Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Retouching

So now let's, act as though I'm really going to retouch this, I would probably play the one without the vignette. This would just be like basic retouching one o one oh, no, I made the black and white one sorry, I just play the color proof without the vignette, so I'm back to square one, but there's no vignette. So everything looks the same that the client saw, but it doesn't have a venue. I'll go in and there's, you know, here's here's a great example of a billion different ways to do this, but I'll just use my healing brush and I'll go in and and I'll touch up some of this some of these stronger blemishes, right? And I don't want I don't like, you know, when people look like they're made out of plastic or rubber, you know what? I'm zoomed in a three hundred percent here anyway, so really, really looking at her close up, but I'll go in and I'll just retouch some of these bigger blemishes there's one here on her chin, and I'm just using the heel toe and there's spot hell, now that you c...

an just go in, but I'm so used to doing this. That this is how I do it is I've done it for years and years and years but there's spot healing and patch the patch tool that might speed up the process a little bit for somebody but this is just the way that I do another thing is who who has one of these okay a third of you do you use them? Yeah that's what they use it use it ok there's a learning curve right there's a learning curve we at our studio if if we hire you if you come in as an intern this is what you get I take your miles away this is what you get for two weeks and everyone complains and everybody hates life for two weeks and they can't stand the sight of me but usually after about I don't know seven to ten days they don't want their mouths back this is it I surfed with this I searched the internet I don't even I don't even know if I have a mouse with me this is what I use uh ergonomically it's so much easier on your hand um you have so much more touch feel control this button on your stylist you can program these buttons sew this button on my starless is the option key so any time I'm deciding in time defining a source for healing or cloning I used this button on my stylist rather than hitting uh one of the one of the keys on the keyboard think it's option or all I don't even remember yeah option or all now that might not seem like a big deal but I'm kind of a numbers statistics guy so a couple years ago actually about seven years ago I did a little test to see like how much time am I saving you know, find by hitting all defining the source with this instead of defining it with all the options and I was only saving like a second every time I did it I was like, well that's not a very big deal wait a second how many times you try to find a source and it was hundreds of seconds you know per session and then I was like, how many sessions my doing with three hundred fifteen session? It was one thousand eight hundred and seventy two dollars, worth annually just because of that that's one way that I used my welcome tell it now people like oh, it crossed through three hundred dollars to get a walking tablet I'm like well, I save one thousand eight hundred and seventy two dollars every time I'm just you know, just just from this, you know, so that's why I was like, okay, everybody that comes in here is going to use alakay tablet and this is how we're going to do it so I contend that if you're doing two or three hundred sessions in a year, you can save hundreds if not in the thousands of dollars just from time alone by incorporating something like that something so simple and something that seems so meaningless into your workflow and here everyday thing yeah, and it helps, right? You know ergonomically it's just so much better for your wrist in your hand the carpal tunnel thing that you know people get I've never had a problem with her have spent lots of time behind my machine just use one of these ok, so then what I would do is let's do some high enhancement assuming that most of the retouching is done what's crazy about this look look we even what it did to her skin here okay? I'd like to show this because you know she's been out in the sun and I didn't touch that you guys that was that's all just that that's just all the proof action you know it's it's unbelievable what could be done? What could be automated without you doing anything? All right? And that was done if she had seventy images that was done every image so all of that all those striations or whatever she's got, you know they're gone it's just it's wonderful, okay, so this is what I would do too her eyes just for some basic I enhanced there's a couple different ways to do this I would probably do it non destructively and create a new layer I goto overlay I use maybe ten percent and I'm going to use a white brush a ten percent my brushes are always fuzzy that means they're really soft it means if you go into the hardness of the brush it's always a zero almost always is here I should say almost always is dangerous okay I'm going to go in and maybe ten per cent and I can lighten her eyes right over here this is the opposite side of the catch light crow's foot and I'm gonna do it subtly this is another thing that I you know it drives me nuts when I see people that make laser beams coming out of you know their subjects eyes they got these really bright catch lights I just kind of want to subtly enhance what's already there okay I don't want someone looking like one of the x men and they're gonna shoot me down or something and then I'm going to use blacks I'm just hitting the ex key you know tio paint anything dark or shadows so this is really how I paint like they mentioned a painting light with ben wilma earlier I'm sure he's got some awesome techniques this is the way I do it to create a new layer it's a blank player I used overlay mode and I use black and white on that boat and it's non destructive not doing anything to the pixels of the image it's on its own separate layer so I can turn this on and off and you can already see a difference right now I'm gonna go into black and I can darken any shadows this is where I can add some scare I can add some