Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing

So we're doing editing now and I know that everybody here has been excited for this part the most so I'm really excited to get into it and hopefully my goal is to help you know the beginners and the experienced editors is alike because my process is really simple and my process is very personal so when I'm editing you know I'm not doing anything crazy over the top technical I am using the most obvious tools and photoshopped hopefully in ways that are a little bit different so when I go into photo shop you'll see that I am using cost like the lasso tool um I'm using curs that's pretty much it so uh so I'm really not doing anything that's overly technical in fact when we were on a break here we were trying to fix up the computer and somebody said, oh, you just have smart objects turned on and I said, what is a smart object and everybody was like oh gasping at me because I didn't know and s o that that's how simple I am I mean, I really it doesn't have to be any more difficult than than t...

his at least for what I do and I know that there are so many amazing ways to use photo shop and I'm constantly learning constantly growing trying to learn new things andi I'll get into a little story about that when we go over later masking specifically because I was very anti layer masking so I'll let you know about that when we get there so I want to show you guys I've opened up some of the images in photoshopped that we're going to be going through an editing so we're going to start with this one because this one is really interesting it's it's the kind of image that doesn't look very great in the camera you know you have the bright wall taking away from the subject and you know she's in a really nice posed but that's about it so we want to fix this image and I want to try to bring the light back to the subject and take it away from the walls so the first thing that we're going to be doing it learning how to change the lighting dynamics changing where the light is coming from and how you read the image you'll hear me talk a lot about how you read an image and this is really important to me not just with the light but with the composition and which direction the images facing so you'll see me a lot flipped the image horizontally to merit and see which way it looks best so I think that you read an image like you read a book from left to right typically unless you're in a country where you don't read like that in which case I'm very sorry about that but in general we read left to right, and so that's how I am reading images, and so I want to create my images with a nice flow that sweeps across the image from left to right. So I'm thinking about that when I'm playing with my light, does the light come from left to right? Or does it come from above? Typically, I don't liketo have a lot of shadow on this portion of the image because that's just going to stop our eye right there. We're going to try to get to whatever's, lightest, but there's going to be a road block where there's a dark part of the image, so I'll be talking about that a little bit as well. So let me introduce you to my work flow in photo shop. I've got my layers palate down here, I have my history right above that, and those are the two boxes that I'm going to be concerned within photoshopped right now, the layers in the history I need to be able to step back in history if I make a mistake, I need to see my layers so that I can affect the changes to them, and then we have the left hand toolbar, and this is my friend, my friend is the left hand tool bar, because when I started editing I didn't know what to click on it was not obvious to me, but I saw the lefthand toolbar and I started hovering the different tools to see what they were called, and I found out that there were some really obvious tools and some not so obvious tools. So, you know, if I am going through these tools and looking at what's obvious, you know, I'm landing on the eraser tool, and I'm saying, oh, race or tool that must erase things so I can use that, you know what it means, but then I would find other tools let's see, like the patch tool, what, that I didn't know what that meant at the time, so I'm looking at this and saying, ok, what's most obvious, and how can I learn to use it? So the tools that you'll see me use most often from over here are the lasso tool, which is right here. It looks like an actual lasso, which is really smart photo shop isn't always super smart about what tools look like way have the crop tool, which will be using for this picture in particular. Ah, we have the brush tool, which will be using for two different uses today one is for its actual use, which is painting a color onto an image and the others for layer masking and then the clone stamp tool, which I also like since it looks like a stamp and we're going to be using that to fix little mistakes in the image or get rid of certain things if we need teo I'm not going to be using the eraser tool even though I used to use the eraser tool for a couple of years I'm not using that anymore, but that would get the job done if you need to erase something. So what I do next after I'm done compositing up these tools are pretty much used for compositing for me, I go to image adjustments so you will see me using that path over and over and over again image adjustments something and I'll repeat that over and over and that's how I make my adjustments, I change my lighting, my contrast, my colors, all of that fun stuff with image adjustments, so I'm just going to jump right in here and start explaining what I would first due to this image first thing that I do to every single images to duplicate my background layer, I never want to make changes to the background layer because I want that to preserve, be preserved somewhere in the layers palate so you can duplicate a layer one of two ways you can either right click the layer and choose duplicate layer or you can click and drag I clicked too many times. You can click and drag that layer down to this little page flip icon and drop it on top that will also duplicate your layer either way is just fine, so we have this duplicated layer, and now I can start making my changes to it. So as I talked about before, I want to take take a light off of the wall, and I want to add it to the subject. So this is how I go about doing that it's going to be pretty simple, but there is sort of a science to it, so I'll go over what that science is. I'm going to use the lasso tool. Now what this last photo allows you to do is to click and drag and draw any shape that you want to make a selection. So if I undo that if I hold down this dropdown menu on the last so you see you have the political lasso tool as well and the magnetic lasso tool now the magnetic lasso tool we shun, we do not like the magnetic last toll, especially not for something like this. I'm sure it's great if you're working with a seamless backdrop or something like that, but what the magnetic lasso tool does is allows you to click and drag to make a selection. But it's guessing the edge in which you're trying to select against so if I click and drag you can see it's trying to select the dress which is actually working pretty well here because it stands out but if I get up into the hair area it gets really muddy and we're not going to get a very good selection from this so I'm not using that so now this is how we differentiate between the lasso tool in a political lasso tool I'm clicked on the polygamy all right now you saw that with the lasso tool you can just click drag and draw your selection well let's say you're not using a tablet like I am right now you're using a mouse or you're using your pad on your laptop well in that case it could be really hard to control your hand exactly to draw selection the polygamy lasso tool allows you to click and define points to create your selection and that way you don't have to draw and just hope that your hand is steady enough the whole time so a couple things that I might do while I'm editing is add to a selection so we can hold I'm sorry I'm on a mac so I'm not totally familiar alright we can hold shift and that brings up a little plus sign next to my pillow gonna lasso tool and that means that we can click and add to our selection so if that needs to happen, we can do that which is why I don't worry about getting a perfect selection the first time because we can add to it and take away if you want to take away from our selection we can choose option and then that will bring up a little minus sign and then we can take away from our selection as well that's what I'm going to be doing for the first step here of changing the light I'm going to flip back to my lasso tool and what I want to do is determine if I want to add light to the subject or take away light from the background and I want to do both so I'm going to start with the background because that's the most distracting thing to me now to start with the background you could do it one of two ways you could try to select the whole background but I prefer to select the subject and then just select inverse because then you have everything but the subject selected it's just easier for me personally now I'm not worried about if I zoom in here I am not trying to go in around every single little finger like this and make a selection I would probably die if I did that so not my goal here I want to make big sweeping selections and make very gradual changes sorry there we go so I'm actually just going to get in here and I might have to do this once or twice we'll see just depending on if the selection is good enough so I am just getting in here really really loosely and I'm just selecting on her skin and wherever I want to sort of section her off so you can see I didn't even select that hand because that has too many openings around it's