Lessons

Lesson Info

Moving to Photoshop: Retouching

here's the image I want to play with um when you're doing senior portrait ce there's a lot of retouching to do but again like I said yesterday there are certain things that the client doesn't necessarily care about if you show them one example image that's been retouched they can pretty much figure out that the rest of them will look that good too so you don't need to retouch twenty five images in hopes that they'll buy them just retouch one show them the rest either in house or on the web or whatever and they'll understand that you will re types the others so there's no reason to waste your time on something you haven't sold there is there is one caveat to my my belief on this and that if you're doing boudoir stuff you probably have tto do the retouching before some will ever even pay attention to that image because you know you're getting into like tummies and things like that that just no one wants to see themselves looking poor in any of those types images so those people there tha...

t's like photos ofthe land all over for them and I apologized that there is no quick and easy fix for you but I was seeing your portrait's we do want to do a couple examples for them but when we're retouching again we don't want to be spending our whole life retouching and so my mantra um is that any work that I do needs to be done as quickly as absolutely possible and I need to do as little as possible to the image to make it work okay so I'm going to take an image as faras I can in light room first I want to do everything I can possibly do inside of light room I want to do all the adjustments I want to do the basic color adjustments I want to get everything even style I want done inside of light room if I can get it done time so I'm going to do as much as I can here inside the develop module to this image first before I go but there's a couple things that I can't do bef four I retouch one of the things that I cannot do before I retouched so I may show the client this image and let's say I haven't added any grain to this but let's say that I did some kind of a style to this photograph where I wanted some grain in it so I went and I went down to my film grains and I and I and I wanted four hundred speed film grain so now you can see that it's got this grain to it the problem is is that if I added some grain to a photograph whatever it is and I don't think I would add necessarily the grain to it but I might but if I'm adding green to a photograph I don't want to retouch grain that's a bad idea and so retouching grain should never be done you always wanted so even if I show it with the grain so the client sees the grain in the image when I'm told to go retouch this image I'm specifically going to come back and remove the grain and then go to retouch and then I can add the grain back later but I definitely don't want to keep the grain on when I'm retouching because then what happens is you you grabbed the grain with the the uh the tool and it starts to copy the grain and then you get these weird little donuts of grain it's really weird so you don't want to do that um in fact let me go further there's a better image for where grain would be absolutely really cool so not see this so I love this hat on her I think it's so awesome and so we've run so I'm going to go in and and work on not that one that's already been worked on so I'm gonna take this image and work on it so we're going to come in here and first do everything we can to this image but we're going to make sure we remove the grain because we don't want to be working on grain inside of photo shop I want to brighten up this image and I want to make sure that I see all of the texture in this hat this has crucially important to the image so I'm going to take the highlights back down a little bit so that I get mohr of the texture in that hat and I also take the whites down a little bit too so that this part of the hat gets in so I'm pulling down the whites and then I'm gonna add um let's pull the blacks down a little bit more and then let's take the shadows up because the shadows air here like this kind of stuff her hair and down here on her on her on her nose so we can bring that up a little bit and then I also I'm not really keen on the yellow nous that's going on in here and so those of those of you out on the internet concede this yellow nous pretty well on the studio audience has a little bit different view here but but it's a little too yellow so I'm going to pull that yellow out I really want to make sure critical to make sure that your color is done in raw you need to make sure all color balancing and stuff is done in raw before you ever go to photo shop because manipulating photoshopped document or a tiff document or something like that in color is going to deteriorate the photo because you're messing with the pixels so we want to do as much of that and raw first so again everything that we can do we do in raw because we can mess with the pixels without doing too much damage to them I'm also going to zoom in and just make sure that we're nice and sharp now notice there's a grain to this photo graph already and that's because we're shooting high I s so because this is there's one time where I use where the sun is I face people towards the sun and it's my favorite time of day and it's right at the very end of the day not while the sun is dropping but after it's dropped soon as the sun drops below the horizon and there's no more sun there's about five to ten minutes of light there that is the most beautiful light that ever existed and I will use that until the lights gone so I will always plan my photo sessions around that one bit of light and so wherever we are we try and end up so that the sun is setting and as soon as it tips below the horizon I can turn them around right towards where the sun is setting and then I can start shooting and I and I just keep jacking the esso up so it starts at about eight hundred and then it goes to twelve hundred and then I'm a twenty four hundred and thirty two hundred sixty four hundred and I just keep moving up until I can no longer get a good exposure and then we're done and those those images air without flash there's no flash all we do is just keep jacking up the because it's the most beautiful light you could turn the person trust straight towards the sun you get the super beautiful soft box light or you could turn them ninety degrees and then you get this beautiful like wrapped light around it sze the best light in the world I would prefer to photograph then anybody in that light as opposed to any other light in the world so if I could I would set up just everyday a ten minute photo session at that time that's all you get is ten minutes at that time and that's what I do like I think that would be an amazing set of photo shoots to do so I always try and do that always try and get that part of light so you can see that there's a lot of grain because we are at let's see we're at two thousand sl right now so you can tell that we've just begun we still have