Lessons

Lesson Info

Post Process: Day One Images

so then what I do is we have um a little secret formula that we love and it applies a bunch of fun things to the image and fades it all out makes it pretty so oftentimes I will take off the brighton layer but that gives it that faded soft pretty look that we love so much ondas a finished image so I encourage you to find these things there's tons of people out there who produced beautiful actions kelly brown has gorgeous ones her little pieces ones are lovely also love flora bella actions they do some nice faded stuff and I use a lot of totally rad actions they do great basic processing actions that you can use every day and I use a lot of their warm it up and cool it off actions if I happened to get mike white balance off or things they're just looking a little warm I will cool it down using his cool as a cucumber action all the time it's a really great one let's go and save this close it out and move on how you guys doing feeling good okay let's work with some boca lets figure till we...

make it which ones we worked with this one's pretty cute oh leg baby lips you such a sucker wei have great jobs don't we just fantastic jobs okay so the highlights are a little hot on his face not bad it's not super bug and me but just a little bit we're going to go ahead and open that up just to touch get myself some clarity sometimes if the baby is really red like all over I'll start in my um saturation in camera and go into my saturation and just produce the reds just a touch to begin with see that immediately started overall helping things now granted it might change your background so just keep in mind if there's red in that background it's going to take it out of there too it's a global adjustment it's not a selective adjustment like a selective color adjustment so keep that in mind that looks pretty good to me it might bump up my suppose you just to touch and open the image any questions were my computers thinking bad actually yeah cayenne on the chat room wanted to know just off topic but about the welcome and you haven't set up oh yeah well just explain what that is so other people are asking what it is sure no that's a sometimes you take advantage take for granted the things that you have welcome is god's gift to the planet this tablet is the hybrid companion sin teak now because of creative live and the fact that they needed my computer's channels for the video I couldn't plug in my video but this actually turns into a video screen and I could be over here actually on my screen here editing and painting this thing unplugs to be an android tablet and I could go out the field with the android drawing aps and draw electronically anywhere I want in the world okay things pretty cool um I had a standard this is my this was my gift to myself after creative live last time by welcome tablet instead of jury thank the three into us five is a great place to start it's a pro level welcome and it will give you a lot of the same features you you'll just be working with it the way I am right now where you're not actually looking at the tablet to draw you're looking at your computer screen and going like this you have to have one of these to paint simple end of story you have to have one of these to paint with carell why it's pressure sensitive it knows how hard I'm pushing in painter so make my strokes more intensify push hard and it will lightly touch if I'm just grazing the surface okay so it's really important part of painting so you cannot paint with a mouse just simple end of story so if you want to paint know the chill need to invest in a welcome that walkom does have the little they change the name of that used to call the bamboo what's it called now they just change the name yeah maybe it's the into us now and then the the next the pro levels like the pro grade I haven't yeah maybe we'll look it up I haven't but they have ah lower and tablet that works just fine for for that stuff that might be a good place for folks sister I think the lower end might be in the bamboo the band that used to be called a man move but I think they just changed the name of it are not sure that something will happen and that mount that you have that lifts it up thatjust came with that protection with this particular tablet because it is technically a serene and I really like them out because it put your hand in a nice ergonomic position and it's like holding a pencil to me editing with a mouse's like anything with a potato you know you're this is a pan a pencil I can actually hold it the way I would hold a paintbrush or a pencil and it's it feels more natural went in the artistic process answer questions yeah it is the walk home companion hybrid in the sinti klein cme t iike you and I believe this is in the resource is okay thank you yeah I'm thinking the monitor their calibrated to your screen it's a little bit hotter not much it's pretty good actually yeah I do have its see the little place is right here right on the nose it's a little bit hot in those spots um I'm the light I was working with is a little different than what I have at home so I'm not used to placing it where it's supposed to be placed so yeah I do have those little hot spots and I could tell those down and curves or uh in raw to begin with with your highlights that would be the place to do it I didn't really do it I should've done it tomorrow okay so this little guy's just about perfect in the now sometimes what I'll do is just is a little tip all going with my dodge tool and just brighten up that little catch light to make the lips go pop up like that it's a really simple touch and I'd kind over diddle of it but um you don't need much just a little brush will make it look like the lights just making their lips look all wet and pretty and lovely okay so now you notice I shot this I think I was an f one point for one point six on that fifty millimeter ji lens so I already have a nice boca in the background but I want to make it even better okay so what we can do is press command j it's actually really easy technique I just duplicating my background that's all I did then I'm going to go into the