Lessons

Lesson Info

Finalize Images in Photoshop CC: Basketball

Now out of Camera Raw this is sorta my initial pass on my editing and it's really just kinda honing in everything, making sure none of my highlights are blown if I don't want them to be blown, getting them to an acceptable sort of place where I think I'm pretty good. I could probably leave these right now, I could send them off to clients. Client will be very happy probably, but I'm gonna pull them into Photoshop and kinda polish 'em up. It's a little hot still on that top. (humming) Yeah, I think out of those two standing-back-to-back shot or the standing with the looking-over-the-shoulder shot I think I like the one with the tree, I'm gonna go right for that one. The only thing I would really do in this one right now is now just take this out, so I'm just gonna switch over to my cloning tool. I'm looking over here and you see there's like some clouds blurred out in the background, I don't wanna grab from up here 'cause that's obviously a different color, so I'm gonna grab right here.

Pay close attention to that leg right there, I'm just gonna use that pen tool. Lotta times, oops, put pens in my mouth. Lotta times I'll go in and I'll use the mouse too and just when I'm going around legs I'll make my brush a little harder because we're going against a hard surface there. I will zoom in a lot because we have hair on his legs as well, so we want to get this out of there. It's really hard right now, but I'm gonna soften it up and feather it out, it's all process. So now I have a pretty clean line, and I'll blend this stuff in, so I'll pull back out so I can actually see the image. Oh, gotta get this down here, it's the hard part of working close-up like this. So you don't see it, I'm gonna shave him a little bit but only because you won't see that later. Let's actually go like here, try to get rid of the stuff closest to the body first, he won't mind if he doesn't have any hair right there on his legs. If I had a little bit more time on this I would kinda fine tune it. So right now I'm cleaning up that last little part on the left here by the leg with the healing brush, it does a pretty good job, especially when there's really no, nothing behind there it's just a little bit of odd clouds and gradients. So it looks a little weird here though. See that doesn't match up. so I wanna go back in, open up that. Take on my my hardness down. I might lower my opacity down to 40, and let's go in over here and see if we can feather that out to make it look a little bit better. I'm looking right now, I'm also seeing this string, I'll probably take that out really quick, just use the healing brush, just follow that along there, using the track pad, finish up that line. Come on healing brush, you're advanced here. Okay, so that bottom looks pretty good, now see again these are nit-picky things right over here. I don't really care for this, but we could take that out if I was polishing up the image for real. I go back and forth between just fast do it on my track pad and then precision is more of my tablet here. So I like this image right now, I think I'm going to give it a little bit more pop. So I think I'm gonna duplicate the layer. I'm going to turn it black and white, this you can kinda like mess with highlights and shadows a little bit and add texture with it. So I'm going to just do a little bit here and there also, yeah right there, so we found the red tones. I'm gonna pop up that red tone on his face, I'm seeing A'Shawn leaning there. (laughs) It's getting interesting, what? What did you just open to mess with the color channels there? Oh yeah, sorry, so I did a quick control, I'm sometimes not thinking about what I'm doing here. So that was the black and white function, so I made it black and white this layer. So you see the first initial layer is just in regular. I like to use a lot of layers and usually if you did it, and I'm gonna take this off really quick I'm gonna put another layer, it's in color now and then I'm gonna go to a blending mode and now this is gonna be really, really crazy. So this is in color so sometimes you can leave them in color sometimes you go in black and white, it's a small little pop and then I'll do the same thing with the black and white one. The black and white version is going to allow it to not have the saturation in there. So you could see it kinda dulls down those tones, so it's just a little bit, see? It's not much, it adds a little shine, and then I go in here and my blending mode's on soft light right now. So it's up to your choice, like I prefer a lot of sort of muted colors sometimes. And if I do want this basket up here to shine more or to get a little bit more color, I'll go back and just use a selective color or something like that. I'm at a pretty good point right now, I mean I like it, I don't love this image. I'm flattening the picture, I honestly just go through and I'll check what auto does, like in auto levels and in auto color, just to see what it looks like, I don't use it all the time. And then I want a little bit more of the whites here. Yeah, so I like that again I don't really like the bottom, I don't like this right here, I maybe would take this out and just leave just the hoop. I don't really think it will take away from the image or, but I just don't like this angle right here. But I want to move on to another picture, so let's get rid of this one. So we're on this one now. I was going for the symmetry in this one, I think I'm going to just make sure that we're all matched up, it looks like I can push over just a tad bit on this side to make it even, it looks pretty close though. Yeah, it looks like my midpoint is right there, I feel like the overall balance is pretty good. I might be able to come down just a little bit more, but then I feel like that, that ball that is, yeah, that's good right there. Again the only thing I regret is the extra brightness right there, I would probably just go in and turn into a quick mask, usually a Q you can push Q, increase my brush size, I use brackets a lot. So the little brackets on your, right above your Return and Enter key, you can select the brush tool really fast. Although