Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Retouch as Efficiently as Possible

So first and foremost I want you basically kind of go over well with you today essentially I think a lot of people have problems when it comes three touching because there's a lot of education of photography and makeup and hair and all this other stuff but you don't have a lot of good information retouching it's it's ah very mysterious a form of art so to speak and I think people have a lot of problems because they're intimidated their attorney with the tools techniques because there's also a lot of bad information out there so with this hour and a half I've decided to try and give everyone a brief understanding of how flower shop works in a way that you can retouch photographs without knowing everything about for the job because when it was down to you can do a lot with just a few simple tools and so that's what I want to show you today with just two or three different tools you can re touch a full photograph without being intimidated so if you're new to photo shop issue experience I ...

hope you could walk away with something that uh that you can apply to work flow okay um now since this appeals to a broad audience so if you're shooting seniors portrait's weddings whatever it is this is something you can take home with you and this is something that you can apply right away with that being said, I was able to get a really good portrait, so we're going to start with a portrait and work from the ground up from the processing all the way to the final touch is I got a portrait because I think it represents most photography, most people photography, so I didn't get, you know, high end fashion model or something like that it's something that can be replicated no matter whatever it is that you shoot as as long and shooting people always not gonna work for architecture, anything like that. But people, it works fantastic. Now let's, go ahead and begin now before I begin instead of using photo shop, I typically like to use capture one when it comes to processing my photos. Now what capture one is it's basically, if you think of light room where you can import a bunch of photos, process them and export them and catalogued them so forth it's the same type of format, you know, the main difference with capture one and I want to show you just by jumping in, going to minimize for shop and open this up. So this is basically capture one. Now I have the portrait right here that I imported earlier, and the way that I did did that was basically come appeared to the import arrow and it basically asked me where I want to import from import from so I picked my location, which was a folder on my desktop and imported this right away and it imports just like you would a typical processing engine now this photo here was given to me by my good friend danny diamond he let us use this photo he's amazing portrait photographer so thank you to him for letting us use his photos because sometimes I know how it is to give people your off out it's like giving exposing yourself without makeup, so to speak sometimes so I appreciate him for doing that and you can reach danny through the website founder pixels and facebook of the links provided below now going back to capture one once I important my photograph what I typically like to do is before touching anything I'd like to look at the photo and get a good overview of what it is that I want to do with the photograph you have to have a game plan if you have to know where you're going and what you want to achieve for me personally depends like you five a client it'll change but it always changes based on who you you are because everyone has their own unique preferences everyday has only textiles or color tony and so forth for me what I like to do is if we're focusing specifically just on the retouching aspect a look at the photo and kind of see exactly what it is that I want to work on now the first thing that strikes me is that the photo itself off is underexposed quite heavily so I want to address my exposures that's the first thing to be like to do is fix my exposures my whites my black points and so forth so we can do that by going over to this exposure tab and what this does is basically shows us you know all the luminosity changes are light changes and keep in mind this works very similarly to adobe camera when you bring into full shop or light room okay so this is something that even though I like using this program it's something that you can apply to whatever it is that you work for is based off of so go and start by coming here to the explosion tab and simply re upped exposure now when I bring up exposure do things like this I don't necessarily look at history graham always I mostly like to look at the photo itself because as you can see here in this photo the difference is that even though this photo looks properly exposed now the hist a gram over here on the left hand side shows that there's a lot more detail in the shadows and this is basically his program is on the left hand side you have all the shadows and the right hand side you have your highlights and bright points and so forth. Now the reason I do that is, if I just looked at the history graham and star justin exposure, you'll notice that now the photos overexposed even though the history graham is spread out more. So whenever they tell you, look atyou, instagram, it's not necessary, the case you kind of have to go, but from picture to picture, so going, we set that back to what looked appropriate. Now, the other interesting thing is, you've noticed that there's a lot of detail in the shadows that seemed to be clipped or missing and, well, that's basically saying right now is that some of these areas in the background or maybe even a sure don't have me telling them, and this is all relative if you want to keep it, if you don't some people like teo black to blow it out, some people don't it's just a matter of opinion, but again, I get these tools allow you to control exactly where you want to adjust these final details. So for example, over here, it says high dynamic range, you can come here and adjust the shadows so that they come out accordingly, so first and foremost again, I'm going to bring out my exposure and it also gives you an option just like like your photo shopped to adjust your curves so if you like playing curves just like it is in photo shop you can do that way or you can use the explosion sliders similarly so I'm sure pretty sure a lot of people are already asking what's the point of capture one if it does the same thing now one of the main beneficial reasons for capture one is in the commercial world when working with high end clients and people are shooting with you know better cameras capture one is pretty much the industry standard when it comes to processing on bigger projects so you have when you see studio sometimes they'll tether in while they're shooting you'll notice they use capture one quite a bit so it's just a matter of preference but I found going further into an industry that people are using capture a lot more than you know light room and so forth for tutoring and processing now aside from the exposure, I'm going to come back to certain points later. You can also fix and tweak white balance and color temperature in a way that you're not able to in photo shop in camera and I'll show you what I mean so going back here to the other tab which is the color tab there are other options that we can do now one of them based options is essentially fixing your white balance here now over here where it says gray, you can do a few things you can obviously use the color picker and pick a great point in the photo so let's have picked a great point here or a neutral point in the image it you know, automatically calculates what it thinks it should be just doesn't mean it's right or wrong it's just a good starting point from there, you can manually tweet your calvin just based on what you think is appropriate for the image or you can fix your tent, which is your magenta or green tents, because sometimes that happens you know when you're shooting a shooting a file and you get the image in your camp in your computer and you'll notice that the image sometimes looks a little bit red looks magenta and that cast is going from somewhere so the tempest thing that's often overlooked, but it can add a huge impact. It's not just your calvin now this is where capture one really shines is they have a particular color balancing tools that I think is really incredible. So for example, I'm going to come back down to color balance real quick, and this color balance is almost like you're manually overriding based on a visual interpretation, so if you if you see his color wheel over here and you think that image needs more of a greener tent, you can move the slider up to the green or section or the magenta or somewhere in the middle, where there's more mutuals so you can easily tweak based on visual representation rather than sliders, because I'm a very visual person. I've