too too thin of a line so that if I were to select that it would also probably get this little piece of wall in there too I don't want to mess with that I'm just going to let the hand go a little bit dark for now so I have this selection and let me show you what would happen if I were to make changes right now without doing anything else I'm going to image adjustments exposure just to show you very quickly what this would look like so if I wanted to make her brighter I take the exposure up it stays in the box that I've just created and I want to make this a really, really smooth transition so I'm going to cancel that and I am going to right click and there are two things you can do when you right click inside a selection you can choose feather or refined edge now if I choose refined edge that's going to actually show you what feathering looks like so inside refine ed you have a feather slider and feathering essentially is taking x amount of pixels whatever you choose inside and outside of your selection and that's going to fade that selection so when we made that selection brighter it would've gotten brighter very gradually instead of being such a harsh edge all right, so I am going to change my feather and take that up and say okay now it's a very, very soft selection and you can kind of see that because the edges have become very soft so now let's say that I go back into image adjustments exposure just to show if I take that exposure up it's a very, very gradual whitening of the subject and that's what I'm looking for here so I am going to cancel that because like I said, I want to make the background dark before I worry about making the subject of light so I am going to right click and select in verse now everything but the subject is selected and that's exactly what I want here now I don't use exposure to make these changes I use curves, so I'm going to take you into curves image adjustments, curves the short shortcut is command m clicking curves now I'm using curves to start with here only for the brightness contrast and darkness so I'm not going to go into color yet but I will eventually so your curves defaults to channel rgb and that's exactly where we want to be if we're changing the brightness and darkness now what you have here is a graph and where these two black points meet those there your shadows if you go to the opposite end of the graph that's representing your highlights so everything in between represents the mint tones. Now what you can do when you have curves is think of it this way. You have this whole top triangle. If you pull this line up towards that triangle, you're making everything brighter. If you pull it down to the bottom triangle, you're making everything darker, so if I just select a point here in the middle and pull that up, I am making the background everything around the subject much brighter, but if I pull it down and making it darker so there you can see by with hitting the preview button that I have made the background much darker, you can see this, wallace. Well, I'm going to say, okay, now I'm going to de select just right clicking and de selecting, and now we have a dark wall it's exactly what we want, and we can go and make it a little bit darker later, but this is a great place to start. So at this point I'm just going to go back in and do a little bit of a better selection on my subject just wherever I think I might want it trying not to get any of the wall in there and selecting her face and then letting that selection go so I've selected her once more and I'm going in teo either refine edge or feather if I choose feather it just gives you a pixel count instead of being able to change lots of other things so with my pixel count I'm going to choose seventy pixels and this is just from practice knowing how much I want a feather it it is totally up to you what you want a feather and the larger number of pixels the more pixels you're fading outside and inside of the selection so if you have two hundred fifty pixels as your feather, you're going to have a very, very soft fade so I'm choosing seventy pixels and I am going back into image adjustments curves pull that back over here and I could just brighten up the subject a little a bit and say okay, now once I d select here I'm noticing that I have this little white glow going around her sleeve here and I want to avoid that so instead of going back in my history and doing everything again re selecting and doing it over and over until I fix that I'm just going to go ahead and make another selection around here to fix it, so I am going in and just selecting wherever I think it got a little bit too bright, cutting into the skin and the dress a little bit as well and then feathering now I'm going to do about fifteen pixels for that one, and we'll see how that looks it might need more might need less, but we'll see now when I go into image adjustments curves, I don't necessarily want to just pull up or pulled down from the center because the center of the graph represents the mid tones, but I only want to affect the highlights within this election. If I were to affect the mid tones, as you see, you are changing the skin as well in the dress, and I don't want that, so I'm just going to go back. And now remember I said that the top of the graph here, those your highlights so if I pulled down in the highlight portion, you're making just the highlights darker, so if I pull down there, you can see that her skin is not affected, but the background is because that's whiter so you can see the preview there just a little bit of a darkening right in that little glow area and say, ok so I'm going to de select there and that looks a lot better to me we don't have that glow happening around her arm all right? So now that I'm pulling back, I'm taking a look at this picture and I'm just gonna toggle this layer on and off so you can see we've already made quite a change there with adding light to the subject and taking it away from the walls but I'm going to go ahead and change it even more on especially this portion of the wall, which is really very bright so to do that I'm just drawing a selection just very generally around that area now this is the whole portion of the wall that I want to fix I missed this little spot here so again I can hold shift, click and drag and just add to that selection yeah, so I'm going to right click inside their choose feather now the most you can feather an image is two hundred fifty pixels but you can always choose feather again and in feather more pixels to add to it so I'm choosing two hundred fifty pixels that looks really good to me it'll probably be a nice smooth transition image adjustments, curves and I'm just going to make that portion darker so if I come back here you can see that that whole part of the wall is just becoming much, much darker all right and d select now I want to add a little bit more light just in a sort of circular pattern here to the subject, so I'm just going toe in general, just select that little area feather two hundred fifty pixels. Now, this is the point where I would feather again another two hundred and fifty pixels just because I want this to be the softest selection that we can possibly gets, then the light looks very natural, like it's fading along the wall, so I'm going into image adjustments, curves, and I'm going to go ahead and just make that a little bit brighter on the wall there and say ok, now, if we look again, another drastic change because we've added light back into the image and I like it hitting the wall because it's believable, you know, it's believable that light was hitting her just here, but not on the sides. So that's exactly what I want, I like that you can see the subject now, but I think that since we've brightened her up, her skin tone has gotten a little bit orangey and I want to try to fix that. So I'm not going to leave her looking the same color that she is, so let me go ahead to make a new layer from here. And I like to make new layers every once in a while just if I've made a major change that will duplicate the layer just so then I have my steps preserved so in order to de saturate this image a little bit, I like to go to image adjustments where are we houston duration and just take the saturation down overall on the image now I do this a lot when I'm editing and sometimes I do it because I want every color in the image too take on color in the same way so let's say that we had green in this picture and red if we added yellow to those colors, the green would pick up the yellow in a very different way than the redwood, so I want to make sure that the colors are very evenly matched instead of having really crazy bright colors everywhere. So that's one reason why I would to saturate I like to do saturate for skin tones to take away some of that color not to make anybody look deathly just then they look very antique sort of s o we're going to be adding color back into her skin I like the color of the dress as it is, but we're going to pump that up later so I'm not going to worry about the dress so I like this amount of de saturation and I'll say, okay so the next thing that I'm seeing is that I do want to pump up the color of the dress a little bit. I like the color, but it can really stand out a little bit more, so I'm going into image adjustments replaced color now replace colors really fun for me, this is how I do a lot of selective color changes in my images, so what it allows you to do is you have this eyedropper tool that it defaults to, and that allows you to select any color within the image, so we know that we're going to be working with this red color, so I'm just going to go ahead and click inside that area. Now you can see this graph has changed. It's a black and white graph, whatever is white will be affected by your changes, whatever's black will not be affected, so you can see