more to go beyond that but two thousand eso so we've got a pretty good sharpness in the ice so I'm happy with that but we do have some grain here and so the question is do I want to minimize that grain and I'll minimize it a little bit by going to in the developed module minimize it by going down to your the detail section where there's a luminous noise reduction but rather than having to go in here I can always go into my everyday favorites and I just simply say okay we're going to minimize the grain by just clicking on the noise reduction luminant ten and so that just gives me a softer feel to it doesn't completely remove the grain I couldn't go higher I could go to twenty five but sometimes that makes things so soft that it almost looks a little fake and so I'm not all that keen on going all the way to twenty five although here it looks pretty good so we'll leave it at twenty five but most of the time I'm a little concerned about going all the way to twenty five so twenty five is about as much as I dare go before it starts just looked too smooth but if you do have to go beyond twenty five remember that once you go in and add some more grain so see how smooth that is even if you go let's take that noise that luminous noise reduction upto like fifty or something so now it's really smooth so it's now it's goingto wants you back out it's going to look even fate and more fake it's like just too soft but you can always go back and add like eight hundred green back in and now the softness kind of disappears but you've got this beautiful grain structure that looks very much like film so but I'm going to remove that grain and I'm going to bring that um luminant stories back down to twenty five okay so we are set for work inside of photo shop now I could go in and do some bright ning on the eyes right now in the raw I could could add a little bit of I can go into my brush and I could choose the this smart dodge and I could go in and brightened things up let me see where my flow is always want to be in about twenty five so I could come in here now and just start brightening things up a little bit on this side if I wanted to just to make sure that I comes in I could do some of that however if I know I'm on my way to photo shop right now then I might as well just do it there because I can do it there as well and I could just get it all done at one time so I'm going to go to photo shop now so when I go to photo shop there's two ways to go and this is important because it's a choice that you make you either have a choice to do one photo at a time or you have a choice to do a lot of photos at the same time it depends on what you're doing in this case I'm on lee doing one photo so we're going they're going to fix it come back and then I'm going to move on with my life because I only need to do one photograph so in this case it's perfectly acceptable to do an individual roundtrip session and I'll show you how to do that but if you were doing fifteen images say it's ah baby portrait session and you're going to retouch these fifteen images because those are the prints the bottom client is buying or you're going to do ah book and it's got thirty images for a wedding and you're going to do those thirty images opening and closing every single file on your own and waiting for light room to create the photoshopped document then open and photo shop and then bring it back is a waste of your time and so if I'm going to do a siri's of images so let's just say I'm going to go into here and I'm gonna search for things let's just do all the three star images and I want all of these oh that's too many and just four images four star images there we go and I'm on ly gonna look for the original raw image and we'll go into the metadata and make sure we're on lee looking at raw images so I'm gonna go toe all those are their digital negatives there we go okay so we're on lee looking at digital negatives this by the way is the library filter you can get it by clicking on the back slash key it brings down the library filter and I'm sorting by four stars on ly digital negatives and on ly the originals so I'm not getting any kind of virtual copies so now that I've got those I can hide my filter and highlight all these images so these are the images there are twenty two of them that the client is buying so at that point I want to make ps d's of all of these so I'm going to go to the export dialog box and I'm gonna click on a preset lo and behold we use presets so if we make a file type off all the time we make a preset by simply choosing all of the options here and then adding the preset over here in this panel so that we never have to go through and make the options again again everywhere in light room there's a preset option always use presets everywhere everywhere everywhere there's light there's preset options so here we are I'm going to choose psd sixteen pro photo sixteen bit pro photo rgb when I do that all of this stuff has changed and so you can see certain things have been chosen it's going to save the psd in the same folder is the original it's gonna add it back to the catalogue and it's going to stack it on top of the original and then it's it's going to keep the same name so it's going to be if it's zero zero one dot dmg it's going to be zero zero one dot psd and then I'm going to go down here and it says psd so that's a photoshopped document it's pro photo rgb and it's sixteen bit so that's what it's chosen to dio it's not going to change the image size at all so whatever the images now it's going to change it's going to stay that way and it's going to include all of the metadata except I always have my image is removed the location information so if I have put location information into the photo like where it was taken or is let's say took something with my iphone has location data on it and it's in light room when I exported as anything it removes that location data because I don't want anyone to know where I am when I shoot number one it's my location I get people calling and asking hey I'm a photographer where's that location go find one I spent hours upon hours driving around my town looking for locations you need to do the same thing and find your own locations because they need to be unique to you and that it kind of that's us it's like you've got these little secret places that you know about now some of them everybody knows about but if you don't know the locations that's because you've been lazy and you haven't been choosing your own locations go drive around and find some there's a learning process there so anyway but but the other reason is that if I have pictures of my kid and I'm taking pictures with my phone and I start posting those somewhere that location information khun lead any creep right to my house all they have to do is look on the internet find out where it is mapped the location because the gps coordinates is on your iphone and now they know where you live and now they know where your kid goes to school and now that they know where you have bagels in the morning and now they know where and now