Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction: Spot Tool

So once you've done your developing and you've worked on your image is, um then it's time to start going in and working on the specifics of your image. So, for instance, um, a lot of your imagery comes in pretty close to being finished anyway, because you were doing a portrait shoot and you worked on the image really in camera. So hopefully you're exposing correctly, and you're not having to do a lot of work on your images When you're in the develop module, sometimes you're doing stuff that you're just ah, doing street photography or you are shooting a wedding and light conditions were changing rapidly. And so, um, you really have to work hard at getting your exposure right. And so in the develop module, you're really having toe work those images a lot. But in the end, there's there's working at the camera on the smarter. You could work a camera the better, because you'll have a better quality image coming in. And then there's working in the develop module, which is global. Everything ...

you're doing in the develop module is global, except for in the top section of the develop module. So if we go to the top area of the develop module. You'll see that we have quite a few tools. You have the crop tool. You have the spot tool, which is for blemishes and for dust spots and coke cans and anything that happens speaking your image. You have the red eye correction tool. You have the Grady int tool, a circular Grady int tool and a brush. These are not global adjustments. So these air your local adjustments. They you localize a specific area and work on them. And that's where you're going to do all of your fine tuning of your photograph after the fact. And so we're going to go through all of those items and show you what can actually be done inside of light room without the assistance of Photoshopped. Most people think, Oh, when I want to retouch photograph, I have to actually go to photo shop, um, and work on it there. But 90% of everything I do to an image is done inside of light room. And then when I go to photo shop, I'm only going there for very specific things that I can't get done inside of light room. The one time I go to photo shop the most is when I'm photographing seniors Senior Portrait's for high school seniors because they have more acne than most. And so it's faster to retouch acne inside of Photoshopped than it is to do it in light room. So there are times when you goto Photoshopped, but most of the time you can accomplish a great deal here, especially if you are shooting landscapes or street photography, vacation photography, stuff like that. There's almost no reason for you to go to photo shop almost ever unless you're doing a lot of photo merging and and layering and things like that. So let's see what we can actually accomplish here inside of light room. And the first tool that we're gonna work with, um, is the spot tool. Now the spot tool has the ability to just take out basic spots, or if you, if you see that there's something in your background that you want to remove, Um like, for instance, I don't know what this thing is, but it might be a piece paper, or maybe it's a rock, but it's calling my attention, and all I do is just cover up with grass. Now what's happening there is there to tools inside of the spot editing tool. There's the clone, and there's hell. Clone is just simply taking a piece of whatever is in the photograph over here and pasting it on top of the photograph over here, and you can actually choose how big that circle is. You can choose the feathering at the edge of the circle, so if you if it's not feathered at all, they will be like a crisp line at the edge of that clone. Um, and then you can choose the opacity. But the hell tool is actually very intelligent. What it's doing is it's doing what you might know in in photo shop is a content aware type of Phil, and so it's looking at the texture and the color, Um, from over here where you're grabbing, Um, and you'll see in this in this circumstance here. So it's looking at the textures and colors here, and it's looking at the texture and color here, and it realizes that because you painted on this area here, it knows. Oh, he wants to cover this, so I'm going to take this texture and put it over here. But then I'm gonna take this brightness here and the colors here and make sure that I replace it with that. So, for instance, if I were to do another clone where I decided, I want to take out, say, this rock here inside of the stream, it would try and choose something similar, and I could place another rock in there or whatever. But if I chose something from the grass, notice that it's changing the grasses color to the color of the stream. And so it actually remove the rock and makes it look like the stream is kind of a bubbly surface. But once I zoom out, you cannot see the Dirac was there, and that's because it's intelligently figuring out I'm going to replace this texture, which is Iraq with a grass texture. But I'm going to put the color from the stream on it. So it's doing a lot of interesting computations as it does this, which means because