Lessons

Lesson Info

2:30 pm - Advanced Tonal Adjustments

One thing I failed to mention was way talked about curves all the concept of concepts I talked about relating to curves applies anytime you see a curve in digital imaging mean if it's in your scanning software first little picture it looks like a curve, then the same constant supply make it steeper you get contrast, make it flatter you get less up is brighter down darker, you'll find it also in camera there's a curve, but just you'll find curves all over the place and it's not unique to federal shop it's in all sorts of things you can find it on your iphone if you download enough camera aps, you'll eventually find curves we've talked about adjustment layer somewhat I'm going to talk more about adjustment layers during this session, but I also want to cover some of the other tonal adjustments because if I don't then somebody's going to ask about him and it's not that I need to use the rest of them all the time because curves could do so much, but there are some others you should really ...

know about. So let's take a look. I'm ignoring the settings that aaron camera offer now usually I don't ignore what's in camera, but we've already covered that in one of the previous classes in the photo shop mastery siri's and I'm trying not to overlap too much with those other courses so just know that I would usually try to get the absolute most out of my image in camera first before I do any of the stuff we do in photo shop because especially if you're shooting in raw file format, you can get more out of your image using camera, then you can using the tools built in to the main part of federation, so get the most out of it you can with wrong then whatever you can't do in camera, too with these other tools, all right, sometimes curves gets to be a little bit frustrating when you're trying to isolate certain areas and get it to blend them with its surroundings, and you seem to have to paint a lot on the mask toe limit it, so I want to share with you a different adjustment that I sometimes use if the change I need to make is isolated into the dark portion of my image or the bright portion of my image. And that adjustment is found under the image menu under adjustments in it's called shadow highlight it's not available as an adjustment layer, which is the only reason I'm going to this menu to apply it once we've applied it toe one image, I'll show you a different what method for applying it that would make it so it's undoable what some people would call non destructive so here's shadow highlight with this adjustment, when you open it, you simply have to sliders one for the shadows, one for the highlights in by default. It turns up the shadows could assumes you want more shattered detail if I turn the previous checkbox off, you can see before and after you see how nicely bringing out some shatter detail the higher you bring this, the brighter it makes your shadows I'm around there looks pretty good turn you off, but there is a choice called show more options and when you turn that on, let me first see if I can hide most of the dialogue box so that when it gets turned on, you don't get distracted by everything that shows up. I'm gonna turn on show more options. And now look, it just took my shadow slider and expanded it into three settings. Those settings air called amount tunnel with in radius. It really expanded a bunch of other settings that I'm hiding from you right now, trying to make it feel simple. Okay, so just know that when I had that check box turned off, it just had amount. Slider for shadows, amount, slider for highlights. We were only using the one for shadows so that's all we're looking at right now, so we have a mount total with in radius. Let's, figure out what the heck those things mean to figure out what they mean. We might want to start with a simpler image. Let's. See if I can find a simpler one. I'm just going to take miss image. Pull it out. So two separate image that I can resize. Scroll out a little bit and let's first applying to that you saw the big one the only c this s o um first we have amount amount is how much do you want to brighten the shadows? So if you look at this image when I turned preview ofthe here's what it used to look like turn it on. Watch what happened to the shadows or dark portion of the image? See how brightened up and the higher I bring him out, the brighter that's going become. But look at the right side of this simple image and notice it's not changing so it isolates the dark portion of the image from the rest of the image. Then we have tunnel with what tunnel with does is it defines what is considered to be a shadow from black upto. What from black should we go, is bright, is here and then not affect the rest of the image? Or should we go all the way up to here? Or all the way to this bright that's what the tunnel with ismaei bring it way down, it's going to limit the change that you're making so it's on ly happening to the absolute darkest shades within your picture and as you bring total with up your affecting a wider range of brightness levels within your image so there's total with makes some sense if I bring it up is high as I can get it now I'm affecting awful lot of that image just not the absolute brightest so tunnel with is going to limit the range of brightness levels that this can effect so when I moved the amount around now he can only affect the darkest then we have radius in radius in general means that within the area that we're working on within the area were bright ning do we want to enhance the textures and detail that's in there boosted a bit if radius has turned all the way down, then this bright ning is pretty straightforward. If you look at this it's nothing fancy, it just brightens. But when I bring radius up instead of just frightening things and leaving them near what they used to be watched what radius does on the edges were one brightness level touches another do you see a little kind of glow appear on the edge that is somewhat similar to the control called clarity that's in camera off you've ever happened to use it then it's going to emphasise emphasize the detail that's in the area that you're changing and so radius can try toe exaggerate that detail so let's apply it toward normal picture now shadow highlight ignore all those settings were on lee right now paying attention of these will get to the rest in a minute so we have a mount let's decide how much brighter we want him I'm just paying attention to him and ignoring the rest of the picture for now and saying how bright would I like him to be? Maybe about that right then I'm going to adjust the tonal whip to see if I can limited enough where on ly affects him and doesn't affect things brighter than him, so I'll just move this back and forth and see at what point do I get a ce much of him as I need but not a lot of the background maybe in this image I have to go up about that high then in those areas that bright and do I want to artificially enhance the textures, the detail in general or not if I bring this down it's more like a normal looking image as I bring this up, we're going to emphasize the detail it's in they're bringing out some more contrast that's in it can be nice let's turn preview ofthe here's before here's after you see how he's really come out of the shade there in those with control so it was amount which is how big of a change tonal with which is what range of brightness levels from black upto what and then radius which is should we I enhanced the detail that's in that area we've changed using something similar to clarity now I'm going to slide this up so you can see the rest of what's in the style of box so next there's a section in here for highlights and it's just the exact same three sliders how big of a change to want to make the highlights it would darkened the highlights to make it so it's easier to see the detail it's there how wide of ah brightness range to want to work in and do you want to enhance the detail it's in there we can try it on this image I could darken these bright parts by bringing a mount up dark in those and then tunnel wait see if I need a limited mohr or wide net about like that and then do I want to enhance the detail it's and thereby making it exaggerated in this case I might not want teo because it's going to just I think distract from the kid that's there and so I might leave it down but