you've got complete access to your personal life so I know someone could find your house some other way but there's no point in showing everybody exactly where you're taking pictures because a lot of that's very personal information so so I always anything that I x export always removes the location information because you just don't want people knowing everything about you so anyway that's that's all that needs to be in that export and when I export now I can walk away I can go do taxes I can go get a drink I can goto lunch aiken do whatever and it's exporting all of those and then it's putting him back on top of the other one so I could just hit export and now all of those and of course these already exists so I'm not going to overwrite them so I'm going to cancel but I've already done this process so it would export him and then when you get back into their into the into the job when you come back from lunch or whatever when I click all files now you'll see that I've got a photo shop document on top of this raw documents see how it has one of two two of two and I can collapse that stack by clicking on the one of two and now it's on ly going to show me the top one which is the photoshopped document and before you export your j pegs to the client you go up to the library menu our I'm sorry the photo menu and you go to stacking and you collapse all the stacks that way on ly the photoshopped image shows and if you collapse stacks and then you highlight everything it will ignore what's underneath the stack so now the client will on ly get photo shops if there's if there's a raw image like this one here this one's just a raw image it'll send this rai image out is a j peg but if there's two in a stack it'll only send out the top which would be the photoshopped document which means your client on lee sees the retouched image rather than confusing him with a retouched in a non retouched image okay all right so yes jane's wass is that devon's between world in that to appear to the end oh why to click in the image and choosing as it and vote job I'm going to go over there right now so we just did the process of exporting a bunch of them so I didn't have to sit and wait for it to build it but watch what happens if I'm just doing one image and I decide okay I've done what I want to do with this image now I'm gonna I'm going too edit it in photo shop so I hit the edit key which in this case it's telling me that there's a difference between the photo shop camera raw and the camera raw that's in light room and when that's the case I'll always use light room to render the photoshopped document so I'm just going to render this using light room and it's going to render a photoshopped document but see I'm waiting on it I'm waiting on it and then it's opening and I'm waiting and I'm waiting so this is stuff you don't have to wait for waiting and in a minute here I'll be able to edit and all of this all this time that we've wasted waiting for this thing to open up you don't have to be here for that okay now I can edit so let me close it and let me go backto light room if instead I were to export all of my photoshopped documents that I was going to work on all at once adam back to the catalogue and stack them then I can come in and just simply look for all the photos off documents so I'll go back to the grid and I'll search for on ly photoshopped documents and then I can look at my photo shot documents and just say okay here's the photoshopped document I want to work on and I can just edit it and it says you want to edit the original or a new copy I want the edges edit the original edit and it's going to open and photoshopped very quickly as opposed to waiting for it to build then open photoshopped then open the document so there's less time on your part spent if you do let the let the computer do all that work on its own and then you come back and just use it almost like you and use bridge you just document open work on it close it document open work on it close it instead of waiting every time for it to produce the psd okay like I said if you're waiting on your computer to do something than you're wasting time you need your computer to be doing stuff while you're doing other things kind so he always consider your computer as like this free labourer that you can use twenty four hours a day to do things and make sure that that computer is working for you all the time I always want my computer doing stuff when I'm sleeping when I'm eating when I'm and I always planned stuff around that I'm like okay I want to go to lunch I'm going to get through all of this stuff so that then I can send my computer to work while I'm at lunch okay so um I apparently opened the wrong because I want to edit this okay so here's the unedited photoshopped version and I'm going to edit it and photo shop and there it is see how quickly that opens so it's very easy to then work on your images and now I am going to transfer over here to my lockem tablet and I'm going to I liketo work on this in full screen so I can so you hit the f key and it puts you into this full screen mode where you khun dragon image around and place it where you want it and then I've got my actions over here and so I've just got a little tiny set of workflow actions and there's just a just several things that I do and again I don't want to do them over and over again for instance if I want to burn and dodge something I don't want to have to go in and do what is necessary to create a burn or dodge layer so instead all I have to do is push on the burned dodge layer button and hit play and it's creating a burn layer right there and so now I'm all set plus it's already chosen my burned brush for me so that I can just start burning like it's all set for me already I don't have to do anything additional although my cursor is being weird right now and see hold on let's go into our cursors in the preferences cursors and make sure that we have the right cursors okay there we go all right so now I can choose okay I want to just burn the highlights and burn in her hat just a little bit and I'm gonna turn change to the shadows and that one of the reasons I'll choose sometimes to go into the light room to burn and dodge is because it's much more accurate you can do basic burning and dodging in light room um and and you could do a lot but sometimes it's even better to do it in photo shop because you can you can burn on ly the shadows and so see that aiken burn the thing about this is the shadows inside of this are what create the texture and so I convert nw just the shadows and not the highlights and so that's allowing me to create a little bit more texture in the hat because not burning the highlights of that's only burning the shadows so up here at the top of the burn every hopefully everybody knows what a burn layer is if you don't know how to create a burnley let me create one I'll bet there's someone out there saying how do you create a burn dodge layer so what we'll do is we'll go to the layers panel and some reason I can't they're ok so we're going to go toe layers panel