arts background and stuff like this really make sense to me, and the way capture and render skin tones is a lot more realistic than camera eyes. So this is why I think I prefer capture one as well. And lastly, we have this look color editor here, and this color editor is really special, and I'll show you why this color editor allows you to basically his pigs particular tones of the image and manually tweaked those specific tones so you can come down here and click on this eyedropper tool and then comes your image and click anywhere that you'd like for specifics, skin tone. And so if you if you have a skin tone, that's, let's a little bit red, so I'll click on skin tone here, and what it did is now with the color wheel, it identified that exact color, and then you can rotate that color with your rotation and modify exactly how red yellow magenta it looks so you can tweak different castes perfectly. Which I think fantastic because you can also adjust skin tones specifically so you can come down here and add layers you can say I'm going to pick one and then I'm going to just that and this move this table over here which is also in the basic tab what that does is basically allows you to have better transitions from tone a tone that evens out things even before you start retouching so I think that's really been official so I can undo this by cooking this undue are here I'll go back to basics because I think your skin looks a little bit red jed did not intend s I'll bring that back to neutral and take it just a little bit now a lot of this is based on just playing around and see what you like and this is where your artistic interpretation artistic license comes in because they're artists what one person does complete different another you know that's why images look different it's not necessarily just based on a composition but how are processing them too saw go ahead and bring this somewhere that is pretty standard I think I liked it where it was stock and I'll keep it there now here's another really cool tool that I want to play with before we start going into the retouching process is you'll notice that her watch is blown out and that would be horrible to fix otherwise now here we have unadjusted brush as well, and what we can do here is we can take a brush and adjusted so that, you know, we have individual exposures saw hit um, where you go, I'll hit new, so I have a new layer and what this does now is aiken say, draw mask and then here it tells me, um, the brush size that I can use and saw it come down to the image, and I can even use my bracket keys to change my breath site russia size, and I will also make sure that my opacity and hardness is according to the harness is basically, I'll softer brushes and concede there's a outer ring and there's the entering and opacity is basically how much of the effect it's going to be placed on the image? So I'll keep my capacity low, say around twenty percent, and then I will remain exposure down and load by brush, and this is basically saying that whatever I painted now will be a negative exposure. You saw it go in here and use the mask, and since my passage is low, I'd have to build it up, and then I can tweak my exposure so I can rescue the detail that was blown out, and since the's days, roth also have a lot of information. You can play in mask and do all sorts of things with your creativity with exposures so you can paint exposures that wouldn't be possible maybe even five years ago where they didn't have that much dynamic range information how they will differ at the n g from a brunt role file, for instance so basically a d n g file is proprietor too, I think kobe so what that means is say you have a cannon fantasy or two or a nikon following any f right based on the version of photo shop you have sometimes in may or may not open it. So say you bought a d a ten a nikon d a ten and you have photo shop three it's probably not going to open that file because it requires that your camera raw has to be updated and what camera is is what photo shop uses too you know? Read that raw file now what a dnd does is you can convert this year to end you have to any other cameras raw files into a format that can be read by any version of photo shop if you wish any but you know once that could read raw initially so also brings consistency however, is there difference reaching them? No, not really for the most part there's almost no difference in how they operate they're almost the same, okay so that being said I'm going to go ahead and see if there's anything else I want to tweak at the moment I don't think there is anything else in particular that watch was bothering me I might bring it up just a little bit so it's not so dark but they're still detail there and then I will look around her face make sure you know she's not to under expose overexposed and I think she looks pretty good as our base so I'm gonna go ahead go ahead and exports this outs all right click and I'll export and I'll say variant and it will tell me where I want to export which is store files I'll say format image name which is fine um export I'm going to export this is a piece because I'm gonna bring it into photoshopped right away my camera isis you profile here my colors basil keep as a doobie rgb because I think most my clients want me to work in rgb for the most part um and I'll keep it a bit just so that's a little bit faster to work on and so we can get on with the retouching process so export one variant and it's working here with a little screwy realign the stop and is completed and also it gives you other options so for example, if you wanted to export the same fund other areas you can do so and said his export folder and you can say instead of job name you can leave it as is and you could even say open with photo shop cia six so that this does now is the second exports it'll jump right into photo shop there we go and capture one has done so close that out does anybody have any questions so far about capture one to capture one of you slide room for years and I'm used to it so this whole new view it's kind of interesting to be honest with you and when I used to tethering on my computer my cannon I use the counted supper that that it comes with a with a with a camera and then interface it with light room so I can tether sure, but it's not as good as capture one from what I've seen lately and you know it just it's so fast the picture comes from very, very quick and I have this awesome but I'm just afraid of making a huge change for me because all the you know, my pictures alienated and lied room I'm afraid of I'm going to lose that information if I go to capture one right plug ins and know the actions and all that so but I'd be kind of brand new to you that you will have to reformulate kind of but it is I think it's a really interesting step because you can also try and play with it because they give you a thing and sixty day free trial to kind of play and see what it feels like and I always say the best way to see the difference in what you prefers actually try them both and see what it is that makes it so different and what it is that makes it the same because honestly, if it's something that isn't such a huge deal then it may not be worth it but what happens? I find that when clients typically will try it out and see the difference it does the color I think that's the biggest sell capture one has is the way that it renders skin tones and colors and makes things look much better than the real election processes it it's real interesting so I think give them both a try because they just recently released capture one pro eight which is the most recent version and capture one december you have any questions so far one more source so when you open that filing photo shop are you opening an original the original copy? I'm I'm opening the copy from capture one right? So so you're right it won't use camera from photoshopped to open the raw file again it'll exported from capturing an opening day so here we have the file open in photo shop now I'm going to start working with this as a base template now here's a really interesting thing that I've found is that whenever I bring files into photo shop I have changed my layout so everything's neutral gray um and basically the reason for that is that you know, whenever you have a neutral gray backdrop when you work in images, you see colors clear if you have black or white as your border the way that colors are interpreted our differently it's just the way your eye works when it's in different place so I keep photoshopped mutual great because it's been like that since almost forever it feels and it gives you more realistic rendition on how color should look as I'm working on them. One of things that I noticed right away was that her skin tone is still a bit red, which is okay because it gives me more to four concentrate how to fix that in photo shop, which is not so much about thing, but typically what I would do is go back in and tweet that a little bit before working on it again. Now I want