Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop: Retouching Continued

uh remember there was a car in the lower right of this photo and in order to get rid of it we ended up having to put whatever brightness levels and colors should have been on the edge of the photograph we had to kind of uh approximate that and put it in then we did a little retouching and it's not looking too bad there's a few issues one is this little shape here I think is just copied from over here and that was because up on the roof of the building there are various things or I don't know if it's thes objects that air creating some of those shadows and I don't know if that one's appropriate also we still the curb to get rid of right here and I believe this area right here is a little bit too light and it might need to be just a little bit maybe bluer or more magenta I'm not sure toe look like it fits that accents as faras what's left so let's just continue on with it I'm going to try the spot healing brush just see what it does with that curb is now I can predict ahead of time that ...

is gonna have an issue on the bottom edge of the photo where the curb bumps into the bottom I'm assuming it's going to be too bright when it's done because you see the bright spot in the middle of that curb right word hits the edge of the photo and remember it always matches the brightness and color of everything all the way around the edge so at the bottom edge if I paint over this I'm assuming the un result might look a little too bright when I end up getting that part we done we'll see it's not terribly bright but it is a little bit bright so I'll choose undo in any time that's the case that's when I go to our um clone stamp tool I copy from something that has the appropriate brightness and color and I just fill in that edge so that now that tool when it gets down there is gonna not try to blend in with the old brightness of the curb I'll go back to the spot healing brush now and let's see if it can deal with this just because I fixed it doesn't mean it will be perfect but should help it now it messed up in a few spots I see some blurry information and this is where I used the idea of three strikes and you're out and give it another chance maybe give it to chances but just paint over and see if it will be able to deal with that you know it's starting in a smaller spot there see how it just work a smaller and smaller as faras if it's messed up and see if it can eventually fix stuff so just because it messed up doesn't mean that I'm going to immediately switch to something else I'm going to give it a few chances let's see if it can get rid of that little part that sticks up not really let's try once more not really so I'll choose undo a few times just so you know what get multiple undoes most people know the keyboard shortcut for undue because use it in every program and you screw up a lot leased I do and that's command z an imac control z and windows well photoshopped actually keeps track of the last twenty things you did and if you want to go back multiple steps you have two choices one is you can use the history panel the history panel will list the last twenty things you did and you could click on a previous step meaning one closer to the top of the panel I personally never used the history panel it just takes up space on my screen instead I used the standard keyboard shortcut for undue which is command z and usually what that does is it will undo something and you've he type it again it will simply reapply what you just undid and if you want to go back multiple steps which you need to do is just add the option key that's all tim windows to the standard keyboard shortcut for undue and if you do that you get multiple undoes and aiken type it twenty different times in see how he got that curb all the way back and that kind of stuff I didn't even get most of the car looks like it took about now it takes more in twenty two steps to get rid of the car and so option commands the an imac that would be all control z and windows to get multiple induce what's weird about it isthe then if I take the normal undo keyboard shortcut right now we're the last thing I did was apply multiple undoes it thinks about all those multiple induces being one step it thinks is if I open the history palette where I have a long list of all the steps and I clicked twenty steps back that's the last thing I did I just happened to have done it by hitting the keyboard multiple times so if I just type command z now I'm kind of going twenty steps forward twenty steps back because the last thing I did was the all those undoes so anyway I might want to just touch up this one area what I might do for that is switch from my spot healing brush to the normal healing brush and then choose an area that would have a nice straight line going between dark rocks and light rocks and I might do that actually over here right about there all copy come over here get that edge tow line up see if I got enough information to make it across to there let go knowing that it should make the brightness and color match because it's something with the word healing attached and then I could try to re retouch this if I wanted to but it might come in just a slightest it is now so this is what I might come down here and just use the curves adjustment layer if I use it curves adjustment layer we have a mask and you can start working on the mask before you even mess with the curve I don't know if you remember what I did when I used curves with a mask is if it was ever a small area I wanted to work with what I ended up doing this I actually inverted the mask to get it all full of black and then I paint with white where I wanted it to show up I'm going to do that right now I'm gonna type command I watched the mask in my layers panel then I'll grab the paintbrush tool painting with white you know just come in here I won't be able to see it because there's no adjustment dialed in to for to show up but I'll just click here and paint to say this is the area that I want to effect when I make my change so that in my layers do you see a little white spots in there so then I can go to curves click on the little hand tool and click on what I want to change and drag down you see I get it toe matchup and if for some reason the color wasn't just right it needs to be more blue or magenta or something else that's when I would change this menu up top and let's just say it needed to be the tiniest bit more magenta unfortunately mogens is not in the list bomber but if I look in the info panel and it's not set up from what I did during a different session usually the default is called actual color but I can see magenta is across from green so I could