and we're going to click on this little drop down menu and create a new layer when we created a new layer we can call it you know bern layer and then we go to mode and we call it a soft light layer so and don't ask me why it's a soft light layer it just is so it's a soft light layer and then you fill it with fifty percent gray right there you don't change the opacity to fifty percent you just fill it with fifty percent grande hit okay then when you look at that layer so this is the bern dodge layer that I used on her hat anything that's darker than mid grey is considered a burn and anything that's lighter than mid grey is considered a dodge so if you if you use your burn layer because you khun burn you khun you can add a burn teo image you just take the burn dodge tool and burn it to an image but it's not a subtle and it's not it's not as easy to pull out of the equation and you can't scale it back whereas with the burned dodge layer I can go in and do as much burning as I like and then later on I could come to the opacity of that layer and I can go okay that zero percent burn that's one hundred percent burn and I could just find the happy medium and say ok that's where I want it so I find the midpoint and say that's remember good r is what going beyond and then pulling back and so what we do I I have never burned something on an image and then thought that's perfect I've always burned and thought that's too much and then I've pulled it back but instead of having to delete it and do it again I could just grab the opacity of the burned dodge layer and just pull it back so it becomes subtle and that's the way you do really good burning and dodging I used of course do this in the dark room like this you know and then you take a piece of paper and you go like this you know and it was never as accurate as you could be in photo shop but the fact that you khun you khun burn just the shadows and just the highlights and just the mid tones is much more intricate than you khun b inside of photo aaron side of light room now does that mean that you should always use photo shopped for burning and dodging no absolutely not most of the time you should do your burning and dodging and light in light room because it's faster because you don't have to go to photo shop but if you're going to go to photo shopped for a really important image and you really like the image and you want to do something amazing to it the best burning and dodging methods are still going to be inside of photo shop because there's far more control but you just have to learn where your limit is is the client going to care whether or not you burn and dodge this image to be to be absolutely amazing probably not so the only time I really going to photo shop and really work on an image is when I want it for my blogger or I want it for my uh portfolio or I want it for a print contest or you know it's for me not for them kind I do though I do um what's called an artist print and if someone orders an artist print from me then I end up in photo shop because I tweak it to the end degree and really work on it and make it but they're paying me a lot of money do that so anyway so that's the burned dodge layer the next thing that I'm gonna worry about is dodging now a burn layer is too dark and things but dodging you could go in and just grabbed the dodge tool which is here and start brightening things up but the dodge tool sucks and the reason it's bad is that it just brightens things up and the problem is you don't want to just brightened everything up because then you get thin shadows and so then what should be black looks kind of like milky gray and it makes the photo look bad so what we do instead is we create what I call smart dodge layer and you notice that I have that same thing inside of my presets in light room I have a smart dodge layer what's doing the same thing so if I if I push play on the smart dodge layer like that it creates something in the now where did my other all that I'm just going to close these because these are worthless to me you can't see this edge of the screen here something's going on so they're out noting it see there okay so I go here and look what it's created what happened in this in this little action what I did was simply make a layer out of it's it's basically an adjustment layer so if I were to create an adjustment layer of and this is this is just a curve so if I double click it you can see what that curve looks like so I made a curve layer over the top of my image and what I did is I brightened up the middle but see how the shadows stay where they're supposed to be on the highlights stay where they're supposed to be so I'm really only going to be dodging out the middle oh are the mid tones but the shadows were still locked down where they're supposed to be rather than everything raising like this the shadows and the highlights are locked in and on ly the mid tones are allowed to rise so that's the first thing that happens is you create a a curve layer then after you've created the curve layer you're creating a mask over the top of that and you're turning the entire mask black so the way a mask works is that anything that's black on the mask doesn't exist so if you've created a curve and you put a mask that's black it negates the whole matter are the whole curve doesn't exist and then as I paint white onto that mask then whatever I've done in the curve starts to exist so I go in here and I click on the mask itself which have already created in the action and then I go into the paintbrush which the action puts me in the paint brush and I paint white and I don't want to paint one hundred percent why I want to paint more like thirty percent thirty percent is a real good subtle painting method so as I paint that now watch what happens see I'm just subtly painting up those shadows can you zoom in it's a little hard to see from oh sure yeah so let me show you before and after now so that's without them the uh curve and that's with the courtesy I just brighten it up a little bit time so and and if you want to you can see the curve by just just hitting the always forget this there see that the red is the black mask but you can see how I've negated it by about thirty percent here around the eye so I painted this white in and that's erased out that mask I mean racing mask basically okay so whatever you paint as white will become see through and then the black keeps us from seeing the actual curve so just think of it as any time you have a black mask it's nothing it doesn't exist it's it's blocking it out it's a mask and then any time you paint white into it you're cutting through that black paper to see what you've done below it okay so once we have the mass created and we're painting then where it's just a matter of coming in and it's good for brightening up eyes like this so we're painting in the eyes and brightening them up it's also this is where it's really really effective is going in and just highlighting people's hair like you go in to see those curls you can go in and just do some amazing things with a dress