Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop Controls

So now, I go into Photoshop. Again, I'm keeping things pretty simple. And the thing about Photoshop that I should say is there's a million ways to do what I'm gonna show you, and there might even be better ways to do what I'm about to show you. This section, I'm going to show you like shortcuts I'm using, simple little techniques that some of it I did in Lightroom, it rolls over into Photoshop. The main point is just to showcase like I did for Lightroom, just key things I'm doing so then we can focus on the thought process of how I'm editing each image in Photoshop in the following section. So, let's get into my computer there. So once you get here in Lightroom, if you hit Command + E it's going to pop it into Photoshop here, gives you a little spin and wheel of death there. First things first, Photoshop is pretty destructive at least the way I edit, I'm a destructive person. So, I'm gonna hold Alt and duplicate this. So in case we just really mess up this layer, we always have a backu...

p original layer. The first thing I'm gonna do after I duplicate it is do some stamping. The shortcut for that is the J key and boom. You have a few options here, spot healing and healing brush tool. I usually use the spot healing tool, it's pretty simple and quick. I'll show you on this dark spot here. I'm using the left and right brackets to make it bigger. So if you press the left one, it goes smaller. The right one goes bigger. Pretty sweet. I'm just gonna go around and stamp out some things real quick. And then I'll show you a before and after of how much of a difference it actually makes. One thing I'm noticing is this spot right here when I'm trying to remove it, it kind of adds or at least the paths time. Yeah, it adds a little bit of this path right there. I'm not really keen on that, I'm gonna undo it. And back in this tab, you have the healing brush tool. So what this will do instead of just dragging and dropping, and says, "oh my God, Option + Click to define a source point to be used to repair the image." It's a lot of jargon. What that basically means is if you click, like I could click curl. Look at this, click curl, make it a bit bigger. And I can literally just paint curl in and it will try to compensate and make the colors correctly. That's obviously not gonna work for that reason. So let's, target something more sensible, like the actual grass, and then just paint it in there. Looks pretty natural. I think I'm gonna go try that again and go a little smaller. Keep it subtle, and then I like to just for safety measures and for lack of consistency's sake, I will target other parts of the image and just paint over it. So it's not a carbon copy of a section. So, originally I targeted red about here and then I painted over that section. But the problem is it's gonna be an exact replica of that section just with a bit different coloring to it. So then I went back and targeted a different section and just painted over that zone. Yeah, the reason I'm doing that is because the human eye picks up on certain patterns like that, or just like similar patterns across the board, especially identical ones. So if you grab a little from there and then a little from there, it makes it so it's not exactly identical to that pattern prior. So here's the before image without any of the spot healing done. And boom, that's a little bit cleaned up there. You could go further into it, but for tutorial Lyle's sake we're not gonna do that. One thing that I pointed out in Lightroom is this right here, it's this big white spot that was kind of blown out. And I just wanna like fix that completely. And the way I'm gonna do that is with the lasso tool. So instead of doing a big old spot heal across the whole thing, I'm just drawing a lasso around it. The key for that is this L right here, the lasso tool. And once you've done that, select your layer and then hit fill and content aware and we'll see how it goes. Boom! Hey, that came out nice. Sometimes it doesn't come out nice, so I'm pleasantly surprised that it's just a one and done right there. I think, let me make sure. One thing to make sure is come in and just check these edges here. It looks pretty solid though. There's kind of a sharp little line right there. We could see if the spot healing makes a difference, that's very subtle though. Like, you'd have to be real nitpick to notice that. So fix that there with the spot heal and then over here, just make sure you're not mirroring too much like for instance, this grass is the same as that one. So, I'm just going to stamp this little dude out. Make sure I don't get caught. And cool, yeah. That came out nicely and easy. And it added a little bit of mount there for us, so I'm not complaining. So here's the before without any of that spot healing or the lasso tool. And then here's the after. Looking solid. So from there, I'm going to duplicate that layer just to preserve those changes. The reason I'm doing this again is because if I make some changes, like let's say. Let's say that I did do that lasso tool thing and it came out fine, like by my standards by looking at the photo in a zoomed out fashion like this. But then let's say I zoomed in and I noticed all these artifacts that looked terrible but I had already done so many more changes after that. The way I'm editing is destructive. So I wouldn't be able to just bring that back unless I did some advanced stuff I don't even know how to do. So, I just keep copying layers. There's might be a better way to do this, but again, like this is my method. This is how I've been doing it all this time. So, I'm not gonna try to teach something I don't know how to do like, I'm destructive as hell in my editing. So, I'm going to just keep making copies. Keep it scrappy. From there when I'm gonna hit Edit, come down to Transform, and you have a plethora of options here. I'm gonna just do, one thing