Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Photoshop Concepts

I'm kind of kind of take you through my basic workflow in process now it's really important to understand that tiffany is a huge component of this um when I first start of course I did all my processing myself now in the interest of time and just cost effectiveness it actually cost me less to have tiffany do it because my time is spent marketing dealing with clients doing things that are shooting that kind of thing so tiffany goes through her basically how it works now is tiffany goes through and cole's all the images and does the initial first at it cleans them all up color corrects you know makes him pretty and then I go in she sends those photoshopped files to me and then I go in and crop the way I want to crop I might just touch a few things and liquefy that I that are that you know artists being picked picky artists all going and do things that I being picky about that kind of thing all enhance a few of the family image is a lot for the eyes and stuff like that I'll retouch out da...

rk circles and things like that and so and then those air considered finished images and that's what we import into pro select and show the client um so I'm pretty much going to take you through just a basic couple of things that make a big impact on an image um so let's see what can we start with this where the images from yesterday and they were we called him down to a few of our favorites and one of the things that you'll run into a lot is dealing with backgrounds that aren't quite where you want them to be so it's actually a pretty easy fix to to deal with this stuff so I'm gonna go ahead and um open up some of these this is the first time I mean opening any of these so yeah these are all straight out of camera um and it's probably only been in the last two years that my images look quality out of camera um it took me a long time to get there so if it's not there for you yet don't stress too much but focus on it because once you see me go through my process and how quick it is one with an image straight outta camera looking good it will cut your editing time and now you know why it takes us less than an hour to process a session because we spend thirty to forty seconds on image and that's it because we don't have to do anything more because they're good out of camera does that make sense it's it's really helpful when you're first starting out you know you're learning exposure and you're not nailing things right it can be challenging but that's simple step of white balancing yesterday all these are I don't have a touch white balance their perfect white balance because I did a customer a bounce in my camera I mean if any of you are fussing with us up here you're wasting time you are um and I know that's not that important when you're not doing a ton of sessions but eventually you're going to need to get that efficiency when you start growing your business and doing five six seven clients a week you're gonna have to have that type of efficiency in time so a ce faras exposure goes his two grams up here obviously it's pretty well exposed I don't really have to fuss with too much there I like to increase my clarity just a little bit too create some contrast in the mid tones that's all that really does there you could see she has some pink hands and some pink feet will deal with that in a few minutes I always enable the lens profile correction which can sometimes brightened things just to touch so all pop it down just a little bit back to where I like it but the fifty millimeter lens tens and based on my camera tens of and yet somewhat so that lends correction profile fixes that immediately but this image is looking pretty good and ready to open up so we're going from camera into photo shop a lot of stuff on my computer so hopefully we'll take two of these huge files okay so one of the first things I deal with is um the background here okay there is a super easy fix for that if you go to your marquee tool and just make an outline and don't include the blanket the gray blanket there but get everything that you can on this side first commander control t and stretch out your background press return d select and I've just about made a whole new background that easily um simple but effective so I'm gonna go ahead and just crap in a touch I'm a free cropper a lot of people like tio crop things with a ratio and tiffany's one of them she really likes have a ratio I'm a free cropper and the reason being is I want to create one of my rules for cropping is making sure if the image is this close down here to the subject I wanted that close up there on the top to create balance so just to give you an idea this is before the crop this is after the crop it just cleans it up and tighten the edges too do you see that I'm talking about there yeah steven has a question if you do crop that tight then when you're printing different ratios do you end up having can be some issues I'm really long here so if I go to an eight by ten ratio I'm just gonna lose right here on the left and right here on the right and it should be okay occasionally I'll lose a few things but clients don't really seem to mind that you have to be cognizant of it by all means but if I really really my clients are particular about it and they want everything in that I'll go back to the raw file on drea crop it on export when we when we send it to the lab okay so um one of the things that I would deal with here what's really bothering me is the fact that her headband is cooking do you see that okay just totally being particular um but liquefy is your best friend okay so shift command x brings you in to liquefy and in cs photoshopped c c and c s six safe sex too yeah I think it's a sex to um the you don't have to press the bracket key anymore to this's just a quick tip that will save you I'm all about time you guys now amy if you press control all ts and I'm on a mac guy so if control option or control out on a pc of but I'm not sure I don't understand all I don't know all the photo shop commands on eh pc so you'll have to forgive me you can extend expand and contract your brush by simply pressing control option and then dragging your mouse back and forth it's a super quick way to make your brush bigger faster so you bracket keys you don't have to do that anymore you can just drag it makes things much easier so I'm on the forward warp tool up here and I use liquefy all the time I'm gonna make my brush about his biggest the area that I want to move and I'm just gonna go ahead and start flattening things out just to touch move the flower up every basis weren't you worried about destroying the baby doesn't look like a star of the baby no I'll look for vice and beautiful thing kind of took things a little bit so to make those images that are really perfect and you have to be careful with these minds because you can really tweak those a lot but I will liquefy fabric I will liquefy backs I will talk but in all kinds of things you could do to make it look absolutely round and perfect I'm not changing baby I don't care she's cute adorable and chunky I'm not going to change