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Little Things That Make a Big Difference

Now let's talk about little things that can make a big difference. Sometimes you have old photos that are actually print sitting in a drawer and you want to scam. And if you end up scanning these photos, do you really want to scan them one at a time, Putting one picture down on your flatbed scanner of time hitting skin and all that kind of stuff is, I don't know, something I want toe have an intern to or something, not something I'd like to do. But if you have a scanner big enough where you can gang those images, then why not put more than one of them on the, uh, on the scanner at the time? And you don't even have to be careful that they're perfectly straight. You noticed that one of the lower right? It's not straight. Then if I go to the file menu and I come down here to automate, I'm gonna find a choice. It's been Photoshopped for quite some time, called Crop and straightened photos. If I choose, that is long as the lid for my scanner is white or another solid color, and you haven't ...

put like pasted a bunch of newspaper or something on it, where there's detail, it should be able to find the edges of those photos and let's see what it does. It just made each one of those photos a separate file, and it cropped them. And if I switch between these tabs, it also attempted to straighten them. Usually it doesn't pretty good job. In this case, it was off just a little bit. You see how it got it into separate documents? So if you want a gang scan, ah, bunch of, uh, files feel freedom to throw him in there. Sometimes I do that when I have business cards and things to scan, although it works best with business cards that don't have just a plain white background because they often blend in with live my scanner. Um, so that's a nice thing to know about can save you a lot of time. If you would find it to be useful on occasion, it won't rotate exactly right. Like on this one. All you have to do is grab the crop tool afterwards and touch that one up. In fact, if you look at the one that it messed up on, I think it was this one. It was so close to being straight. It probably just thought it didn't need it. But this one here, I think it did find with and that's the one that needed to really rotate. So that's crop in straitened photographs and that is found in the file menu under automate. Now I'm just gonna open a random picture, the work on, See if we can find one. That might be kind of fun. I recently captured this one in Australia that it was cool the way that that he looks now. There are some general concepts in photo shop that I find a lot of people are confused about, and I just want to make sure that you're not confused about him because they're things that there's a lot of misinformation about. And also you just you wonder about which of these features should I be using? So let's take a look at some. One of them is if I look at the top of my layers panel, there's a choice. Call opacity, and there's a choice called Phil, and they seem to do exactly the same thing. Let's figure out what the heck the difference is to show you the difference. I'm going to choose a color not sealed. Just choose a red, and I'm gonna use the text tool and just put some text in here. This doesn't have to be text. I just need something to work with. We just need some sort of content within that layer. Now, if I go to the opacity control and the way I usually change, these is one of two methods. One is if I'm in the move tool, then if I use the number keys on my keyboard, I'll change the opacity. If I press four, I get 40%. Press six, you get 60%. If I press two numbers quickly, like four and then five, I get zero gives you 100 in the newest versions. 00 gives you zero. If I wanted to change the fill instead, I would add that shift key to that. So shift in the number keys would be able to change the Phil. Huh? But what the heck is the difference? Well, if you look visually if I change the opacity, it makes this layer disappear. When it's all the way down or makes it semi see through is I bring it up. If I adjust Phil, On the other hand, it does exactly the same thing, and therefore a lot of people are confused about should use a passenger your film, and that's why I want to cover that. So there's no longer any confusion about the to. So what? The hex. The difference? Because visually they seem to be identical and results well, here's the difference. If you're working on a layer and you get out of the letters FX at the bottom of your layers panel and you choose one of these choices, I'm gonna choose something called an outer glow that's gonna add in effect to this layer. All adjusted settings, mainly the size that's here in a little bit of spread. I'm not suggesting that this should be turned into bacon or anything. I just needed a word, uh, and now click. OK, and now is when I'm gonna notice the difference between opacity and Phil. I'll click on the word opacity. I'll drag it down to zero, and I'll slowly bring it up, and you see that both the contents of that layer, which is the taxed and the effects applied to it are either lessened or increased. Then I'll go to fill and