then below that we have some other settings and let's see what they do mid tone contrast means what should we do with the rest of the picture? We boost the contrast, or should we mellow it out so I can bring this up or down to see? What should we do with the rest of the images? Not the really bright, not the really dark, but everything else color correction, I think, is somewhat mislabeled. It should be called saturation because it doesn't color correct anything. All it does is if you bring it up your imagesmore colorful, if you bring it down, your image is less colorful, so it's much more like saturation than color correction. But what happens is sometimes, if you end up bringing out detail in the shadows, usually there's, not very much color showing up in the shadows, and as you brighten it up, it might not quite look right. You might need to emphasize the colors that heir, thereby boosting color correction. Other times when you bring out detail in the shadows, the color that is there isn't very attractive. And so you might lower this to say, don't let so much of that color show up, I might feel better demonstrate that on a different picture, and then we could talk about black clip in white clip in a moment, let me go to a simpler image for that, but here's before and after so let's look at a simpler image again I'm going to adjust this picture with levels I'm going to do is bring in these bottom sliders a bit to say we don't have any black or any white in this image instead we have this is our darkest this is our lightest because some people find that shadow highlight just amazingly improves images even if they didn't need the shadows are the highlights to be changed? I want to show you why if I got a shadow highlight without moving any slider stuttering that in fact I'll take the one slider called shadows and turn it down so it's not applying all right here's what the much looked like to begin with watch what happens if I bring up the shadow slider the tiniest amount the smallest amount it's capable of doing then that a dramatically different image compared to this that's almost weird the reason for that is if I turn on show more options on lee when you have the amount at anything other than zero does this setting at the bottom kick in it's called black clip and white clip what this means is what percentage of the pixels that make up your picture you shouldn't force the black what percentage of the pixels should it forced the white it's doing the equivalent to open an image in levels and if it has a history graham that doesn't go all the way across it pulls in those end sliders remember the slaughters that forced things toe white and black. It pulls him until it touches the history. It does that automatically so that alone, for some images, if they were dull looking, ends up making them look a lot better. And then you can sit here and bright in the shadows. But if you get these to go down to zero, then that's not applying yet that only kicks in once either the amount for the shadows of their mount for the highlights is it something other than sarah? Then it kicks in if he didn't want it to do that, all you have to do is take black clip in white clip to zero, and now it's not gonna automatically get the brightest in darkest parts toe come in there, and now you'll find this is, you know, not as exciting to use, but this means you could use it on an image that was foggy or smokey, because if you come in here and apply this toe overly fog here, smokey image, when that black and white clip setting comes in it's like it breaks through all the fog or the smoke and doesn't look right, so on occasion you want to spring those down to zero, so say, don't automatically enhance my contrast for me. But just so you know, that's that's applying, and you're welcome to send it to zero if you don't like that, but otherwise any setting above zero is going to give you your full brightness, right? It's, just like on the levels going to this go into this, you could go up to the image menu there's a choice in here called auto tone or auto contrast auto contrast to do that for you. So if you like that feature of shadow highlight and you don't need to brighten your shadows, you don't need to darken your highlights. Just go over here and she's, what a contrast, then you'll have just that. All right, let's, look at a few other examples of shadow highlight with this one. If I end up bringing out shattered detail for remember correctly, I don't like the color that appears in the shadows. Let's, see what happens? Bring this up tunnel with see if I can limited enough radius. If I need to enhance the contrast in there. If you look at this turn for you off and on when it brings up the shadows I see a little bit of kind of yellow is she read a she thing and in a few. And see it on this is much, but if I don't like the color showing up in the shadows, I take color correction, which defaults up plus twenty and I bring it down to say, don't let me see the color in the shadows so much, whereas if I brought it up you see more of it you see the reddish now, so sometimes you have to bring that down let's look at how our applying it instead of going to the image menu, choosing adjustments and choosing shadow highlight here's how you khun applied in a way that's easily undoable where if you say, then close your image and open it six months later, you can still see the settings you've applied and you can change them. The first thing you need to do is go to the filter menu and you will find a choice they're called convert for smart filters when you do that, if you look at your layer in the layers panel, you will see an extra icon that appears on top of it. This little icon is the only indication that you have what's known as a smart object did that by going to the filter menu and choosing convert for smart filters. Now if I go to the image menu, choose adjustments, you'll find most things air grate out because when you're working on a smart object, you can't use features that would need to directly affect that layer where it would permanently change it but they especially implemented this shadow highlight feature for smart objects because they could not implement it as a adjustment layer so the people were yelling at him saying why don't you make it an adjustment layer and that people were yelling at him didn't understand the limitations of adjustment layers at the hole and how much work it would take to do that so they decided well we got this other feature called smart objects we could just apply them there so now I could come in here just my shadows here were in iceland by the way not that you could really tell from this but s so anyway I've applied shadow highlight to a smart object and now if you look in the layers panel you'll see it looks different here's the layer itself below that it says shadow highlight I could turn off the eyeball here and you'd see what it looks like without the shadow highlight adjustment see what it's done and if I go to the right there's this little icon here if I double click on that I could change the opacity of it remember if adjustments too much you could lower the opacity and I can change the blending mode of it as well so if I needed to only affect the colors are only affect the brightness that kind of stuff you could do that and then there's also this mask that I can click on and now if I paint with black I could remove the adjustment from any area within the picture and so I can easily do that but I first had to convert the image into a smart object before I could do it like that and so it's a different way of applying things which I think could be rather nice so shadow highlight I use here's another picture for iceland just attempted more missile your head I didn't know you wanted to go to iceland before I came here and you're not helping me oh so convert for a smart filter again and I will shadow highlight again but sometimes I just find that curves it's a little too difficult to isolate the really dark parts of my image from the rest of the picture and I end up painting too much on the mask and if that's the case if I really wanted to concentrate on the really bright are really dark areas I will often use shadow highlight is an alternative because it makes it so I don't have to paint on the mass quite as much if I just highlights darkens the highlights so in this case is going dark in the waterfall and I might