that the dress is in that selection you could see some of her face is in there, which I'm going to leave for now if you didn't want tohave her skin being affected by these changes, you could always joe select right around the dress and then on lee, what is inside your selection would be affected by your changes, so I like this a little, but I could maybe take it down a bit, so fuzziness fuzziness slider will allow you to add to your selection or take away, so if I take that fuzziness slider down, you can see that less is being affected if I pull it up on a lot more is going to be so I'm going to choose something that still has most of her dress selected, but just a little bit less on the skin. Now you also have these eyedropper tools up here with the plus sign and a minus sign, so if I choose the plus sign, I could go back into my image, click another color and it would add to the selection and you can also use the minus sign eyedropper tool to take away a color from your selection. But I'm really happy with what we have here, so I am going to my saturation slider and I want to pump that color up, so I'm just going to take that slider up and you can see that it is making the dress much more saturated. We can change the hue of the dress if we want, so we don't have to leave it as a red dress if we didn't want to, but I do because I really like red, so I'm just going to reset that back to zero. Now that saturation was a bit too much for me so I'm going to take that down a little bit you can also play with the lightness if he want so you can take the lightness of the dress up or down to make it darker whatever you prefer but I liked how it was exposed so I'm going to leave it right there and say okay do we have any questions? I I know that I'm like just plowing through appreciate quite a few people would like to know why you're not using adjustment layers what is your thinking? Awesome okay, so I use adjustment layers from time to time and I will definitely be going over that so I'm going to do that so I use adjustment layers if I am definitely if I am not shooting something personal so if I'm shooting something that somebody else has to use at some point I use adjustment layers in case things need to be tweaked now I'm the kind of editor where I kind of think a bit like a painting rather than being you know more more like a photo so I love having an actual layer and then making changes over and over to that layer like a painter would have a canvas and apply paint to it the other reason is because I make so many curves adjustments to my images that I end up with sometimes two to three hundred different adjustment layers going up my layers palette and it's very overwhelming for me and I also read an article once that said that if you have that many adjustment layers it's justus bad as making changes to the actual layer I don't know if that's true or not but it made me feel better so so so I like to quote that but yeah, I get a little overwhelmed if I have too many adjustment layers so now an image like this I could very well use adjustment layers because I'm not going to make that many changes to it but typically for me it becomes too overwhelming to deal with and you don't worry about destructive editing I do not come in here but I've never had an issue before so I mean I've had a very heavily edited things printed very large I never had an issue so that's why I've never really worried about it okay actually one quick question because a lot of people are asking it could you just touch really briefly on shooting in robertson's j peg just what you do and how you import yeah and get it into a photo shop definitely so I shooting raw and I don't really see much of a point in shooting in jpeg unless you're shooting a large quantity of images and I need to save space on your card or you don't want things to load super slowly but you know, I'm not doing that, I'm taking a few pictures, so shooting and raw is very convenient, it opens really fast, I love shooting and raw because, you know, if I have a highlight that I need to bring back down or a shadow that I didn't need to bring up, I'm going to do that in raw, so I opened my images into camera raw goes straight into photo shop if I am doing a composite image, I am not going to edit anything in camera raw because I want my images to be exactly as they worse than they blend together seamlessly, so I'm not making random adjustments to them to try to make them look better, but the instance where I will make a change in camera raw is if I have a highlight that's too bright or a shadow that's too dark, and I'll just fix it slightly. So then I am making the changes to the raw image and not the converted images photoshopped thank you, questioning the city audience from back to the expanding frames again, okay? And I know you're going to go over that, but in an image like this, you're not going to be, and so if you were going to composite, would you put all the pictures together first before you're making all of these little? Absolutely yes, I would definitely definitely do the compositing first and the next one that I opened remind me if I don't get to it, we're going to do the we're going to do the dirt shot s o I will be compositing in that one and I'll definitely go over it, okay? So I'm going to get back into this if we're ok to do that. And one thing that I definitely want to do is cropped this image. So I am going to my crop tool and I like squares you definitely don't have to prop into a square, obviously, but if you want to, you can hold shift, click and drag that's going to create a perfect square, and then you can move your image within that if you don't like the placement of it. So when I'm cropping an image, I am definitely thinking about the rule of thirds, and this is something we talked about yesterday. Yes, I love a center composition and she is generally in the center of the frame, but we have her hips in one side of her head in the other third and that's what I like to see, so I'm making sure that the line of her arms and her head is just generally in the third of the frame, hit my check mark to say, okay so we have this cropped down and from here I would definitely add some contrast to it just to pump it up a little bit so I would do that an image adjustments curves because I do everything and curves so the way the adding contrast works within curves is you're on the rgb channel good now if you think about it, what is contrast contrast is making the shadows darker and the highlights brighter? That is what contrast does so I want to do the same thing on this graph. Now, if I creative center point here, what I want to do is creating s curve so if I do this to the curve, what you're doing is making the shadow portion, which is in this bottom half darker and the highlights brighter. So by doing that, we've added contrast and that's definitely a little too much contrast, so I'm just going to pull that back a little bit to about there and then check on the preview so it's just sort of punching up the shadows, especially right in this area, which is what I want now if I wanted to make her face even brighter, I'm just going to go back to that lasso tool and I would just get right in there and just select around her face more carefully than before because we have a nice sort of isolated area that we can effect I'm going to feather that and I will choose thirty pixels on this one and then back into curves and I just want to make sure that we highlight her face a little bit just a little like that and then d select now one last thing that I want to do to this image in particular is I want to go in and change colors so I am going to image adjustments curves and in fact why don't I go over adjustment layers right now before we continue this your adjustment layers right down here it's this little half black half white circle that I always think of cookies when I see it and then I want to go eat cookies and so if I click that I want to make sure the on ly click it when I am on the layer in which I want to make the changes too yeah so I am selecting that little tool and it brings up all of these options and it should look pretty familiar because these are the options that you have when you go to image adjustments and that is what is going to show up there so I have curves levels, brightness contrast all the things that you might want to use to change the aesthetics of urine midge so I'm going to choose curves and the benefit of using an adjustment layer is that you can undo that later if you don't like it so I have what is a layer mask here and right here we have the curves graph so I can make my changes to this picture just the same as I did before in curves, but if I don't like it, I can turn the layer off if I want or I can erase within the layer mask, so let me just throw that in the trash because I don't tend to use adjustment layers and it's just totally personal preference I fully support using layer asks I just personally don't do it! I'm sorry adjustment layers so image adjustments curves now let's talk about the channels within curves so it defaults to rgb. If I use the drop down, you have red, green and blue now red, green and blue that's what we're going to be changing we want change the colors, so in fact click my red curve the opposite of reddest science, so you have to kind of remember what the opposites are to be able to change those colors. Now if I want to change red, I can pull up on the graph, so whatever color it is reading for your channel pulling up will make that change for you, but if you pull the opposite direction, you're going to add sigh in and as you can see, a little bit goes a long way. So then if I go to the green curve, I can add green or magenta depending on which way I pulled the graff and then same with blue and yellow there we go now I tend to make my changes very, very specifically, I