any of that I just want to change change the posing so that she looks like everything was meant to be does that make sense so here's before the liquefy here's after the liquefy I've got a few issues right over here that I should probably fix but just be cognisant of sometimes these lines can get you in the fabrics ok straight lines and it's often a reason why I will photograph the line's going in because if I have to tuck in fabric if you go with the lines and liquefy you're fine and you can use the free stool and things like that but honestly them or factors you bring in and photoshopped to deal with the more time you have to spend doing it okay so the next thing that I would do is color correct the image okay so her skin is not that I think she's got some pink areas but her face is pretty good for the most part but I'm going to show you what I do I have adjustment layers and I always put a selective color adjustment on there um selective color is the best thing ever and you don't really have that power and light room selective color basically allows you to play with the science magenta yellow and blacks and whites in the actual color channel so if I dropped on this menu I want to play with the reds in this image okay so I'm gonna click on the reds I could bump up the science you see what's happening that's taking all the science out okay just in the red channel nowhere else I can increase the scion and it starts to affect her hair you can see that her hair's turning a little bit of a funky tone so by just kind of increasing my sand just to touch what I really play with a lot is the magenta channel in the red so when I dropped that down her skin starts to warm I might increase the yellows or not you have to be really careful with this that you don't overdo it the other thing you could do is go into the yellow channel and start playing with the magenta is there is well but see what I mean be careful you khun go nuts with this and make baby looked kind of from an outer space planet so just looked yourself um and oftentimes what'll happen is we'll just be the feet and the hands that are irritating you so if that's the case when I will often do is I'm a totally destructive editor just warning uh some people keep other layers I once I commit to something man smash it and go on it's kind of my feeling if you can't commit to it then then you know it's times sometimes especially on these quick edit so when you're just processing files for clients it's really a waste of time to keep all those layers especially if you know you're going you're going to keep what you just did you're not gonna do anything with it um so if I was to play with this hand I might make a second layer just just safe myself in case I want to go backwards so I'm gonna press command j to copy my background layer and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use my marquee tool and you could be pretty loose with this and the reason is because I have a feather pixel on I have a feathering on here right now I'm a ten I think I'll pop this up tio fifteen and I'm literally just going to kind of come in here and outline I gotta go along her joint there to see that joint and just give a decent little outline I might make sure I don't making show uh making sure I have all my little fingers and stuff so I've come outlined that red area that I don't really like then I can go up to my adjustments and same thing again go into the red channel and just bring down the magenta see how that happens and all of a sudden the hand starts to lose its red color it's just adjusting it slightly then I can also go into my curves layer at a curved adjustment and just give it up I must have missed my selection here hanging dump that real quick so I can go back to my selection my selection again here we go click you can command click on the layer mask and that will make select your select your selection again say that five times on and then go back to adjustments and add that adjustment layer sorry wrong one was going to do curves I'm sorry getting ahead of myself here do a curves layer because I just wanted teo a mid tone adjustment for that hand right there just to brighten it I'm so doing if I do this overdue this it looks terrible so I'm just gonna bring up the mid tones a little bit give myself a little contrast we're talking subtle adjustments here and then I'm gonna smash my layers because that looks pretty good because what happens is because I do these little adjustment there's a little bright spot right here but when I apply my artistic action on there it's going to annihilate all that anyway so I don't have to do it perfect every single time so I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing for the legs for the feet and occasionally I mean this could be time consuming to do all this to every single foot so keep in mind your time management I mean I'm not gonna do this to every single image the ones that I print for my clients either in an album or a wall portrait you betcha I will be doing that to every single image but it's important to recognize that this is not done to every single one okay take out the reds is to touch and actually I think that looks pretty good I don't need to worry about the feet or the curves adjustment I basically just duplicated my layer selected the legs did a quick color correction on the legs by reducing the reds the magenta is in the red channel and that's it done okay yeah so you do this after they've made the selection of which photo which images they want this kind of detailed work yes the quick color correction where we just reduce the reds make the background you know extend the background that kind of stuff will do you know tiffany usually does all that but occasionally she'll if a baby is super bad we will do the color correction in the details and that session will take her a lot longer to add it than others and there's gonna be a session where I mean poor thing she knows it she sees a baby and she's like oh my gosh this one's like john just and pink she she knows it's gonna be a nightmare and in light of photoshopped to deal with and it's just gonna take her a little extra time so some sessions are going to take you more time than others we had pretty easy babies that had relatively smooth skin tones with not a lot of issues going on so it's not too difficult but there will be baby sometimes where the baby is like almost purple and mom has this olive itoen skin and their next to another and it's just you go this is gonna be a nightmare to fix but that's yes we will fix all those and spend the time to do it the one that they order for their wall horseshit or their art that when we go even with we go into even further with a fine tooth comb and all the details the little acne the circles under mom's I brighten the eyes all that stuff we do down to tea as well as we can and came into question okay so I'm gonna zoom in and kind of see she has a few little spots on her so I'm gonna go ahead and take I use the patch to a lot and I also use the spot healing brush tools so all I'm doing in the past this is basic photo shop stuff is I'm outlining the areas that I want