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Lesson Info

Creative Retouching Techniques

A couple of things that I wanted to demonstrate that I told people I would demonstrate, um, one picture kind of a tease, tio, how I do creative retouching uh, one thing that I encourage everybody who does fashion flare? Um, one thing that you should do is remember that you're in control of color, people remember light and posing, and they remember props and all these things that talked about what color is an important element of all of that. And if you you could make decisions to pick clothing that matches and backgrounds that matches, but sometimes it those things are out of your control on dso sometimes photoshopped comes into play there and so don't just let the color I didn't have another, you know? Oh, the shoes imagine and have it because you can't change it in photo shop, and so as faras fashion flare goes, remember that you have control over your color palette. So to give you an idea, this is using a fashion image that I did, and this is on my creative retouching download somet...

hing like this, so the theme of my chute was red. Um, it was for paper cup magazine, and I wanted the picture to scream, read, read everything, uh, I wanted red leaves, but there weren't red leaves anywhere. Uh and so I knew that if I photographed them I could shoot them and turn them red. Now the first instinct of most people is holy crap you got footage of every leaf read really? But it's not like that if you know the right tools and selective color adjustments so if I go into our friendly uh adjustment layers and go back once again to few saturation had been there many times before. If I go here I can't go into those color channels again and go into yellows by going to yellows I could drag my yellows until the red and I can look there and say ok the red is supersaturated it's a little too much so I can close some of the saturation if I do a before and after the biggest problem you see is that her face is had some yellows in it that turned red so you mask it off you grab your black brush you paint on your and that's what I said that's why I said you need to know adjustment layer layer best I use I mean for everything I do so I painted off her face and so something that people would have said is completely out of their control it took me ten seconds to fix so well how this applies to you is maybe you have a girl who has a shirt and the pants don't match change the color of the pants if I mean it's much easier not to do in photo shop but guess what? Sometimes you it just it wasn't there or you have a girl and she's in a bright blue dress, but every everything in the picture you have is love were really a soft pink like you like to go for selected and change it mob or soft pink or if you have, you know the nineteen fifties couple and they're out there and she's in a blue dress red car but you want the red dress and the red card make your dress red it's just a fact that you need to take control of your color palette and you can it's about how much effort you want to put in I'd rather get it right in camera and get the red dress for the red car but if you can't it's not on your control especially if this is maybe a promo image that you want to scream and show that you have control of the entire image so that's an example of selective color and that's kind of my message to you guys is that it doesn't have to be hard but the more you play around and photoshopped you realize the tools you have available to you um I wanted to show the faux hdr effect um and I think that's the only other major thing that I promised oh, and that one okay? Okay two professors you promised do it tones to or no yeah that's cool but the presets good preset in white room presets on the right hand side it's it's put tones and it says what color the highlights what? Close the shadows you drag it? Yes, now she's thinking back the red wig because you kind of showed us then okay, I got both of these things. I got it under control. Those two that you get to see I've got it under control. Okay? But had I known it, I quit to change trees read like one, right? All right, so let's, open up our friend here, I think that's the way I just grabbed the other file I'm going to drag let's, just grab this one, okay, so this is a picture that we took of the guy with the steampunk glasses and he looks really cool. Uh, and what you can do is you can come into, uh oh b camera or light room and what you're trying to do is you're trying to bring the details back in the shadows and detail back in the highlights so I could look over here and what I can tell you you can play with all these different sliders thes air new so you can figure out what they're doing you know, maybe this is playing with the highlights movie I want to bring down the highlights this obviously shadows we want to bring up detail in the shadows because for full hd r h d r stands for high dynamic range, you have detailed the highlights shadows in mid tones, so I need to pull as much detail as I can out of the shadows as much details they can out of the highlights of in order to achieve that effect. So I'm going to play around with this a bit let's, pull out a little more detail here in my tone curve and so what this does and effect don't go that far. What this doesn't effect is it flattened out damage because now it's it's flat you have every tone and so there isn't really any contract so you can see the foreign after so far. Uh, I think that's gotta such back over here for the entire before or after there we go. You can see how it starts bringing back in more detail. Uh, because it's kind of flat. I need to add some contrast. So see how it's looking a little more cartoony, more cartoonish? Uh, if you add clarity, it gives a little bit of that grittiness if you guys want to add, pull up more detail in the skin um a tool that I recommend uh is nick software if you have a vase or the hdr expressed that they have you conducive thing called structure um look it up there's free demos but play with structure and you can pull it out if you just have adobe kamerad you can play with clarity and that will pull out some detail in the skin so to see before or after so far and you go really extreme how I did it for each jar effect is I pull out vibrance pump up the century are pumped up the contrast a lot and so this is kind of roughly so I think that what looks much more cartoon and so what I did brought up all the detail in the shadows brought in the detail on the highlights and I majorly pumped the contracts and pulled the clarity in d c d saturated the picture played with the vibrance and so that's kind of not ever going into photo shop at all and I could always warm it up you know just like that make a little cooler when you're playing with it so it's not reality anymore I use this affect all the time for bands and for uh porters of guys that was like three minutes of it uh yeah just destruction out okay all right last one that I promised uh last thing that I promised wass this one um the white skin all right, so here's