Lessons

Lesson Info

Remove Distractions & Extract Details in Photoshop®

Okay let's take this picture here. I saw this light in the foyer on Creative Live. I thought that's beautiful. It gives me that bar feeling. You know that tungsten light into the bright. So I like that world. So I want to make this quite a dark background. I want to bring a bit of textures out. So first thing we have to do is remove unwanted items in the background. So this thing here. So I'll take the spot healing brush and just brush it out. Okay, good enough. It's only background. Here, this one, It's gonna be a bit harder with healing brush. I look for easier solutions. Why is it resizing? My laptop and my mouse are not working correctly together. Okay, the brick here, I will get rid of that black area. Anything that's distracting the picture. Even dots sometimes distract the picture. So with healing brush I clean them. I clean those areas. Now this area here, what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna select the area approximately like that. Feather 10. And I'm gonna move that selection to a...

nother brick area here maybe, let's see, how's that? Around here, something like that. Command J. So I made a new layer of that area. And I'm gonna move it up to cover that area there. Okay, it's not matching hundred percent but don't worry, it's gonna go dark, so let's lighten it up a little bit. Lighten it up. Let's merge it down first. Now with the stamp tool, just continue. Hold on. Oh, it's wrong, not the stamp tool. Here's stamp tool. Select this area, just continue the brick there. We can do it also here just get rid of that. We can do that better with the healing brush. You see I'm not even increasing in size to see what I'm doing. And Creative Live has a crooked wall there. (people laughing) You should have fixed the wall before I took pictures. But really, do you see it if I don't tell you what I've done? Everywhere is crooked so it doesn't matter. Command J, commamd T. Okay, fix this one here. Oh boy! You're working too fast. Let's go back. Command T. Command J, Command T is for cropping I said. I will crop it inside there. And then skewing. Skewing is a very useful tool. You see I want that line on top to be a straight line. So it doesn't show me distortion. Transform, skew. And I will make that line straight. And the good thing is Yervant has a shortcut for it, so instead of looking for the manual click 'skewing' It creates a new layer and it's straightened up. Command T also to stretch it a little bit because the girl is now distorted a little bit. That's it, perfect. Okay skewing will fix lines. If you have a building, a door or something it's crooked I'll show you on another picture which will show better. So I've cleaned up the picture. The background is great. Now I'm gonna flatten this whole image. Flatten. I'm gonna run a different frequency. This time I don't want to make too much adjustment. I'm going to do Frequency Flat. So it flattened it already for me. There it is. I will select the highlighted area there. Go blur the selection. So it's softer a little bit, there you go. And it's nearly there. Now, the next thing I'm gonna do is extract details out of the picture. So this is one of my fun actions. Click 'detail extract'. So it's gonna pick up all lines and everything and especially on those lights and her dress and everything It's gonna exaggerate it. Once this is created I will delete areas that I don't want detail extracted. Especially on her face or something like that. Okay, you see it's just before and after. Its exaggerated the brick, the lights and everything. But I don't want this effect so there's a masking layer there so I will select her face, everywhere her skin is. And Feather 100 and fill. Fill with black because black on a masking layer. I'll add about 80 percent of black. So I got the effect out of the face just a little bit. So let's see before and after and let's see the original and after. Original. And after. Okay, let's deselect. Now, once that I've brought more details into the brick I will select around the edges of the girl. Approximately not detailed. I will go into the Yervant actions and the Yervant linear thing. I will do 250 is quite good and darken the edges. I also use output levels so I don't want to go too contrasty. So output levels. Okay, we've darkened the layers there. So the brick is meaningless now. Now, once I've done all that, I will go and adjust her eyes a little bit. Feather 5. Levels, just bring it lighter a bit lighter, okay. So now I'm gonna merge once I'm happy I'm gonna flatten the image. Flattening image. Okay this is where I need a bit of liquefy also. Her shoulders, this is popping up a little bit too high and makes her rough, so I'm gonna go liquefy. Click one of the actions, liquefy you will get the action. Have a big size brush. The top one which is for liquefy and just reduce. But there's a problem here, when I liquefy her shoulder the brick also moves with her. So what I'm gonna do is reset, restore to the original and now, I will go to this one here this is freeze masking layer and I will paint the brick where I don't want it to move with the shoulder. Okay, once I've done that now I go back to the liquefy tool. The brush and the big brush, just bring it down. I should have done it also on this side but doesn't matter I can do this. And then click 'OK'. This is a great, great way also to reduce weight. And sometimes the way