eyeliner right now I'm going around the virus. This is also a lot easier to do with the way welcome tablet has opposed to using a mouse that's more like a you know, potato that you're kind of trying to draw with it doesn't work very well on, so I'm like twenty percent ten percent maybe I'm gonna go and I'm gonna dark and you know around her eyes like this if if you do something that doesn't work, you can use your best friend command z or control z to back up a step. My left hand is almost always like right there, commander control z so right away and this is on its own separate layer I can just show you that I'm just enhanced her like what she's already done with her makeup and what she wants to really stand out, I've done that just really quickly I consume in just a little bit more and you can see because I turned that on and off and because it's on its own layer if I don't like what I did, I couldn't put a layer mask on there or just a race it whatever one I want but just put a layer mask on there and get rid of it just by hiding it I'm not erasing it with the lam asking, just hiding it I didn't like that part down there maybe it's a little too strong or whatever, so that's I enhancement, you know, for me there's not a lot, we don't do a lot, you know, our goal is to get it right in the camera room or on location in the camera we want to get it is good as possible, like, seriously, it came out of the camera as a raw file looking like that that lighting is great, that exposure's right on the background just a little bit diffused, you know? She's got the right down the field for our look and that's what we want. I don't want to have to do a lot to my stuff in post and we haven't set up so that we don't, but the stuff that we do, I'm either going to try to automate it harmonies simple little system like that I enhancement think you should be able to enhance those eyes and I don't know twenty seconds maybe and these are just for the ones that the clients ordered I'm not going through in doing this before the client sees this this is just making a little bit better toe what they've ordered so afterwards I looked really great but I don't want them to look at the image and say boy my eyes are crazy but I just wanted to look at the image as a whole and think I look beautiful oh my skin so soft oh my eyes are so retouched her oh this part I just skip ahead to this because we're kind of there oh it's next anyway the lashes we have lashes that we had you know because we thought this is a redundant process what am I doing over and over again for these signature images you know eleven by fourteen and larger whatever if someone orders a bigger image we add lashes and we were I'm serious I've never done that to a dog but hey, if the client wants that you know whatever okay so I'm dragging my lashes in here okay I have ah lashes layer now when I drag it in and drop it and I can use free transform which is just commander control t to bring that lashing scroll it down and now instead of drawing on my hand I have a lashes template is only on our wall portrait way did not do this on our smaller friends everyone and not every image would get it anyway you know when it makes sense you know you do it when it's when it's going to make it better like usually with women are our senior girls um maybe little boys sometimes uh depends but I would not want them for me just for the record uh you think and then they're only we only have him set up for one eye so it's really easy to just hit commander control j which copies that layer and moves it over you can move it over and then transform, flip it horizontally and then do a free transform again put her on the other eye okay, so now I have these lashes we've had these lashes for years um and again it was because it came out of that philosophy. This is something that we're doing over and over and over again and, you know, I found that I could draw lashes on the left I really good because it just how my hand worked through that been on the right eye, it just didn't work every time the left eye would look great as I'm looking at the client's right and the left eye would look great in the right eyes all jang ki and that laugh is there kind of like crooked and we like what we want consistency and we want automation it's a redundant process and so we worked this is our fifty fourth or fifty seventh I don't remember we went through fifty four or fifty seven different iterations of lashes to come up with this exact lashes template that works almost every time and it's really quick and really easy and if you want to put him you know enhanced down below you just flip it over you know, copy it, flip it vertically but now I can merge those two layers so I had my eyelashes on their own separate layer and if I want I can adjust the opacity if they're too strong and kind of drop that down but you can see now that you know, just over the course of, you know, a couple really that all that could have been done in in a minute the enhancement and lashes and I'm going from that to that all right and it's not too strong, you know? And if it is it's on its own separately and that I could just bring it back a little bit with a layer mask or whatever or opacity okay, so you know that's no that's that's about what we would do then I would save this file has it is as a psb, you know, in in the client's folder and then if they order in an eight by ten I just crop it to an eight by ten and three hundred and then say and then vignette it this is where I would be in yet lots of different ways to vignette I mean, an easy way to vignette is just with your you're radiant a linear grady in that goes from four around a transparent that's but this if you open up your radiance it's this second selection right here it defaults to this but if you do, if you try that, you're gonna get this it's no good that doesn't work, so if you want to do it right, go to your grady into a laptop foreground too transparent, just it like maybe thirty percent capacity. My foreground is gonna be black, so I'm gonna be starting at a thirty percent black and fading off to nothing fading off the transparent okay, so I can go in in my sides like that, pulling from the corners and just bring my eye