you can do is Command + T and you can just drag these edges. I'm holding Alt, you can see how much it warps the photo. You can go buck wild on that. Sometimes that's nice, if you want to just affect the composition a little. You can do some of this and stretch things out so you have a better foreground or something like that. So that's without it, and that's with it. I'm not gonna keep that I think. Well, yeah, I kind of like it I'll keep that. It brings the background out a bit more which is kind of nice. Another one that's really handy is if you have a weird horizon line and you need to fix some things, there's this one called warp. So if you come back into that same menu, Edit, Transform, Warp. You get this and I'll just show you simply what it does. I'm not gonna change too many things on this, I think, but, well, I mean might as well just to prove a point. So when you're in the Warp panel, like I said, it will help with horizon lines. You can literally just fix it like that if you want. But one thing it might help, like one thing I'm kind of bugged by this image is this space over here, it feels very empty and unnecessary almost. So you can literally just pull your photo over. See right there. It is get dragged over and fills in that empty space. Then if I want to do a little less, so something like that. And if I want to bring it up higher to fill more of that empty space and fill that frame, you could drag this up a bit or maybe this one. Yeah, right there. Cool, I mean, hit enter right there and you can see that significantly affected it. Here's the before. And then there's the after with it. It just fills that frame a bit more without making it look fake. I think I prefer that. So, I'll just show you what we've done so far. Here's the original from Lightroom. There's the stamps and then there's the transforming. Really digging this composition. The frame definitely feels a bit more filled up and yeah, I just appreciate how it doesn't have as much non necessary space over there without having to crop in and make everything, like crop out parts of the image that I liked. So, just looking at that to fill the frame really. So I'll be doing that to every image I take into Photoshop, some stamping, some distortions, some transforming, just stuff like that to clean it up and bring in a better composition to it. But I do wanna show you how I'm gonna be changing, like the exposures, the colors, stuff like that. I'm not gonna go in depth on this image, I'm just gonna keep it practical and show you what buttons I'm clicking the shortcuts, et cetera, et cetera. So, we'll jump back in here and open up a curves panel. The first two shortcuts you need to know are the X key and the D key. This is gonna be affecting your masks. So if I hit the X key, you see that changes from black to white. And then if I hit the D key, I'll show you what that will do. I'm just gonna change all this, some funny colors. I don't know why it's only changing to gray but that's fine. I want my masks to be black or white this whole time, and you'll see why in a second. But if they're not black and white hit the D key, and boom, it resets it right there to the black and white. If I come into this curves thing, there it is. You see it's gray right there. I'm gonna hit D and it's black and white and if you notice right here, all this is white right now. So that means whatever I do in this curve panel, this square represents the entire image. So, if I go like that, it's gonna affect the entire image cause anything that's white in that mask, in that square down there, in the curves panel is going to be affected. I'm gonna undo that there. And I'm gonna show you pretty much what I mean by that, just by a visual example. If I come over here and I hit the X key to go into black. Again, black, white, here's white, here's white. So I wanna add black to this mask and in doing so, any part of that mask that is black, it will not affect that part of the image and the curves. So I'll show you what I mean, I'm gonna do an entire. I'm just gonna go up on the curves and over exaggerate it. And I'm gonna come into this brush tool, which is the B key. Boom! And notice it's on black. Actually, I'll show you first. If it's on white and I start painting, nothing's happening I just clicked and dragged all across it. No, no results. So if I hit the X key and come into black, all of a sudden you see that disappear. And, then if you look down here, you'll see that beautiful artwork I just painted over that in all black, is showing up on the mask. And so, if I change this panel, you see it's only gonna affect where the mask is activated, which is the white. I'll show you a quick a real life example of something I might do just to illustrate the point home. So, let's say I wanna target this whole landscape right here and make it a step brighter. So, I often will just do that in the curves. I'm gonna come up and push it a bit brighter and notice it affects the entire image. There's a couple things you could do here. And one thing would be to select the black brush, notice it's black right here. Here's my brush, and then just brush out the sky cause I just want it to affect the landscape, like I said. So that's a really quick scrappy one but there's the before and there's the after. Notice the sky for the most part is not changing. So I'm gonna go back a few steps real quick and show you one other quicker way to do that. I'm gonna create a curves panel and I'm going to do the same thing, adjust it. But let's say instead of removing it from the sky, I wanna just paint in where I wanna do it. So if I've the mask selected right here, again make sure the mask is selected and I go Command + I. You'll notice, all that mask becomes black. So it all it's doing is saying, "oh like, this is what you wanted to select." So all it's doing is like this is all selected and I'm doing an inversion of that. So Command + I means none of it is