let's see the difference when I bring it all the way down. The true contents of the layer, the text or paint or whatever is in that layer is going to be lessened. But any effects that are applied to it will be at full strength. And so then I can control how much of that text. How prominent is it? But the effects remain at full strength, and so that could be really nice. If I want just in effect, like a drop shadow or a glow or something else without it having to be attached to something, that thing it's attached to you could be hidden by bringing the fill all the way down. But if you don't have one of these effects applied to a particular layer, then there is no difference between the two. Okay, One other thing that seems to be a lot of confusion is if I paint with, let's say, white in this particular case at the top of my screen or two settings that get confusing and that is opacity inflow. What the heck is the difference. If I lower the A pass ity, let's say Bring it down to 20%. I click and I dragged here and painting with white. You can see that I'm only putting down 20% of what I've asked for, and I have to release the mouse button and click again to get more to build up. Once I released the mouse button, it thinks it it's a fresh photo in front of it. Doesn't remember if anything has ever been done to it before, and when you click, it just adds 20% Mawr White. But in order to get it to ADM. Or I have to release the mouse button and then click again, which I just done release Click again, then let's look it flow. I'll bring it down to 20 instead. Flow again means only give me 20% of what I asked for until I overlapped my brush strokes. I'm not letting go of the mouse button. If I go back and forth and back and forth with flow, it's gonna build up. If, on the other hand, I do that with opacity. Now I got opacity 20. I go back and forth it never builds up. The only time it will ever build up is if I release the mouse button and click again. So I find a lot of people get confused by that. And so opacity just means what's the total amount I'm going to get in? The only way to get to give him or that its release. The mouse flow means what I want in my first paint stroke. But if I overlapping strokes, it will build up all right. A couple of the things about the interface in general that I find to be useful. And now and just sometimes I end up working with a small screen, like when I'm on my laptop, traveling to be more efficient with things you've noticed. I used the info palette and all right amount, especially if you're in the 1st 3 day seminar that we had. We used the numbers in the info palate to make sure we matched colors. Well, I find that the info palate takes away too much space with default settings. And so one thing that I find to be useful is if I go to the side menu, the info panel, there's this little side menu icon on the right, and I choose panel options in panel options Down at the bottom. You can make this smaller by hiding the tool tips and by turning off this check box called document size, watch the info panel When I click. OK, do you see how much smaller just got? Well, that's really important when I'm working on my laptop screen because I like to be able to see the Info panel. The actual settings for my adjustment and my layers and the info palette oftentimes takes up way too much space. I need to go to the upper right corner, choose panel options and then turn off the check boxes at the bottom that were already on a few other things that are overly helpful to know about. Let's say, 1/2 something in its own layer. I'm gonna just copy this onto its own layer. Command J and I end up trying to transform something. Oftentimes they do need to scale things, rotate things, that kind of stuff. So I typed command t to do it a scale this up for a scale it down. Well, when you do that, know that with default settings. It's not giving us high quality as it could. And here's the setting you can change to get you higher quality. You have to be in the middle of transforming something in order to get to this setting with him in the middle of transforming things in the options bar. At the top of my screen is a pop up menu. It's called interpellation. That means what kind of math does it use to calculate how to make the image larger or smaller? Default setting is by cubic by cubic is fine if what that layer contains. A Grady INT. It's just simple graphic thing that fades from one shape to another. But if what's in that particular layer contains detail, which you want to do, is choose by cubic automatic by cubic automatic. What the heck is at Dubai? Cubic automatic? Well, there are settings here called by cubic smoother and by cubic sharper. One of them is good for increasing the size of your image. The other one is good for decreasing. The size of the image in automatic automatically switches between the two. Because it figures out, Are you scaling the image up? Are you scaling it down, and it will automatically change between the two. But that is going to give you a slightly higher quality result whenever you transform an image and you scale it up or down. And so why not make that the default? Why not set it once in the next time you