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Retouching Student Images, Part 2

So I didn't have any time to look at anybody's pictures, I just grab something that popped out at me. So I'm not saying that these are the best images that they have, but I'm going to start with jen for a second and all I have to pop it back and fun to pop back and plug it back in. Um so for me, I will tell you, when I do a shoot, um, a lot of times for fashion, what I'll do is I will work it for I don't know I'll work up a pose, a scene for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, but I'll do a lot of prep them testing on an assistant and so everything's tested before the subject show up and then it's a matter of I pose them until I find that pose, and then you just go. I mean, once you find the pose, you know it for me, like, okay, we've got it, I don't need to shoot a ton, especially when time means money. So doing the whole thing in, like, fifteen minutes, trust me, I mean, I never shoot a whole entire shot in fifteen minutes, always a lot longer, so don't feel too stressed, it's not usually ...

like that, okay? All right so this is a shot that we got when I said I wanted to light from behind because I love how the light kisses on the face there um and then we have how it was in case you guys it couldn't quite see where the soft box in the back last which you can see in the corner there uh that I had a large uh piece of white foam core to the back right where the light pointed in it and that's what gives you that kind of glow on the mom andi I took the lead off the background because I thought it was being a little bit distracting so of course for something like this I would crop out the soft box um I might crop that and even and I'm not sure on dh there's a couple of different shots but I thought this one was really cute um and I know that will probably turn this black and white but I am going to take it into photoshopped as is on and kind of work with it so let's take a look all right? So a couple different effects that I could do someone I could turn it black and white so I'm grabbing my adjustment layer black and white and again since it was talking about how if I dragged the reds it lightens up the skin tones so for me it's almost like a fill light if somebody has reds and yellows in their skin so I'm gonna pump that up just a little bit and what you're watching for it when you put the reds too far their lips will go white and so that's when it looks kind of funky so you just need to watch that and so you see it's a combination of pumping up reds and yellows so you will get something like that um for me I want to control the eye so I would take my levels and I would go in and I'm gonna darken down the background a bit so I just dark into down and I can paint black to get rid of it where I don't want to get rid of the dark and levels where I don't want it to be so maybe I would painted a bit off the hair here and for phase and then again off the face a little bit in the background something like that and kind of just make them pop just a little bit from the surrounding so something kind of focusing in it and on them a bit um I would go in and select both of their faces and maybe pop contrast just a little bit you're trying to be carefully don't see clear halo that's basically what I'm looking for um so I know I'm going fast I'm just giving a demonstration of kind of what I would dio had come in here pop a contrast just a little bit just making sure you don't have a really defined halo so for me, the changes I had so far were something like that so I feel like you're focusing more on the actual emotion there uh maybe I you know, I think I would try to do something to dark and down the shoulder if I could shoot it again, I'd have a turner shoulders so it wasn't so much back and so much shoulder you can look go fly a little bit and it's not like it's big shoulders just it's the lightest spot in the picture there so I can also go in and dark and down just the shoulder, which is what I'm doing here is going to apply that levels of the curves effect just to his shoulder such is a little bit darker and then maybe I'd go in face of this is what I'm doing I'm tweaking, I'm saying ok darken down the shoulder, I'm lightening up their faces okay wanna lighten up mom's face here just a little bit so I can draw some attention to it there? Um so re touching a lot of times when I'm retouching it's not retouching a face it's controlling the late a little bit better and kind of tweaking so I think you could go with black and white or what you could d'oh is teo really subtle? Something like that? So all I did is I went to my black and white where black and white layer and I backed it off from one hundred percent to seventy, seventy five percent something like that. So I think that it gives you an age. Look, if you want to go in, remember how I showed you kind of adding a little bit of color tone? Maybe I wanted to look like a little bit older warn photo, I could go back in, maybe grab some orange de saturate it. So it is something to that effect I could go in and add textures, there's a million things I'm gonna I think I'll take think I'll take a second little too much color too much something like that. I've even add a texture, not because this picture necessarily needs a texture, but I'm going to demonstrate how to add textures to a photograph. Um, let me just give this a quick safe, so I'm gonna send these files with you guys. You can take a look and see. Um, and again, this