it's doing all that computation and there it's doing it to a raw image, and it's totally non destructive, so you can remove it. You can replace it and change things all of that takes a lot of processing power. And so if you're going to be retouching and image and you're gonna have thousands of points of retouching, you know, because you just doing a lot of blemishes, it's better to go to photo shop because it's just gonna bog down your system. Um, it also means that if you do a whole bunch of blemish retouching and then you turn off that tool and you go and do a whole bunch of burning and dodging and then you do a Grady int, all of those tools are going to start slowing down that one photo when you're working on it, because the computer has to keep. Every time you burn and dodge over one of these retouching areas, it has to burn and dodge after it thinks What's it gonna look like if I burn and Dodge and I still take that area from over here and put it over here? It just has to do a lot of computations. So just be aware that if you're going to do a bunch of retouching, photo shop is probably a better tool for it. But if you are just going to do light retouching. This is a fantastic way to go. So we're going to go over to our model here and we're going toe work on her skin. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna choose. Actually, I'm gonna. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get my welcome tablet and pen and start with that because it's much easier to work with a pen tool. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change the size of the brush because I want to work on her blemishes. So I'm gonna make it just a little bit larger than the typical blemish. And then I'm gonna make sure that my feathering is kind of high. I don't want it to be low. I don't want it to be all the way high, maybe 70%. And then the opacity is going to be at 100% and I'm and make sure that I'm in the hell mode and I'm just going to start clicking on blemishes, and it is choosing an appropriate place for the copy paste. So I'm just simply clicking here here and see how it's choosing the spot. And if for some reason, it chooses the wrong spot. If I just hit the forward slash or what would be the question Mark Key? Just think of it as you sing to the computer. What were you thinking when you chose that spot? Just click the question mark and it will choose a different spot that's more appropriate. So click on your thing. Uh, just keep Just keep moving around looking for major blemishes, things that you can see at 100%. Now notice that I'm at 100% and I'm still seeing her entire face. That's probably the right amount of Zoom to be working on someone. If you're zooming in all the way to you know, Ford one like this and looking at these little tiny blemishes all over the place, no one's ever gonna see those. So the amount of retouching you do should be based on the size you're gonna print it and how close people are gonna be to it. Eso if it's a shot of someone, that's mostly they're in the, you know, in the distance, and they when you zoom in, you just see their entire face or maybe even their entire upper torso and face. Um, just look at the image and get the things that are obvious at that distance because they're not going to be printed large. Furthermore, if you're designing a book, and this is why having a book module inside of Light from Classic is so awesome is because I can design the book. And if I'm designing an image that's only gonna print this big, I don't have to retouch it at all. But if I'm doing a double truck spread oven image than I need to retouch that one so I can choose which ones to retouch after I've designed the book rather than retouching and then designing the book. So this is critical workflow thing for those of you who are shooting weddings and designing albums for people never re touch anything until the album is completely designed, and someone signed off on it and says, Yes, I want you to print that thing, then go in and retouch the images that need to be retouched for that size because it's a waste of time to retouch something that's gonna be a two by three photograph. So I'm not going to zoom in at that level. I'm just going to keep it out at this normal level. And just if I hold the space key down while I have one of these tools open, it turns into a hand just like in photo shop. And I could just kind of move around and see if there's hope there's something right there and I can use. This is a spot tool where I just click once and it makes a circle. Or if the circle is going to be a little too small, I can simply click and drag around it a little bit, and it makes its own shape. So I could do that here and here. And let's just go down. There is a couple more right down there, so we're just looking for the obvious ones. Now. I have a rule of thumb, actually, Um, and that rule of thumb is that if the blemishes something I I don't see while I'm talking to the person, I remove it. If it's a blemish, not a blemish, but like a beauty mark, um, that I see when I'm talking to them like it's ah, it's it's a mark on their face that I would see, like my son has