to go and start my actually retouching workflow and now here is something that's really interesting now when you think about retouching you think about spending hours buying a screen working you know endlessly on imperfections and so forth but doesn't have to be the case and the reality is most of time your clients are seeing photos at a viewing distance that is like this or in princeton, medial bigger, they're not seeing prince that air wall size, they're not seeing them at, you know, two hundred percent not seeing this view not say a hundred percent so it's not necessary that you have to go in and start at one hundred percent and work your way around the image. You can go out and make a game plan just based on what you're seeing from this distance so you can basically say, ok, I'm going to set a new layer, something you blank clear here I have my brush and I'll set two hundred percent flow and I will pick my color and you can basically make a game plan before you begin, just so that you can stay on track without overdoing it because they overdoing is the biggest concern or problem that most people have, and the reality is when you over reducing the influx a lot worse than if you did less of it, because I think people will forgive you if you do less, but they won't forgive you if you go too far. That's what I think so essentially, whenever I work, I don't do this anymore because I have a mental game plan of where I'm going to go. But usually what I'll do is say, I don't think out loud here just for sake of demonstration is the things that stand out to me the most at this view of the thing thing that I want to fix so far for example, you see the under eyes here that's me I want to fix you see some of the discoloration, maybe on her arms that's the only fix maybe some of these veins. Ana, lighten up. There's some here going around her face. Um, there's little flyways going through the image in the background that I want to fix us. Well, maybe lessen up some of these lines and something lines here and maybe fix some of the color that's going on here and some of the redness that's in her eyes a little bit as well. And it's funny, because we just talked about freckles in our last segment with courtney and you see it's, just freckles, and I'm not gonna touch that. That I think should stay as well, because I think, you know, when you keep the likeness of somebody it's much more powerful than trying to take away with you, make things too perfect that's, why again, when you zoom in one hundred percent and you working, you forget you lose a track of reality, you know you lose track of exactly what a person should look like sometimes and you overdo it so it's always important to come back out to make sure that you're not going too far all right, so that's kind of what my mentality is before we begin actually working now I want to go ahead and actually start working on the image now without being said, I am going to delete the slayer real quick because I don't need it it's just a mental representation of what I'm going to do. Um so how can I pretty face this by saying that this whole course is going to be essentially working with the least amount of layered as possible with the least someone tools possible to get the best results? So this is for somebody who just doesn't have, you know, hours of time or can a photo, but and also doesn't necessarily know all the tools, but I still want him to get things that's extremely usable and beautiful, and I want to show them that they don't have to know all these, you know, techniques and tricks that are sometimes really overrated, to be honest with you, they're just there for show their flashy and there may be good sometimes, but not as a base rule it's better to understand the base techniques efficiently and as good as possible rather than trying to learn tips and tricks that are not going to help you for most of your work ok, so the first step that I always like to do is the cleaning stuff I think it's the most boring step to be honest with you because it's literally just healing our imperfections and flaws and things like that and then after that I like to light and dark in the image and what I mean by light and dark and is if there's any heirs of the face like say her under eyes I will light in that up if there's any dark patches on her skin, I will use my methods of light and dark and those up so that they blend in better with the skin and that that allows me to keep all the texture there and it doesn't disrupt any of the color or any of the good healy work that you've done because it's really, really important to make sure that you're not using the healing brush to take away, you know things that could be lightened that's really important if its texture and it's flat leave it there don't use a hang bush and try to remove it ok, because the more texture the better, the less then you start having issues you end up on, you know, social media sites and we did a whole bunch of issues there all right, so um first and foremost, I'm going to start a new folder, so over here my layers panel you'll see there's a full gear icon I'll click that and I will name this cleaning because I will be cleaning her skin and hair using this particular folder and keep everything organized I'm going to set a blank layer over here and this is where we're going to use our healey in clue bush to basically clean the image and a lot people don't know this, but you don't have to work on duplicate of the background you don't have to duplicate the background and work on it to heal our cone you're gonna send she's a blank layer, come over to using brush and set it to current and below. Now they're a lot of minor things that I'm not going to go over because obviously if you went over every single thing, it would take you three days and that's why I had my course for three days on retouching because there you can learn about everything I'm doing from you know my pen tablet settings to the photo shop settings, but this is definitely a ah huge overview and as little time as possible and I won't have trying to go over everything, so keep that in mind in case you didn't you know if you're wondering how I did one thing another there's the place for that as well so again, coming back here, we have our layer or blank clear here, and we have our healing brush as their first go to I don't use the spot hitting bush no lobby last why don't you spot him brush? And I'll tell you why. So the way the heating brush works, the regular heating brush is that you have to actually sample by hitting option key and sampling an area of a good piece of skin before you remove a particular another piece of skin, and what this forces you to do is it forces you to look around the image and see what areas are good and what airs or not. The spot healing brush is a very automated process, and what it will do for you is it will decide what air that it wants the source if if you spot hitting brush, you get into this really lazy habit of rushing through the image and spot hearing everything. And because retouching is a serious of many, many steps what happens with spot heating brush? If you're not sure where their sources coming from, you're just going to get our van demise pattern going through the skin it's not so bad, however, I just prefer using human rush because it's a lot more accurate, especially because you're being so many steps okay, so I'll go on with the heating brush again said to current and below and making sure that my layer selected, I'm going to go go ahead and work at a reasonable distance, so say about twenty five percent, I'm not going to start by going all the way in like this, this is not what you do, okay? This is not what you do the second time, because I know everybody has habit of doing this, so I'm going to start by coming here twenty five percent and taking out the things that matter the most first, because that's, what it was going to be saying, that's, where your time should be going to so let's, go ahead, let's get started with the face, so I'll start sampling and working across the skin and later on, I'll zoom into the areas that are harder to get to, and another thing that is really critical is making sure that every time you work on an area, make sure the healing brushes covering whatever you're trying to take out completely, because if you covered only halfway to leave a very grave blotchy mark, so keep a eye on whatever here is that you're doing and don't rush through this process because this is the most important process through healing, including is actually making sure that you do a good job with your initial steps, and this is where your results are chewing you'll notice I'm quite liberal because my brush is quite small and I use it like a bandage I kind of covered up and make sure it's thorough and then move on. I'm not extremely detailed, and I'll go ahead and take other things that appeal to you. First, you'll also notice that with this process, when you start removing one area, other areas are becoming more obvious, and this