Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop: Content Aware, Selective Focus

so there are a couple of the things that you sometimes need to deal with when it comes to retouching in other issues let's look at just a couple tiny things um sometimes my re touches are not about um removing things sometimes I'm requested to move something within a scene and I just wanna let you know about a particular feature that might be helpful to some won't be helpful for others but it's good to know that it exists um a bunch of different things we can work with to do a job retouching you've seen we have he spot healing brush the healing brush and so on but there is a feature in newer versions of photo shop called the content aware move tool to access this tool you go to the same slot where your healing brush would be and you find your content were moved tool what it's allows you to do is you make a rough selection around the object he would like to reposition you do need a little bit of space around it so don't get too tight where you're absolutely precise that needs to know wh...

at the surroundings look like and then you can click within that selection and reposition it somewhere else when you do it's going to do two things it's going to just do a content aware phil where it used to be you know just like a ziff I went to the edit menu chose content aware phil to have it removed something or I used the spot healing brush to remove that thing but then it's going to move this somewhere else it's going to try to make it match its surroundings and it doesn't always do a great job but sometimes it's pretty amazing and can save you a lot of time so you see how it just filled in the whole of where it used to be and then it put it over here if I click somewhere else you can see that at least at first glance it doesn't look to be too bad we do need to look around it though and be critical because a lot of people looking at your pictures will be critical and so you probably have to retouch a little bitty areas to touch it up this primarily will look good when you have organic stuff in the surroundings grass rocks mountains if you have man made stuff bathroom tiles uh straight line things you've seen how the spot healing brush doesn't do a great job this is using similar technology so it's also not always going to do a great job so the more organic and just like detailed but not patterned uh it is the more effective that khun b like you want to see another example all look at this guys all by himself over there get a shadow a swell and his reflection and we'll just move them over here by his buddies then that sweet there much better um but we still have a little bit of a reflection over here that we might need to retouch out you still need to be critical around the edge and see if there's anything odd and if when I move this over the water was wider here that little chunk of the ground that we kind of hit over here might not have lined up just right so he might need to retouch it that kind of stuff and just so you're aware there's also something else in here you can do if I were to select all right now and go to the edit menu you know how when we do free transform how if you grab the side without holding shift you could easily squish things but these guys on a diet but you see no also under there there's a choice called content aware scale and what it does is it looks for what it thinks is important detail and it tries not to scale the important detail it tries to take the stuff that it considers to be generic detail and do the scaling they're kind of weird so generic detail would be like the mud and dirt surrounding this and let's see if it can do a good job here I'm not sure if it will or not do you see these guys getting closer together without getting skinny it's only if I try to really push it that they'll start getting skinny they're they're all together but just so you're aware that's in there it's under the edit menu it's called content aware scale and it is going to mainly do the scaling stuff wherever there is textures that look like they're not important that they don't have dominant details in them in the areas that do have dominant details will be scaled either less or not at all so here's our little moved them all together one final thing when it comes to retouching where it's not really retouching it's just fixing things is that sometimes you end up with an image where when you open it and you take a look and evaluate your image you'll find that your image is a bit soft well if the reason why it's a bit soft is because your camera moved then there is something where we can try to improve it know that what I'm about to show you is something that will fail the majority of the time but it can save your your ass sometimes so I'm glad it's there so if you look at this image do you see that's just blurry now there is some text on here and if this was fixed I might be able to actually read the text let's see if there's anything I can do now first I'm going to duplicate this layer I'm just going to type command j to do this command j is a short cut for the menu we used before of layer knew vehicle layer via copy command j think of it as jumping it to a new layer that's how I remember it then I'm going to go up to the filter menu and in here under sharpen in the newer versions of federal shop there's a choice called shake reduction it's not a miracle worker though and it's only gonna work on some images also it's going to work in some areas dramatically better than others and so that's why I duplicate the layer first because I might decide to only use it in a few spots when you two shake reduction it analyzes your picture and it puts a little rectangle on the area that it thinks is important where it should do it uh analyzing work and in the lower right it will show you a preview if I click on the preview you'll see before image if I let go you see after and if actually looked where that text is and I click before I couldn't really read it when I first looked at it the only reason I could read it right here is because I had just seen this where I could actually read it you see that but when you do this it doesn't always pick the right spot it's going to put this little thing on it sometimes it's amazing it picks the right spot other times it's not well you can click on that to make it active and hit the delete key to say don't pay attention to that part then you can put your mouth on top of the image and say know what was really important was right here because you never know what what it is that he needed and