am not at all trying to make overall color changes to the whole image in terms of changing mid tones very often so if I'm on my blue curve and I want to add a yellow to this image, I'm not going to pull down from here and add yellow overall to the picture so you can see if I'm doing that it's just looking really, really great ghosts and neon colored, but I want to change the color of the light, so if I wouldn't change the color of the white, I have to work with the highlight portion of the image, so I'm going to pull down tto add yellow and the highlight portion of my graph just like this, so now the color is changing of the light and not in the mid tones in the shadows, which can look a little bit lucky. So now when I added yellow to my highlights, I liketo add red as well because that creates a nice warm light, so I am going into my red curve and pulling up in my highlights toe adds a red just like that now you can see we've made that color change and I'm really liking that color change a lot it sort of makes it look like it was evening time when we shot this and I think that's a really beautiful way to go so do we have any questions about that think we have a studio audience question um I was wondering if you ever use just the dodge and burn tool toe highlight or darken every so often but very, very rarely so dajun burn I have a strained relationship with those guys because I tend to you to use it tio make muscles pop in backs and stuff like that s so I will use it too create highlights and shadows maybe where there weren't any to create the illusion that something is popping off of the screen more than it is because if you think about it, the only reason why something looks three d and images because there's light and shadow hitting it it's popping it and so that's what I use it for sometimes, but I don't use dodging burn for like retouching or the normal things I think that it's typically used for I use it to like accentuate ribs and souls in back and stuff like that all right, okay, so I'm going to move on to a different picture unless you guys have any questions about this one, okay so I am we're going to that one last you guys we're not going to do it yet so I'm going to use this image to start working with because this does involve a little bit of compositing and it's funny because if I you know once I do one thing and compositing my process is very similar from one thing to the next so if you ask me you know what is the process of doing this or that or this is pretty much going to be exactly what I'm going to show you so I want teo find this image now this is the one that I decided to work with but I didn't like the hand as much so I'm going to go ahead and just put a different hand on her body so what I want to do is come over here to this image with this hand that I liked a little bit better and I'm just going to grab that using the lasso tour so I am going to use the lasso tool to just draw a big selection right around there I am not cutting this arm out that is the last thing that I want to spend my time doing and it's not necessary especially because we have the same background it's very neutral and aiken blend the background rather than cutting out the arm so in order to move this over I'm just going to copy it command see and then go over to the image that we're working on and command v to paste so by using the move tool, which is this first solid arrow tool, we're going to move that around the image. Now she wasn't at the exact same angle, so we're going to have to fix that. So in order to fix that, I want to go to edit free, transform that brings up these boxes all around the image that we're working with, this little piece of arm, and then I can rotate that as I need. So now, obviously, if I'm rotating this, I can't actually see where it needs to go because I'm putting it right on top. That looks a little weird, so I am going to lower the opacity on the layer, so we have the opacity right here in my layers panel, and that is going to affect whichever layer were clicked on. So if I take that down, we'll go to somewhere in the fifty percent range we can see right through that arm, and then we can match things up a lot better. So if I just zoom in here, we can get a better idea of where this needs to go, I think that's looking really nice right about there. Something like that? Oh, yeah, there we go now, if you are not having any success with your mouths to your tablet or whatever you're using moving things around, you can use the arrow keys, and that will allow you to just gently nudge things into place. So I do like to do that most of the time, so I'm going to take my capacity back up, and I'm gonna hit this check mark to say, okay, no, I'm just going to zoom out a little bit to show you what I'm doing now. This is the point in which I used to use the eraser tools to start erasing around the arm. It was a very, very, very stubborn and hated layer masking, and I was convinced that I could do everything right the first time, but then I sort of realizing by printing my images that I couldn't do everything right the first time, and in fact, I didn't, and so I had mistakes in my images that I could not fix s o I have since learned to both check the images I'm going and make sure that I don't move on to another step until everything looks perfect, but also, if I have layer masks, then I can always go back to them to change things, so what I want to do is create a way or mask in order to create a layer mask, you have to use this little circle within a square icon here, and you were clicking the layer mask on whichever layer you want toe a race. Now, obviously, we want to erase the arm because it's not blending yet with the background. So I'm going to go ahead and choose that, and you can see it pulls up a white box and we have this little highlight around that white box, so I can flip that back and forth between the layer and the layer mask and it's a really important distinction to make when the reason why it's important is because you use a layer mask with the brush tool. So I am on the brush tool which should normally paint to color, but when you're on the line, your mascot defaults to black and white with your color swatches. So if you paint black on your layer mask it's going to a race he's gonna pull my opacity back up. So if I paint black, it is a racing now say that I went too far. You can always switch to white, and you can do that with this little arrow toggle here switching back and forth, or you can choose x on your keyboard, and that will also switch your colors, and then you can bring back what you accidentally erased. So if I flip back to black, I'm just going to a race just generally around where I knew the dirt had to blend, and so you can see here when I talk about this on and off that I really didn't have to do anything room getting in close to the arm, I'm just erasing the surroundings, and I do that as much as possible. I don't want to have to get in there and a race along a subject, but let me zoom in here and let's pretend that I did have to do that let's say that I just had to a race right along her arm. Well, if I had to do that, then I would want teo, uh, change my story will change my brush, so the brush size is right up here, it's at three twenty one right now. And if I click that you can see that you can toggle the size, makes it smaller, makes a bigger that's actually too big to see on the screen, and then you can change the hardness. Now. The hardness is really what we're excited about here, because if we have a zero percent hardness brush, it's going to be a really soft brush, so right here, what is selected this little box that's, a super fuzzy brush very, very low hardness zero percent we clicked the one right next to it that's one hundred percent hardness so you can see what the edge of the brush is doing. So if I were to erase with this brush as it is right now off of our subject we'd have a very, very sharp line happening and we definitely don't want that we want to be soft about it, so I'm just going to fill that back in now let's say though, that we didn't want to brush right along her arm I would want a very hard brush so the question is how do you know if you need a hard brush? Her soft brush? I want a soft brush if I am blending something like this background where I want everything to fade into each other but if I need to erase along this arm and I take my hardness down all the way then I am going to have a really, really very, very fuzzy tool. So I am going teo just paint that back in and I am going teo choose ah, harder brush now this is not tak and focus it is probably in the eighty percent range, so I'm going to choose something in the eighty percent range and that is how I would then go ahead in a race along that arm so the deal is that you have to figure out what you're racing against if you're racing against something that's very very sharp very and focus you want ah hardness that matches so we're pretty good with what we're doing right now that looks solid to me so I'm just going to zoom out from there and I'm going to make some quick changes here because I don't want to spend too much time doing the same thing that I just did but my process isn't that different so what I want to do is merge these layers but I don't merge my layers as they are a duplicate them and then merge them so there's a short cut for this it's really, really long I believe it's now now I'm on a max I don't know control all to shift hee but on a mac it's command option shift e I believe so let me try it out we'll see if it works command option shift e they're so what we've done is we have taken these two layers below duplicated them and emerged hm if you for some reason can't remember that shortcut which I don't blame you because it's a really long shortcut you can click the top layer of what you're working on here