come in, it should remember the settings and start to give you higher quality and results. That's not one that you'd easily discover on your own because most people just transform and never look at the settings. A few other things that bug me in Photoshopped that there are little helpers for, and that is when I'm doing something like making a selection or I am cropping an image. I find that frequently Photoshopped likes to snap whatever I'm doing to something else, like, I'm trying to move a layer and I get close to the edge of my file. It just maps it over there trying to line it up. If you're ever moving something and you find it snapping, I'm trying to get this one pixel away from the left edge, and I simply cannot do it Well, if you're already clicking the mouse button and the mouse is currently held down. Hold down the control key for as long as you hold down the control key snapping will be disabled. So now I'm gonna try to move this within one pixel of the edge of the document and I can easily do it. It's not trying to snap it all, but it only works after you've already started to push the mouse button. And so you want to make sure that you only do it after you've already clicked and you're starting to drag. It works with anything that would usually snap. That means if you're making a selection and you find when you're dragging the selection, it doesn't seem to be smooth. That seems to be snapping in some way. Hold on control and you will temporarily prevent that snapping, which I find to be useful. Other things that it can be useful sometimes simple, sometimes not. Let's say that we have a panorama. Do you remember with earlier in the day we ended up doing a time lapse Might have been yesterday or today. I don't remember, but in a time lapse, we ended up actually having video in photo shop. Well, we can use video and photo shopped for other things, and I want to show you how we might use it. Uh, with Panorama. Sometimes I end up with really, really wide panoramas, and I have one of the Seattle skyline that is immensely wide. But the problem is when you try to show it on a small computer screen or on an IPad or IPhone, especially in an IPhone try showing a really wide panorama, it's so tiny that it's not really useful. So let me show you how to take a panorama and converted into a movie where all the movie does is pan across your panorama and therefore a woman you want to show it on your IPhone or your IPad, it's ah, much easier and effective to show. So I'm doing Start with is opening the image and I'm gonna go to the image size dialogue box, and I'm gonna make the height of my document the same height. I want my video to be. I don't care about the with just the height. If you want to do this to be shown on television, the resolution of a high definition television is in the height 10 80 you've heard of 10 80 p before. That's specifying the height of the image in pixels. So that's what I'm gonna do. This particular 14 If you're doing this for a device like an IPhone instead, what I would do is go on Apple's website and look on the specifications, and it will tell you the resolution of the screen. It will tell you how many pixels Aaron, the height, how many are in the wind and type in whatever is in the height of the screen. But I'm gonna do this for an HD TV, so I'm gonna type in 10 80. For the height, I'll click. OK, that's going to scale my image. So we have the exact right amount of information for the height of a HD TV. Now I'm going to turn this into a smart object. I'll do that by going to the filter menu and choose convert for smart filters. That's one way of getting a smart object. Now what I'm gonna do is crop the image, So all we see is the end of the panorama that I want to show you at the beginning of my video. So to do that I'll go to the selection tool, the Marquis. You can go to the top of your screen and up there you have an area called fixed size, and I'm gonna type in the resolution of whatever device it is. I'm gonna display this on in here. It's remembering the settings I used last time when I showed you about that time lapse trick. But 1920 by 10 80 is the resolution of an HD TV. You need to click within my image to tell which area want to show to begin with, and I'll just click and then drag it to the left side or wherever I'd like to start. Once I have the proper size selected, I'll go to the image menu and I'm in a choose crop. So now all we're looking at is what I want to show you during the beginning of my video. Now we need to start making the video, so I'm gonna go to the window menu and there's a choice called timeline. It doesn't know that this should be a video yet, So there's a button right in the middle of where the timeline would usually show up that says create video timeline. So I'm gonna click on that. And now it thinks this is a video, but there's no motion in my video yet. There's just has specified it as a video. If I want to make my video of a certain length down the bottom, there's a little zoom iconic. I might zoom it so I don't see this. This doesn't fill my entire screen. I could grab this edge and drag it out to say, Make the duration longer. I consume out again. If I need make it