basic brush tool okay um speaking of which when you're in the brush tool if you press uh command control option you can move your mouth or you're walking back and forth and it'll increase the size of the brush if you move it up and down increases the hardness of the brush you see that I'm just holding down my old and option key and going just makes oh my gosh these little short cuts you learn them I learned that from richard sort of and I went oh just save me thirty seconds so I'm going to go ahead press option and pick a background color okay I just made my foreground color this brown that matches the background I'm gonna put my opacity down to twenty percent so I pressed the two key that puts my a passing twenty percent you can see now that I've changed twenty percent and I'm just going to start painting over the background and the baby painting mawr my poor computers like oh big for me at home I work twenty seven inch I mac that has a terabyte memory thirty two gigs of ram and an sst scratched disk if you want photoshopped a haul butt work on a scratch disc set set the scratched disk as the set the ssd drive as a as the scratched us for some photo shop and don't put anything on that drive don't save anything on it use it entirely to run photoshopped especially when you're working with layers like you've got fifty layers in a document and your documents up to a gig in size for the shop needs its own drive to operate on and then up your computer to as max out on the ram just this thing has sixteen gigs my my thing my eye mca home has thirty to max it out and photo shop has a dead designated scratched disk at home and it's a hundred and twenty eight megabyte ssd drive okay ssd drive solid state drive has no moving parts in it and so it tends to run smoother and faster and when photoshopped a has a designated disc to run off of it it'll screen okay you'll go really fast I order mine from other world computing they have great ssd drives for relatively cheap and it's just I just plug it in my computer is just a external drive that plugs in you don't have to have been things and made inside or take it to somebody to fix okay so continuing on I'm just painting over the top of the baby I don't care if I get the baby I just want to create this book I'm gonna go up to thirty percent in my corner here poor computers like I can't deal with these eight hundred files I should have known that we should've bought the seven hundred well don't think about it so I'm just creating this softness in the background I don't care about the baby right now so I'm going to ask it out later I could do it at the front end too let's do a little darker color paint paint paint paint paint computers of van started going up all right uh and then I just paint maur intently at the corners where the boca would be most intense okay you see do you see where I'm just trying to create the natural process that a camera would then I just put in layer mask on that layer go back at one hundred percent using my default colors black takes away white ads you guys are you know I'm their master I know there's gonna be a lot of questions about this because there's some people at home who don't understand later masks okay tomorrow I might lose you just a warning those of you who are beginning in photo shop tomorrow morning I will lose you just be ready for it okay so then I just go and paint back baby I dropped to forty percent as I get back here every time you lift the brush and put it down again it's taking away forty more percent does that make sense so the minute you lift the brush you're going toe and then set it back down you're gonna add another forty percent so I'm just gonna add that forty percent right there manzie always gets rid of everything for you and there I've just created fake boca here's before and there is after to really make the focus go in the face now I've exaggerated a little bit here this is strong right here it's a little too much the nice thing about doing things on multiple ares is you could always reduce the opacity of the layer to make it on that point so intense okay and it's very fast and easy to do that and create that focusing attention right on baby space okay yeah steven is there a reason to use the paintbrush with solid color as opposed to making a layer and blurring it with a gaussian blur surface blurred like texas there's so many ways to skin a cat you can tell you that you want to just cares if there's a specific reason why I'm fast and efficiency and also I can use the color to my advantage some of that new tilt shift thing and photo shop is actually really cool so when we go play with that on the next one there's like you said there's tons of ways to do this um this is a way that I kind of learned the beginning it's easy it's simple it's tools that everybody uses all the time and so it's fast and quick it may not be the best way sometimes things I do are not the best way I will warn you there um I am not that's the hard part about teaching photo shop is there's so many ways to do things and no one way is the right or wrong way to do something and everybody will think that they have a better way not not that you're thinking it's a better way but everyone will have a different way of doing things and you have to do it works as long as it good looks good at the end who cares how you got there okay so you will learn techniques that are faster that you enjoy better and that's the fun part about for shop I don't think I could ever learn everything there is about photo shop I mean it's such a huge programme so try these techniques I'm giving you something new and different that maybe haven't done before play with it and then we'll go ahead and look att the tilt shift blur or gazi and blur and see and see what that does so shall we do it with the same image much right let's see if we like the difference let's go for it did I say this I don't remember okay so let's go back and open that image again now this baby is so cute let's just we'll deal with our highlights so that more they're hot aren't they sometimes bring the exposure up can help deal with the highlights and I have to deal with that