hold shift and click the bottom layer that will select both layers at the same time you can then click anywhere in this highlighted portion right click and duplicate layers and say ok so now we have our layers duplicated and then you can right click inside there and merge layers it was just a longer way of doing it either one works fine I always forget to do the shortcut so I always go the long way but there's certainly no benefit to that so I want to work on making this square but I don't really like how she sort of upped the top portion of the frame I do want her in the center so if I were to go in with my crop tool hold shift and create a square around her you see her she's in the upper portion of the frame I don't really want that so I am going to say no to that crop and now I'm going to expand the frame so I'm going to expand the frame just for julie just getting so I'm going to do it in a way where I'm not adding extra pictures into it but I'm filling the extra canvas by cloning so I am going teo sort of get a crop that I like on this where I am just sort of guessing at how much room I want above and below her I think we're going to go we're going to keep all the space down here certainly maybe pull this in a little bit and then whatever we can do to add more space above that's what we're going to do I'm going to hit the check mark to say okay to that crop, but now I want to expand so when I'm expanding my frame you know it, I'm not doing it just everywhere, expanding sometimes I cropped the picture and then expand a little sometimes I expand and then re crop because I've gone too far so I'm going to image canvas size now canvas eyes is a little bit tricky to understand sometimes it defaults to percent usually with the numbers that you're going to be working with and I don't like percent I like using pixels, so I always change that over two pixels just personal thing just how I like to work so right now we have a width of four thousand eight hundred sixty one and our height is three thousand six hundred seventy four so because of that they're not matched there's not a square I know that right now, but I want to make it into a square. So how I determine how much to expand this frame? I just want to make it a square so I'm just going to match my height to my wit now in order to expand the frame on ly in this upper portion which is where we want to expand on actually going to click this bottom middle arrow so the way that this works is all of these arrows will create blank boxes when you click them so when I click this bottom middle arrow, the whole top portion of my box goes blank, so whatever's going blank, that's where I'm going to be expanding now I need to choose a number so the height it's really easy for me, but I just want to make it match the wit. So what you're doing when you're adding numbers here is you're saying, ok, the height is already three thousand six hundred seventy four, and you need to add a certain amount of pixels more than that. So however many pixels you add to that number that's, how many pixels you're expanding in the frame? So if I were to make this four thousand six hundred seventy four, you would expand by one thousand pixels at the top of the frame I'm going to go ahead and make this for eight, six one, because I am just matching it to make a square, and I'm going to say, okay, it's now, if I zoom out here, you can see what we've done. We've added this canvas to our frame, so I want to go ahead and change that. I want to add the dirt to it, so I'm just going to start cloning and the great thing about dirt is that it's really nondescript, you can't really tell that you're cloning the dirt unless you have very, very specific pieces of mulch showing up or something like that. So I'm using the clone stamp tool clone stamp tools over on the left hand toolbar, if you want to make your brush is bigger and smaller without going teo the size slider, which you can also access by right clicking, you can use the square brackets on your keyboard so you can make it smaller with the left square bracket, the girl with the right. So I am going to go ahead and oops didn't mean it like that. If I option, click it's goingto let me define a point, so I'm just going to find this point right here and then I can click and drag, and those exact pixels get moved wherever you want them to go. So clicking into finding a point and just continuing with that now you can see I've stuck her knee and thereby accident was human there and that's ok, it's the kind of thing, or maybe I could back up in history, but I don't really need to, because I could just continue to clone it out. So I am going to continue that very, very, very quickly. And once I have done my cloning, that is when I want to look for duplicate areas. Little areas that just are being repeating throughout the image so I see right here and here and here we have that same little bit so I'm going to re clone that from the more neutral part of this image, so I'm just getting rid of all that stuff from neutral parts no big deal if you see something, you can shout it out, but I'm not too worried especially because we're going to dark and down this background a lot. We have my legs of my stool here so again something that I can easily clone out just like that. Now when you're cloning, you do want to make sure that your cloning from one space that has the same light to another one and the same color palette because you don't want to have for example, if I were to click down here in this corner and then clone that up here it would be a lot lighter, not a lot lighter. That was a really terrible demo, but this is a really awesome background for this, so you just don't want to take something it's too light and clone it on top of something that's too dark that was the point, so I have a square I have it all filled in and I'm really happy with that, so now I need start changing my light again so I'm going to go ahead with the lasso tool and I already like how she's wit on her whole bottom half, but I want to add light top, so I am just going teo do one big selection there, right? Click and feather, and I'll do one hundred fifty pixels now, even though I have all of this mulch selected, she is still by far the lightest thing within this election. So when I raise the curves on that it's only really going to affect her skin, because the rest of it is just in shadow in the shadows will remain in place, so image adjustments curves, and I am raising the highlights in that area. So it's the mid tones of the highlights, it's all being brought up there, and as you can see it's really not changing the dirt at all and say, ok, so now her face is lit the same amount as her body, which is, as I was saying, when I was shooting something that I knew that I could change, so I was not worried about getting all that light on her. What I was concerned with those is making sure that she didn't have really strange shadows on her face. So as long as the light is, even even if it's dimmer than what's on the rest of the body, we can fix that really nice and easy. Okay, so I'm going to just zoom out here and I know for a fact that I want to make everything around her a little bit darker to create a nice spotlight effect, so if I were going to do that I could do it two ways well, I could probably do it fifty ways, but I'm going to show you two ways so I can continue with my lasso tool and I congest just like we did before section her off select inverse and then make a change the other way that you want to do that if you want a perfect vignette all around the image is to use the rectangular and elliptical marquis tools so mine is defaulted to the rectangular marquis tool but I want the elliptical, so I'm switching to that now I have a perfect square, so I want a perfect circle so if I hold shift, click and drag that creates a perfect circle and now I have everything inside the circle selected I could move that around if I want and now what I want to do ooh is right click and feather and I'm feathering two hundred fifty pixels the most you can feather without going back into it again right clicking and select inverse now all four corners are evenly selected with a nice big feather on it and if I go to image adjustments, curves or you could do an adjustment layer and I make that darker I'm just making the outside edges look a little bit nicer so then we're focusing in on the subject brooke I just had a quick question in the tack room just tell people why you're actually feathering yes absolutely so let me do that one more time without a feather and that will pretty clearly demonstrate I hope so I am just moving back in history to undo that now if I go ahead and make that circle again and I select inverse without feathering then what's going to happen when I try to change my curves is that it's going to be a line such as this by d select you can see we have this really ridiculous looking circle sort of pinning it on her actual looks pretty cool though I think but I'm not gonna leave it like that so what I want to do is step back to where I have this elliptical marquis tool in use and I want a feather so I feather two hundred fifty pixels it is choosing that many pixels inside and outside of the selection to fade so as we're fading it it's making that selection soft and it's making your changes very gradual so I am going teo make that change again in curves oops I forgot to select inverse right click select inverse make that change to make it darker on the outside edges very good and now we're a little bit more focused on her now I still think that she could pop a little bit more so I am going to just change my contrast in curves make her a little bit brighter add some contrast into the image now one thing that I like to do when I am playing with my contrast is I actually like to skew my blacks to be gray and I do this justice part of