decide that I like what it's doing to the sky see the sky but I might not like it on the waterfall because it might um, make it two dull, so when I'm done, I can click ok, we first do a little color correction here, click okay? And then I have this mask you'd just have to click on the mast to make it active. I can grab my paintbrush tool and now wherever I paint with black, I should remove the adjustment so I could just paint right on the water fall so hey, don't do it here, don't do it they're gonna want that here in all of that. So then that mask affects any of these what's called smart filters that are applied and so could be rather nice a question could you just clarify what a smart object on a smart filter? Ok, a smart object in general means let's protect the contents of this layer, although it could be more than one layer if you want let's protect it almost like it's in a little protective bubble, then the only thing we can do to it is add settings to it, not things that would permanently apply. But settings things like khun shadow highlight just the settings of where the sliders are applied things that you could always turn off, throw away later on so I could click on this and drag it to the trash and it would say, okay, I don't have that applied in it so now anything I do to this layer is only an accessory to the layer that could be thrown away later or it's settings could be changed and if it happens to be a filter that supplied they generically call it a smart filter I don't think it's great terminology when it comes to filters all it is is a smart object with a filter applied they happen to call that a smart filter and when I go to the filter menu and choose convert for smart filters it's exactly the same as choosing this command that is the choice called convert to smart object it's the exact same command he just has a different wording they just put it there to try to suggest the people do that before they apply filters by putting it also into the filter menu under a slightly different name uh you may have another question in the studio audience so now that you've added the smart filters on this can you still now add adjustment layers and do they go up on top of that? They hacked yeah a song as their adjustment layers I could go over here do you curves to whatever I want and it would just be above it's a little different as faras thinking ghost but yes, you can all right, so that shadow highlight now let's look at a different adjustment that I don't really use all that often but somebody else is going to ask about it if I don't bring it up. I mainly use this to apply extreme adjustments. If I wanted extreme amount of contrast in a picture, I might find it to be useful. And that is, if I choose image adjustments. There's, a choice called exposure. And if I go to my adjustment layer pop up menu in here it's also available as an adjustment layer. So with exposure, I have three settings. Exposure offset and gamma correction. That sound official. Just so you know, the middle slider in levels is called the gamma slider. So any time you see a slider in any program called gamma it's, like the middle slider and levels to merits a general brightness control, so just say no. It sounds all special in l a. So in here we have exposure and we have offset, and we have gamma correction. But I just think gamma crash in sounds so like techy, you know, like almost scifi gamma correction. You love it? S o. Anyway, in here, what I might do is darken this up and then use offset to try to get contrast, we'll actually get contrast. First, you could think of the offset as how much contrast you want. And as you lower it, you get more contrast. It's kind of weird, but you get more contrast, is you lower it, and as a result of doing that, though, your image might end up being too dark, so then you adjust exposure to control the brightness but know that these are very sensitive it's very easy to get to black, very easy to get to white without having to go to extremes to do that. So offset you gonna get your contrast lowered is the more contrast to get, then exposure is an overall brightness, and then gamma correction is kind of a medium brightness more of a mellow brightness. But let's, look at the difference in this image if I turn off the eyeball before look pretty mellow after it looks pretty extreme. If I wanted an extreme difference in an image and I wanted to look almost less like a photo more like just in effect, I will consider using the choice called exposure offset means contrast, exposures, brightness and the gamma correction is kind of a little the hint of a brightness correction, but it's rare that I end up having to use that let's look at what else we can come up with. Sometimes I don't want my image to look like a photo, I want people to ask, is it a photo? And so I want a little bit more of an illustrative quality or just a different look in my image and I can get that using an adjustment that is called hdr toning hdr toning and if I look under my adjustment layer poppet menu you'll find that hdr tony is not available but if I convert this to a smart filter first and then go to image adjustments hdr toning is available so it just wasn't available it wasn't technically possible to applied as an adjustment layer that needs to know what the surrounding image looks like in order to figure out howto work so they didn't work around where if you convert to a smart object you khun apply it in a undoable fashion I was going to flatten it so I actually I don't know why it acts like it's available in there is it actually flattened anyway? Let's take a look these are the same slaughters that adobe came up with for originally processing hdr images hdr images are where you have more than one exposure that varies and brightness that you could merge together into a single image and I found that the hdr feature within photo shop was not very good and so we'd use other software instead the most popular one is one called photo maddox you ever heard of that? Another one was from nick software called hdr affects pro and you use that because this wasn't very good in photo shop cs six though they added the ability to process hdr files he's in camera raw and that's how I do most of mine today and it's great, but this is still available. It's not available just for hdr files, you can apply to normal images as well. So let's see what we can get out of this. We do have a shadow in highlights slider so if I want to pull out shattered detail, I can try to brighten it here with a shadow slider I can try to bring up and brightened my highlights will bring down and darkened my highlights. It's nice having separate control over shadows and highlights to control them. We can control both vibrance and saturation, which means how colorful the images vibrance is going to make the image more colorful and mainly try toe affect areas that are not all that colorful to begin with, where saturation effects all colors equally. Once I'm done with one section, I can kind of collapse it down there, and now we have a few others here we can enhance the detail that's somewhat similar to clarity in camera, and this is where if you want to pee, have people ask, is it a photo where if you want it to look like old hdr that a lot of people hate crank up the details slaughter once you get it up high enough it'll stop looking like a photo and start looking like just something else that's an effect I usually try to steer away from these these days but some people still are overly into that uh then we have exposure which got to be careful with but it can control how bright the brightest part of your images and we have gamma which is just an overall brightness control then is part of the end result we have something called radius and strength and this will control the little halos that you see around the edges of things if you make them larger or smaller smaller they are the more obvious they usually are and the larger they are the more they blend them with their surroundings so I would say the higher the radius the more like a normal photograph it will look lower the radius the more like a what is that it will look so you have to dial in what you think might be necessary and then this controls how bright or dark those halos are you can see the halos right now around the building and such uh and so you want to get him low enough where they're not overly obvious then we do have