the highlights on a dress or the highlights on the curls for a girl's hair or maybe the highlights on this this little piece of string are this stuff hanging down so it's just it's just a matter of highlighting these really cool curls in her hair so this is like and and really this this senior like that's her signature the her care is currently and so it's just her and so when I'm working on her images I want those curls to be super prevalent because they are they really speak to who she is and again I'm not going to be doing this to every image I'm on lee doing this to the images that either I want to highlight myself so I'm paying myself to do it or the client is paying me to do it through an artist print but it's important to have the skills to be able to do something like this to really enhance an image but you can see the difference now if I if I take this out to fool watch the difference between the before and after so this is before after you see that watch her hair her hair just just starts to shine and all I'm doing is I'm taking the mid tones on the hair and bringing him up but notice I didn't have to be like all tricky and worry about whether I was going over any shadows because the shadows they're staying where they're supposed to be because of the curve okay so that's what we call a smart dodge instead of just a dodge yeah can I go then our friend is in my lexicon an artist print is a print that the artist me the photographer takes and it brings in himself so like for instance picked taj is my print provider so all of my images once they've been adjusted and perfected as raw images get get exported to j peg and sent up to pick taj and then clients can go to pick taj in order prints all day long and then and when they order him picked taj retouch ism for them so any obvious blemishes get removed self like that and then it goes to the client they ship it to the client I never even see it but if the client wants my hand in the work then they pay me directly and I do the work and it's very different and it's much more high scale and it's not just someone that's being paid to retouch random images it's me it's the artist working on the image and so I'm involved in doing it I am involved in in tricking out the image and doing stuff like this that would never be done by someone else who doesn't care about the image too much right okay so once I'm done with all of those kind of things I also want to go in and work on the retouching that itself so we've got a couple things to do here so we're just going to go in and get rid of the major things that air in it so we go to the healing brush and we want to make sure that we do the healing brush tool and uh and we just simply go in and hello there we go spot healing rush sorry so when we're in the spot healing brush is just a matter of o and see this is whenever you get to a new computer this becomes a problem see how see how it does this like if I do less f like I'm pushing less on the walk of a tablet and then when I push mohr it makes it bigger right so that's great for painting but it's not good for retouching because then you have to like decide how bigger thank you know based on your touch how big the dot is so I always go up to the brush settings and I turned the pin pressure off so that it's always the same size so all I just cooked it doesn't matter how hard I click or how soft I click it's just doing the size of the brush and then I also make sure that there is no hardness so it's soft I want the brush to be soft on the edge is um and so now I'm going to come in and I could just say that it's just it's just touching it and it takes care of the the thing another interesting thing about this brush by the way sometimes he ever noticed you could use this healing brush and when you click on it you click like really close to something and it and it draws the black thing out into the skin like it draws her hair out into the skin so if I were here and I do it next to an eye lash and I go like that it pull it'll pull the eyelash out so the key to that is it's the direction of the brush so if I'm in close to something that's got darkness if I brush away from the black thing it's going toe pull stuff from where you started to where you're going but if you pull if you brush towards it it's going to brush the statement it's based on the direction of travel and so if you travel away from the black linus supposes that you want the black line to go this way but if you travel away from the skin it supposes that the skin is the more important thing and goes so it's just it's not like you're painting it's just um it's just a slight movement so if you're if you're having trouble where it's grabbing an edge and pulling it out try going the opposite direction towards the thing and it'll grab the skin and pull it in right it's just I've found that it's just direction of travel that helps to change the way that that tool works and so I'm just going in and grabbing the big things the things that that would stand out when I'm farther away and you can do it really fast it's just a matter of going in and and grabbing the things that will stand out and you can always test yourself by just going out and looking for things oh there's something there that stands out so I'm gonna grab that of that I'm gonna increase the size and grab that so I'm just looking for the on ly things I concern myself with are the bigger ones because I've got a tool then that's going to go in and grab the small stuff and minimize that so I khun khun on ly I only have to worry about the larger imperfections in the skin so I'm gonna almost done here just gotto get around the chin a couple items here all right now let's zoom out see if there's anything else that we see just one right there on her neck so we're going to go in and there and back out okay so now we're done with the major retouching and now see how she's got the shadows under her under her eyes who want to take care of those so those we just want to make a basically we're just going to do um uh a uh a clone so we just go to the cloning tool so we go into the cloning tool and then once we're in the cloning tool wanted to be a thirty percent so thirty percent of whatever it is um is going to get cloned across and we're going to grab it from here and let me just make sure I checked this brush you make sure it's not weird okay so I'm in a clique option to grab it from here and I'm clicking right there next door knows and then I'm going to go over here and just pain thirty percent of whatever I'm choosing in and that's going toe see that it's just taking that and it's now we're done with that and sometimes you want to do that on the nose just a little bit so that you don't get some weirdness there or there's too much of a shadow here and so you can just and you can smooth like transitions here see how there's like that a little bit of a long temple there but it looks more in perfected and so we can grab this and just kind of just so we're just grabbing highlights and pushing them down here and it's filling in those shadows we don't