Lessons

Lesson Info

Telephone Lines Through Trees

You know sometimes I don't have good source material within the image that I'm retouching where whatever it is I need to get rid of it is just two huge covering up too big of an area and so in this particular case on the left side of the photograph when I needed to get rid of the sign that was a good amount of information and I found if I copy just from the surroundings it was too easy to see repeat where I just noticed the same branch used twice so oftentimes what I'll end up doing is I will um look in the same folder where I shot this photograph to see did I capture the same scene from a different angle in another shop and if so I make sure I process it with the exact same raw settings as this image and then I know the colors should be similar because it was the same lighting was the same brightness over all the same colors in all of that let me just briefly show you how I make sure the settings are the same because I might not realise I need that picture until later so let's see if ...

I could go here to a a raw picture and I want to show you how to grab the settings from one image and quickly apply it to another so let's just say the settings for this image I need to apply to this image I don't know if it'll actually look good because they're not actually captured in the same location, but if they were, I could do this if you right, click on any image and bridge or if you're on a mac with one mas button control, click you're going to get a menu in about halfway down or a little further than halfway down that menu is a choice called develop settings that really means camera settings it's going to give you a list of presets here, and if you have any preset saved, you find him there, but at the very top you khun sake, copy the settings from this image, then I could go to a different image I can right click good on develop settings, and I'm going to find the choice of pace settings when I choose that it will ask me which settings I would like to apply. Usually I don't want to apply the same cropping, um, but I might I want to do other things also, I don't usually want toe apply local adjustments that's where I used the adjustment brush and painted on the image. Unless the two images have the exact same composition exact same content I wouldn't usually want to do that, it wouldn't match up with the features that are in here. But then I can click on ok now I doubt this image is gonna look any good with that because these were two completely different photos but you can see that they look different that's getting the settings from this one and apply it to this theory journals of the two though look quite different and s o it's not quite appropriate in this case but if the two we're two of the identical images when it comes to content of the camera settings were very similar and all that it would be appropriate and that's how I would be able to open another picture and be able to use parts of it within this is just making sure I copy and paste the raw settings all right, what else can we look at here? Well here if you look there's a bunch of different pieces that are over by the trees and below and look at that telephone line going right through the trees sure, if I toggle it off and on you might be able to get a sense for it where it used to be. But if you never saw that before, you usually never be able to tell where it wass so how do you deal with some of that let's take a look I'm gonna get rid of all the later center in here except for the bottom layer I do that by turning off all the eyeballs do you remember how you can option click and eyeball it'll turn off all the others then I could go to the side menu that's here and there's a choice called delete hidden layers that means throw away all the layers that have the little eyeball turn on and I'll create a new layer to put my retouching on now if I want to get rid of these there's a couple different things they need to dio first if I noticed that the telephone line that is there is lighter than its surroundings it's brighter than its surroundings then one of the things that I could do is I could change the blending mode of this layer to a choice called darken so whatever I put in this layer is only capable of darkening the picture and therefore if I come in and use something like the clone source my clone stamp tool I can copy from surrounding areas and quickly cover that stuff up and even if I copy from an area like over here and apply it here it's not going to be a blatant copy of what was there it's on lee going to be the areas that are darker then where I'm applying it so if for instance I copy from here and I attempt to apply it here well that would be brighter than the area where I'm attempting to apply it so when I click and drag nothing really shows up on ly where it's darker than what's underneath and so by doing so, it makes it so I can copy from or um basic areas without having to worry about things and so I'm gonna copy from down here we have some basic details see if I can get that copy from a darker area touched that up so that's one trick that I use but other tricks that I use I'll just create a new layer to do this, son sometimes I'll just use this spot healing brush to start with I'll get a very small brush in just to get that line out of my picture it might not perfectly fix it, but to get it out I'm gonna click near the beginning of it can you see where my mouse is right now? It's over here, I'll click right here let go ah, hold the shift key and I'll click over here and that's going to connect the dots is if I painted across there and let's see what we get home on it, I have to have sample all layers turn on that's why I didn't do anything now a strike then I'm going to do it again it's not going to make it look perfect, but it's going at least get it initially partially gone so I don't have to concentrate on manually replacing every little part of it then I might work on a layer above in this case I'll actually just move this layer above where I have that layer set to darken and that's when I come in here and his copy from some of the surrounding areas somewhat randomly uh sample signature sorry, but that's when I come in here and use something like the con stamp tool in copy from somewhat random areas and start covering this up and darkened mode in it will suddenly start breaking up some of those spots but it's not a blatant copy because in dark and mode all it's capable of doing is darkening so copy from here put it up there copy from over here put it up there copy from up there put it down there and I'm just trying to break up any kind of a straight line since it's in darkened mode it's not a blatant copy it's only where it's darker so I could get away with a lot more when it comes to some of that retouching when I'm done with that I might merge some of those layers together to simplify but I give you some idea of how I could do some of that when it comes to telephone lines themselves sometimes with the newer versions of photoshopped it could be a simple as just making a selection around them or just using the um clone stamped they're not closed out thie come on spot healing brush so spot healing brush I could try to just do this sometimes cross your fingers it would do it but you see how it didn't do anything that's because I'm working on a layer of set to darken mode and all I can do is dark in the picture so I might just create a new layer then try