and all of it the contrast on that monitors a lot greater than it is on my screen just so you know no so go ahead command j duplicate my layer and let's go play with the gaussian blur filter first we'll show you the difference okay so I went to filter filter blur gazi ambler okay this is gonna blur the entire image so we're going to basically do the same thing but with a blur what gazi ambler does though is it faiths it blurs the entire image the same and when I like to run the reasons I use the brushes because I congratulate it to be like riel boca now the tilt shift blur in here now does that and the tilt shift field and iris blurs are all I believe new to photo shop sees see me I don't know my versions I'm sorry if I'm getting that wrong doesn't mean I would you know stephen isn't see six um so you know I'm putting a global blur across this okay so you know we can play with that and then you know mask it out in in I kind of do our own grady in't we can pick the grainy in tool and get rid of it doing that or use a brush so there's like I said there's tons of ways to skin a cat photoshopped if I am going to do it this way I'm going to start first really low opacity and then just keep pressing the brush down down down so I get my face nice and um nice and in focus first okay so obviously the line of focus the plane of focus is right along the face this is a strong transition here so maybe I'll drop down to twenty percent get rid of that there and just kind of keep going back towards the background towards the foreground and same thing here so you could achieve very similar fact with the glossy and blur as you can with paintbrush paintbrush really gives you into that solid color where is you'll keep the texture a little bit more with a cosy and blur so it works look looks great so um it's just kind of up to you and what tool you want to to use okay let's do the tilt shift I'll show you the town just you can see the difference I always duplicate my layers just for safety in case that makes me semi destructive you know I mean I'm not like completely annihilating my image by doing it on the background layer at least I'm doing a um copying that that layer so these right here are fairly new to photoshopped field were iris killer until shift the tilt shift is the one that's pretty fun because you could see it puts up this little um guide on your on your computer screen and then you khun tilt it where you want that field of focus or out of focus to be and you can move it around and then this gives you the the depth of how like it moves your focus point out like gives you your depth of field almost and then this right here gives you your plane of focus that's in focus and then you can make this increase or decrease by how much blur you want you see that I'm getting a lot of blur and then just a little bit so the tilt shift feature is kind of neat because you can really play with where the focal plane is then you press return and it pretty much does everything for you automatically as long as you put your little lines and I'm not talking very technically but it's been a long day you know I'm talking about but there I just put a tell shifter on it with one tool it's very subtle but it's a little little bit right here I probably could've made a little bit stronger ok I do it again so that small stronger you can see the difference shift people like it when you do things twice do it twice so I can see it twice a little bit more blur you could see his lips are out of focus we're gonna go ahead and pull that gradation from infocus toe out of focus see that and then I'm going to move the whole thing over to where I want things really pressed to some makes sense you see that face chris this just quit that makes the grade ian so it's either really tight radiant meaning it's that's like using a macro or the fall ofthe is really quick or you could make the fall off more gradual okay so it's going press return make that happen julia what's your rule for knowing whether you've gone too far with an effect like this or not oh I don't know if there is an actual rule for it um it's training your eye and you know it brings up a good point these guys from the break we were talking about print competition and and stephen wanted to know more about how to enter print competition um the one thing that doing something like print competition will do for you is it will train you to see and being able to see what's too much and what's not enough I would err on the side of less is mohr because like especially with things like portraiture oh my gosh people just beat the death out of torture and overuse it and it looks like the face is plastic and it's terrible but if you really learned to see you'll notice when that's going too far so print competition basically you submit your images to your state organization or international or fbi and a panel of five judges evaluates your work and scores you and yeah it's intimidating as heck when you first do it but boy when you sit there and sit through that judging and watch it and hear them comment about your prints especially when things are challenged because the five judges all give it a score and then it's average and if one judge doesn't like that score he could go challenge I don't like that let's talk about it why are you guys scoring it like this I think it should be higher or I think it should be lower and so they all discuss it and those comments that you get our invaluable because you start to see things and images that you're like how I did not see that until they said something you start picking things out and images and eventually you see things so well that your eyes just trained beyond other photographers and when you can train your eye beyond other photographers that's when you start getting really good so training yourself to see is one of the greatest things an artist can do print competition great going to do that studying other art is a great way to do that and asking yourself what they could have done better what's missing from the image what's distracting to me in the image if the effect is distracting it's gone too far that is definitely if you had to