is the reason why you want to make sure that you're taking care of the things that stand out most first, because then you can focus your time accordingly. Now, the thing that I think people find the hardest is knowing exactly what to heal and what not to heal. And I say that if it's a bump on the skin, you should definitely here, or if it's in the next extremely dark, you should take it out. So for example, you notice that right now when I turn my later on enough, I'm taking out these deep lines some of these little bumps that are, you know, one of the reasons why the image looks un retouched is because you're trying to get the image back to a place that's more realistic, so say for example, you're talking to somebody in person, right, and you're looking at them. You typically won't notice these things because they're in motion you're focusing what they're saying their expression but then when you freeze them and you kind of look at their face and a photograph, you notice things that you wouldn't notice in person, right that's what I think retouching is about it's about bringing them back to what you saw in person it's not about, you know, overdoing it essentially so that's at least my theory as long as my clients see the same as well, so I'm going to take this straight here and move around the face uh now here you go, you'll notice that there's some areas like this'll here going through the eyebrow and I will come a little bit closer because easy to work on now with the edge like this, what I'll do a sample on the edge and then he'll right here and what that does is it doesn't make a gray mark because if I don't sample properly what's going to happen is I'll show you I'll sample on the skin and then we touch here it makes a blotchy marc that doesn't resemble what here should look like or the eyebrow so what I do to circumvent that is sample on the h of the hair and then work by pacing on the edge as well and what that will do for me is will continue the actual hairline without disrupting what the image should, what the area should look like, so I'll go and continue to question, will there be cases in which you will use the const up instead of the he didn't brush? Yes, so why? I will basically use the clone stamp in areas that are impossible to use a hitting russian. So for example, say that you wanted to remove a good portion of this area here. I think theoretically, what I would do is I would start by healing out as much as I could, and what happens is if I tried to hell out, this area becomes a mess, so what I could do instead is I can take my clone brush and said something a really low flow up here, so say, like, four percent or so, and I'll take my cologne brush, and I'll start brushing, and what that does is it cleanly removes that here without leaving a really big, you know, blotchy gray area says areas where essentially the heating brush would fail if you want to make a copy and paste something quite quickly that so the clone rush does really well, is this copies and pace? It doesn't have a brain, a newbie question, but what exactly, does flow do so flow? Interestingly enough? Is kind of like a speed of a car so let me give you a quick example I'm going to set a blankly on top which I'm going to do it in just a second this is just for demonstration purposes now say have a brush um say my flu is one hundred percent and I have the white color selected and I do a quick swipe like that it brings a quick white line so now with flo what happens is if I bring it down to say two percent and I do a line to get back to that solid white line matthew brushing over and over again so it's like a building process so to speak and I can quickly swipe back and forth and it builds up very gradually like makeup essentially and this is where a lot of you know good retouching will come into place affected those a if you used a welcome instead of a mouse because yes it actually works the exact same way so if uses uh the welcome the only difference is say you have actual mouse so say how can I put this so if I start brushing with my pen right and I start going back and forth it builds on each other if I used the mouth all that have to do is click once and go back and forth and it does the same building process so they were kill almost identically so that's, why I keep my flow as the thing that changes constantly because it just built gets one hundred percent eventually and I think I like that when it comes to the retouching process, so, uh, see here I think I like where she's at with her face at the moment I'll maybe get rid of some of these other flyways coming here and again, keep in mind I'm not re touching this the standard off, you know, complete high in editorial because obviously I'll take a little longer, but I'm trying to touch this to a point where it's a really clean, good portrait of her that's my goal. So I'll take out some of these lines here patch this appear somebody's little hairs, but not much. Now you'll notice that her skin looks a little patchy and law people are tempted to go and cloning heal everything, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to say that the next time because the next step is about even the aunt, that patchy area to blend it all together without using the healing brushing claim brush it's using lighting to fix those patchy areas. Okay, so before you go into that let's, I continue on to the rest of her skin now check this out, this is a really cool tool that I use by default in photo shop if you hit the archy I said to the iki but the archy you'll get this hand with the arrow and what this does is you can rotate the canvas like this and the reason for this is sometimes if they're areas that are hard to get to just based on how they're orientated normally you can rotate it so that it's easier to work him. So say I wantto remove this line I can rotate the canvas and then come back to my healing brush and start healing out that line because I think it's a natural tendency that there's some angles that are really hard to work on I think that when you experience it yourself you just know that you know it's true so this has saved me a lot of effort instead of going working at our angle so I use this rotate till quite often and to reset this all you have to do is click on the recent beautiful here so say I reset view and it goes back to the way that the portrait was and this really allows me on the fly to customize my whole work flow and if you want to edit your shortcuts like I have like have a set to healing brush tested to the cone brush and q and w that changing my brush size there is a section here it's an edit keyboard shortcuts and says shortcuts for tools and this allows me to edit whatever tool that I want to any keyboard shortcut that I want. So in case you use maybe five tools and you put in one place, you can do that, you know, have to memorize where it is like you're playing the piano, right? You can just put them all in one place and then go back today so again, I will keep my canvas rotated here, I will take my hitting brush because it is a deeper line, and I will go in and start healing it out very risky. I'm not worried so much yet about any of the other patching is that's coming up because I can fix that going forward, but I just want to remove the appearance of the deep line, so you'll notice that I even revisit areas in case that a one past didn't do so well, because sometimes two passes work better than one. There we go and again there's some bright and doctors, but I'm going to keep that to the next section because I think it's a good example to use, uh and show you the power of fixing things, using lightning and darkening, all right, so we have other the lines here come back to normal and continue on. You know, once you get in there really it's like a very it's a very zen like process because you get so transfixed in what you're doing, which is why it's really important to make sure that you don't, um and stay zoomed in for too long and move some of her beauty spots here now here's something that's really interesting we have a complex background but complex meaning it's not solid there's patterns and lights coming from everywhere and we have hair in the background we have flyways right? Sometimes it's not so easy to fix with the hitting russian clone brush. So for example, well, if I start using the hitting brush here even though it starts getting rid of it, you're going to see a lot of patching us as you get close to the hair and it disrupts the natural pattern of the background. So what am I gonna do? I was going to leave it now, okay? I'm going to fix it so I think it would be screaming if I left it there. So here's the really cool tip that I just figured out because I had a deadline and I was freaking out I didn't want to do so I play the bunch of options and I found out today that's really interesting well we can do is we can take a blank clear and we can use another technique to get rid of these flyaways in a very fun way so this is where flow comes into use I'm gonna take my brush