my personal style it allows the image to look a little bit more antique, so you're saying okay? We don't have any true black points but that's because we're working with an aged image and that helps create a timeless image for me so that's just totally personal but I really like how it looks so I'll just pull up in the shadow portion and then back down to darken it all a little bit more so you can see what that's done we've taken away the black point and I'm actually gonna lessen that just a bit there we go I still like some of the detail in the dirt there okay, there we go so I can raise the highlights if I wanted to really highlight her body and take it to right there though and say okay, all right, all right, so the next thing that I want to do is play with the liquefy tool now I tend to hate the liquefy tool in a sense because people see it in such a negative way to make you know girls look thinner and stuff like that but the fact is that you can use it to create straight lines in an image which will create a more pleasing effect when you're looking at the image and that doesn't mean that you have to make somebody's waist super tiny or anything like that just means that you're straightening things out and it's great for fabricas well, so for example this little portion right here of the fabric that sort of sticking out we can just tuck that back in so let's go ahead and go into filter liquefy and so liquefy defaults to the forward warp tool here typically the forward work towards what you want to be using when you're in liquefy if you want to click and drag pixels so it's exactly what liquefy does it allows you to click and drag pixels wherever you want them which could be good and bad it could be really bad if you're not paying attention to the background and you've got straight lines and all of a sudden you're straight lines air worked because you're trying to make someone look thinner or whatever you might be trying to do or fatter you know who knows but I'm just going to zoom in here and focus on this little portion of the image so I can change my brush size I can take that up now the brush sizes really depending on the area that you're working with so I wouldn't want a giant brush to change something that's really very tiny in the picture, so I want something to match in fact, I'm gonna take that brush lies down a little bit more now if I click and drag I'm just talking that little bit of fabric in now that's what I want to do I want to just flatten this fabric out that was on her hip area so if I zoom around I'm just seeing if anything else needs to be fixed I don't think so this's the kind of thing where I really wouldn't I mean, I love her arms I love everything about her in this picture so I wouldn't need to do this but you khun tuck arms in a little bit to create those straight lines if you want teo, I like doing this to next a little bit, so if I make this brush size a little bit smaller, you can just click and drag the neck so then it's a little bit thinner and that's not something that needs to be done, but it's something that can make an image look a lot more elegant if you have a nice sleep line of the neck something else that I d'oh um women typically appreciate this is I will click and drag the draw up a little bit just so it's a straighter line throughout their but nothing drastic now like I was saying earlier this is how I change facial expressions open in there way too too smart to close so if I click and drag the eyebrow that's how I would click and drag it up to make it look sad or whatever you're trying to make your subject look like okay so you can see there that liquefy it's really not doing much but it's just straightening these lines out that I really wanted to straighten especially along here I really like that change okay all right any questions about liquefy okay okay so um the last thing that I would do to this is to change the colors and I'm not too worried about these colors actually because we had such a nice color palette we created what we wanted in camera but if I wanted to mess with this image a little bit she does have some red going on her skin that I might want to get rid of a little bit so if I go into image adjustments hugh saturation like I usually do I will just do saturate this image quite a bit I like to saturating an image for skin because it gives it sort of a shine which is what I really like say okay and then adding color back in, so going into curves now, one thing that you can dio is go to the blue curve and again, like we talked about already you khun ad that yellow to the highlights, but when I add yellow to the highlights, I often like to add blue to the shadows, so you're kind of doing some split toning here where I am clicking in the shadow area and pulling up toe ads and blue creates a really nice soft atmosphere for her to lay in my like that a lot, I might go into the green curve now, I don't talk about the green curve very often, because I'm going to make her look really disgusting if I add a lot of green to this, but I do want to add some magenta, and I'm adding that to the shadows, and this is just my personal, you know, work flow of how I add color in so of course feel free to play with anything that you like and then again adding some red into her skin just back in their more evenly. So this is the direction that I would go in coloring this image, and I'm going to leave that alone for now and then move on to the next shot good, okay? This is the one that we've been waiting for I think because that was a really, really fun shoot to dio and there's a lot of work that's going to go into this to you know turn it into what we want I've already cropped this I understood that a little bit earlier and what I first want to do like every time is duplicate my layer now that I have my layer duplicated I need to figure out the best game plan of getting rid of this pool because I have to do something to get rid of it now here's the issue with cloning we've already tried cloning we know how to do it but if I were to click my clone stamp tool and I were to click over here and then try to put that over here you're getting a lot of repetition because this water's very specific it's murky in a very specific way so if I clone this merc over here it's going to be a lot of variation in light and shadow and pattern so that's goingto present a problem for trying to do that for this edit so what I sometimes do with a background like this it's really awesome to just paint on top of it and that sounds really strange to just grab your paintbrush tool and start painting but that is what I dio a lot of the time so what I want to dio is if I right click I can choose my size and hardness for my paintbrush I'm going to take that size up quite a bit in the four hundred range and I'm gonna take my hardness all the way down. I want this really, really fuzzy. My opacity is on one hundred percent, which is good that's what I want and what I want to start doing is choosing colors within the image to paint on the outside edges, so if I choose option while I'm on the brush tool that's goingto automatically pull up my little eyedropper tool and I'm just going to click anywhere in this image where I want to paint that color and I just want to start clicking and dragging to paint. Now what you'll notice is that this was a very harsh transition because we have one hundred percent opacity on our brush, so if I stepped back and take that opacity down into the sixty percent range, make my brush size a little bit bigger, you're going to have a much softer transition in between the colors I can now option, click for a lighter color and go back in there with that at a low opacity and so I am recreating these colors is all along the outside edge there a little bit brighter and so that's what I'm going to do along this whole thing now, if you'll forgive me just for time, I'm just going teo, get right in there, start clicking and dragging, choosing colors that I think makes sense now, this area is a little bit weird because we have this really bright spot of milk, and I don't actually like it that bright, so I'm going to choose something from over here, take my capacity down a little bit more and then just dull that down, take my capacity backup, choose the same color to continue painting. There we go. So I am doing the best that I can. Teo just get rid of the edges of what we were working with. All right? I want to get rid of that a little bit. I still think it's a little bit too bright in there, so wherever I think it doesn't transition very nicely. That's what I want to fix so you can see here we've got this image now, it's been expanded in a sense, we have gotten rid of the pool that we could see before. So now that I've done that, I want to darken down the outside edges, and instead of using my elliptical marquis tool like we did last time, I'm going to use the lasso tool. And I'm doing that because this corner is already a little bit darker than the others, and I don't want it to stand out, so what I want to dio has just select wherever I want to make it darker just like this, and this is where I'm just going right around the subject, I don't typically do that, but in this case, it makes sense, okay, just like that, I'm going to right click and feather two hundred fifty pixels is great, and then I can go into my curves, image adjustments, curves and just make that a little bit darker on the edges, so what I'm doing is adding light to the subject again by taking it away from the surrounding area. So let's say that I want to focus on the subject a little bit more. Well, I don't like how bright it is here because it's taking away from her face a little bit, so I'm just going to select in that area, right click and feather will do one hundred pixels, and then I am going into curves and just darkening that down a little bit and saying