a little scar up here and its a defining characteristic of his face. And so I don't remove that scar, but I'll remove a little scar somewhere. But I won't remove the big scar because the big scar is kind of a defining characteristic. Unless my client wants me to, then I'll do it. But generally speaking, I'm not gonna remove those things like beauty marks and stuff like that, because they are like, I'm not gonna take someone who has freckles and remove all their freckles. That's what I'm saying. So those are the ones that there's all of the edits that I've made. If for some reason you want to get rid of those edits, if you hold down the option key, a little scissors comes up and you could just draw so you could just draw a box. And if you go over those, then it'll dilly everything you draw a box around. So it's really easy to get rid of those blemishes that you've removed already. You can get rid of those pinpoints if you need Teoh, and if you ever need to go back and edit a pinpoint, you just simply go and click on the pinpoint that you want to edit and then start moving and round or changing the opacity or what not now, beyond the ability to remove things is the ability to soften up skin in certain places. Like, for instance, the one thing that I see here is that there's a little bit of a wrinkle right here above her nose between her eyebrows that I want to soften. I don't want to get rid of it because I want to still see the the the skin moving I want. I want to see those some shape to that area. But what I'm gonna do something increase the size of the brush and I'm just gonna paint over the top of that area. And it chose her hair, which was wrong. So I'm going to choose a piece of skin that has a similar texture to it. So it needs that you can't choose a piece of skin that's that's blurry. You need to choose something that has the same kind of distance from the camera so that it has the same amount of texture. But if I just leave it flattened her out completely. I don't want to do that. So I'm gonna take the opacity on that on that particular healing brush, and I'm gonna take it all the way down, and then I'm gonna build it back in until, ah, little bit more there. So now you still see that that wrinkle or that that worry line interface. But you don't see it as drastically. It's it's lighter. So I'm gonna do that again here. So I'm just drawn another one right there and why it chose her hat. I'll never know, but I'm just going to choose a similar pieces skin. And now, because my last one was a 43% opacity, this one's also 43% opacity. So thes settings are going toe. Always stay exactly where you last had them. And so I have just softened up a certain portion of her skin and I could do the same thing. So I just have these areas in this photograph where the shadows are a little bit too distinct, and I'm just I'm just taking him and softening him up, not removing them, just softening him up. Oftentimes I do this for, like, bags under the eyes so if there's bags under the eyes, doesn't have any. But if there were shadows right here, I would remove them with this technique. And it's very easy technique, Often times there's a bit of a shadow here at the knows that bothers me. Um, and everybody has it because it's the deepest little shadow area you can get, um, on the face because the lights over this So I'm just I'm just grabbing a piece of skin and I'm putting it over the top of it and this time and take the opacity way down. And just so all I'm doing is adding like a little fill flash in that little spot on her, the corner of her eye and there. I'm happy with that. Now. The last thing that I would want to do is come in and get rid of this hair. But that is pardon the pun. That's a hairy situation like that's That's a hard thing to get rid of. So what would happen is you would have to go in to, and this is if you just, like, refused to go to photo shop to get rid of that hair, you could come in here and just scale down your brush Super, super, super small and then draw line right here. And then I got to take the opacity all the way back up, and then I would draw another little line and I'm gonna take the feathering down a little bit. I'm gonna draw another little line right here, and then I'm gonna draw another little line right there and then another little line right there and then another little line right there. So I'm just see, I'm drawing little bits aligns, because if you try and do the whole thing at once, it's just not gonna work out. So photo shop would do this a little faster and better, probably. But this will work. It's fine. I'll end up getting it done. But it's just a matter of doing it in little tiny bits so that every bit is choosing its own path. Um, so now I just need to come up here and do one more over her eyebrow, and then I think maybe that right there Good. So I got rid of that hair, so everything that most people would go to photo shop for we just did right there on her and she looks great. So I'm happy with all the retouching of the actual skin of the brunt, blemishes and the hairs out of the way. I got rid of those shadows by using a limited opacity on the same brush.