I'm a right click make sure that my harness is set to zero and I will take a bigger brush ice it's nice and sweeping and I'm going to start sampling the background and start start painting and basically cover of those hairs ok now one thing I notice is any time I see backgrounds that are blurred out and things like that they're easily replicated well by doing this technique because I realized that a lot of the backgrounds are basically like paint with noise essentially you painting ad with noise then you have another background okay, so here let me show you what I mean in practice um let me start off with this site god, I don't do this but I have to say I'm going to use so I shall put a little bit higher flow and I'm going to start by sampling and brushing we'll start something rushing and you notice that the hairs will lighten up and I knew that I'm covering some of the actual here it's not because I'm going to come back and take out that in a second but bear with me as I go for it so I'm sampling brushing and you'll notice that what happens is the hare gets less and less visible okay so I think based on what I'm seeing my screen at least the hairs don't look there but you see it's a solid color and the outside is grainy so what I'm basically to do here is going to filter noise at noise and at a one percent one point five there we go one point five in matches of close the background and when I turn on and off you know is that these little flyaways basically dispute and the background looks very similar, so what I can do here is I can take a mask which is right over here this little rectangle, the circle in middle and I will take my brush said to black using x, bringing up a little bit higher floor and I will bring back so her actual hair so that it's not painted in and we have the background that is essentially filled in with the flyer is gone and I would repeat that step on the other side as well. You can leave it on its own layer or you can bring emerge it to the layer below and if you wanted to merge it, all you have to do is hit command e and it merges the bottom layer with the top layer so you have one condensed little there that has everything you've done so far in it okay, so I'll do the same process I'll come here um, see if I can maybe he'll a little bit of fly raise to make my job a little bit easier just in case I don't screw up and then continue on with that similar process because sometimes you really can't clone if the background is changing so much so similarly another blank clear take my brush a low flow start sampling and brushing and you're basically just drawing over the image or painting with the image same thing filter that noise and then masking in so that doesn't impact her face. There you go and you have a background that's really clean ellmers that together and zoom out it's always important to save, so don't forget to say I should in that way before but you can save it to your desktop, which is where it wants to save and it already had a copy there, so if it crashes during the course not screwed, all right, so back to our little cleaning game that we've been playing appear blasting what to do before continue is maybe some of the red eyes here, saul zuman my heating brush and continue going for it and how about some of these roof fire is up here? A lighten those up so I'll sample below with my clone brush this time because we just talked about earlier the low flow and I'll start cloning and lighten that up I can come back and dark, and that if I so choose later, so I go across the image to see some of the other areas, and I noticed that a lot of this for the looks blotch you'll notice it's flat skin it's not imperfections. It's not you know anything else, and this is something I'm going to keep, because I'm gonna lighten this up and it's gonna blend in beautifully, zoom out and, uh, here's the interesting thing some clients will say, take out the veins, some council say, lighten them up and I think it's personal preference. However, if you want to take them out, I do the same process for the healing of cologne brush, and I just basically, you know, remove them or I will like them up using the next step. Another really cool tool that you can do is something which is called fade with the hitting brush, so I'll take my healing brush here again, and I'm going to start by sampling sandler. I'm going to remove this or faded out, I'll sample next to the actual vain start healing, but if I don't want to completely gone, I could go to edit, fade, heating brush, and it gives me the option to bring it back at a particular passage e so say if you like something but not so much you can do it halfway and removed particular amount which makes it a good medium pointy thing in case you know you want keep realism but not too much all right, perfect so let's go and see if there's anything else um she had a little here tie here which I'm actually going to crop this image or the intent was to crop later on anyway, but I would claim that out if I had to andi I think that should be it for our healing process also taking a look at her lips now there's some area there's a area right here which is coming out I don't know what that is, but what you can do is take your clone brush and again with the low flow simple next to the actual lip itself come in and then just let it out the reason why like using flow a lot is because as you're working and kind of see what's coming out of the brush as your painting, you don't have to guess you know you have to worry if he goes too far sometimes when you're working with these tools they really abrasive and they're really intense and you want a really easy middle ground I think that's the best way to ah play around okay, there we go all right let's go to the next step and again command s safe and it saves in the background and we will claps this folder I'll turn this layer on enough to show you kind of what we did so far so essentially we took out the things that were most visible with the things that stood out the most I didn't move her freckles I didn't take out her under bags or any of that I didn't take out any of the blotchy areas with my handing including brush because again that disrupts too much texture and you want it displaces um little as possible okay, ok, now I'm going to set a new folder and I'm gonna call this my dodge and burn there and what dajun burn is case for those of you don't know is dodging is a process of lightning essentially, you know, lightens darker parts of india which and burning is when your dark in parts of an image ok, you can use this for multiple multiple output so say you want a contra face like you doing makeup you can use dodging burn with bigger brushes in contra faces or you can lighten up under eyes and dark and lips and things like that so it's very versatile in commutes for so many things even color correction and multitude of techniques, so the way that we're gonna do this is first we're going to set a new curves layer so now where the curves are hiding is in this little adjustment panel here so it's just basically half cookie half black and white cookie so I'll come here and it's his curse now with curves what this does is this represents your history graham here the left it's your shadows and essentially right is your highlights and everything the middle shows you where your meat tones are there was supposed to be so this curve manipulates that hissed a gram essentially so what I can do is put a point in the middle and bring it up or down and adjust my exposure of an image. So although this is a global process or global change, we can use this to fix local areas so I'll go ahead and bring this curve up to the first crosshatch over here so it's this first war is on the line and I'm going to come here to my mask which is white I will invert this and I'm going to use this to lighten areas and essentially I will combine this curve with my brush and light areas let me show you a visual representation of what I just did case anybody's has no idea what a curve is or what a mask is what it does so over here you'll notice that if I switch that mask off or if I bring it back to a white white basically reveals it means it's not doing anything so anything I made any change that I made to this curve here it's showing across the whole image, if I haven't said to black, it means it mass everything that I did out it's not showing you anything that I'm doing right now because black is concealing, so we're going to punch a hole through that mask in the areas that we want to lighten essentially, ok, so again, I'll bring my curve up and because I'm asking said to black it's not showing you anything right now, but that's, okay, because we're going toe actually use this mask to manipulate areas, so I'm glad you brought up the flow question earlier because here's, where flo takes really big importance now clicking on my mask, I will cook my brush and start using white and before I do so does anybody have any questions? Okay, good. So if save my flows really high two hundred