you can actually do this and more than one spot and it will try to analyze what's going on each one of those spots in over here it shows you this is how much movement it thinks there was in one spot this is how much move but there wasn't another like the direction of it uh that type of thing um but with this some to go to a different picture try to be a bit critical of it because otherwise you'll use it and think that it's amazing and then only when you make a big print in somebody else's looks at the go what the heck are you doing to your images because it looks weird but it was under sharpen and then shake reduction it's only in the newer versions of photo shop in what you could do is sometimes it'll do a good job sometimes it won't uh and the main thing is that zoom up on your end result because sometimes you get doubled images that weren't even in the original and if it helps in one spot fine mask it but look at what's around his head look almost like sound waves coming out of his head and if I choose undo for it looks soft after it looks a little bit better but you see the weird looking things around his head so that's where you want to work on a duplicate layer and if it ends up helping one area of your picture consider adding a mask in painting with black wherever it didn't help so that you can get rid of some of those artifacts but it can be the difference between being able to read text and not in some shots this one I don't think it did enough to make the rest of the picture usable though but it's one of those things that in some cases makes for good demo meaning that if you pick the right image do the right thing it does a great job but for the majority of images it's not gonna be a lifesaver all the time all right let's go years let's talk about some creative things we might want to do to our pictures and so there's a bunch of different things we can accomplish we're going to do some of them here and then we're going to do mohr of them when we come back in april and have three more days of time a bunch of different ideas we could get into so first let's talk about selective focus when I'm out in the field shooting in my camera bag I have a special lens that allows me to very easily knock areas out of focus to get this very out of focus look with only one little areas in focus and what the special lenses is it's a lens where I can grab the front of the lens and if you think about a camera most of time the front of lens stays perfectly parallel with the body of the lens well with this one I could grab the front of the lands and tilt it so that it's at an angle to the camera and what happens is on ly things that are parallel with the front of the lens and focus so that when you tilted over it's kind of shifts that the plane of where things are in focus and it's easy to knock things out of focus off on the sides and things the lens that I have I have two different ones one is a one that's just I used for making images just like this where's lots of out of focus a little infocus is called a lens baby if you google lens baby you can find out about it and it can work kind of nice that I also have a very expensive version that I use for architecture and other special uses and it's notas a tilt shift lens I have seventeen millimeter tilt shift and its eye don't use as much for this out of focus look I use it for other purposes but sometimes I want that look but I didn't think about it when I shot I didn't bring the right lens with me when I shot or anything like that but I still want the look I want to be able to isolate things down to just a particular area let's see look you have two versions of this we'll go with that one so if that's the case we have some options uh if I go to the filter menu I'm going to come down here to blur and that's where I'm gonna find tilt shift until shift is going to act as if we had a lens where the front of the lens could be shifted which would knocked various carriers out of focus in with this it comes in looking like it does right now there's a little dot in middle that I can click on in drag and I wantto put that right where I want things to be in focus then there are these little handles I can use to pole like this to control how much of this image is going to stay sharp both above and below where we are so if I want to get this narrowed in they only have that area and focus in between these two bars then I can have it fade out how gradual dough I want it to fade out is what the dotted one controls should it be an abrupt fade out where it's really fast fades into out of focus or should it go over a long distance before it gets to truly out of focus and you have one of those in both ends this one's just beyond the edge of my screen but I can still pull on it to make it more gradual or stretched out then in the middle if you look at that little round circle that's there there's a little kind of bar around it that's just a little bar you could click on in drag in it determines how much blur is being applied if you turn that way up you get mega blur and if you spin it down you get less of a blur and so it's a matter of determining exactly what you'd like there then if you just grab these and pull on him we're just moving them if I want to rotate it so it's not a perfectly horizontal ban and where it is in focus I could grab these little dots that air here and just rotate the whole thing to say what angle should that little sliver of your image that is in focus like that and over on the right side there we have the blur setting and that's actually what we're setting when we're dragging that little thing in the middle so we could do that and when we're done I could just uh look okay and if I choose undo you see the bottom getting really blurry if I do this trying to get it where your eye is concentrated there just know any time you do this that often times people will ask you if what they're looking at is either riel and what they usually mean is they think it looks like a model because the only time they're used to having things with that limited depth of field is they see it when they sing see things that are magnified so if you ever seen anything under a microscope or something else that magnifies it has very very limited depth of field and your brains just used to that fact and so when they see something with that really limited depth of field though ask you is that realistic especially if it's a picture of a city or something it'll look like a little bitty model there's also another choice in there under the same um area called iris puller and you can actually just