what I can do is click on this end leko hold shift click down here hold shift click down here shift come back if it screws up anywhere be very careful when you get close to objects here do you see the top of that tree? I came really close and it ended up getting it so end up missing if you find it has issues usually it's going to have issues were two things bump into each other and if that's the case if I end up with a lot of issues, what I do is break up my things into small chunks I'll use the clone um stamp tool here and all I'm going to do is break something up a copy from over here and I'll just break that up so that now I have the top part that could be retouch it separately from the bottom because the two are no longer connected together this little love thing over here I'll just sever it like that I'll sever it again right here so it's separate little pieces and then I'll deal with the separate pieces is individual parts just several fuel him then I could come up here with a spot healing brush and this will usually be much easier to get rid of this top part will be much easier although on occasion it will suddenly see the pole below and think it should be a pole just get a brush slightly larger than the thing you're trying to remove shift click there to get a straight line and then when you're done sometimes you need to smooth things out but is painting over larger areas to get it to smooth you see how the top part of that's gone the bottom part I would need a separate wherever it bumps into something so that means wherever it bumps into this sign I would have to very precisely paint just around the edge of the sign there to make it so there's a gap between what I'm trying to retouch out the sign then break it into chunks and retouch it out oh I should mention on that same one ah how did I do this thing? Because that was something where I did constructed out of multiple pieces so let's take a look there so I can see if I can show you when this layer right here called de clutter so in order to do that what I ended up doing is right over here is a nice clean curb and so I simply selected that a larger area that I knew I needed and there's a choice where you can copy it onto its own layer, you have to click on the layer that contains it than type command j as we've done before, and then I could move this over with move tool, I'm gonna put it on top of the other retouching is right now it's underneath it and I'm trying to kiss get things toe line up visually with what looks appropriate, so this now lines up. I need to get the height of this to be appropriate for over here often times what I do for lining things up like that, and I'll just create any layer, and I will put something in it in this case. Actually, I don't even need a new layer if I used the the line tool here, I can click drag like this, and I'm watching how it lines up with the middle over in this area bring it down until it lines up right there. Now I have this line drawn on top of my image, and I can see how far off I am, so I will go in grab layer below, which contains that, use the move tool, air it up until it lines up, he tell it, lines up now. So sometimes they need to do something like that I just grabbed the aero tools right above the hand tool usually that's where you find the shape tools and general rectangles rounded corner rectangles and things but the line tool could be useful for just snapping a line across there once I'm done it's on its own layer just grab that layer throw it away so that's the first part of it it looks like I need to go a little further down now to create the other curved side I stole from here so I used the lasso tool I grabbed part of this more than I thought I needed I clicked on the layer that contains it which I believe is down here but let's say it was made out of more than one layer let's say that this retouch layer was part of it if it's made out of more than one layer what I do is go to the edit menu there's a choice called copy merge and that means copy whatever this looks like regardless of how many layers it's made out of copy merged then I go back to the edit menu choose paste and that would give it to me even if it was made out of more than one layer to begin with use the arrow keys and move that to where I think it would be appropriate did you see how we have part of it here and then we got part of it coming from there and then we would have to add masks and paint with black wherever we need to hide each then the main keys I need the two to match in color in on the other three day seminar that we had I talked about using curves to match color. We ended up matching two things very precisely or in this case it might work to just change the brightness. And if that's the case, this layer here needs to be darker so I can come in and do a curves adjustment layer I can click on that, but when I pull down to darken it'll darken the entire picture. All I need to do is in curves there's a little arrow pointing down this little guy right here and that means only adjust one layer the layer that was active at the time I made this adjustment and that would cause it to on ly in fact that one layer. So now do you see it's affecting only that one and I could find to knit tell right about there the bright house was right then a little bit worried touching around it but you get the idea of gravity in different parts of the image and I'm kind of constructing things as I construct them I sometimes need to adjust them to get the brightness to look appropriate uh but I'm not gonna spend the timeto do the entire thing. I just want to give you the essence. All right? Well, I think that's good in general, you learned about the clone source panel you learned about how I copy and paste from different areas, scaling a little bit of getting the brightness to match and then it's just a matter of working it enough where you get to clean all the way around it. Any questions or comments before we move on? You know, when would you mind touching on this one cause I know it's something usually comes up in a lot of our classes from a camp wanting to know the difference between a tiff file with layers and a psd for later use with file retouching in general, not much of a difference. The quality is exactly the same between tiff and photo shop. Sometimes a tiff file will be slightly smaller and file size, but it depends on the content of the of the thing photoshopped file format can handle the larger file. So if you happen to have one hundred fifty layers in it and it starts getting over, I think it's two or two and half gigabytes and size, which is pretty big uh then the photoshopped file from that would not be able to say that, but if I could, I have lately been leaning towards using two files instead of photoshopped files, mainly because there are some advantages with light room, where, if I do, and if I do, a hd are emerging. Tiff is what's used for the processing of that, and I do create some images that, uh, exceed the file size that that photo shot file from that can handle. And so then, when I get above the file size, I have in general, to main choices, and that would be tiff or something called psb. Psb it's, photoshopped big, but the problem is, light room doesn't handle psb files. If I want to be able to see it, I needed a tiff file them. So I've been leaning towards tiff, but technically there's, not really a huge advantage, one way or the other, so feel good about using whatever format urine.