toning curve in history graham which means if you wanted to you could try to pull out detail in things you see one big hump here which is a medium brightness level and then one really bright thing that really bright things got to be sky right the medium thing and here it's got to be all this dark stuff and so I could say, give me some more contrast in that by making this a little steeper, I could say take that bright stuff and maybe darkened up a little bit my sky it all depends how much you know about curves if you just learned curves today, you're not going to be using that part yet. Ok, but let's, take a look at what this is done. I'll turn preview ofthe here's before here's after well, it's way overdone over there just so you know what? My screen is much darker than that so that's looking a little overdone there. I'm not sure what the broadcast people are seeing if it's what's on my screen or they're hard for me to tell, but if I were to do it for that screen, I would have backed off of my settings a bit and the main thing is anytime you bring out a tremendous amount of shattered detail, you're going to need to do noise reduction because noise hides out the dark part your image as you brighten it up make it easier to see you're also making that noise easier to see, so you might want to consider some noise reduction but looks pretty nice on my screen about yours, but we can't like how we keep going back to the trailer image is gonna leave it there, so I think it's fun? Uh, now let's, look at how we can mess with some of the adjustments and just how we can do things you might not have thought of using adjustment layers. I'm going to apply an adjustment to this that's called black and white, which is obviously designed for making your image black and white and let's see if there's any way we can somehow transform this adjustment this designed for making things black and white into something that doesn't make it black. Instead, it just becomes a simple tunnel adjustment, meaning of brightness a while all I'm going to do is change the blending mod menu. I'm going to choose a choice that will limit what this khun due to my image, so it can only affect the brightness of the picture and that choices the bottom most one it's called luminosity luminosity means allow this layer toe on ly affect the brightness do not let it affect the color at all, so when I said it to luminosity, since it can affect the color, the color comes back. And now, with that little hand tool active, I can move my mouse on top of my image and the yellows don't look bright enough, so click on him and drag left to right, and I can now affect all yellows. The reds aren't dark enough, so I click on the reds and a drag left to right and I can darken, so I've just taken what is designed to be a adjustment that converts things too black and white, and I just made it a tonal adjustment. I'm not suggesting you necessarily need to do this with everything, but the main thing is you can transform any adjustment available in photoshopped into something that only affects the brightness of your picture by using the choice cold luminosity, and this is just more of an extreme example another example would be if I do invert, invert usually makes your image in negative of itself. Um okay, but I don't want it to be all blue. I like the original colors well, let's set it a luminosity, and now it will only be able teo invert the brightness of the picture the colors will remain what they were before that's different, so we still have red flowers where the red flowers still of green stems where the stems were, but the brightness is the opposite of what we started with so it's different this is useful when we learned about color correction tomorrow because color correction, we're trying to just correct the color, but oftentimes in the process of doing sell the brightness of the image shifts even though we didn't mean to setting to loom setting tau luminosity could make it on lee could affect the brightness, but there is the opposite of that which is color, which means only affect the color. Use that for color correction and it won't be able to change your brightness, so have two opposite modes luminosity and color now, let's say, wanted to make an adjustment? I went in here and let's say I applied curves in in curves, I added contrast to the sky, I clicked on a bright part toe lock in how bright it is, so it doesn't darken on me. I clicked on a dark part and dragged down that sky looks much better, but I don't want it to affect the bottom portion of the photo so let's see if there's any way I can do that here's something I know if you've considered or not, or if you've used this feature, but if you have an adjustment layer active, you go to the bottom of your layers panel you click on the letters f x the top most choice is something called blending options and look at what it brings up I just went to the letters fx to get to it. It's called blending options. These sliders are called the blend if sliders and you notice is called this layer, an underlying layer underlying layer would talk about whatever's underneath this one, and this layer talks about whatever this layer is making the image look like I want to make the dark parts of this and result disappear to reveal what's underneath it. Think about that if the dark parts of what this looks like just disappear and reveal what's underneath. What's underneath is the original picture, so I'm gonna pull over this part right here and watch what happens to the image. I don't want it to get into the sky there. Do you see the sky changing? I'll back off until the sky is still affected and to get a smooth transition, because right now the transition is completely sharp. It's like he's in an exact double leg, cut it out, you need to actually split the slider in half. You need to hold on the key that gives you special features, the option, keep ultimo windows and just pull that apart, and that could give you a more gradual transition that doesn't give you as much of jay g's and things okay there, and I'm gonna click okay, but what this is doing is it's hiding anything on this layer that is this brightness range right in here and then letting it fade out as it goes over to this brightness range look ok, I'll choose undo to show the difference before seal the bottom was changing after they see how the bottom isn't let's do it again I'm going to do another curves adjustment layer this time I'm going to bring out detail in this bottom area let's see, I'm just gonna click on a bright area I can see a bright area on your screen I'm sure it's much brighter yeah, and I'm just going to drag up after dragging up click on a dark area if I could get to a dark area, I'll drag down, then I don't want that to affect the entire image. I wanted to only affect the bottom of the picture and so I'll go back over here to planning options in this time I'm going to say let the bright parts of the result disappear hopefully the sky is the bright part let the bright parts disappear, revealing what's underneath over far enough I'll need to split the slaughter to get a smooth transition and I don't know if this will be the most effective adjustment because I wasn't being overly careful but I was able to do something that tried to isolate them I am mainly used this technique when I'm actually colorizing a picture I find that when you apply color to a black and white picture, it usually looks fake because too much color is put into the dark portion of the image in too much color is put into the highlights, whereas if you actually look, I mean just look at somebody's face or anything else. If you see any highlights by chance on my skin, you're going to find less color in the highlights then you see in the rest of my skin, if you look in the shadows of my my skin, you're going to find less color in the shadows, but when you colorize you get the same amount of color in those areas as you get everywhere else. Using those sliders, I can say let the bright parts disappear from the colorizing to reveal the original it's underneath what the dark parts disappear to reveal what's underneath, and it makes it so I can pull the color out of those highlights and shadows and make it actually look more realistic. Karen my wife made this image we went to a vintage trailer park if you're ever in colorado, near the royal gorge bridge, go to the starlite classic campground that's