to find little round areas to say this should be in focus everything else would be out of focus similar controls I had a special request from someone on facebook that asked me how to do something and I just so I don't forget I will show you how it's done they wanted to know what they gotta make what they called a shadow border and I don't know what the heck they talked about what they meant so I said sent me on an image and they sent me an example and I'll show you what it is special request I'm going teo try to make a border on this particular picture that doesn't really cover up the picture all that much it just kind of establishes thie edges a bit and the way I'm gonna accomplish it is in the tools panel just above the hand tool is a shape tool and if you click and hold on it you can choose from various shapes I'll choose the rectangle that's usually the default that's already in the slot but we used to say the other day to just put a uh yellow circle over a son in fact I think I did it in a different session but anyway I'm going to choose the rectangular version I'm gonna click within my picture and drag right where I want the edge of the border to appear leko it'll put down a solid colored rectangle usually uses your foreground color so the color you get will be different than mine because you're four young color will be set to something different but now let's use that to define where a little border effect would appear in my layers panel remember how we have the letters fx we've clicked there once before and we added a drop shadow well one of the other choices that is in there is called an inner glow and let's see what an inner glow would d'oh now the only problem with inner glow is usually it can only brighten things and if you look at what we have in this layer there is not much further we could go teo to brighten it so right now we're not really seeing the effect of this so let's change it so instead of brightening things that's set up to dark and things in order to accomplish that what I'll do is here there's a little yellow square I'm gonna click on it and I'm going to choose black the default setting was yellow I'm just choosing black then there's one other thing that's limiting this where it can't show up in that is there's a setting right here called the blending mode and the bloody mode is something else will explore on that other three day class we'll get into what all of these things mean um and the one called screen makes this layer act like light the problem is the color we're using is black and black is the absence of light so right now it can't do anything because of the setting I'm going to set it up here to a trust called multiply uh which makes it act like ink and if you got black ink that could work just fine now we'll start to see it do you see this little kind of dark edge that's in here we can control its size with the choice called size you see how we can bring it in like this that if it is too bright or dark we can lower the opacity no light no dark in it and then I'll click okay the only problem is where that's my picture well there's a special sighting we can use at the top of my layers panel there are two settings there's opacity and there's phil and it seems like the majority of the time when you try those two they seem to do exactly the same thing there's one time when they act different and that is any time you have one of these layer styles also notice layer of fact supplied then opacity and phil act differently from each other let's see what opacity will do if I lower the opacity it'll make it so I can see through whatever's on this layer to what's underneath the problem is I want to see all of what's underneath so if I bring this down by the time I get it down I can no longer see the effect phil on the other hand is different it leaves any effects that were applied to this layer at full strength but it takes the true contents the layer not the effects attached to it but the actual stuff that's in that layer and makes it be lessened which means the white box we have we'll show up less and less and less but the effect applied to the layer will stay okay so if I bring phil all the way down now what I have is a rectangle that on ly defines where the effect shows up but doesn't actually obstructs my view of what's underneath now these little handles you see on the edge they're only going to be there when this layer is active if I switch to a different layer they'll go away that was just showing me where was the bounds of where had dragged out um so now I have this and any time I want a shadow border those air the steps I could go through but I don't know about you I didn't enjoy going through those steps I wish somebody else would remember how to do it for me so I could do it in one click well you can if you go to the window menu one of the choices within it is called stiles that thing that I have applied is known as either a later style or layer effect you can use those terms interchangeably so I'll goto styles here you'll see a list your list won't be as long as mine because you don't have as much stuff loaded I probably have some stuff loaded twice but in here if you click on this little icon you're going to save whatever styles are applied to the later I'm working on you save it and here's a preset I need to have both of these things turned on and that way it remembers the layer effects which is the one called inner glow and it remembers the blending options which is actually that's setting called phil that's part of them uh and I click okay now any time in the future I ever want that effect I just deleted the later uh I go to the shape tool I draw out my rectangle and then I go to the styles panel and I click on the very last style because that's have you had a new one it puts it at the bottom so now I don't have to remember how I ever got that I can simply draw a rectangle it doesn't have to be with the shape tool uh just so you know watch this if I do go instead and create an empty layer and I paint on that layer with anything doesn't matter what I'm paying with could be red green blue yellow and it could be hard edged soft edge little look different and then I just click on that icon and as long as it was on a separate layer then it's going to become that effect so you're just going to remember how to get something on the layer uh that would usually cover up your picture and then click on that pre set all right so that was a request people were asking how the heck do you make those because sometimes it's hard to figure out and so I told somebody I would show