is kind of what I do in my intensive classes. When you shoot something, I'll take your images and show you what I would do to tweak it. Okay, so take a picture like that um I'm going to go and grab a texture on my store dot lindsay out of tiger dot com I do have some texture packs I also search online and I also to take a lot of photos of textures so the key is that you want to be shooting after eleven f sixteen and you want to be parallel to the surface for shooting an angle something will be out of focus is and others won't be and that doesn't make for a good texture so let me coming over here I have a texture right here actually let's grab don't phrase computer that was like a handoff okay to get mad at me. Okay? Let's, grab this texture on this is a texture I just found online so it's very texturally um another one that I have grabbed recently is uh oh, I got one hold up um this one I'm opening is old film um I just found that online and it is not a very large file and one of the things that you're told is you don't want teo stretch files right? Because you start to actually see the file stretch you'll see picks elation in it with textures it doesn't matter as much because it actually used to look just like grain so it's not a biggest deal um so here's my considerations I'm going to open this texture and I have my other photo open on the left okay what I do is I take this texture and I click and I drag it on top of the photo we had there okay someone click and drag and as you can see it's not big enough um ideally you wanted to be the same size the same native size but it's not so you stretch it and it's it's okay in this instance so I'm going teo if I click up here on the move tool you can turn on the transformed control so you see the edges of the dialogue on the edge of the box there so I'm gonna just kind of drag it to fit roughly this is like one of those things you never want to do except for with textures it's kind of okay otherwise you never ever in any reason want to do this um I mean him okay and I need this to be on the top. All right? So this is where blend modes comes into play again you're changing how that layer interacts with their blood and this is how you add textures to anything this film cutout is technically a texture you're adding a film texture to the front of it so you can do overlay soft light are hardly so overlay saw flight were hardly um the problem here that you're seeing is since this texture is kind of a yellow brown that color translate through until they're below it. So what you need to do with need to de saturate that you need to take the color out. So what I can do is I could just go up to image adjustment de saturated it's just de saturating that layer because I have only that layer selected, so it makes it a little better. Um, if I like this tone where I like where the the kind of this effect this was, the hard light effect if I like the hard light effect I mean, well, it's, just a little I can add in a lair mask. So, so far what we've had our lair masks were applied to adjustment layers. So is applied to a black and white white layer. It was applied teo a hue saturation or a levels later, but you can actually apply a leather mask, too, a texture or to an actual layer. So for example, if you smooth out somebody skin and you think you went too far instead of a racing, you can apply a lair mask and just a race off of where it went too far without having to a race, so right here, um, next to the half moon cookie, you have a rectangle with a circle within it if you click that it gives you a mask on so you can switch over and I can kind of go in and just paint off of there to face is if I want something like that and I could make it even more gonna warm it up. If I wanted even more black and way and so you can kind of play with it and then you could always crop out those white edges as if he wanted to. It was going across those. So this is one approach and something that I would definitely do with a photo like this for my client's crop it make it into an old photo. I think it's really cute. So let's enter apply something else click off of computers, not keeping up with my movements. Okay, right. Something like that. So it's kind of an old time photo. It looks really cute and I think you did a really great job. I feel like even if it's not exactly the photo you envision, they think it's a really successful photograph and I like that you have the expressions there. I think it really highlights the mother. Even though this the action is on the daughter so it's about both of them instead of just a picture of the little girl, or just a picture of the mom. And instead of being a picture of the two of them, it's a picture of their relationship in their emotion in their interactions, so all right, so that's an example of what I might do your picture doesn't mean you have to add in all texture, just that's. One approach. You might have a really cute, I think. I think it's a really successful. All right, let's, grab another photo. Um, let's, grab I'mjust going literally. Just one. I just took a photo ground one of yours. Whatever. Wanna grab so she may have better photos. She may have different photographs. I'm just grabbing one for an example. Okay, uh, so I like this photograph because you do have kind of foreground element. You have these really nice leading lines. Um, you can add different textures and all time feeling I'm just going to on lee do my adjustments right now in adobe camera, which is the same as light rooms develop