where you'll find all these, but don't just go in and take pictures they don't actually want you and you'll get chased out with a little guy on a golf cart will come in I think his name's larry and he'll chase you out of there because he's making it for the people that stay there, he doesn't want all these people wandering in, but if you want to stay in a classic trailer and then they let you hang out, take pictures and things, try the starlight classic campground colorado that's where we got inspired by this anyway here I got a bunch of layers let's just turn off all the layers and build it up slowly this is their bottom layer on top of that we have some shrubbery bring me some robbery, then we have some pavement for the car to go on. We have a sign and we have our trailer and car above that some graphics in above that some layers that are applying texture. Those textured layers are set over here toe a mod called soft light, which is what makes them apply that way. That's what we got now I want to apply some adjustments here and I've shown you before that if I had do some sort of an adjustment let's say come in here and do black and white just cause it's obvious that affects all the layers that are underneath and have also shown you that if you click on this icon looks like a square with a don pointing arrow that you could cause that only affect one layer your layer directly below this right? But what if I want this to apply to two layers or three and not anymore? Well there's a way you could do that in your layers panel let's say wanted to apply to the layer that contains this stuff right here and the layer contains this stuff and the layer that contains that stuff those are the three layers will select all three that I wanted to apply to what I could do is a couple different options I want to put these into a folder a folder is known as a group in photo shop but it looks like a folder and the easiest way that I can think of to do that is to credit group is just type command g control gm windows watch what happens to those three layers when I type command gee, they just went into that folder if I expand the folder by clicking on the little triangle you'll see that inside are our layers now if you go back to our black and white adjustment layer and I look at the settings for it remember that little down point barrow thank you if I click it now what's it clipped to its pointing down at a folder and now it only affects the layers that are inside the folder all I did is the adjustment layer sitting above the folder and I went in there and hit that little icon has the down point arrow on it say on ly affect the thing directly below it? Well, what's directly below it it's a container for layers that folder it will affect all the layers that are within it so that's one way we could do it, but there's another I could also click on this layer and put it inside the folder by just dragging it down in my layer stack drag it down however far I want within that folder and then here's a different thing you could do when it's just sitting in the folder effects all the layers that are underneath none of the layers that are above, but if you click on the name of the folder, it has a setting by default called passed through, which means this adjustment layer will pass right through the bottom of this folder in keep affecting layers that are outside of that folder if I change this to a choice called normal, which is weird because it's not the default setting wouldn't normal be default. But normal means that now that adjustment layer should on ly affect those layers that are inside this folder. So now this adjustment layer affects the layers that are underneath it that are within this folder and so that's another way of isolating things all depends if you're used to working with those folders and if you're used to working with with adjustment layers if this is helpful or not if adjustment layers and folders are completely new to you your brain is probably going home what the heck and if that's the case just get used to using those features and then playback this course for the section once you're used to him and this will make more sense but now when the folder itself is set to normal this adjustment layer on ly effects the layers that are underneath it and it does not pass outside of the folder so it doesn't affect the layers outside the folder what else do we have I want to see here there's always a whole bunch of things you can do I'm just showing you some of the possibilities don't expect you to remember a mall on just one watch all right here I would like to enhance certain areas of this image just want to show you a little idea of how you can occasionally cheat I would like to isolate the bright part of this photograph somehow do you remember that previously when we had masks attached to adjustment layers like when I had this image open how I could get a selection somehow out of those masks and the way you did it is you hold on the command key and you clicked on the mask and when you command clicked in the mask you got a selection don't you remember that or not well, you could do that to anything that looks like a grayscale picture in photo shop, as long as it shows up in one of these little panels, so what I can do is go to a special place, and that is the channels panel in the channels panel. These are little gray scale cher's. I can't even use the top one, even though it's not gray scale, and if I hold down the command key and click on it, what I'm going to get is any area in there that is white will be fully selected, and then all the other areas will be selected based on how bright they are, where as they get darker and darker, there'll be less and less selected. If there's an area that's solid black, it won't be selected at all. All I need to do is hold on the command key and click on the little thumbnail for that layer boom. It just selected all the bright parts of this layer command. Click on a channel so now let's, make an adjustment and see how we might be able to use that I'm gonna add contrast to our sky, looking on the cloud to the lock in its brightness, and then click it on the sky and pulling it down a dark, innit? Now look, it automatically has my mask filled in with a great scale version of my picture where wherever it's bright in here it's applying wherever it's dark in here it's not and this I'm going to just adjust to try to get most of the bottom portion of it to turn black I could do that using any kind of adjustment I'd like I usually use levels ignore the picture for a moment and just look at the mask as I pull in the upper left slider I'm gonna force more and more areas to black look at that mask do you notice the bottom portion of the picture is not black? That means the bottom portion of the pictures not being adjusted the sky though is not completely white yet I'm gonna pull in the upper right slaughter that forces areas to white pull that into there and now if we actually look at that mask option, click on it and see its contents white means adjust the image black means don't I could come in here with my brush tool and touch this up a little bit just paint with black to say I didn't mean to get all this junk but it did most of the work for me because I cheated the way I cheated as I went to my channels panel in the channels panel I held on the command key and I clicked on a mass which was that channel and that allowed me to isolate my image so let's see where this adjustment supplying before after c hi isolated to the sky that's not for everybody that's if you're used to working with masks and you want some tricks now I notice it's affecting an area on the right side that I don't I wanted to do sea like a mountain like thing just grab my brush tool and I might paint on that with black to say don't affect it over here I'd usually zoom up and be more careful but well you have a limited amount time so then just like before I could command click on any little gray scale picture like the one of my layers panel right now to get the white areas selected I could select inverse to get the opposite and now I have the bottom selected we do a separate curve for that a different adjustment ah locking the bryce rightness of the dark areas and I'll brighten up the bright stuff I want this area a little bit darker but my masks are which separating that stuff in the on ly thing I wanted to show you was on occasion