want to go too far with it because remember your smoothing it out while you're doing this so you don't want to go nuts on it so that you'll have grainy here and then smooth here and that's another reason that you don't want to have the grain on the photograph before you get too photo shop because you're actually taking the grain and then pasting in a smooth motion and so then suddenly you've got kind of a textured here and you've got smooth here right so you want to do a cz minimal is possible but there's a big difference now between let's let's look at the image now from here to what it used to be so let's take the history that's what it wass and now that's what it is so we've done an amazing amount of work just with those couple little things that we've done and then the last thing that we want to do is we want to smooth her skin so we want to remove all the imperfections in her skin so at that point I have even if you're using plug ins you want those plug ins to be automated and so I love the portraiture plug in and so I'm going to go and just click on a this is my action so the action has a stop in it to tell you what to do and then it duplicates the layer and it goes into portrait the portraiture plug in it it makes it it does the part after plug in and then it fill it it it will make a a a mask so that then you can paint it in um and then it'll it'll select the right brush for you and it does all of that stuff rather than you having to do it every time so there's a lot of little things that go into a plug in you first have to launch the plug in and then you have to set the plug in and then you hit go and when it comes back you go and choose a brush and you make yourself a a uh a uh you make yourself a mask and then you choose the brush size and all that you don't need to do that you can tell light are photoshopped to do that for you so I'm gonna hit go on this and it's going to say oh this requires image nomics portraiture plug in which is a great portraiture plug in by the way is by image gnomic hit go and now what it's doing is is running through that and now it's telling me to paint the areas that I want and what it's done is it's created a second layer that's just like the first but see that black mask so you're not seeing it if I were turned off that black mass by hitting the shift key and punching it see how soft everything just got so I'll zoom in on that see how soft she is and if I undo you see that see how beautiful the skin becomes when I turned that on but it's a little bit fake looking and I don't want that so what we do is we first start with nothing we've the black mask pulls out the effect and then I can take my my brush and I can add it in so now if I go to one hundred percent I'm gonna paint in by clicking on white so I'm painting white onto this mask and I'm just painting it on her skin that's the only place I want it I don't want to smooth out her hair I don't want to smooth out the cab I don't want to smooth out the the background I just want her her skin to be smooth and that's the only thing I need smooth so now that I've done that I can see the difference there's the difference and now what I do just like with everything good are is you go beyond the point and you bring it back and so we grabbed the opacity and we pull it back all the way to zero and then we start bringing it in see this we just keep waiting for until she looks naturally beautiful instead of like a like a doll right so we don't want to be here because there's too much imperfections but we don't want to be here because there's too little imperfections so we just look for the place where and we can zoom in a little bit more to get a good idea and we just kind of pull in and out and now that's about right so now she looks like she's have has great skin but it doesn't look I like I did it remember what we talked about on thursday we talked about hiding our hand not only do we do that at the photo shoot but we do that here we hide our hand whenever we're doing stuff so that so that the world thinks that this is what reality is and that's what makes our work more powerful is that they think this is actually reality when it's not yeah james how do we get the pledges to again go to image gnomic dot com or search image gnomic and purchase it it's not that expensive but it's a really useful tool when you were doing this spot healing tool I knows you're on the background layer is that what you usually do yeah I couldn't I could copy it and then just work on that one but then I've got two layers and I'm and I'm going to end up flattening it anyway and I'm never going to use that other layers so I don't I don't worry too much about that I just make sure that here is something that you should worry about make sure that your history levels allow you to get like ninety nine in your history so they can go back in time far enough because you only have nine or ten in your history levels that becomes a problem you can't back up far enough so but now now we're done with this image and we can simply flatten it or let's say we want to add the grain back well let's do a awesome plug in okay we've already done one awesome plug in which is r image gnomic but let's go into another awesome plug in which is our if you goto filter you go down to your knicks software and you can open up oh hold on what's going on here I hope we have access to that filter yeah there we go silver effects pro right so what we're going to dio we already like what we've done here so I'm just going to highlight all of these in all of these layers here and if I hit command e it flattens them all so I flattened all the layers I like what I've got here and now I'm going to add grain to it so I can go up to filter image gnomic silver effects pro and it's going to pull me into silver effects pro now sylar effects pro makes black and white images and so I can come in and choose a specific like I can make my own presets so I can do custom presets oh shoot I don't wanna update okay so I can do my aiken do custom presets right here I can add my own presets so once you come up with something that you like presets presets presets but in this case what will do is we will start as normal and we're going to go down to various film types so I'm going to go teo film types here and choose a film types I'm gonna choose agatha x a px pro one hundred so now I go in and zoom in one hundred percent you can see the grain type and that's it's just a beautiful beautiful grain they do such a great job with the grain but look how sharp it is below the grain and then I can so I've just chosen a grain and I like it but if I want to adjust it I can change the size or the amount of of grain that you know how much grain I have how big the green is how soft the grain is and then I can also go in and choose like the color filtering so am I using a red filter am I using ah on the camera so I'm going to zoom out watch watch the difference remember this is a red hat right here right so what happens if I use a red filter see that it it over exposes that red because I have a red filter