then set this to work on the greens click within this area and less green equals more magenta so I can click and drag down you see attorney more magenta so if that was needed I'm not saying it was in this particular case who would be able to dial it in if the color was awful all right then if I didn't want that as a separate layer because I just wish that the retouching would have ben that color I could choose merge down and it would be in combine this with the layer that's underneath and see merge down that means combined the layer I'm currently working on but on lee commanding with layer directly below it so when I choose merge down it just permanently affected the retouching material that's there I would only need it to stay is that separate layer if I think I might have screwed up and I might need to find tune it later uh but I just wanted to re touching stuff to look right so murch down we'll just simplify all right anyway it gives you a sense for how I might tackle an image like this one there are still a few areas that might work with I see a few dark patches in here that I might not like they're very easy to fix I would use the healing brush copy from a similar area just cover it up yes remember when you're done performing to retouch that you might want to search across the image and just make sure there are no repeated shapes that are really close to each other then when I'm done doing that retouch I might find too in the image and here we have a bunch flares let's just turn them on one at a time and see what was done to this particular image uh in this case darkened bright rocks I actually named so it's nice looks like I didn't like how bright that was because my I was being drawn to it so I decided to tone it down that's probably just one dot on the curve moving it down then says less yellow in shadows uh and I actually might mean less blue well see I think it means more yellow and shadows actually in this case usually shadowy areas in a picture will look bluish because it's usually the blue sky that's lighting them and so in this case I named my layer a little off it should say less blue in shadows but this is a curves adjustment layer and you see how it makes the shadows less blue so all that is is going into the curve work on the blue channel and move it down a little bit paint on the mask so it only effects that particularly then it says darkened sky do you see in the upper right corner of the sky is quite different than the rest of the sky so there is a curves adjustment layered dark nina and making a little bit more blue then it says plus contrast on trees I wanted the trees to pop out a little bit and so we did those now we'll learn a little bit maura about masking when we come back for the next three day course which is in april and that's when you'd learn how to do stuff like do the complex mask that might be needed for this tree I'm not sure how precise I made it but we can find out option click on the masks you can view it but you see how complex that mask is that mass did not take more than I would guess about a minute to make it takes a lot longer than a minute to describe the technology used to make it so that's why we're not doing it here but you will learn how to do things like that then I don't usually name my players this but pure cheeriness uh that's most likely me not liking the fact that this entire diner is in the shade and so it feels a little dull because of that I usually like having more highlights and shadows and stuff so this is most likely me just having a curve that makes things steeper and being applied just to where I want somebody to look so you see that coming out like that so that would be adding a dot for the dark stuff to lock in its brightness adding a dot for the bright stuff in pushing it up um then it was painted in with that does that make it pop a little bit more so you get the sense how this image went from its original which looked like this this is actually an hd our image processed in to this so far including the retouch but then we gotta talk about other kinds of retouching that might be difficult so I want to get rid of this raised area of this asphalt I think what they did is they put in this lighting after that done the asphalt and the wiring this underneath this raised area um which I don't like so the first thing I notice is when I retouch this out I think we're gonna have an issue right where the raised area touches the edge of the photo we noticed that with the car in the curb so we should pretty be pretty used to the fact that that we should assume it's going toe not look right there so the first thing I might do is grab my clone stamp tool copy from an area nearby in just put in the right stuff down there at the bottom so that any time a tool with the word healing attach gets to the bottom it gets the right brightness makes sense then the other thing is I'd love to just grab that spot healing brush and just cover this whole thing and usually you do have to cover the entire thing you want to retouch because it always blends in with what's just outside of where you finished your retouching and if I let go right here is going to blend in with the color of that medal thing that's holding the light in place and that's not what I wanted to blend into so I usually need to cover pretty much the whole thing I want to get rid of you might even need to go over here and I don't do that twenty eight really that wouldn't post too because they put wouldn't post in here so you can't drive through and if it's a gas station when they'd be kind of odd to do it's just that it's a vintage one so let go and I'm assuming it's going to screw up totally and if it does I'll show you how to fix that yeah looks all blurry doesn't okay doesn't always work great with huge areas so if it doesn't work great with huge areas what I do is they break up big retouching into small chunks but when I break it up into small chunks I need to have it so each chunk is surrounded on all sides by the proper brightness and the proper color just like what we did when something hit the edge of a photograph well this is where one chunk of retouching bumps into another chunk of retouching I want to make a little gap between those two with the proper brightness in the proper color so all I'm going to do is go to the clone stamp tool with a clone stamp too will act of all copy from up here and I'm just going to break this apart so that now this is a separate chunk aiken retouch separate from this junk uh then I'm gonna copy from up here so now that's a little bitty chunk separate from that one and I'm just going to do that through out here so I can deal with these individually and I don't have to try to deal with