you might want to cheat goto the channels panel command click on the top most channel and isolate the brightest part of your picture um and sometimes that's useful to be able to transform an image I think I went a little too far on these but you get the idea we have a quick question gilead in that from shade k from spain what's the difference between making a mask from the selection of the channels and using apply image he's talking about coming up here and using apply image if I use apply image I get this dialog box I got to apply image by going to the image menu and choosing apply image and in here you can tell it what document would you like to get your information from? I only have one document that is the same size is this one's? Only one shows up. It asked you what layer? If you want to work on a individual layer act as if your document has been flattened and right here I can say what channel? And if I choose rgb here and I put this in normal then there is not a difference. So when the person asked if I what's the difference between this and command, clicking on the top layer is long as he said it to normal and you tell it to do the merged rgb, then there shouldn't be a difference so it's just an alternative method of doing the same thing. Excellent. And kyle asked what you might have just entered answered, but when you speak of channels, are you speaking of rgb channels? When I was speaking to the channels you can if you want to, when you're in here command, click on any one of these to get a selection. It's just the one called rgb represents the overall brightness of your picture. Where is the red, green and blue will look quite different when you compare them thiss one is the overall brightness so that's where I usually command click thank you. Sure so then and just really quickly I wanted to say I've noticed in the chat rooms people are asking questions about how the stuff applies to portrait it's okay, are you goingto kind of talk about any of that tomorrow are coming up for well tomorrow we'll talk when we talk about adjusting color that'll probably apply a lot more to portrait, it's it's any of these things? They can be applied to portrait ce most of the time, though, when I'm doing things like curves, I find I'm doing into the background, maybe dark in the background to get the portrait to stand out more from it, that type of thing. But when it comes to portrait's, let's say somebody's face is too deep into the shade on one side, just brighten it up doesn't always make it look. Right sometimes it's more of a color adjustment so you'll find a lot more things that apply to portrait's tomorrow this stuff still applies is just you have to be a little bit more careful with it the stuff tomorrow be a little bit more direct application so there you go stay tuned thank you all right just gonna clean up a little bit but closing some images all right here's a picture of one of the buses that I own on two buses one is a modern one and one is a vintage one this's the vintage one if you want to find out more just go on the web to creative cruiser dot com and you'll find a website dedicated to it if you want to find more frequent updates looking up on facebook creative cruiser but eventually this will become my home because I cruise around to a lot of vintage america sights that be fun to do it in a vintage vehicle crystal was so funny we were chatting about this earlier and I was like you're like a turtle you bring your home with seo carry with you a scarier thing meant it in the best the way the best possible I love it it looks great yeah so if you want to get an idea of one of my images here's one of my images as it might have been built and let's see if okay here I can show you the in general, the original I've had to retouch some stuff out to make it appropriate for creative live, but here would be the original you see extensive retouching to get rid of stuff, usually the modern stuff in the sight and that will be built on some layers above that and then let's, just build us up one layer at a time, so I usually have my original image at the bottom above that I have my retouching, and so I usually call my first retouching layer I call it weeds be gone because I think of retouching is pulling the weeds in my garden, my guards, my picture, so if I turn on weeds, be gone, you'll see all the junk that I pulled out with that then after doing that, I just found my attention sure looked at everything, but it would explore this area on the right too much and so I decided to de clutter the right edge so retouched that up as well and just so you know, we're going to have ah class upcoming in the photo shop mastery siri's called retouching and collage will be a full day about retouching, so if you want to know how to do things like exactly what was done here to get rid of all that stuff, we would cover it, then that's why we're not doing it today then they put this electric sign on here look at that vintage beautiful sign here and they slap that thing on it um and I had to retouch that out in order to be satisfied with what I had so that's the first process that I went through after that I build up my adjustments with adjustment layers and if you look in here you'll find any adjustment layer that has this icon is a curves adjustment layer and any adjustment that has this icon is a human saturation adjustment layer which are the two adjustments I find apply most commonly so if you look curves, curves, curves, curves, human saturation curves, human saturation curves and I just keep going lots of adjustment layers right so let's turn them on one at a time, see what they're doing in the image and see if you get a sense for how they're helping for me to improve this image. So here I just named this one pop small sign I have no idea where the small sign is, but ah little sign over the doorway you see up here has a name if I turn on and off that's a curves adjustment layer, it probably has two dots on it one toe lock in the brightness of the dark part one to put the dimmer switch higher for the bright part make its deeper then the next one says de orange sidewalk if I turned that on do you see on this sidewalk looks a little orange ish brown well that makes it not look orange we haven't talked about that kind of adjustment jax it's a color adjustment we do that kind of stuff tomorrow more green on lamps is also a color adjustment but if you look up here at the little lamps above the doorways that you see what they're doing there so you learn how to do that kind of stuff tomorrow then here it says mellow reflections if you look in the window somewhere over by my bus there's a reflection that was calling my attention I wanted to mellow it out that's justin curves adding the dot for moving it down you know bring down the dimmer switch for it and then I painted on the mask if you want to see where I painted I'll hit the back slash key you see those little area then there is sleeping zoom out a few other ones this one I don't even think you'll notice what is doing but here's brighton wall over on the right side where I retouched out the other stuff this area was in the shade so I'd brighten it next one here I'm increasing saturation you see on the green stuff make the sign pop a little more over the left that's usually two dots on a curve and make it's steeper and I just keep building this up one after another to slowly enhance the image until there's nothing that I don't like about it so you get the sense for how many adjustment layers I haven't some images but if they're images that I'm just trying to finish in a hurry I'm going to end up with two or three if it's one of my fine our dimension is designed to be printed five feet wide I'm going to keep going until there's nothing wrong with it and I like having them a separate adjustments so that I can very easily turn him on and off I can paint on their masks very carefully into all that as I have b two multi purpose it's gets up being difficult too remove one of them without affecting other things if I don't put him on separate ones but there's one thing I did that's rather special in here that I'd like to share with you I have a black and white adjustment layer sitting right here if I hide the layers that are above it this is what the picture looks like with the black and white adjustment layer applied usually you end up with one mask on an adjustment layer it controls where