ok, now, something that I noticed with this image that I really loved was the fact that her eyes are really great color for matching the surrounding blue area, so if I zoom in here look at her eyes they're so pretty so I just want to get in there really really tight I am way zoomed in now and I want to select her eyes and make them pop because for me I'm not going for reality you know I'm not going for how she really looks this is not a picture that I would you know give somebody to be representative of how they look at that time in their life for anything like that so I wantto I'm just way way zoomed in here so that I could get close in on her eyes and I'm just going to select right around the eye area if I want to add to that selection I can hold shift click and drag do the other eye at the same time we don't to do this twice and then right click and feather and I'm going to feather three pixels just a really really little um feather because we have a small selection so if I zoom out here has been just a bit more I am going into image adjustments curves now what we can do to eyes to make them pop is to make them brighter add some contrast and change the colors so I want to add blue to her eyes because that's what the color of the surrounding area we can add some science as well to make them really pop and say okay and do you select so now when I zoom out, her eyes are really going to stand out and they did before, but certainly now they're popping a little bit more, so I want to make some more overall adjustments here. I want to go in and darkened down the corners again because I don't think that we quite dead enough before and that's the case where I would use that elliptical marquis tool. We have such a circular composition here that I don't really want to break that, so I'm going to right click and feather two hundred fifty pixels will feather that again on another hundred pixels for safety, right, click and select inverse image adjustments, curves then we can darken that outside edge down now. She doesn't really need a lot of contrast. She already has it, but if I wanted to go into curves, I could definitely add some contrast to this. I could make the water murkier by pulling up in the shadow area been pulling down again so you can see just that little bit of murkiness that we added to the outside edges. Now I already love the colors in this, so I just want to take it one step further, and I want to go into my curves and accentuate what we already have, so I am going to my blue curve. What we have naturally is what I have already been doing to my other pictures. We have the shadows that are blue and the highlights that are yellow, so I'm just accentuating that by pulling up in making the water a little bit more blue and her skin a little bit more yellow and then adding some red into the highlights of the image thing. Okay, so I like where this image is going a lot, and I want to add some texture to it, though, because I want to give this image, which is very, very smooth right now, something that's a little bit grittier, that's just the style that I love now, I don't actually know where my textures are on this computer, but we're going to see what we can do about that to find him. I'm sure that there's somewhere in bridge somewhere lovely. No, not there. Have you ever purchased any kind of stock photography? Or do you take all of your own textures? All of I take my own textures now I didn't used to. I used to get them from a flicker site if you confined textures so easily on flicker, if you do a search and a lot of people give them away for free. And so yeah, I used to use those but now I could find a way for free so uh so that's a good place to go do you want textures? I have twenty of them available at the moment but yeah, I tried to shoot my own textures wherever I go now and it's really funny because I'll be I was just on a tour of a castle and everybody was taking pictures of the rooms and I was like in the corner photographing the baseboard stuff on the tour guide she was like, I've never seen anyone do that before, you know and I was like, yeah it's a great texture so uh so you try to shoot someone over I can so sammy lane from the chat rooms is wondering if you actually add grain to your photos as well. Very rarely I rarely add grain usually that's pretty much done with the texture so the texture is going to be so gritty that adding grain is just going to sort of mess up the skin a little bit and I'll talk about how I preserved the skin in just a second so these are actually the textures that are being given to anybody purchases the course so I thought I would just open those up here, take a look through them um and there's the burdens to okay, so I am going to choose this one and when I am choosing a texture, I sort of have two categories of textures. There's, the painterly texture, and then there's the texture that is very gritty, every film, like like, as if you were looking through an old film camera. Um, now, this one is sort of a mixture, because this one, you can almost see brush strokes running through it, which I love, and that will give it a sort of painterly look, but you also have a lot of grit and grime, and this was just taken on the side of one of my cooking pots at home, so I am going to use the move tool, and I'm actually not sure where we are here. There we are. So I'm just gonna drag this away if I can a little bit too sir, to see all of my layers here. So this is my texture among my move tool, and I just want to move one image on top of the other. So I am clicking anywhere in this image, dragging it to the tab that we're working on, and then just dropping it on top. You can also select it, copy and paste it. That would also work no big deal however you want to do it now, this texture is indeed smaller than the image so we're just going to stretch it no, I've never had any issues with stretching my textures before it's always been something that I've done from the beginning I have printed with all the textures texture is much smaller than this one and it's been just fine so it's just been my personal experience but obviously the bigger the texture the better so I'm going to edit free transform and I'm just going to click and drag this right along the image and then hit the check mark so once I have that texture on their how I want it this is the point where I want to blend it now I use my textures in black and white on ly I never use a color texture and the reason is because I do my text during last the very last step of what I'm going to do so that means that I've already colored my image I already have a nice blue in the back and yellow on the skin and that's how I like it so if I had a texture in here that was orange and red and blue all over that sounds like a joke if I had that then I would basically be messing up the color of my picture you'd have splotches of orange and splotches of red and things like that so I convert all of my textures to black and white so I'm clicking that on and we have the layer mode normal here that's what you're going to default teo, I'm going to click that layer mode and I'm going to find soft light within my layer modes it's a fight click soft light you can see that it's blended the texture into the image now here's the issue if you leave it on normal and you take the opacity down, you can see that it's just sort of like a layer on top of everything it's dulling the highlights is making the shadows a lot brighter and I don't want to do that I want to preserve the contrast that we already have in the image, so that is why I use soft light now if you're using a texture that isn't showing up enough with soft light you khun try hard white and that'll just make it a little bit rougher show up a little bit more, but in general I really like to use soft light for blending my textures and if you have a specific mode that you like best, please feel free to use it um that's just what I tend to do so I'm going teo just pull this layers tab up again I'm going to create a layer mask just like we did for the other image on that layer with the texture now the reason is this rarely ever used my textures exactly as they are so instead of, um, you know, leaving the texture over her skin, I don't want it to look like an overlay I wanted to look like it's part of the image, so I want to erase it off of her skin not only for that reason, but because if it is on her skin, her skin's gonna look scalea so if I zoom in here as it is, she does not have the prettiest skin at the moment, but if I take it off, you can see it's a lot nicer, so I don't want to give her I mean, especially on the legs. My goodness, I don't want to give her that extra texture that she does not need on her skin, so I want to erase it off of the skin, so I'm going to use my brush tool on black. Taking the opacity anywhere is fine. I mean as long as it's, not one hundred percent to start your pretty good, I don't use one hundred percent because I still want the subject to look like she's part of the image, so if I would or erase it exactly off of her skin and one hundred percent she might look pasted into the image because she's not going to blend with the background, so I am just clicking, making sure my hardness is at zero percent and then I am erasing it off of the subject now I want to bring that back a little bit from where just a race is that they're in here too and I think that looks really nice so we've added a texture and of course you can change the texture as much as you want you can clone stamp that texture you can heal brush that texture whatever you want to dio you could do it and you can change the texture I think that a lot of people tend to get textures and then just use it exactly as it looks but that might not match your image so as much as you can change the texture to fit your image then you're going to have a more cohesive