them as a whole so let's take a look this little pole all I'm going to do is grab a little bit from over here and just cut off the bottom of it so now that could be retouched separate for this thing I might copy from over on the right side and just come in here and put a little separation between it in what surrounds it just there's a little gulf of stuff here for the rest of this wooden pole I'm gonna break it apart in little pieces I just copy some of the area from the right side here let's break that off so that now the top could be retouched separate from the bottom crab a little bit from here and break that light off from what's below and I would just continue doing that I'm not sure I'm going to retouch out all of this but when we touch out a chunk of it ah here see it's going all the way up here and bumping into other things we're just sever it so now that top half could be dealt with separate from the bottom half and it might also sever it down here where it bumps into this chunk of stuff just get it so it's surrounded on all sides by what would look appropriate now let's see if it's any easier to retouch this stuff out I'm gonna go back to the spot healing brush and see if it can deal with it it may or may not be able to I'm not certain yet um so let's just try this and see if it happens to be able to get rid of it time let's try this let's try this let's try this little chunk okay this one sis easier yeah it's not always going to do it right I'm like waiting for you to screw up here assuming it will soon yeah uh now here it might be a little different just because we have this line going through here which it might not deal with we'll find out but yeah just little bit off not hard to fix though with the normal healing brush there's copy from the right spot put it across there I'll try up here I didn't sever those too so I'll have to do them together and we'll give it a second try here but I doubt it remember it does a really good job with organic nature stuff man made straight line stuff often messes up with ah here I didn't end up making a gap between these so I might do that quickly go back to my clone stamp ah copy from somewhere over in here and I'm just going to separate that pile of stuff from the pole so that I can go to my uh spot healing brush then and see if it can deal with that portion of it now let's start just fixing things like here where it messed up that's what I'm going to go to the normal healing brush where I tell it where to copy from and I'll go over come over here get a slightly small brush so we don't have a copy too large of an area and I'll come to the black line that's over here that's what some people call the ding ding court when you pull up the gas station that used to go ding ding so the attendant could come out and and uh fill your tank for you uh so we're gonna go in here try to get that tow line up usually had zoom up a little bit probably a little more precise but do that now it looks like a little too bright above and below but remember this is a tool that's got the word healing attached to it which means it's going to try to match the brightness when I let go I might need to retouch up some of this stuff up above you're getting the idea of how I break it up into smaller pieces deal with the smaller pieces individually and then go through and try to retouch out or fix any areas that are problem look for repeated shapes look for areas looks slightly blurry look for areas that are a little often brightness and go and re evaluate those spots and fix them it's only right up against the edge of the sign here and here that I'd have to be absolutely precise make sure the edge my brushes the right hardness makes from copying from the right brightness and everything and use my clone stamp tool on ly right there were touches that sign because that's where I usually wouldn't be able to deal with stuff all right just so you know here this is quite a bit brighter than this we could still copy from over here and use it over here I just want to show you that I'm going to use the ah healing brush option click over here and let's use it over here just to see if it works remember the healing brush always matches its surroundings so when I let go we can do that a lot of people get the mindset that it has to be the right color the right brightness but if you're using a tool with the word healing attached to it it's not looking at the brightness or color of what you're copying is looking at the variation and brightness the texture that's in there so I can copy from way over here used that near the edge here as long as it's inappropriate texture that is uh to do that in this still has some work and see little you know jar there and that kind of stuff but we've seen how to deal with some of that it's just a matter of time how much time you want to invest in it I might also decide to even out these two sides and that would of course be a curves adjustment layer and what curves I might invert the mask remember command I and then I might paint right over here I'll click right there hold shift click there and make a straight line you're not seen it on the picture because the adjustment doesn't contain anything yet I just paint over approximately where I think it needs to go and then I'll go into my curve grab that little hand tool and to make this look more like that I think we have to brighten it one way so I can click track up and then I think it might need to be just a little bit warmer more towards magenta possibly so I go over here and I don't see magenta listed but in the info palate I do in across from magenta is cream so that really means it needs to be less green so I choose that I moved my hand over here click and I dragged down do you see how it got a little bit more might also need be the tiniest bit more yellow looking at the two sides I'm not sure if you agree with that or not but over here just looks a little more yellow wish to me so yellow is across from blue so that's where I go to to drag a little down not too far just a little and then I couldn't create a new layer on top and heal right across that transition you wouldn't see the little seem anymore I might just be a little bit more careful with exactly how brighton in exactly what color you zoom up look around and decide what you need but if you look at the difference it's starting to get close also be more careful with your mask all right and when it comes to things like telephone lines when they're in the middle of the sky oftentimes you could just come in here with a spot healing brush and sometimes it does a great job just come in here do that if it ever messes up it's going to mess up on the ends where it bumps into something else just