percent and I started brushing, you'll notice that that underlying exposure change we do with our curves is now visible in the areas that I'm brushing with, and the reason for this is because this white color is punching a white hole in a mask, so when I hit option and click on the mask, you see this what the mask is it's showing you this is where I punched the hole and this is where it's showing the effect so I can move this curved upper down and it's giving me a really terrible effect so I would not recommend anybody do so shift delete or commander lead I should say it goes back and fills it in two black with the background color and we can do that again or in case you wonder start over you can also right click on the mask, delete layer mask and at another one and so there's so many options to get the same exact place in flower shop it's ridiculous so if you have one preference on how to do something stick with it because there's so many short cuts that get to the same thing so don't get bogged down in short cuts as long as you're comfortable what you're doing that's the most important thing ok again we have our curve, it said high and we have a black mass that's all we did ok, now we're going to come back to a brush and house through the opposite called mask, which is white because that's we're going to use to punch the hole through it and our flow now instead of one hundred percent it's going to be set to two percent and the reason for that is because we want to very gradual changes that's very easily seen and controllable we don't want to make it so extensive but before we start actually lightening up areas I want to make it even easier for myself I just want to see the dark areas I want to make it easy without any interference of color and things like that so I will add one more adjustment layer and it will be the black and white adjustment lier and what this does is a temper rarely discard all the color and the reason I did this is so that once the color is gone you're easily able to see the darker patches of skin make it much easier to work on so with my black and white adjustment there said I'm going to go down to my curves click on my mask and I will also use my rotate tool now to play around and start lightening up areas so I'll take my brush again making sure the hardness is soft and go in and start lightening under eyes patchy skin and things of that nature also a little fun fact every time he wrote in an image you'll see different different things there's this really fascinating psychological effect is when you rotate someone on their head they look complete different if you were if you saw them right side up they had this viral picture going around where they had these girls lined up upside down and they look normal you didn't really think of anything when they put them right side up all their features were wonky like there comes to the inverted and you would have you had no idea so it's really fascinating fact that has that happens to your brain when you change the angle that you're working on, you see a lot more imperfections and different different things you wouldn't notice so routine images really practical and very helpful so I'll come in here and start working um and start lightening up a little patchy surfaces and sometimes even two percents really a lot, so I'll bring it down to one percent and so working and this is why I just my brush size quite a bit is because I'm constantly changing the area that I'm lighting up there we go on and so I'll ask you a quick glimpse of what happened here you see that her under ice is lightened up, some of her jaw line patchy areas are lightened up a bit I went a little too far, so case you go too far on something say that say I do something ridiculous like, oh, I made a mistake, right? And I didn't want that which you can do is easily go back and switch to a black brush over here and just go over that again and it basically patches up that mask ok, so let's go in and do a little bit of this area here and continue on lighting some of these dr patches opportunities to undo do you have like can you make change and dumber change number like like they didn't do undo for several times in a row and it's usually compare just the one how do you change that? So basically, though it's actually quite easy I didn't actually undo anything the way that the what I actually did was instead of using the undue command, I change the color of my bused to black and what that is it basically covers up any any place of the image, so even if you did one hundred steps ago, you could go back that specific area and just patch it up again and fixes it itself. It's funny because my history my history states only sets like seven I really don't even have that many induce available for me, so if I mess up e, I'm really screwed basically and this is why? Because I can easily go back and undo any place that I want without worrying about, you know, oh, I don't have been history states nothing about the undue function is that say you have to say you made a mistake hundred steps ago and you did a lot of good steps in between you wantto undo everything you just kind of want to go that one particular area and fix that so that's why I do it this way instead and maybe all these here are like freckles himself so I'm not going to particularly move that may be a lightning just a touch just for practice here and and some of these darker spots here okay, you can see here that you know when you just light and some of these darker patches up her face looks a lot more symmetrical and evened out it's not that you know she slides all their skin texture and if you want to go further you can which makes it great because you have a lot of control inverse it versatility similarly I will go to her arm and start lightening that up it's funny this process is a lot harder when people are watching you if like you don't know what you're doing there you go this almost becomes like your painting because when you see the darker patches you get obsessed with trying to even that out and the cool thing about this flow is that it makes it easier for everyone because if they're flows really high it's almost impossible to control this process so I will lighten that up a bit and obviously I'm not going to become obsessed with every single little area right now because of time but the principal slaughtering the same lighten up these dark areas here for the reins okay don't go too far there maybe this little guy here and let's see where else maybe some of the dr patches done here just that fills in so these dark crevices because of lighting also the same process is done with darkening patches so if they're light areas that need to be darkened up you'd basically the same thing with another curve I'm going the other way and that will be our next little step that we do is we will darken areas that are really bright on the skin like there's a little piece on her cheek here okay I don't get too obsessed with this others will be here for ok so the next step again is going to be just darkening some of those little patches here and I'll do the same thing by setting I'll rename this so that we know a rat another curve and we'll bring this one down the same amount that we went up on the other one same thing black mask command I makes the mass black now sit just a burn I'll click on the mask and start darkening some of these light patches here. Maybe this guy here on dh is the lines up here I mean with this line right here and again this is all subjective so you know it's all based on individual preference oh, I want a darkness and light this and this what I think is right and wrong and everyone has their own approach so there isn't you know particular rule that you have to do what I'm doing exactly it's just based on what anyone prefers, I will however typically dodge more than I burned just because I think there's a lot more to light and then there's to darken you can also get carried away with this process and go too far if you light and dark in too much you'll see a weird three d effect going on so how would recommend just keeping things natural is possible and only doing what's necessary so I'm going to zoom out again and I'm going return my dodge later on enough and you see what happens with the face and her arms is those patchy areas are lightened up okay we can go further and you know do a little bit more work but the results will be pretty consistent with the direction we're going so we wanted to we can go back to our dodge and push some these little patches a little bit more so that it's lightened up just a touch and that way she still looks like she slashes a re alarm not overdoing it and you go so I'm going to turn this black and white layer off and you notice right now she looks just really clean she looks natural she's not overdone you know there's no texture there all the destructive elements were taken away so I turn this on and off you'll see that the areas that we wanted to focus on are essentially taking care of right like we go back we go up