image I'm going to save this one x I like this picture is it okay if I save it? Okay um all right? So let's take some questions so actually, um there is a question in here about saving your images yeah, not quite sure where it is so can you talk us through that allowed what should we look for? Okay, so when I'm saving my images I saved them all as ps defiles the photo shop file I do that because that's going to preserve the layers that I've created so if I ever need to get in there and take that texture away which happens a lot for me the reason why I would want to do that is because when you print the texture is going to look a lot more enhanced than when you put it online as a little image, so sometimes I'll have a little bit more texture on my images that I released online vs the ones that I'm going to print I just soften it a little bit for the print um so I do want to be able to go back to my layers you could also save as a tiff file and preserve those layers I just like to save it is a psd file just personal so er once I've done that I will also save it as a tiff if I know I'm going to print it. My printer likes to print from flattened tiff files just what he likes to do what he told me to do from the day one so that's what I do for him if I'm going to put this on the internet I'm saving it as a jpeg and I am sizing it to no more than seven hundred by seven hundred pixels that way people can't create any sort of decent print out of it so that's sort of my process for saving my images um I always I have a naming system for my images so whenever I say va fi while I always say that shade in underscore and in the name of the image and then that way I can save it based on files and aiken search really easily through my files cool thank you I don't know if you want to get in a little bit more to textures but there was quite a few questions about what do you look for definitely what is an example of a painterly texture how do you catalogue them? Definitely okay, well let's go back here into bridge okay, so I'm just gonna take a look so this for example very very gritty texture no, this is going to be something that's going to be very filmic it's going to put it on you're gonna have grain and things like that this would be much more of a painterly texture because it's very very soft you don't when you look at it you don't see the detail of the harsh you know a little grit and detail like you see in this one so this would be a very painterly texture for me I would add this on in order to make something look softer and have it you know, sort of look aged but in a painterly way I don't know if that makes sense but it's sort of something that's really great to work with if you are used to textures you know figuring out which ones have different effects on your images but if I open this one up I could very easily use this on the image that we've been working on and in fact let me just I don't know what to do with that so we're gonna hide it and pretend it's not there um so if I take the texter off that we use below you can see this is a much larger texture um I'm just going to free transform and stretch this just so we can see the different effects so if I go ahead and change that too soft light, you're gonna have a much softer texture so you can see the difference that one's very harsh and that one's very soft so that would be a much more painterly texture to me and I really I like that texture a lot better actually. So thank you for forcing me to do that. Um so textures are awesome in that way because they can really transform how you see the image and remember I don't have to leave this texture just as it is so I could go into curves make that texture darker if I wanted to and that adds a really nice effect as well I'm liking this so much more so if I create a layer mask I can then go ahead and just erase it off of the subject a little bit okay, go ahead this image is amazing when you're you said you did a minimum of two hours are you just playing for those two hours like you, you just like trying things out are because you just basically edited three photos and less than I don't know, forty five minutes, right? And I mean, if I were taking these home, I would spend a lot more time on them than I am right now, but yeah, I I would take my time and sort of focus on the details a lot more um now an image like this, I mean, sometimes it just doesn't take two hours it's a fact, but this is a very, very simple image at the same time, so I'm not doing compositing and things like that and that's, why I try to spend a lot more time where I'm going through every pixel of the image to make sure that it's blended so that kind of thing does take a long time, but then it can also just take a long time to get the colors exactly as I want them now. We were very fortunate or I shouldn't even say fortunate because I really hate the idea of look, you know, like we got lucky with our colors and stuff, but it's not luck, it's the fact that we created our color palette, we had a very neutral color palette, so we could easily add color into these images. And it picked it up really nicely so where I'm spending my time is coloring an image you know figuring out exactly what shade of dress I should use or you know what color I should make the background or how I should edit the sky and things like that so yes, an image it would normally take me two hours if I were going to do something more complicated this one I would probably spend another thirty minutes with or so on probably call it today on this one but then again look at it in the morning to make sure so now this is a picture that I would not crop into a square um I like this one as it is I framed it for this composition knowing that um I might take a little bit off of the top on the bottom but it's generally framed how I want it to be framed so if I zoom in here now there are some things that I do want to change about the image just a little bit what I wanted changes the fact that her dress is sort of billowing right here it's sort of puffing and I want to tuck that in because I know that that was something that just when she sat down her dress poofed I remember watching it when I did it so I'm gonna go out and make my duplicate layer go into filter liquefy and I'm just gonna liquefy that in zoom in here a little bit, make my brush size bigger, and I'm just going to tuck that in for a nicer line. You can see him pulling his leg a little bit, so I want to make sure that I don't do that. So now it looks like it's falling instead of proofing so that's good, and I want to add some more light to their faces even though it looks awesomely cinematic and I want to dole down this dress a little bit so as you can probably tell my process is extremely simple cause I'm gonna do the same thing over and over again, but I'm just going to select very generally around her dress just through here feather and we will do something like fifty pixels right in that area now when I go into curves, I can pull down from the highlights again because this is a very bright portion of the image I don't want to affect his hand or the branches and just dole that dress down slightly do you select? And then I just want to select their faces and maybe her chest a little bit through here make their heads a little bit brighter, we'll do fifty pixels again, image adjustments, curves make that a little bit brighter through that area. And d select so now we've already changed the lighting dynamic a bit so now their faces or brighter the dress is a little bit less and at this point, this this the very a difficult image for me to work with in a way because I really actually like it as it is, and I get so messed up and confused when I like a picture as it is, I mean, I have a really hard time dealing with that because I'm used to manipulating, and so I see a picture like this, and I think, okay, what do I need to dio, um, not that of a great photographer, and I took it awesome in camera anything, it was just the smoke makes a really need effect, so I love that aspect to it, but I would definitely play with some contrast, so I'm choosing command em to get into curves definitely want to add contrast a little bit through their make that bride pop a lot. So now that I'm looking at this image again, I'm going to do a little bit of a vignette just right around this portion where the branches end because I don't want you to know that the nest doesn't continue, and then also just drawing in my vignette manually and then feathering two hundred fifty pixels, and now I'm just going to command and make that a little bit darker on the edges. It's a little bit more cinematic that way, suman again. And at this point, I'm going to change the white, so going into image adjustments, curves going to my blue curve, I wantto pull up some of that blue that's happening in the shadows very, very mysterious to me, and then add some of that yellow to her skin, because that looks really beautiful, I think again, adding, read to the highlights just to make her skin glow a little bit and that's that so I might try a couple different things, like lightening up her arm in here, um, and maybe even just adding some light to make sure that it doesn't get lost in there. So if I select that, we'll keep fifty pixels as our feather curves make her arm a little bit brighter and say, okay, now, when you add brightness and contrast to an image like that, it tends to add saturation as well. So if I do command you to bring up saturation, I could just take that saturation down a bit on her arms. So then it's not stealing any focus. So that's, I think, where I would sort of end that picture. Um, I might add some texture to it. Of course, I might play up her eyes because she has beautiful eyes. And I could, of course, clean up their skin, since it is a wedding image. But in general, that is where I would leave that.