this was with the raw photograph looked like uh still looks pretty good uh what we did is we have to stop boxes in the front and a reflector underneath so I'm going to open this up in photo shop and as I said if I mean if you want to download the retouching uh tutorial that's I mean I go over actually had to do a little more detail instead of in two minutes um what I decided that I wanted it I wanted this picture to be symmetrical so I grabbed my marquee tool in the top left and everybody doesn't know photos out there I know you hate me right now please I'm not I'm just trying to prepare people give them the tools in case they do know this so uh what I didn't collected half of her face I didn't command j it copied it into a new layer and then I can flip it over on itself so now she's symmetrical ish something like that uh but if I look at it I mean this shift your over a little if I look at it it's too symmetrical um I just wanted the hair so I can always go back in and erase it on the face so she's more believable you know kind of play with that and that's what her face looked like but I'm able loops back up a little couple steps there goes looking racist uh so you can kind of just perfect that but I think that it could make the hair looked really really cool because I wanted it to be all about symmetry so I can prop this with harris symmetrical so that's kind of what I did to the image off the bat let me get her hair in there and let me show you about the white and it's really simple um in order to get the porcelain skin part uh I use portraiture and still it may flatness real quick so one thing that I could do is I could go into image gnomic portraiture and I could grab her skin tone and just send in the super fast they can grab her skin tone and really really smooth it out so you would over process it if you want to get something like that you do much more than you want so something like this I kept the fine but I basically smooth out everything else so hit okay it's going to smooth it out and I would have retouched the one side of the face before I married it and trust me I see like look you can see where the hair like in the other picture if you check online I made it perfect you can't tell but that was much more time spent okay and then I can see kind of smooth it out and then the next thing that I did is I could do one of two things I could go into hugh saturation and I could go into the reds and yellows and pull out that color tone and then I use on one perfect math to make a mask of her hair and it will create a mass so I can apply that effect on ly to one place but without going in and doing that fundamentally what I can do is you know, going with my leather masks I can paint the effect just on the skin and paint off of the hair and so's this super fast version uh the problem you have here is when you decide situated when you kind of pulled that color out of her skin uh the picture went a little flat so I would go into levels and give myself a new black point and white point something like that and if I think the hair went a little too saturated I can always d saturate the picture just a little bit and so I went from there there something like that and like I don't know to win it so that's what that is it's just a pen dependent how extreme that you take it with the skin how extremely take it with the retouching so sorry about the super fastness but I wanted to impart as much knowledge as it could as quickly as I could it was still understand so maybe next time you bring me back and I'll do creative retouching for three entire days that would be great there there's a talk we should talk there are a few people saying that you had maybe promised to show them how to do flare and post I'm not sure if that actually happened ten second things that's ok for that okay um I mean this is these are like a million different things you khun dio uh all you have to do for flair and post is find a picture um that looks play this something that's blue blurred out lights looking for blurred out lights of some sort and you put it over your picture and you change the blend mode so I am going to open up samantha's picture real quick and used her as a demonstration may open up both of these because this will apply actually I could do to ramona's picture because I did more to samantha's already let me just grab ramona's let's grab this example okay uh real quick whose exposure it's fill in a little bit of shadows okay, a little bit of clarity call it a day there. Okay? All right. Okay, so open up your picture and I add lens flare is you drag and drop a picture of blurry uh light so you might take a picture of christmas lights and I take a picture of few next time we're at the bar and then those lights around the post taking picture those uh and you drag and drop it just like you would a texture and have no idea different textures are goingto work with different photographs uh let me close this were to just lose my photo to open this back up okay um you want a drag and drop let's take this one let's see if this works you drag and drop it just like you would your texture and then you change of blind mood teo really soft later hard light to see the lens for down here it won't work in highlight areas because you're adding highlights so it's going to work better and shadow areas um see what other ones it looks good in so that obviously is a much more extreme version but if you wanted to have that many highlights you could then go in and just painted off the areas that you don't like it um or just to kind of a half tone you're adding some lens flare in there um or what you can do is you can darken down certain areas the pictures here's another set of highlights so I could see how this one works on that backup drug this over rotate this and maybe I wanted these big colorful ones and I can apply that to the picture and let's do this one as overly soft later hardly um and so that's, fundamentally, what you're doing, it's going to work better with a kind of darker toned picture was noticed how it shows it better in the shadows. Uh, but you could always go ahead and then maybe dark and down your photograph a little bit in the corners, I can always start going down just a bit on dh, then kind of erased that effect off the face later brush. So the whole point is it depends on the photograph, but you're really just looking for these highlights and overlaying them, um, and finding a way to make it so it kind of pops and adds this affect the picture, so probably not what you would want to do for this picture this extreme, but maybe you would want to do this just like maybe you would want to do just a little bit of the bubbles in the lower right. So it's not overpowering the picture, but it makes it even dream here, especially if you're taking actually samantha's where you are making it have lots of lens slur or it could be if it's a heavily backlit situation, it'll make more sense there could actually be lens for there that was general drag pictures of bubbles onto other photograph and change blend mode two overlays off lighter, hardly