module. I would basically it totally changed ps for everybody who has five, six thie adobe camera has changed a lot, so I'm going to kind of address something and that's the same in both if you come over to which one is it? If you come over the second one over it's something called your tone curve this is the same in both c s five six I'm going try to make it applicable to everybody. Um what you have here is a slider for highlights lights, darks and shadows so I can target each part of the picture and adjust it. Uh so what I think here is if I look at my history ram I'm missing a black point, so what I can do is I could drag my shadows just so that black becomes a little richer instead of if I went over here, let me to show you the difference if I tried tio go to exposure to bring in a blackmail goes way under and then if I add contrast, it still works. But at some point, when you increase contrast, you start to increase the saturation this again, so I would probably go into my tone curve dragged the blacks little bit filling the dark's a little something like that. Uh, and then I just I can't help it. I always do my, um d session my pullout vibrance so I'm just gonna meet a little bit of vibrance gonna pull it out there a little bit a little bit of clarity clarity is literally what it is increasing contrast in your mid tones because what happens if you saw when I increased contrast, the highlights blew out and the dark went to black so it's taking the extremes is pushing contrast and everything, whereas your clarity is just taking those mid tones and popping the contrast, and it makes it look like something gets sharper if you know anything about sharpening your increasing contrast along edges. So that's why it looks like you get sharper and that's the name it clarity because it makes your picture look a little more clear because you're backlit, you're getting a little bit not even flare, but it is a little bit of light into the lens, which makes it look a little bit muddy and tones so sometimes adding a little bit of clarity maybe ten, fifteen, twenty points uh, pops it a little bit, I think like something around there. Um I also like to play a little bit with color temperatures and maybe I like to warm up the photo a little like something so it's kind of romantic and may play a little bit he's at training and was something so I play around with it here's a before and after safar um and this is the same thing you khun dio in late room the thing that's great about white room is if you get this all set up and you're like okay that's just what I like or you go over here and he said, oh, the vignette I'm going to you know, make the edges later you'll kind of make it look like it's glowing uh in light room you have the ability to say this is a pre set so if you do all these changes in light arms develop module you can create a preset and then apply this through all the other pictures from the set so they all have the same field. So if you're selling this as an album or a sideshow or doing this for storytelling, all have that same effect applied to kind of hold together as a unit. So this is something that I think I would dio all right uh real quick this touch on yours real quick because I'm going to spend a little more time and years to try to do it quickly robin we'll see uh these pictures if that were really beautiful I love the color that's really, really cool um for her, the biggest thing I see is right here on the edges of where it goes from her skin tone to shadow I think it's a little red so I would probably work on that because for me I love these colors in the background but then I kind of I kind of get pulled away by the color of her skin tone this is purely me stylistically it doesn't mean it has to be your solution I'm just telling you what I would see and what I would do and so I figured that's why you have me here is assuming so let me open this up in a photo shop on the other keys I'm looking for it this highlight right here is a little bright so I want to make sure that doesn't get I'm blown out too much so I'm going teo fill in my darks that same tone curve kind of lighten up my dark tones a little bit and I'm gonna open up in photo shop and I probably will dio you know you could do a little bit of with gunnery touch but what I could do isn't going to make you saturation that we popped him before the adjustment layer uh goodhue saturation and go into think it's going to be reds and plot red's a little um see in the kind of the shadow area there you might still want her face red but at least this isn't his red and you can always go back and paint it back into her face so I'm erasing that reduced read off of her face but at least see look again the shadows it's just a little too red. Um, so I would do something like that. I would come in. And as far as a retouch, uh, I would just clean it up when she has, like, she doesn't have a lot of blemishes. It's not really, really brought blotchy so there's. Not too much that I really need to do, which is really nice and convenient. Uh, I like her eyes were green. Uh, remember how I showed you before how to add make up for any close up shots. If you want those eyes to be even more green, I could do the same thing is makeup. I create a new layer over here and grab green I can zoom in, I can paint it on to her eyes. I can change my blend mode is the same thing as makeup overlay soft later, hard light and I can always adjust that color so that it matches. So it just makes the green's a little greener. I heard you say