longer. I know there's other ways of doing that. But that one Nice way It's just grabbing the edge pointed out. Now what we need to do is it thinks this is a video, but there's no motion it. If we actually hit the play button, we would really see anything change. So what I'm gonna do is in the timeline, I'm gonna click on this little arrow that's here. This is the name of the layer that is currently active, and I'm gonna click there, and this is what would we like to track? I'm gonna track the transformation of this layer by transformation. That means scaling, rotating or actually moving that layer. And all I did is click on this little icon to the left of the word transform. It's supposed to look like a stopwatch. So now I need to move the play head, which is this little vertical line here to the right edge of my video. Which means I can show it what should be visible at the end of my video. You could manually drag it all the way to the right or if you go to the side menu. I think there's a choice called Go to Last Frame that's gonna move that little play head to the end. And now where my picture is, I need to have it displaying what I want to show at the end of my video. Right now we're seeing the left edge of the panorama. I want to show the right Well, we still have a selection sitting on top of my image that we used for cropping. I never got rid of it, and we're going to use that by going to the layer menu, where I'm gonna find a choice called Align layers to selection, meaning take this layer and line it up with my selection. What I'm gonna tell it to do is align the right edges. Well, my panorama is really long. It's extending beyond the edge of my document, and it thinks that that's the contents of the layer. So when I say align the layer that I have to this selection align the right edge is it takes the right edge of the panorama and slides it over so it matches the right editor. The selection. That's kind of weird. I went to the select menu are not selected layer menu. Ah, line layers to selection right edges. And that's what slid over some seeing the opposite edge by Panorama. I no longer need the selection, but it's okay to have it there. I just find it to be a little distracting. So she's de select, and now we should have the video that I need watch. I had to play, but and maybe I'll zoom up so you can see it. It might not be the smoothest thing in photo shop, but once we export it, it will be completely smooth in order to get it. So it's gonna be completely smooth. What I need to dio is go to the file menu, choose export and choose render video. It comes up with some general controls at the very top. You can name it below that. You can tell it exactly where to save it. I'm going to tell it to save it on my desktop. I just click the button there. Uh, h 264 is a fine video format to use, and in general you can leave the settings that are in here. Okay, Click Render. And now it's going to save out that file once it's done saving it out. If I play it in any program designed for playing video, it should be nice and smooth. The only thing I might want to tweak later on is decided that I wanted a little longer shorter because it might go across the panorama too slowly. That type of thing with the main concept of what we did here is we scaled the video so the height was appropriate for the dice device we're going to use. He turned it into a smart object, and then we cropped it, so all we could see was one end. And when we cropped it, we typed in both the width and the height of the device we wanted to use so that it was the proper size down in the timeline. We told it to track what's called the transformation of it or transform. And then we moved a little play head to the very end, and that's when we just had to slide that layer over until we could see the other end of the panorama. We had Photoshopped do that automatically by telling it to align the right edge of the Slayer with the right edge of the selection that was there and it did it for us, which is pretty cool. Once this is done, it'll be ready. You get a question or you uncover Hello, it audio. No, I'm not gonna do that here. I don't. You extensively used the features and Photoshopped that have to do with video. It is something you can do. I actually primarily do that in my movie just because it's an interface that I'm more familiar with for video. And so here I don't I'm not that good with doing video and photo shop. It's just something where my when I do what I do in my movie A question from a cam. Is there any difference between smart objects from the filter menu or adding it by right clicking on a layer and choose smart object? I think what they're asking about is when you want to convert an image into a smart object. If you have it open, is there any difference of going to the filter menu and choosing convert for smart filters? Or it sounds like they go down to the layer menu. If you right click on a layer, that's a choice called converting Smart up. There's absolutely no difference whatsoever. Great. The other way you could do it is if you're used to going to the layer menu in going down here, too. Smart objects. There's also a choice there. It does also the exact same