to her face and returning on enough you'll see that you know the under eyes because they have the patchy areas were lightened up um her forehead and other areas were lined up a cz well maybe her cheek and jaw line and she still looks really it doesn't look like she's retouched it just looks natural like she was there on a good day and you took a good picture of her on dh should be quite happy obviously again you could go further and so forth however you can also use dodging burn to contour like I mentioned earlier so say you wanted to contour right say you wanted to enhance her cheekbones or you know, bring highlights through her clothes or things like that you can also use it to contour with the same process say you had another folder just for the sake of contrary so say I put another set into the contra so bring it up again same process and start by this time using a bigger brush so say you want to add more highlights I don't know why you necessarily would but if you wanted to he could use a low flow and start brushing highlights two years that you want to have at highlights too so if you increase luminosity on areas that you want to enhance, this allows you to do so so when I bring in enough, you notice that she is lot more highlights, however again it's the personal tastes not that I would do this it just be based on with photographer wants me to do okay, so this isthe gives you know their example of what to do when your country so I'll go ahead and delete that now the last essential step in regards to actually, you know, having a well polished image aside from cleaning and changing light issues is adjusting color. So say you have different color casts the image and this image is a good example because you have, um little patches here that are lot grayer, then the rest of skin was very easy to fix. So you know, there are other issues here where say we wanted to completely change the skin tone to make it look more red or yellow weaken do color fixes, so open another folder here and said to color, so we have these three folders and what I will do here is also the blank clear, and I'm going to rename this too color just so that you know it's not empty. I will use a regular brush set my awful about the same I will come down here to where the great patches sample the color next there that want to fix and then basically start brushing and what happens is you'll notice that the color of actually and you change the color mode because is wondering why it all great out for a second there we go what happens is the color actually changes to the color of her the rest the arm so it's not completely gray or anything like that and you could do this very similarly to any other part of the skin so say you wanted to change color cheek closer to save the chain closer to cheat you can sample other colors across the skin and replace it accordingly so it makes it a really good option two fix colors that way same here with the side of her face and also with you so the shadow areas here you can also use um now here's a close part about this work flow is that if ever you want to go back in time and say fix something all man I should have fixed that you can come back and do that. So say I realize that oh, you know what her for has a little bit blotchy. Still I can come back and just work on that particular area without having to undo everything so the work though is really clean it makes it really easy to find tune in polish and since we have that additional time I think I'm going to go ahead and essentially go round do quick will pass just because I wanted the extra perfect and mia look really good and this is also like typically you wouldn't start by zooming in like this because you're going to spend hours going from pixel of pixel and I don't recommend that if it's not necessary especially for things like you know, natural portrait's and head shots we typically try not to go that far because again this is something that's you know going to be used more realistically than editorial for you know, beauty campaign or something like that I get a lot of these are little freckles so you have to keep that in mind as you're working and not overdoing everything so you can switch back to dodge and burn and fix even works on lips so safe here you have little gap you can fix little bright and dark areas should have ever I didn't know it's been a problem isn't this method sees you are the brightness or the christian very necessary of a fire with the curve you mean added noise on top of it? Yeah, I know has no it's been automatically at it is you're stretching the radio you're saying not so much you won't notice it very much at all I think what happens is with this with the curve the amount that you're changing the exposure is so minimal and in relativity that you won't notice a huge change in noise essentially because he has blended in really well with the rest of skin to its good question it's almost like here using filler to fill her lips okay and see all soprano ahead again very good maybe some of these little spots here on dh when even this heart I think I'll go back on our and well, this is great for highlights and shadows but like it's skim variations in tone like yellow yellowish or pink issues will admit of reduced so if I ever get this changes with skin tones, I will go back to my little color layer here and then over here what I'll do is if there is a little you know a color cast so see if there's a yellow on the cheek I'll come here and select a neutral tone for example and then come back and brush over that yellow area and what happens is it'll take you go from yellow to that exact home that you're looking for so let's see thie ice want kind of method you have tio brighton teo you make those eyes crispier sharper typically I won't lighten our sharpened ice for safe because what happens is sometimes when you modify the natural light that's hitting the eye, your tension goes there directly and the reason that may be a bad thing is because you realize that you know the exposure is not natural because typically it's in a real world setting it's almost impossible to get the isis stop that much and that's when things are looking like they're suspicious so once you have one life, you start thinking that everything is a lie, so but if you wanted to, I would basically just come down to my dodge there and bright in those up manually so I can come back here and, um just start lightening it up. What happens is you'll notice that the eyes come out with more, but I tend not to push it you know too far because when you start adding sharpness and contrast eyes alone, that becomes issue because if your photographer you know you're lighting, you know what? What just happened there with someone dies have a question? Are there any of these techniques you've shown us today that you don't use on male portrait or that you modifying for male portrait's with male porch it's? I've come to realize that there's less of a need for the healing process because I think men skin I don't know what it is but there's more texture and is less flaws that need to be correct in the healing process, so I stick to more dodging burning so our lightning darkened areas and I'll chisel the night more per se sel I will contour mohr and add more callous and shadows along the facial structure to bring it up more so, it's more of a balance that goes toe lighting instead of the cleaning process. So but that being said, did anybody else have a question on that? We don't have the techniques changed according to the skin color of person. So say you have a different skin, it won't be you won't be cheeky one change of the skin color of change in the texture profile. So if this kid has a lot more texture, it may need more work, you know, figuring out the light on the skin. So if you know, you see a lot more, how should I say this blotchy nous than that will determine how much dodging bernie have to do to fix that problem? All right, well, we're question. How about, uh, smoothing the skin skin smooth? You use it or you stay at women I trying not to, because especially when you go to hire and work that's, you know, commercial or really good editorial this white you know, our last session, horton was so adamant about the land out to be right in the blush has fear and make has to be good is because when you have those things and lighting everything's good, when you do, when you keep it to this degree where you see the skin texture there it look a lot better than trying to smooth skin because when you smooth going to send you what you're doing is displacing texture and when you kill texture on already good foundation it you know compromise of the whole team in editorial says we'll be your take on techniques like frequency separation security s o exactly so frequent separation the problem with that is a lot of the times when people use that technique they're using very very wrongly and I covered a lot of frequency separation my last you know tutorial however on overview is typically with fifteen separation they use it