I want the makeup and the eyes to match. I want that makeup to plot the color of the smoke that's part of your intention. And this is the way that you can emphasize what your intention was, uh, if you decided you wanted this to be really surreal and superhero like um, you could really pull the reds and yellows out of the skin. It depends on what your intent is. If you want to be more portrait or surreal on so I could go and this on, then increase the congress kind of messing with things I could increase the contrast on her skin and reduced that off her arms. So this is how I work. I just try something, and if it doesn't work, I move on and try something else. I never really go in knowing exactly what I want to do. I just know the goal of the photograph, and then I try to tweak that goal of the photograph. I might try to treat the retouching to fit the goal of the photo, and so I would keep moving around and tweaking and they popped the vibrance a little bit and decrease saturation. And so right now, you know, change. You may like it made just like it kind did something like that you could bring some by, bring the the bright teal back into her eyes and then maybe bring the color back into her vest, but then leave it subtle on the skin and maybe really suit it's and she looks like she's a superhero uh, someone was out of that all right, and so did everybody else is right, okay? Uh oh and I wanted to show everybody what I did like the final kind of retouched that I had for samantha's I worked on it for another like two minutes during the break. Um something like that that's beautiful. So this is my before and after I think this still mean because she's beautiful it's still a beautiful image but I think it looks much more like a fashion image when I've added some lens flare around and change the color and smooth it out so I think even though that actually those are really small changes there's nothing drastic there but I think it looks a lot more high end after the changes um I'll take a look here for robin what I might d'oh um I have not looked at any of these images we did not have time just going to try to grab some things wish me like everybody. Um so let me open this up a little bit. Um so let's look for something like this. Um what I would do is I would take a bunch of these images and open them up and then take different streaks and cut and paste them uh let me grab exposure just a bit now to show you what I would do for the skin retouch and for the coloration so we liked the red in the hair let's say maybe wanted the hair to show a little more I talked a couple times about the shadows highlights tool it's going to show you how I use it sometimes I'm using dramatic light but the hair gets lost you can use it to bring back some of the hair so I went to duplicate the background and I can go over to image adjustments shadows highlights and see like if I hit that I mean this is to the extreme but it really brought that hair back so what I can do is I can say ok I can add my lair mask like I've been telling you guys do over and over again um and I'm just going to fill the mask and so I can come back in and just paint back a little hair if I wanted to be just a little more red showing up so it allowed me to still have that really contrast the light but still bring in a little bit more of the hair that you said you liked um for the skin the picture that you had it was not this red s oh it's that same thing of maybe you pull out the vibrance you know, I think that gets a lot better because that light was so focused and so contrast the increase contrast increase saturation that's why you had all of those kind of supersaturated reds so right now and I do this you know I think it it starts to make it better um and I'm going tio go in and do a quick retouch on and show you a couple of tips uh you're mad it's like awesome one woman show huh no choices necessity right yeah you won't mind showing me um so I would come in here and I would do my spot healing brush just mostly riel professional rita cher's don't really use all these other little tools a lot of it is they're doing one to one pixel size um clone endlessly I did it for there's a picture if you guys go to favor visit any of the signal booth at photo plus or imaging or w p p I n e of those there's just picture that it was like six mate foot of the girl in red and they blew it up six to eight foot it's a beauty shot which is that retouched that photo for like eight hours pixel by pixel cloning everything you cloned it to perfection there's a few other tricks but there's not too much you can do when you know it's going to be six by eight foot is crazy and then that girl can end up coming to the show and standing next to her photo was cute cute photo so I click around um and so what I would do for all of this to kind of connect it I would probably just use clone and I would find a way I can cut and paste or I can find ways to kind of clone it up onto itself and find a way to merge the two or maybe I'd kind of do this watch I can copy this part um command j copies it into a new layer and so what I could dio is I can kind of moving tweak this and rotate it and then erase it so it blends so I could kind of come around the edges and its okay what can I do to make these two look like they connected so recently edges here I'm just kind of blending it and I have to stretch that a little bit so that's how it make it look like they're all connected first it's coming out of the middle of nowhere um okay kind of makes sense so far