she's standing, sometimes the way the dress is sitting on her, you need to do that, liquefy to make her perfect. Okay, now that I've done that let's see up to now where are we. Okay, before and after. Now I'm gonna apply a bit of filter. This will happen again when you do the album. I'm gonna apply a vintage look to it, a Yervant vintage look to it so click on that. This one you need again, Nik software so download Nik, its a real good software. And you can make your own actions also. It's gonna give me a nice softness to the picture. An old look, there it is. A bit of emergent in the background and then I will change the opacity because it's a layer to go where I want it to be. And there it is. Let me add a bit of contrast. Perfect. Beautiful. And there it is. Another picture. Lets save it as jpeg and we're gonna print this later on. Okay with printing, Creative live has the great Canon printer, they have the 2000. We're gonna see that later on. I love those printers, they are amazing, good investment. Okay, questions? Yep. So when you're running these actions and you totally change the color right now on that, are you ... Mostly I can't- You see this screen doesn't represent the actual picture but what I really did, most probably on internet they're facing the original so when you watch it after. What I've done is I've softened it a little. I've added a bit of antique look to it so the bricks have gone softer and mergantile and that's an action. If I run this action on a page most probably I'll run on the rest of the pictures so it matches and it's all unified. That was my question. Yeah, okay. Yes sir. So you don't use the lense correction in Live room? I do but I've made my own version of it and that's called Skill. I have more control over it. I'm a manual person, I want to control everything. So photoshop has given us the tools. Let me say, let me add this, I'm not saying my way is the best way, there's many ways to do it in photoshop. This is my way, this is how I like to do it. If you have a better way of doing it you can use the same techniques to do it your way but you didn't like the frequency separation, there's another way but if I run the image nomic picture it gives me quite a nice clean up and then just plain the top layer and it's gonna give me a good finished picture without working too much. You see, the practical thing, I have to build two albums a week I need to do it quickly but high quality. this is what's important for me. So yeah there are better ways, there are slower ways, but I've worked out that this is fast, this is quick. I don't want to do more than this, keep it simple. My pictures are already perfect. When you see the original most probably you don't want to change. So I'm just improving the picture so it looks different, classy and high quality. That's all I'm doing I'm not changing anything in the picture. I'm not adding background, I'm not doing anything. I'm just bringing it where I want it to be. I imagined already. So that's perfect. You see, this is a situation where it was in a classroom, it's not a real wedding, it's totally different and all the pictures are nearly perfect because same lighting. When you do weddings there's so many varieties, so many different things to do. That's why this is the last one I'm gonna do from the classroom and I'm going to start moving to weddings where things change differently, okay. So then you'll see big changes in what I'm doing. This one we have a big brick wall or we have a gray door, that's it, simple. But we can do a lot more. Something that I just thought about. The interesting part in a picture like this also is when you have a background that is metal and that is interesting and you want a bit of change to it. You can select the background. Let's select a bit more. What I do usually for these type of things, if I need a selection, I don't want to sit down and select. What I do I'll send it to one of my staffs they do the selection, send me a selected layer so I don't have to sit down and do selections things, it's waste of time. So let's assume I have a good selection there. And feather 100, command J, so I make a new layer of that selection and I will go hue saturation so command U, I will change the colors in the background by rotating the hue. So if I want to put a bit of interest into things maybe match her dress color. I will make a small change so the background will match her dress color. You see, if I do changes it's always about the background because I don't care about backgroungd, the background is me too. My main subject I don't touch too much other than the re-touching. So if we see the before and after, see how I added a bit of orange there to make the background look the same as her dress. So it just adds a bit more and then there's the green chair. You know I like that green chair. So select that green chair. Feather 100, and I will go command J again, new layer. Hue, and I will exaggerate that hue over there. Oh sorry I didn't do a selection, I was on the wrong layer, let me do it again. Select this, feather 100, command J. Hue and I will exaggerate that color of the, make it even more green. So in a simple place I will make that picture much more interesting. You see that has beautiful colors. The background is nearly the color of her dress, the green is exaggerated and looks amazing. So small changes like this, I will play with the picture because I want to take the picture to the next level.