very wrong going what they'll do is they will use that to blur an image and they will just because the texture is kept they'll think it's okay really it's not is because the skin looks over the smooth and looks artificial still so in a traditional sense I would avoid using it and also the reason I am really emphasizing these techniques is because any time you go to a retouching agency or if you're working with a hiding client they will know the difference of good work in bad work or cheap worker fast work so to speak so I would really recommend knowing how to use these this workflow first before fiddling with within tricks because it's better to be able to retouch completely with a good set of tools rather than try to cheap your way out of it I think that's you know, ultimately with bows down to you and lastly say that you know, you have a final image and there are obviously a couple of things that I would do and I'm going to go take you through that process real quick is one last little tool that I have um let's say you want to liquefy right say that you'll liquefy and things like that I typically don't sharpen I don't people think that's crazy why don't you sharpen right? Because falls are so sharp other camera when you over sharpen something, you get a lot of flaws that just about again and what I what I think is if you sharpened selectively, you know it's okay, I don't sharpen the whole image entirely for a portrait because that may not be so flattering, you know, it may be detrimental to get everyone has their own preferences and so forth, so you know things like shopping liquefying keep to the end typically so sharpening I'm not going to cover so much, however I will cover liquefying real quick, so say we want to liquefy right? The way to do that is we can make a little copy of everything we've done so far and we can do shift option command e so if these three tools are these three functions and what that did was basically set a new layer on top and I'll show you this really, really quickly with the last few months we have now liquefy there's one functional initially that's really imperative when you click on advance mode, you want to make sure that your brush pressures not set to one hundred because what happens here is if your brush pressure said two hundred and you have a really high brush size, it becomes really easy to mess up with liquefying it's really difficult to get that right? Because look, if I ng a buying by default is really hard tool to work on just like float, so what I recommend is with your brush pressure, keep it really low, so say maybe, you know, between five to ten, we'll keep it owes seven just because and here, if you find anything you want to refine, necessarily, you don't have to go find I recommend not doing it unless it's absolutely necessary, but again, if you do have to, this is the essentially setting to use my brushed entity is typically out fifty because it's like softness essentially and fifty is a good point, but, you know, play with that brush pressure lower is, I think much better because here you can do little nudges instead ofthe, you know, really harsh transitions and so say, if you wanted to modify this and being her arm a little bit more because sometimes happens when someone pushes the arm against the body if it widens out so I fixed things like that liquefy okay so again you don't have to look fine but if you do need to um I would recommend keeping this as you're setting so that was it ok and the other thing is typically with crop and anything going forward it's all based on the photographers recommendation so I know I know danny has a preference for example to crop this going in closer so I will do so for making sure that he it's very similar to how he would do it. Um so again a quick overview I basically did my first process uh with just healing including and I turn on enough you'll notice that I basically just took out the flyways uh some of the forehead areas some of the sides some of the lines and things like that then the next step is when I turn on off you'll see the patch is essentially disappear however the natural transitions and skin still remained so she still looks human and not like a barbie doll and you get a really nice, beautiful portrait of her it's not overdone it's clean it's you know what she wants and then maybe some color fixes and then you know optional liquefying with the color fixes the only thing that I really did was some of the you know, fixes here um maybe someone cheeks the last thing I want to show you is that say her if her skin's a little bit red or yellow and you wanna quickly just tweet that um there's one really quick way to do so you can go into your adjustment layers click on human saturation and you can go into this red channel and here you can tweak, you know, reds and you can see it's actually quite a huge shift and you go from hope to know you over yeah, you can, you know, fix skin just based on whatever it is you're trying to go for things that you know one another and includes yellows and things like that so you can really find tune in customize whatever color you going for and so with that being said, you know, with these three steps you can essentially retouch a clean portrait without, you know, destroying it don't take a couple more questions from I'm sure okay, so let's see which one to ask first. So, um, basically there's a question from alejandro who would like to know if you've ever tried doing some or most of these rest retouching techniques directly and capture one pro? I haven't because I think what I find is a more comfortable using footage shot because it has a lot more options with the same tools, I think his capture way does give you tools like spot, anything I believe and things of that nature. But since I like to keep things very adjustable going forward and later stack, I'll keep it all in for the shot rather than through capturing. But it's, very appropriate if you do want to for quick fixes. Okay, question from bell hawk, do you take out the multiple reflections in her eyes? I do not. Because whenever you looking at somebody look, in fact, you should do right now, just look at what he look at the end of next year, you'll see that they have reflections in her eyes or their eyes, not her eyes. It's weird, but everyone has reflections in their eyes. So that kind of adds a human characteristic. And in fact, if you try and take it out, it looks on human. So, yeah, a question came from jason. Do you have a process to add sheen to the skin, like something I've seen on some high fashion magazine? Yeah, of course. So during the dodging burn process and I talked about country, that would be the exact place the ad sheen, so essentially clean back to my dodging and then taking my brush, and then basically just adding a little machine here and they're just based on where you'd want to now the sheen can changes based on your brush size so if it's more speculate can make it a really small brush and then she know eh okay and this is one of my favorite retouching questions from nick and green cup how do you decide when images finished on images finish just based on your own preference or and that I think that honestly comes back to personal taste and just experience because if you're the type person that's never knows when it's been it if it's finished or not it's never going to be finished I think you should take a break come back initially it took a while to know when it's when it was finished what I used to do was I took frequent breaks you know thirty minutes I'd go over everything else come back and get a fresh perspective on what I was doing and then also looking other examples of images because if you look at other examples and see how far they went you have a good basis of what you want to do and if you don't have a good basis you're just lost then you're just missing around and and also making a game plan the beginning and see exactly what would you want to take out and which want to fix before even retouching because then it gives you a confined space the working awesome. So someone who doesn't make a difference if you heal with a small healing brush and paint in a big circle or using a big brush, it does, because one of the reasons is if you start using a big brush and I'll show you what I mean, I'll just go back to my healing step because, you know, we have our layers, which makes it really cool, or did you go here? Is so let's say we have a really big healing brush, and we start dabbing from place to place. What happens is it displaces a lot more texture, and if you have a really small brush, what happens is you can actually make a patch that's the exact size of each blemish. So even though your brushes small, you can confined to the exact blemish you're almost making little custom cookie cutter shapes for the blemish itself. So even though sometimes the brush is looks a little bigger because making big patches, it changes just based on each individual blemish. So keep your brush by smaller and then, you know, work accordingly.