thing. I just find that the one under the top of the filter menu is so quick and easy to get to that. It's where I seem to go to, but you're more than welcome to right. Click instead on top of your layer and you'll find it there, too. Yeah, but all of them do the same thing in the end, So if you want to see the end result. It's on my desktop here. If I click on it on a Macintosh, at least you can preview things but is clicking once on something and hitting the space bar. But you see how it could be nice and smooth in the end result. It's sized exactly for an HD TV right now, and so if I showed that on TV screen, it would look great. It all looks also look fine on any I device. It's just it's a little larger than needed for those devices, and that's why I'd look up the resolution of whatever device you want to show it on and get it optimized for exactly that device. In that way, you don't have an overly large file or one that needs to be scaled up too much Teoh work. Yeah, Then you can get rid of the timeline. When you're done with it, just go in the upper right of the timeline area. Little side menu, say closed Tabb Group. Get rid of that file. One other thing I wanted to cover as far a simple things go is I find that a lot of people get confused about keyboard shortcuts in general, it seems like the keyboard shortcuts we use in photo shop are somewhat of a random jumble of, uh, choices when in essence, there is some sort of a logic to the keyboard shortcuts. It's not that every single keyboard shortcut makes sense, because sometimes the most logical keyboard shortcut for something is already used, like Command C is for copy. Darn it. What about curves? Yeah, that could have used command sees. We got to come up with something else, but the overall what keys? I hold down to do various things. I find it to be overly useful to know some general logic behind them. So let's talk about some of that logic. First off the option key on your keyboard. The option key on your keyboard usually does one of three things. Let's look at what those three things are. First off, it can take away from things. So if I have a selection on my screen like here's a selection and I go to any other selection tool. Usually when I click and drag, it would replace that selection with a new one. That is, unless I hold on the option key Right now, I'm holding down the option key. One of the things option does is take away. So if you want to work on less of something, the first key I usually reach for is the option key. Now we've run into that multiple times. Do you remember when we're removing the background on hair? After I was done painting around the edges, I look at the end result, and I saw some hints of old background sitting there that shouldn't be there. So I held down the option key when I painted over them, and that told it to remove these areas. So you see how the logic kind of rang true There, that option can often mean take away from something. And so it's good to know that other things that option can do is if you have something that's sitting on some layer and I use the move tool, I could just move something This one already typed Command J to get it on its own layer, but usually just moving around. But if you hold the option key when you move it, you'll move a copy because that's another thing. That the option key does is it works on a copy of things. And that's not just when I'm dragging a layer like this. We use that earlier. I don't know if you remember. I created what I called emerged visible coffee, which means act as if I merge all my layers together but do it to a copy. So I keep the original layers there and the way I did it. As I found the menu command called Merged, visible. Let's see what merge visible would usually dio. I go to the layer menu and down here is merged visible. Watch my layers panel. You see what merge them all together. I'll choose undo, and I'll add the option key. Now, when I choose merge visible, it will merge all the visible layers, but it's gonna merge a copy of those layers, meaning that the originals will still be sitting there. So when I choose merged visible. I still get it all is one layer, but it appears at the top there, and it did a copy of them so that all the originals are still sitting there. So you get the sense that the option key can also signify that you should work on a duplicate of something. Other examples just so you get it more cemented in your head is if I open an image that has some masks. I remember this image had a bunch of masks. What I could do is, let's say this black and white adjustment layer needed a mask on it. And for some reason I want to put this mask down here. I could click on a mask and drag it down there, and if I let go, it would move it. But when it moved it, you notice it's no longer on the layer. It was on earlier. If I choose undo, she's undo again. You see it moved it down there. Well, if I wanted to move a copy of it, I hold on the option key. Then I drag it down, and now you'll see it's on both of those layers because it moved a copy. So does it make sense that, in general, the option key in photo shop, one of its functions is to work on a copy of something so it can take away