that adjustment applies we've done that multiple times today haven't we were painted with black to say remove the adjustment well I wanted to be ableto have multiple masks so that I would just have mork control over what's happening and I'd like to share with you how to do that let's look at how this is set up. I have my black and white adjustment layer and notice that it's inside one of these folders it's known as a group but you can tell it's inside because it's indented from the rest of the layers to tell you that it's inside that folder then if I click on the folder it's just set to pass through that's, its default setting inside there, I have other adjustment layers that have masks on them let's see what the masks look like option click I wanted to be able to control all those areas separately so let's see, how the heck did I do it in a way that you probably wouldn't think of there's, a feature and photo shop that I've never seen anybody demo a good use off, but I figured out a couple good uses for it here's what it is you can use what I call an empty adjustment layer an empty adjustment layer is an adjustment layer that would not usually change the look of your picture, for instance, brightness and contrast or levels or curves before you move any sliders at all, you've just created the adjustment layer you haven't moved anything and therefore it's not doing anything to your picture that's what these layers are right here if I go to any one of them, double click it's what I call an empty adjustment in that that adjustment would not change the appearance of your picture whatsoever because thie adjustments that's in there is that default settings hasn't done a thing. Okay, those are empty then here's the weird part if I take one of those and I go to the bottom by layers panel, I click on the letters fx there's, a choice called bunting options and here's the weirdness here's, the setting that I've never seen anybody used have with a useful setting, but I figured out it would work in this case, since this is called photoshopped mastery, I gotta share the weird stuff there's a setting right here called knockout. It has the choice of none shallow in deep when it's set to none that's how all the layers you've ever worked with in your lifetime have been set. It just means this features turned off when knockout is set too shallow. What this layer is supposed to do is knock a hole in whatever's below it bit on lee what's in this folder think about that for a second with this layer is supposed to do is knock a hole in whatever's below this, but not go any further, then what's inside this folder, so if this is a black and white adjustment layer below it this layer above is going to poke a hole through it, meaning make it so it can't apply to what's underneath but it's not gonna affect any of the other layers that are below that because it's set to knock out shallow if it was set to knock out deep, it would mean let this layer poke a hole through everything below it until you get to the background layer poke a hole all the way through the background, but instead when it's set to shallow, it means only poke holes through things that are in this particular folder. So I have an empty adjustment layer and if I fill the mask with come in here whatever part of the mask is white is poking a hole through this, removing the adjustment whatever part of this layer is full of white is poking a hole through the black and one adjustment layer same with this one same with that one and so therefore I can just have a mask and each one of these individual layers and it's going to remove where the black and white adjustment layer is where every of white in these so what I'd end up doing if I want to do more of it because I would come over here and you say, hey, I want a new adjustment layer of curves don't touch the curve at all I wanted to be an empty adjustment then fill this mask with black tech command. I in now, wherever I go. Well, now I have to set this up. Specially goto letters, fx blending options. Turn on that feature knockout shallow. And now anywhere where I paint with white will remove my black and white adjustment layer. And so I could come in here. Where do I not want it? They want up here to see how it's bringing the color back in. So this is for people that want a crazy amount of control. Because if you look at what I have here, this one here is knocking the whole wherever the white stuff is to say, bring back some of the color. But it's opacity is at thirty seven percent, which means only bring back thirty seven percent of the color. This one here set one hundred percent. So it means bring back a hundred percent of the color there this one's at seventy seven percent. Meaning bring back seventy seven percent of the color there. This one's at fifty three. You know, just being ridiculously control freak here saying in these various areas on lee, bring back certain amounts of the color and it makes it so I can have a tremendous amount of control, but this is for people that are overly used to adjustment layers are overly lee used to groups, which is what that little folder is called in is overly used to layer mass. If you're new to any of those three concepts, this will be too much for you to think about. But if you're overly into those three concepts, this might be a new thought that gives you a lot more control question sophie years knockout deep and that affect all of the layers underneath so it's the same as a normal adjustment layer mask. Well, except you can change the no hold on one second just so you know what knock out, does it knock out? Means poke a hole? It doesn't mean just affect meaning, like an adjustment affect all that's underneath. It means whatever's in this layer is not affected by anything whatsoever that's below it until I get the background. An example of that is I had a friend that wanted to convert an image to black and white in a weird way where used three separate adjustment layers, let's say I wanted to go over here and use a black and white adjustment layer, takes over colorado and do something weird, like make the red's really dark make the blues really dark, and I wanted that, but now I want to apply. A different black and white adjustment layer, one that makes green's really bright. Well, the problem is any black and white adjustment layer I put above this one won't do anything because the images already black and white it's going to see this simmons right here this end result it can't see the original full color image, but if I come down here in, say, black and white adjustment layer in I go to the letters fx planning options and say, knock out deep I don't know if there's a background layer in this image, if there is, it would go and look all the way down to what's in that background layer, there isn't a black crown because it knocked all the way to through beyond that, but if I took this and turned into a background, okay now this adjustment layer is ignoring all the layers that are blue it it's, knocking a hole through all of them all the way down until it hit the background and it's a weird feature that not too many people need, but I find it to be useful for very, um unique things so knock out means poke a hole through either what's the content of this folder or all the way to the background, and, uh, you have to really stretch yourself to come up with really interesting uses for it. The black and white adjustment layer with the knockout layers above it what's the advantage of doing it that way over creating separate black and white layers and masking the individual areas. Is it just you have consistency and how the black and white is applied to the other places or that's part of it thie other thing is, if I have to black and white adjustment layers and I've painted on their masks, if those two masks overlap each other it's not going to affect it in the same way because this one be different than this one and it's already working on black and white info, then it's it's just a little different? I'm not saying that having separate black and white adjustment layers wouldn't be helpful eyes just I find this to be a little more convenient in this particular kind of an instance uh, but it is really stretching what we're doing here. Um, with that one other concept with empty adjustment layers I'll share with you is some people do certain techniques where you duplicate a layer and then you change