selected. And then from there, make sure you have the brush tool selected and then make sure this, remember that X key I said earlier. I'm gonna hit X, and it's gonna switch to white. And then you can just paint in that zone where you want to be brighter. Voila! And I did a really bad job cause if you hit the back slash key, you can see where you painted and I just missed everywhere. So, you can paint it this way too, by looking at where it's affecting, pretty sweet. I'll be using this a ton in the future edits coming up. So just note that, but I'm gonna just delete this for now and show you one other thing that I'm doing which is the same idea, but with a gradient filter. When I get into the real editing here, you'll see me use those a ton. And I mean, I'll show you real quick. You can literally do that with any of these filters. If I select the photo filter, same thing. Boom! Makes a big warm cast over it. But let's say, I just want to affect again, this ground right here. So I'm gonna hit Command + I, invert it and I'm going to just make a bigger brush. And you can see it is affecting all of that. So, it's kind of subtle. So, there's the before, there's the after. I guess you could probably see it a bit more on the sky, so I'll paint it there. Oh yeah. Very much changing that color. So, here's before, there's after. So you can literally go in, and local like I'll just show you a great example here. Going a bit too in depth for this practical tutorial, but we're here, why not? You can literally just change the crop out of the curves. Like let's say, I just want to mutilate and really make those whites faded. I'm going to hit Command + I after doing all those changes. I'm gonna select the brush tool. I'm gonna make sure it's on the white right here, and remember I inverted it. So it's affecting nowhere right now until I paint it in with white on that mask and boom. And then, I mean you can just change the snot out of it if you want. You know, so that's a big part of my editing there. And so the last thing I'll do in my editing pretty often is the same idea but using it with gradients instead. So instead of brushing in everything, having a nice gradient filter that will affect it locally but also gradate into not affecting it. So I'll just show you visually what I'm talking about here. It's really similar to the tool I used in Lightroom, where you drag over. It affects a spot and bottom, boom! You have a bit more control over it here in Lightroom and you also have a billion more adjustments you can do. So same thing, I created a curves adjustment right here. I'm gonna hit the G key, which gives this little thing. Make sure this up here is selected on this first selection, which is linear gradient. You have radial as well, I don't really use the radial one in Photoshop, it's a little tricky. I pretty much just stick to linear all the time. And make sure this is selected just white to black cause that's what the mask colors are gonna be. So, right now you see this whole mask right here, is white. So if I hit the G key, I have all that selected correctly. Let's say I wanna affect the sky again. I'm gonna click and drag. Boom! So now you see that this whole section is white. So I'll just show you exactly what that means. Boom! It's only affecting that section and notice it just slowly fades out and right here it's not affecting it at all. And again, you can hit that back slash key to see where it's affecting. Unlike Lightroom, where it's like green or red in the area it's affecting, in Photoshop, it's gonna be red where it's not affecting. So just so that, so just so there's no confusion there but yeah, you kind of can see what that's doing. And then from there, I mean you can go buck wild on this. You can really just mutilate and change whatever you want. You can destroy it, you can make it nice, like pretty sweet. And then same thing with any of these other adjustments. Like let's say I want to do some color balance adjustments to just that area. So I'm gonna hit that. I'm gonna hit the G key and drag it over. And actually one thing you could do real quick too is you could hold Alt, click this mask and just drag over and boom, it does the same area. We'll create our own now. So select that layer, hit the G key, and run it across, brilliant. Come into the color balance and a lot of this is probably a highlight and let's say I wanna make it more magenta for some reason. Boom! And let's say I target the shadows. It's gonna target that section a lot more and not so much the sky. So yeah, that's pretty sick. And the last thing here too is, let's say I'm gonna just over dramatize this for tutorial purposes, make this look real bad. So let's say, you want this to also target this little section right here for some reason. You can go back to that same idea with the brush tool, hit the B key, and just paint in that as long as that mask is selected. So once you paint it in, you see it changes that mask area right there. So, all this black right here it's not affecting there and all this white is where it's affecting. And with that, we'll delete that cause it looks bad. So that's pretty much what I'm mainly doing in all my Photoshop editing. I'm looking at the image, asking the question "what I wanna do?" And I'm either local targeting or global targeting to achieve that with the brush tool, with a gradient tool, et cetera, et cetera. It's really not complicated. And you know, there might be a million other ways to do it but I really like using the curves tool just because you have a lot of editability within the shadows, within the highlights. And then if you brush in stuff, you can just target it really well and affect specific sections. Like if you want fade the sky, if you want to target that green area and bring it up brighter, you can totally do that and then make changes to it later. So without further ado, let's actually get into these edits and you will see a lot of that in action.