from some things? In other cases, it works on a duplicate. Now there is 1/3 thing that the option Kikkan Dio. The third thing is it can show you alternative features. So, for instance, let's say that I'm in some adjustment like curves, and I've made some sort of weird change. That's a pretty weird change. Now watch the buttons on the right. Some of the buttons on the right have alternative functions because they didn't want to clutter the dialog box with too many alternative buttons. But if I hold on option, do you notice that the cancel button changes to reset because they didn't want to have an extra reset button in here to clutter it up or if I'm in camera? Ah, lot of the sliders that Aaron camera have alternative views. For instance, this slider here, called blacks, can cause areas to become solid black If you move it to the left. Darker areas become even darker, even darker, and eventually some area will become black. I can usually tell when it's happening by looking at the history Graham and seen. Does it hit the left edge? That's where black is, but I can't tell where within the image it's happening. If I hold down the option key, though, when I click here, it will show me exactly what's becoming black. If you ignore the colors that are in here and just look at the black, it will show me. Is there any black? Or if I move in the other direction and none of it shows up, no part of that image has become solid black. The same thing is true for the white slider. If I hold down the option key when I click on it, it shows me an alternative view. And right now nothing on the screen looks white, which means there is no part of my Mitch. That's white. But if I bring this up higher and higher, I'll start seeing area show up. There are all sorts of things in camera raw where you end up getting alternative views. One other choice is when you're under the detail slider. Remember when we were doing things like noise reduction? We brought up the Luminant slider. Well, sometimes you get distracted by the colors that are in your pictures, so if you hold on the option key at the time you click on it. It makes you image black and white, which allows you to concentrate on just a little specks that you see that might be noise, and you're not distracted by the colors that are there. Try holding on option when you click on just about anything in camera. If I do it with amount, we see black and white on sharpening. If I do it with Radius, you can actually visualize how much space is it using for radius? Which is means how much space is being used for sharpening? Same with when I'm in detail. I mean, it's in so many of these features that Holy Mount option means give me an alternative view. Or if there's a button that has more than one function, let me use the other function, for instance, in Kamerad. And if you notice that I was holding down, there's a button at the bottom that says Open image. If I hold on option, it's his open copy. And that one's kind of funny because it's using two of its definitions together because option convene. Show me a hidden feature or work on a copy. So open copy. That would mean I did something to this raw file like I made it black and white, and I don't want the original look that way. So I don't want to click the done button and save these settings. But if I hold on option and open a copy, it opened on Lee. This version that I just adjusted and did not save the settings back into the original file. So option it could do three things you can duplicate. It can take away, or it can show you an alternative feature like a hidden feature. Right, The command key briefly. If you're in any tool when you hold on the command key, you get the move tool. If you want temporally, get to move toe. Go for it. If you click on something when the command key is held down, you'll get a selection. So if I click on a layer, I select everything in the layer. Click on a mask. You get a selection, Um, in that type of thing, and those are the two main things it does, and then one other keyboard shortcut is the shift key. The shift key constrains things, So if I come in here and use the move tool when I have this shift key, when I don't have the shift, he held down. I can move it around all over the place. When I hold shift, it constrains it. So I can either move it at 45 degrees or straight. I can't move it just a little bit. If you're transforming something, you hold shift to make sure you don't squish it in one direction, that kind of thing. The other thing the shift key does is it allows you work on Mawr of things. So if I make a selection and I want to add to it, I hold shift to add. Or if I want to work on more than one layer, I've clicked on one. I hold shift, click on another slicks all the ones in between. So shift often means work on more of something. But I just thought I'd share a little bit of the logic behind the keyboard. Truck cuts, because if you get solidified in your head, it doesn't seem like you're holding down random keys to do everything. Instead, it makes a little bit of logic when somebody tells you, okay, I'm going to duplicate this guy, but you're gonna hold the option key because that's what that does. That kind of thing