increase my s o if you do that more carefully you could make it look like ok, they're actually connected because I feel like it was coming over face it doesn't make sense um and I like it down the hand I might pull out some more reds in the skin um more towards the bottom of the body because they feel like down here it was a little too red I'm just so you guys know I'm not trying to like super teach photoshopped I'm just talking about some techniques that would d'oh I know you were doing that. I just want to ask you is that teacher you talked about what it was like? I have no mouths here. This is my trackpad is that how you usually know? Okay, but it's doable I mean, I'm doing it so if you only have attraction and then you could do with all the bad that's okay, but thank you if she chooses a tablet which is a good way to do good way to go. Um all right, so let's do some skin softening for a second um I would go teo the fields are image gnomic portraiture and you were very lucky. She has very nice skin. She had beautiful skin is kind of glowing up close. Um, so I can, uh we want this to fit my screen. No, no comeback. Okay, this's, the screen there we go. Um, I'm going to zoom in and I would look at her face here and it's. Not that she has that many problems with her fine details, which just have some blotchy nous so I would select that skin here and I back off the fine. I mean, pump up kind of mid tone, so if you look, can you let me do a before and after so it seems that the blotchy nous a little bit we still have some of the skin tone so I'd probably do that maybe not that extreme and I would go around I do one for the highlight and do one for the shadow and I come over here and do one kind of for chin had run one for the neck uh public the night chlo and it kind of bounce around um I'm just gonna hit okay yeah so in this case you were clicking with the drop drop uh so you are picking like several colors and shift it'll add to the colors versus just clicking yeah, if you would shift it will add multiple colors. This is more smooth than it would probably do but this is a kind of distance demo so I retouch around them orange down clean up all these spots smooth it out. Look over here. I think that shadow looks a little funny so I went to my clone tool on light and and lighten it up a little and smooth and so most of it's just perfecting um the last thing that I would do is for merging these and trying to make it look like they kind of melt together the biggest issue have is matching us the texture is what I can dio is if you spend some time I could go in here and do that color rise so I could make it be kind of a deal on the letters and so you can match that deal color and then this makes you only painted on the letters and then you're gonna grab um more pieces of when it was kind of dripping down her face and find a way maybe you can have it drip into the v or drip into something um if you can go in and depends on how much time you want to invest but you can actually go in and get some of this texture and apply the texture or um if you take on a take on your own skin or well actually the one really worked we have to make a lighters but you take a skin tone take a picture of that texture on skin er what you can do is you could actually I can explain it later but you could use it as an overlay and would could have actually add the texture without you having to photo shop it in so that's like really crazy but I do stuff like that all the time because I you know I couldn't get the letters to stay you know what and still say love so like the photos that I have of this the flowers on the face I couldn't actually tattoo or paint those flowers um although apparently that guy adam works here probably could if he's that good so maybe next time so sometimes photoshopped plays an important role so that's a really rough overview yes the only other statement I have every time I look at that her mouth looks like he slightly not smiling but and a more happy sure let's make out with this downturn in the mountains said ok open up in liquefy zoom into her mouth and I want to go over liquefy now so this would be a good segue way and after this makes you really sad give a big lips and I can make you look a little smaller if I wanted to I mean you could do no whatever I can elongate her neck I could make your finger's longer your wrist skinnier I can only think that also armpits big ears spears but your ears are fine but like for a lot of time to look at photos and just screams ears and I'm always like making people you're smaller like all the time so I would you just you come down to your mouth as much as you want so this do the before and after and I'll say this and her hand actually has some good drips too kind of working in there so zoom out francis supplied you'll see her get sad in a second it'll kind of thinking it'll click see she got sad now you're liquefy is that's in your um I can't I don't know if it is indifferent any foot it's in a photo that's making that was a photo shot me, and I forget what issue, which edition, they I created him, but I know it's meant cia three minimum. I just don't remember. I was just making sure it wasn't no image on which is just kind of the skin softening. So that's going in in that direction and again, I would work on getting it. But that's, how you make the love, the right color, okay, you're going to select it, do your colorized, and then you have to go in really close and just painted three of the tablets gonna be easier going, you get out.