper and a little bit sharper, and I mean, you can keep doing this, but notice much how much sharper got, and so I went to an extreme, so you guys could all see, but just like we did before, I can use my my lair mask and then just paint the duplicate of that layer there. So what? I can actually dio delete everything you can't group them as well. Um, what I'm just going to do to show you is conflict on that hyler I could roughly select his eye, um, and then like modify feather, feather it so I'm just basically selecting the eye and softening the edge don't do this, and I'm going to hit command j, which copies and paste that into a new layer so I've duplicated it and then I can just duplicate that and so right now, as I'm duplicating it's, just littering up the eye, so if you watch what I've been able to dio is smooth up skin and sharpen the eye with the same process. Let me zoom in to his eye one more time, and the reason I'm showing you this is this is one of my favorite ways to retouch for beauty. And I figure if you're already doing this just added onto your process it's, right, that you have an extra detail there layer right there, why not duplicated and make use of the detail you have? And then, of course, you could flatten this and go in with your, um, sharpening tool and paint that on or you something different. But, um, I will definitely do this, especially for pictures where I got the eyelashes. I just barely missed the iris of the eye. This is a great place to do it cause I can extract some that detail and keep lowering it on. So this is the most advanced thing that I will be teaching. So anyone that glazed over okay, let's, go back to something, not a stressful