place a rule on it that would be it julius who would like to know if you sharpen the images around the eyes sometimes my sister my sister and I have different taste she likes really soft images and things that aren't necessarily always sharp all the time especially babies it gives that ethereal quality all sharpened image if I think it needs sharpening these air pretty tight right here so I don't really feel the need to go to go into it I'm really happy to see that they're tight because as I remember I remember I told you earlier yesterday I was having some issues with focus so I'm pleased to see that but yeah I mean I will sharpen especially if I'm printing large I will go in and sharpened specifically for that print did I answer that I'm sorry I'm getting tired sometimes I feel like I'm okay yeah steven similar to what you did on the the lips do you ever going to like the eyelashes and dark and those yep we're totally going to get there okay so let's go into anything you guys want me to do the dandy lions oh becky would be so happy to hear you say that this one's in a little bit better exposure so this one got a little hot over here okay so the history damn you guys are all pretty advanced here so you guys understand the history ram this is so important and if you remember when I was shooting I'm like I can't see my instagram cancer I was freaking out because I couldn't see my history ram that tells me whether I've clipped the image if I go and hit what we call hitting the table so too far to the right on the history ram and you're obviously blowing things out I have lost information and data in my wife same thing the other direction okay so if I deep in my exposure so much I have lost detail in this deepest darkest shadows of this okay so when you're shooting don't do that when you're shooting you want you want your history ram to have good peaks and valleys now ah brighter higher key image the whole history graham is going to be somewhat shifted to the right you just don't want to hit the table same with a low key image it's gonna be a darker image so the color tones are going to be over here but you want to make sure your entire history is a totally general and there are exceptions you want to make sure that your hist a graham covers a decent portion of the line down here in order to feel like you've really captured the data in the file okay so it's actually put that's to our lens correction here so we you see how it it definitely blew this out a little bit because that um fifty millimeter lens loves to give me dark corn vineyard vignettes a little bit up my clarity just to touch the clarity just gives me contrast on the mid tones are gonna open up my shadows just a little bit I like things really soft and a little bit low contrast with babies some people like it really intense and strong contrast so again personal aesthetic okay I'm gonna go ahead and play with my reds just a touch already you told me with the oranges too but see what that dust the background who makes baby look dead you know what that ok that's gonna open this up becky did such a good job was daniel and stop brand new backdrop she just painted this and she paints these in my hand and that amazing that has the printed on fabric um sarah this came to us last week in the studio and weigh all friended up and sarah squealed like I wanted teo cover out of you so becky bless her heart is printing a debate cover for for sarah in the dandy lions because she loved it so much it's awesome it's so fun very ethereal but looks too much cropping mom's in the babies in the in the power point I kind of like the way the fabrics going there's really not much to fix here other than I'm going to go ahead just be safe and do my layer again and do a little quick skin correction by same thing dropping my magenta sze I confess with my yellow such a touch but see how that effects we've got yellow to deal with you see that would be real careful you're not my fencing with it a little bit but um going too far can be the kiss of death so just quit gwen quick little adjustments here and I'm in the normal mode you can be in content aware mowed down here just be careful and the hardest part with photoshopped sometime determining um why something's not working what do I have selected what's going on why's it not working it happens to me all the time and I think it happens to everybody so just don't worry too much about it just sit down think for a second realized that uh it will come to you uh yeah usually it's because you know I always press command d just to make sure I don't have anything selected all I'm doing right now is taking the spot healing rush tool just dealing with this little flaky skin some parents like it some don't if it's super excessive on a baby I won't touch it because it's just I mean try to put lotion on the baby before they before you shoot it and you'll be a lot happier now I could correct feet and here's a little bit for the readiness but sometimes you can just go too far so that's what I'm gonna do julia can I just catch you I think you just covered one question that we had about dry skin and you were just on this spot healing brush right yes okay right on the spot healing brush so thank you watch your step around home in there I'm just producing the effect a little bit and that's pretty much finished images very warm but I kind of like the warm tone to that looks so different on that screen that doesn't hear you guys sorry about that you could not have been yet to this but this'd be a beautiful image painted I would love to paint this okay becky's backgrounds are very conducive to that because they're already painted so you have to go in and pretty much muck it up a little bit and paint baby and you're done and that's a two or three thousand dollars product that you can sell to a client and I might actually sharpen this one I'm gonna go ahead and use my sharpening I have a little clarify sharpening action this is just a high pass it's not anything anything major I don't really have any major actions that I used my my processing is actually pretty darn boring that sharpen that was to touch reduce it smash and save