right now I'm in quick mask, hold on, hold on. Yeah, I'm on a B for brush, open that up, increase my brush, and I'm going to just paint in really quick, right here, you can also use a magic, a wand, anything else, there's so many different ways you can do everything in Photoshop. I'm gonna do this very sloppy and I'm doing it with a track pad. I'm gonna make it go outta here now, I'm gonna switch to a wand, oops, nope, that's not what I want, go back, Command + Z is going back. I'm gonna add to this, this is not working exactly how I want, so I'm just gonna leave it, go back to quick mask and go into erase or actually I can go back into brush, switch it to white, and that way it will act as an eraser. I'm gonna use the Shift key and click, so I can get straight lines 'cause these are straight behind it. I'm gonna fill in this. ♪ Doo, doop, doo, doo, doopy, doo ♪ Now I'm just tracin'. ♪ Doo, doo, doop ♪ It's kinda hard to do it on a track pad, it's a little easier with a mouse, it's hard to do it on the tablet as well actually for these, at least I find that difficult, but other people swear by tablets and will use nothing else. They don't even use a mouse, but I use a little bit of everything. So that's fine for me, I'm gonna go in now, everything else is select, so I'm gonna inverse it, Command + Shift + I, we're gonna go in and I'm gonna put an adjustment layer in there by going to adjustments. Here's the levels, I'm gonna pull in that. I'm gonna first try this, bring that down, I think that looks pretty good, but looks kinda fake-y. I use an adjustment layer, so then if I am a little bit sloppy I can go back in and fine tune it. The whole idea behind this is I don't want that to be the main attraction, that is not really what I need there. I'm gonna add a little bit of darks in there, nope I'm not. But I am going to go back in with my brush again, click back on my mask, click B for brush, I'm gonna click on my white and then I'm gonna bring down my opacity on my brush, push V, nope B, and then I'm gonna go down to 40%. And then I'm gonna kinda feather, oops wrong one, kinda feather this out. I actually inversed it, so now I'm on black as my, thing away, this looks a little hot, go back. Command + Z, sky right there and do that right there. So I'm gonna move on from this image, I'm gonna flatten this layer, I like what's going on here. Again auto levels sometimes it looks great, I kinda like that, again I would probably go back, take some of this back out in my history, but I like the way it punches up his body. So I'm gonna leave this as is and move on to the next image. Again, I don't really like his place and everything, so I'm going to exit out of that one. Click in to this one, so here we go. This is pretty good as is, again tryin', this is auto levels, They didn't really do anything, here's auto color. Hate that, I don't really like this color of the sky though so I think we're gonna go to adjustments, do a selective color, go over to my cyans, and then open this a little bit bigger. Actually I'm gonna pull this open too, bigger, there we go. Open up that, we're gonna mess with this just a tad. I think I kinda want a, I don't know if I want a deeper or brighter sky, actually I kinda want a deeper sky so I can bring this out just a little bit more, that little sunburst. This looks fake-y, but we're gonna try to mess with these and give it a little bit more blue tone to it. That looks a lot better, to me at least. Again this is about you, you're selling yourself here and what you think is good and I like that. So I'm gonna keep it, yeah I like the color a lot better, it looked very green before. Now we got a lot more blue tones, it looks better with his skin. This really stands out, the hoop is right up there in the corner, I don't really care for the ground again. I think I would probably do something like this. Let's crop it and then, but I don't really like how, no that's okay, actually. I was gonna say if I really wanted more, like a longer shot, I feel like this crop is a little short. If I wanted a little bit more I'd increase the canvas size, you can do that by going to image, canvas size, or you can put Command + Option + C and then I would add on height, like 22, make it go down. Right here, oop, we gotta make sure we flatten that first or make it sure it's a, yeah so now we can increase that. Again, go up to 22, let's make it actually a clear layer, so I'm gonna get rid of that. 22, and then I would take this, grab that selection at the bottom, Command + Shift + Option + C and what that's gonna do is allow me to do cont in aware scaling and bring this down just a little bit more to balance out my image. But, the problem with this is it usually leaves a little line there, however, I think the new update has fixed it, wonderful. So I don't have to do anything to touch that up, now I feel a little bit better, I like that there's more room on the ground, it makes him seem like he's getting up higher. I would maybe even come up just a little bit more now, let's see here, I like his foot over right there. His face is right on that rule of thirds. I like this image, I think I would keep it. I'd probably sharpen it a little bit. I usually use smart sharpen, let's go in here, look at his face, yelp, definitely want some sharpness on that. I like to use a pretty good amount and then I always like to pull back if I need to by using Command + Shift + F afterwords. Let's wait 'til this goes. If I was really fine tunin' this I might put a little pop in his face by using that brush selection tool and then using an adjustment brush, but right now I'm pretty happy with it. I would save it at this point. So I think after cropping up a little bit on this, I think we're pretty much done with those. I would just go through the rest of the images and apply a little bit of the same techniques to it and throughout the day and just really exaggerate on what I wanted to accomplish while I was at the shoot. Again, I was going for a lot of contrasts, a lot of shadows, just doing that and the same in post, really try to mirror that same affect when you're on set, when you're in post, and again put your style into it as much as possible.