so on ly red gets through and look what happens to her face it starts to brighten up and you can change the strength of that filter so it's nothing or a little bit and then we suddenly start getting a glow out of her skin if we're gonna keep this in black and white however I'm not going to be keeping this in black and white so I don't want to affect it that way but just know that you khun put lynn filters on your camera lens after you've shot the shot and if you really want to do some like um fake infrared stuff this is the place to go because you could just go to town in here so but what I'm going to do specifically for this is I'm going to keep it at this amount but I'm going to go into again we're going to zoom into her eye and I'm going to go up to the structure structure is a fantastic you khun do structure in it highlight shadows mid tones wherever you want but I'm gonna take the entire structure up a little bit which is just gonna help toe add a little bit mohr sharpness below the grain so it's adding structure below that grain but then the grain is still the same grain it's not sharpening the grain so that's my image and I'm gonna hit okay and notice that what's happened is it's created because of the action I told it to create a new layer and then we worked on that in that other layer so that as soon as it's done which it should be done shortly there so we got a black and white white layer and we have a color layer the black and white layer has grain on it the color layer doesn't have so much grain on it has a little bit of grain because of the camera but it doesn't have the same grain structure but now what we can do is if we want that grain structure on color we just turn that layer into a luminosity layer and now we've got the grain and the effect from the film from a black and white film onto the color image so now you have a color image that has film grain on it and it's absolutely gorgeous absolutely gorgeous I love it there's nothing I love more than silver effects well that's not sure I like light room or but then beyond light room there's nothing I love more than silver effects pro too I mean it's just phenomenal but then see I don't have to just do black and white film I can do color film too so it's just a matter of and you can automate the whole thing so I could automate everything that I just did I can automate even turning it to color and saving so I can close this down and it's safe now once I've saved it I could take any of my any of my um like for instance here here's a effect this is the pro one hundred color grain right here so that that little action can then be taken so in answer to someone's question someone asked if we could take a action and photo shop and put it into light room if for some reason you can't duplicate what you want to do in the action inside of light room you can automate it and so what we do is we take this action from light room and we go tio we go to automate in file menu automate and we go to create a droplet and when we create the droplet we're going to choose where we're going to save the droplet and I'm going to save the droplet just on my desktop so that I can find it and we're gonna call this color film groups and hit save now it's going to go there and I'm gonna create an action based on workflow action sets I'm finding the action so this is my action set and here's the action I want to do this color green action which is going to use silver effects pro to teo bring it in right silver effects is going to do it and then I tell it to set up this thing and I want to override any kind of warnings about oh I don't want to override open commands I want to include I want to suppress the color and the color pile profile warnings and then if I want to save it in some different way I can do it but otherwise I can allow that the action to do the saving for me and then I can tell it to stop for errors or log dares to file I'd prefer it toe log errors to a file somewhere rather than stopping because if I'm asleep I don't know that it's asking me for information and so I would say that is an entitled on my desktop save so that's what the droplets going to do hit ok and now a droplet has been saved I'm gonna hide photoshopped I'm also gonna hide light I'm going to go in light room to the preset folder and the best way to find it is goto preferences go to show light room presets folder so now that I have the light room precept folder open and I can go here's where the lightning presets air held so there's the light room folder and then I'm gonna look for export actions and I'm gonna grab this color film and drag it in like that and now that it's in there if I'm in light room I could highlight every single one of these images all of these hit export and say I want to make psd sixteen bit pro photo rgb images but at the bottom I can go to the post processing choose export action and choose color film and when I had export it's going to first export the ps d's and then when it's done light room is goingto open photo shop and tell photoshopped applied this preset to everything in this folder so you could be sleeping you could do that to five hundred images while you're sleeping and that color film that you've perfected in silver effects pro is going filled silver affects two is going to be put on every single one of those as a secondary layer so that going later on you can come in and tweak it if you want to so just be aware that there are a major things that you can do inside a photo shop but you can control him from light room even if you can't take the action and duplicated in light room you can certainly use the action from light room okay so are there any questions that need to be answered before we go to lunch why yes there are white why yes so they are you could probably have a whole three day course just on photo shop now way will get there you're a wealth of knowledge all right so this is a question that comes up often um when dealing with a photo retouching and this one is from steak hollis um why do you remove birthmarks and others have wondered you know like how far you go in touching up but what's actually like rules for touching up you know that's a there's two camps you could say I want everybody to look perfect my version of perfect or I can say I want everybody to look as natural as possible minus the zits right so you could go one or the other way so when I look at someone and I take a picture of them I then take them and say what did I see in my head when I was looking at them and if I didn't see it in my head when I was looking at them I remove it so if I see a birthmark that's fairly like prominent and so when I'm talking to you I see the birthmark then I leave it but if when I'm talking to you I don't see a little birthmark here or a little birthmark here then I remove it because what I want my images to look like when I re touch an image I want the image to look like the way I see you when I take the picture and so like for instance a lot of the times you look at someone and you and you talk to them and you and and and you never