right, okay, again. And I was sort of painting right a little bit. You know, if you want to customize it a little bit more through a little through another layer on their goto overlay, you know, and then again with your brush tool may be drawing some are painting some black with a big soft brush painting some I say black but it's really just shadow kind of make that little dark or make that a little darker up there. And you make this a little darker here. Okay? And that's that's getting to the point where it's a finished image and seriously using that proof action and then doing some basic retouching and doing everything else. Three minutes. Okay. That's, a finished image. All right. And I don't know, maybe, maybe if it's a little bit more challenging, it takes me for five minutes, you know, but rarely should it take longer than that. Unless it's a special case. Now, this is one person to all right? If I had a group of six it's gonna take a little bit longer. But these are images that are, you know, that I'm getting paid for these are the images that the clients ordering price yourself appropriately, you know, um, find out how long it's taking you need to do this and that's how much you should charge. Okay, everyone's. Always like, well, I don't know how much to charge. Well, how much are you worth? And how long is it taking you to do it? And you know, where do you need to be? In order to stay profitable, that's I want your charge, okay, here's, another example, gallery wrap set up people have trouble with gallery rap sometimes because, you know you have to add the extra two and a half for addict well, mr three inches for two now and the extra two inches for one and a half so we have this action it's probably going to be probably going to be available through white house um here pretty soon this is kind of the beta stages for this, but I'm getting it all set up just to show you guys that I have it set up so that I have four different options over here and for whatever reason and to be honest with you I made this a little while ago I can't remember but I had to make like a twenty by twenty was the cut off point. I had to make separate actions for less than in twenty twenty and separate actions for more than a twenty twenty because of all the stuff that's happening here and I made one of one for each an inch and a half gallon around two and a half inch gallery so here's my image and let's just say I'm gonna go ahead and pick one let's say we want a twenty by thirty or thirty by twenty thirty wide twenty hi um two and a half inch gallery so I opened my image and I play this I stopped comes up right away it says it's all dramatic first crop her image to your desired size and resolution, then press playing your action palette if the image is already crop, just press play now. Well, I haven't cropped it yet, so I'm going to do what it says and go on crop it my wit thirty my height, twenty resolution three hundred that's fine. And then I'm gonna crop it how I want it, carrie, maybe get rid of that corner a little bit and then I had returned, it crops it and then I had play my actions palace. Now it's going to go through and run the rest of the action. So here again is a wayto automated process that was giving me headaches before, like I was having to do this manually and try to figure out how stretched this for what am I going to do? It's not really working now. I got away that I've actually created an action and it gives me several options on the back end too. Then I can pick and choose what I want to use and then maybe customize it from there if I need to. But the point is, all of this work is being done by the computer I'm not doing all right. And it takes a little bit longer on a laptop because there's an awful lot going on here and you can see the action running over here like there's a ton of steps in a ton of things and inside that step but it's going to give me four options okay? It's stretching the campus for me basically and I'm not gonna get into how I did that but it's basically a bunch of flipping like I tiled it all the way around and flipped it so that it emerges and then I have guides coming in that'll show you exactly where to cut it the linus for the action but this is this is a great example of how to incorporate and action into your workflow for doing something that is normally pain in the butt some people just flat out can't even do it all right this is taking awhile o because I put the resolution at three hundred that's why I'm sorry I shouldn't have done that but you can see that I have all kinds of options now in my in my in my actions pal in fact let me do this let me do it so that's gonna go really quickly crop it by twenty my thirty no resolution just for illustration sake this you go faster, play the action again I already cropped it so does hit play again don't you go much faster that's building faster so then I'm gonna have these four options that I can just hide or reveal with my little eye balls in my layers palate and they're even in your demon says you have for rap options it's either flip, flip, blurred, blurred or just standard and you can adjust option three or four by selecting the layer there's a bunch of instructions on this stuff shows you what to do tells you how to do it but now it's open now here's an optional vigna that's on the outside. Okay, so I can turn that on or off if I don't like it, you can see that this is this is where it's flipped up here in the corner but it's going, you have to understand that's being folded over, so you're not gonna see that that's being folded over on the side. All I care about is that if you look at it from the side it looks okay. You know, everything's flipped and coming around the side so basically my gallery ramp is taken care of and I can choose what I wanted to look like. I can have that option or I could blurt out a little bit or I can have that option or I can have that option it's either sharp it's either blurred it's either flipped or it's either not flipped okay. And if I need to go in and customize a little bit now, I can. But I have a base to start with and something that's gonna go a lot faster because I ran that action to begin with. So for gallery wraps, that's. Pretty slick.