the blending mode of that layer. For instance, if I open this image, some people would duplicate this layer by dragging it down to the new layer icon and then change the bloody mode to a choice like screen mode, and that will brighten up the emissions underneath I personally wouldn't do that because it doubles your file size when you duplicate a layer, but there are some techniques that will tell you to duplicate the layer and then change the bloody mode. If you're one of the people that do that, consider this instead create an empty adjustment layer policies levels and I won't touch any of the sliders it's an empty adjustment because not affecting the rial look of the image it all well photoshopped thinks that this layer, when it comes to the blending mode, contains whatever the result of the adjustment looks like if that adjustment is not changing the picture whatsoever because I haven't moved any of those sliders at all. It means it thinks it's identical to what's underneath it's no different than a duplicate so I could change it to screen mode and get the exact same end result. But I haven't doubled my file size because I have not duplicated this info there's nothing in this layer it's not taking up any space but that's only for those people that duplicate layers and change the bunny mode. Not everybody does know that doesn't apply to everyone a few questions about organizing layers sure, sam was asking about nesting and how you put them in the different layers and then also cal in los angeles asked how many layers and finish up six per project can it hold and then also nothing the layers into groups a similar questions sure, I don't know the answer to how many layers that could hold if you ever hit the limit you're insane meaning it's enough okay, if you had an old old version of feather shop it was limited mohr but now it's enough I mean I have documents that easily contained three hundred layers no problem that kind of stuff yeah, I mean, I do crazy stuff with butter shop it's my job to push into the limits but I have yet teo I have yet to run into the limit of how many layers in the current version of photo shop and based on that one where you had a whole slew of images I have a feeling it's probably a lot a lot of snow adobe well, I mean you're going to try it at home now. Yeah, I'm sure there is a limit still, but I'm not not from here with what it is it's so high that it it's really not gonna affect most people. Okay, thank you faras you asked about later management in general if it helps you to isolate things down if other people are going to work on your image is especially it's really good teo do layer management if you look at my particular example here you'll find that I name all my layers I don't always do that while I create them, but I make sure I do it before I'm done saving the image because if I open this image, you know, three months from now, how am I going to know why the heck do I have that tiny little thing in there? But I will give them names that I hope are useful, and then I will often organized my layers like I might click on this layer, slide down too this one and hold shift to get all the ones in between, and I might throw in a folder by typing, command g and double click on it, name it so that all my adjustments in one spot and I don't have to look at the clutter of all of that, and I could turn off the eyeball and turn it back on to see the difference, not kind of stuff inside there, I could make further ones. If let's say a lot of these have to do with adjusting my bus let's say I might throw all the ones that relate to the boss into a folder, that kind of stuff it's a personal preference, and it depends on how long is it going to be before the next time you open this image, meaning how much you might need to be re orient with it, uh, and well, other people need to work on the the image and if so it's the mohr other people have to work on it and the more you have to work on it way in the future the better your layer management skills should be uh some people are lazy and they're all called untitled or you know whatever however you like toe roll question in the studio audience yeah yes so in other words you're you're basically working on one specific task at a time completing that task you keeping him yeah usually I might tackle the largest problem first and then once that's done I really valley damage what is now the largest problem and I tackled that and keep going until I either run out of time run out of patients or I run out of problems I love it somebody's asking and if you could just clarify again what's the advantage of using smart objects versus just using adjustment layers um the advantage of using smart objects is that I can scale an image up and down multiple times and each time I do it always calculates it based on the original if it's a smart object I can rotate things in a fire decide later on I don't like the angle and I go to rotated again in the future six months later it remembers that it was been rotated and it tells me how much I originally rotated it so I could set it to zero and suddenly be straight again whereas with a normal layer if you rotate it as far as you know it's it started that way so the next time you try to rotate it doesn't tell you about how much you did before also with smart objects smart object can contain a raw file and if that's the case if I double click on its thumbnail brings me right back in the camera so if I forgot to do things like noise reduction, chromatic aberration correction or other things I could go back later on and do that but we're going to talk a lot more about smart objects in how they're useful how to think about them during the session called collage it's part of the retention and clash of course that's coming up very cool to grab you davey photo ass is their method to set white point in black point so that it could be set up to run as an action yeah you can easily well depends what you're talking about if you mean that it's going to look at your picture and make the brightest part white in the darkest part black you can do that with a setting and here that is called auto contrast it'll do that for you and if you want to set the the bottom sliders in levels that could just be a simple step in your action where in your action you open levels and you pull in the bottom two sliders until thirteen and two forty seven are the generic settings for printing but that could be done with an action cool so a couple questions actually came up about your fine our prince eso I'll ask the free minder in the chat rooms asked how much time you spend on those images and maybe that can speak a little bit more to your workflow and really how long people can expect to spend on these images once they know all of the things they're teaching today if you want to get an idea if you visit one of my websites one of my sights is called the best of men which I'm sure will be down in a few minutes and she does all go to but the best of ben dot com showcases my photography it's a website I haven't had a chance to change over to what I really want because right now it uses flash so if you have an iphone or an ipad you can't get to it I'll eventually get around to getting that changed been too busy but on on there if you look at for instance, my gallery on iceland I would say the vast majority of pictures in that particular folder I spent between thirty seconds and the maximum I probably spent if it wasn't a stitch panorama would be three minutes on every picture that's in their thirty seconds to three minutes unless it's a stitch panorama then it might have taken up to five minutes. That kind of thing doesn't take all that long. If instead you look at my fine art images, I work him until there is not a single problem in the image whatsoever, even if it's a single pixel in for those kinds of images and also do a whole bunch of other things to really enhance them. I might spend an entire day on one picture, but the reason I do that is so someone else can't walk up to the same location, point their iphone and go, go. I got the same picture, you know, or people want to know what filter dough I apply to make my image look that way. There's. No straight answer where they could just get that look. Instead, you'd have to spend the time to really get it refined like that. So it varies tremendously from thirty seconds up to a whole day to paint on the image.