to correct and moving that to a patch of clear skin and that gets rid of it for me and you could see she's got a little bit of a baby acne going on but nothing major I could get really particular and start command jay and making duplicate layers and see this little dark shadow spot right here I could remove that as well if I wanted and then bring my opacity down just to touch just to get rid of it okay do you see what I just did my going too fast if I'm going too fast online holler at me okay thinking as I do here okay and that's looking pretty good so at that point I mean it's a finished much let's get rid of this little wrinkles bother me sometimes my poor computers like oh not used to you but that just kind of got rid of our little shadow there okay so that for me is a finished image I might go back and fix this up here because the fabric is bulging a little bit bothering me but this is a pretty much a finished image we would go ahead and save this as a psd file so you figure out where I am this is day one called make a new folder that says day one besties and save is a photoshopped file I save large files fly because those psd is get imported in a pro select pro select does not actually import that psd it takes a j peg copy of that just like light room does and uses that so click a proxy image catalog ament but the pro version of pro select on how puts to sea my claim had orders there prince etcetera etcetera highrise production pro select tells photoshopped to make whatever product I've ordered for the client in photoshopped a second action so if I have large files it's gonna make a thirty by forty enlargement for me no problem and I don't have to go back and touch the order after the client has gone out of the order appointment pretty much thirty minutes after they've left the order employment all this stuff is at the lab and ready to go okay that's the power of pro select harris production whole other class I could teach an entire three course on pro select alone can you just explain quickly what it is yeah pro select is a presentation and sale software for photographers time exposure makes it I'm one of the few instructors in the world really who's approved by time exposure to teach the software on basically it's for selling your work and if you watch the pricing in sales class you saw an action but it's incredible software for showing what you want to sell to your to your clients but it also has workflow aspect components of it where it will take your clients ordered images produced those using photoshopped and create lab ready j pegs for you so I have to do is upload to the lab and it's gone so that's why thirty minutes after my client's gone from the organ appointment we just run harris production and in press elect and bam there their orders at the lab so save us both a lot of time on the back end and you guys all know that I love time theme or I can have the merrier I am so anyway this has turned out really cute darling girl image so let's do something else you guys want to see any of that again do you want to see what we we did we're feeling pretty good about that so cute let's work with this one the reason I say that because we've got a lot of red stuff going on so slightly under exposed you see my history ram something pop let's do lends correction first just gonna actually turned out pretty good once lends correction got on there look at those kids um pop my clarity up just a touch give myself well contrast the mid tones and open I could eat her the problem is we have three women in my studio we all are on the same floor and sarah my social media manager who's brilliant by the way she will see tiffany editing and image across the room and she'll be like so cute it's you just like it we'd get so distracted by baby pictures all the time it's awesome okay so this is definitely one that's going to need a color correction and what we're dealing with here is the blanket see the pink in the blanket how that's going to change the minute I start playing with the red channel the magenta is in the red it's going to affect the pink now I don't mind so much I think that faded pinks a lot prettier than the original pink because you know me I love faded colors but it is affecting things a little bit so what I would do is again select so I'm gonna go ahead delete that layer command j to duplicate my background and I'm gonna go ahead and just select a little bit and be really careful around the pink just go all the way around her head it doesn't matter where there's no pink okay I just need to worry about where there's pink and I'm gonna go ahead and go into my selective color adjustment tool bring down the reds and the magenta is well just a little bit increase playing yellows I play with things sometimes I feel like I had him saying but look what it does to her hair when we have the science I'm not sure I like that I'm gonna go to the yellow channel bring down the magenta is there just touch not really liking what that's doing this is definitely it sounding one I might have to do duplicate selective color layers um and her hair looks a little bit sci me better um I might have to do duplicate selective color layers in order to handle this hand that's really pink because the hand is almost the same color as thea blanket so pink shooting on pink sometimes it's just really hard especially with a pink baby so take that into consideration but see how much better that isjust right there it really helps to kind of define or make the skin tone of the hand closer to the face and this is a common problem in newborn photography the hands and feet are always a different color than the face and so by using these little selection techniques you can really help yourself improve that color easily and quickly without spending a lot of time now there's lots of people out there who make actions for like hands and feet and stuff like that were running the action than having a mask out all that stuff so it's really there's nine ways that's gonna cat photo shopped there really is you can you can do all kinds of they're the same thing all kinds of ways um but I encourage you to find a way that works for you and that you to feel comfortable with and you'll you'll you'll figure it out pretty quickly and it's not that it's not that hard teo feel it out here and they're totally talking as I work and it's not sometimes blabber a little bit yes kelly creating a new layer before this election in case I make a mistake in my selection it's a it's a I don't have to um it's mean wanting a backup I'm going oh in case I need to go backwards I could do it quickly if I was at home I probably wouldn't do it but since I'm here I need to get out of things quickly another way you could do it instead of making like another way to do it is to make a copy select then go up to image each adjustments selective color then play and if you screw up so badly and you don't like it then you can just trash this layer does that make sense you khun trash the upper layer and be fine I double backed up and duplicated the wear and selected and in a color layer on top of it just to give myself some cem cem security okay