noticed certain things about them and then it's on ly after you see a picture of them and you're not talking to them you're just looking at a picture which is infinitely in front of you and you could just gower itfor problems that's when you see the weird things you know like a lot of times you don't you don't notice someone has a zit and you're talking to him but they have one there's a blemish somewhere on their face and you don't notice it because you're looking at their eyes and you're talking to him and they're animated in their hands and whatever most people don't see my face at all because they only see this because I'm always talking with my hand and so they just see hands and body movement and whatever and bald head that's what they see eso so it's only when they see a photograph of me that they can really focus here because most of the time I'm distracting them with my hands so when I am photographing something I want I want them to look like what I saw and so that's what determines whether I remove something or keep it in and so I will leave a birthmark but if I see a birthmark or say there's a mole or something and its prominent I will actually go in and do like a thirty percent I'll grab skin and put thirty percent skin over them also it's softer it's still there but it's just it's not quite as harsh so that's a little bit more pleasing so okay maybe a quick clarification question about portraiture so people are mo dog photog and yes I do weddings wedding photo had asked about is that including your presets where'd you find this action so maybe just okay so the actions that you saw me using that little set it's not a very big set of actions but it's it's pretty useful that whole set is inside of my comprehensive preset collection but it does require a couple of them required to own image gnomic software or toe own silver effects pro in order to use those actions it'll otherwise it'll be like you don't you don't have that plugin but literally it's just that's what I use that it's a my action set is literally that long because I don't do much maurin photoshopped than what you're seeing because I'm not trying to trick it out do like lo mo effects and crazy weird stuff I'm just doing very very good retouching techniques in photo shop I'm not going crazy with things and so that little thing is inside the comprehensive precept but just to clarify those air separate their separate plug ins yeah so when you buy him the portrait plug in is not part of that collection you have to own the portrait bye image gnomic which is a great piece of software so go get it and you have to own um silver fax pro for the action tohave toe work so you just have to own those things but there's also a little you know like you don't have to own anything for the the smart dodge um layer to work or for the burn layer toe work those those are just part of photoshopped thank you yeah I have a question you didn't do anything with her eyes like frightening or um you know sharpening their eyes more that's remember I did a little bit of brighton ing with the dodge tool I just kind of hovered over her eyes and it left the blacks the way they were and just kind of brighton the whites a little bit but just a little okay you can use dodge for that yeah the smart dodge for that if you use regular dodge for that if you just use the dodge tool and photocopy the eyes will get milky and ugly because it'll it'll pull the black up to just the whites yeah just never do much with the iris is like a lot of this especially the seniors they really like their eyes to pop they want well if you're in a situation and we'll talk we're going to go in after lunch on the fourth segment of the day well do so much stuff in light room that you won't believe what we're doing and we'll even do that in light room where we take the irises and like intensify the blue on the eyes and all that kind of stuff we could do a lot of that kind of stuff inside a light room so we don't necessarily have to be in a photo shop for that but yeah I will do that some times if someone has significantly blue eyes the and I saw them at the photo shoot I won't fake him I won't say oh I want you to have blue eyes but if I looked at him and thought and she has striking blue eyes then I'll make sure that that shows through okay we're wondering if you can clarify about working on layers and specifically working on the original layer vs do you ever duplicate the background layer or just work on a fresh new layer every time okay the only time that I will duplicate a layer is when I'm doing something so tricky that I'm pretty sure I'm a screw up a couple times so if I'm tryingto layer stuff or pull stuff in that's that is just unnatural and shouldn't be there I've got a I've got to remove someone from a photograph or I've got to remove that then I'll duplicate the layers so that I have two options and I and I'll usually work really heavy on the one and then use a mask to kind of show parts of that layer and not other parts of the layers so that's the only time I do it so maybe this would be a good example here hold on let's see I have a photograph that is quite something when we come back I'll grab the photograph but it's it'll show you the difference between before and after as to what we did in photo shop and so when we do something really tricky that's when we'll go and create a new layer but if I'm just retouching I'm pretty certain I'm not screwing it up and so there's no reason to duplicate the layer okay one more quick question this is from s t a n g and stds from tasmania very cool um is there a reason use the dodge in bern tools on grey layer rather than a brush with a black white color say that again question is is there a reason to use the dodge in bern tools on a grey layer rather than a brush with black and white color oh yes ok good point so you could do once you make that gray layer which is your burned dodge layer you could just use the brush tool in paint black and paint white but then you're just painting the actual colors so you're painting a specific color in the reason I use the dodge tool and the and the well I don't use the dodge told but I used the burn tool is that I have access to the option inside of so when we were in photo shopped there was inside of that dodged or that burn tool you have the option of the range of shadows mid tones or highlights that's critical to the t to burning the right thing so if you want to burn the shadow on lee but not the highlight you need a tool that will allow you to access on lee that and so that's more available than just doing something in a brush see there's no there's no tools up there and so it's very valuable to do it without plus the burn tool is more subtle it doesn't if you use the if you use a black brush it just even if you haven't had a limited amount it still is much more heavy in its action it does more to it and I like things to be very subtle I like it to take me a while to get there so that I don't overplayed my hand so for subtlety and for the ability to go between shadow smith jones and highlights