act like it's the edge of the document and go put a little gap in between the thing you're trying to retouch out and what is bumping into so that I would copy a little tiny piece of the sky and put it right there tiny piece of the sky and put it right there and then do it but that's only if it messes up you don't want to do the extra work unless you truly need it now when we come back on to the next three day course where you learn more advanced stuff you'd learn how to get rid of that telephone line where it goes to the tree all right so that should give me some idea what we're doing um those are the three main tools that I use it was the clone stamp tool on lee when I have to and that's usually when I don't want it to blend in with its surroundings so if I'm calling right up against the edge of something like right where this edge of the sign is and I need me retouching to stop and not blend into that thing where I stopped then I used clone stan but otherwise I end up using ah healing brush or spot healing brush and because they make it so it can blend in to its surroundings and do other stuff in this particular image I would want to fix ah this little chunk that little chunk right there there's samad texture in here that I don't know if I like or not I could replace that in this little area right here looks a little bit bright and remember when we had a little bit bright area on our other picture we've got rid of a car we could use curves darken it out that kind of thing so are there any general questions about the three tools that we used I will tell you that I do use content aware fill a lot of people ask about that it's under the edit menu choose phil but know that the spot healing brush when we're using it it has a setting at the top called content aware and that's what we've been using the whole time meaning is the same technology is making a selection going to the edit menu in choosing content where the main reason I don't use that vory frequently is if I attempt to when it's on an empty layer like I'm on right now then I go to the edit menu in shoes phil content aware more often than not it will complain well first off they didn't do a good job right there but more often than not it will complain saying there's not enough information for it to do what it wants to dio whereas this particular tool doesn't complain like that it just does the work and if there's not enough information it's just that the workers looked that good but it does the work so I do use it on occasion you did see me use it when I it filled the empty areas of a panorama it's very good for that also you will find it works a little better when objects bump into the edges of documents like that car that's one time when I might consider using the content where phil because it doesn't seem to have a tendency as much to blend into what used to be on the edge it seems to be a little bit more intelligent to say yeah what used to be on the edge is gone now er and so that's another time when I think of it um and there was one other tool we didn't talk about which is called the patch tool and the patch tool is something where you make a selection of what you want to get rid of and you drag it to where you want to copy from and it's just a different way of thinking but um it's one that I rarely used because the other tools to the same thing it's just I'm not making a selection to accomplish them anyway was there any questions comments well it's funny you should mention that because people were just asking about when to use the patch tool as opposed to the spot healing tool as opposed to the healing toe right so there's when to use which yeah the patch tool I would use when the area that I need to retouch is oddly shaped in the area that I can copy from is extremely limited so that I need to get this oddly shaped area retouched from something else that's very limited and shape I make a selection of that area and I drag it over and I can see the entire area we're about to use it one stroke and they move it over and say do I have a big enough area to get that from or not that's clean and then it would be useful um but otherwise I find that I used to three tools that I showed you here the majority of the time cool and not technically a photo shop question but you could you talk to the folks out there on the internet who enquiring minds must know about your physical work flow as faras do you use a welcome tablet do you do things with the mouse can you just a little briefly for photo shopped for photographers sure well what I do is a little bit different than what I would say you should do because of my living situation I live in a bus and when I'm not on the bus I'm on a plane and I'm going somewhere you know do something whereas if what I was doing is going to my home my home's got more you know would have more square footage and if I was going to an office instead of getting on a plane it would be quite different as far as what I do so talking just about ideal not me but just what would I do if I didn't have my situation is I would have a graphics tablet I have a walk on graphic sam but the one that I have is called the it's called the sin teak companion hybrid and the light and close my eyes and try to get that out in what is is it's actually the kind that has the screen built into the tablet so you're actually drawing directly on the screen and so what I end up doing and this is what I would like to do if I had an office and I do this when I'm in the bus and I have a particular project that needs it is I have a large monitor sitting there it's twenty seven inch display in what I do there is I will be displaying the image at fit in window size then you can create a secondary window for any picture and if I come in here it'll take me a second to find x I don't need to do it every day ah where is it it's ah did teo don't ask me why I can't so I think I was there where is it somewhere in here there's new window maybe one of you um but I'm not thinking about right now there's a way in one year one of these where there's a create a new window for this particular image and I can drag that over to the other screen and what I'll be doing is on the other screen which is my sin teak which is a walk on tablets gotta screen built in uh is I will have the image there at one hundred percent view where we're zoomed in and I could do fine work I'll be painting on the mass really nice and and uh smalley then I congrats up my big screen and see the overall view so I can see how does that small area that I'm working on now fit in with the big view and go back and forth glancing down here to do the detailed work glancing up there to do the toe look at the images a hole and then I have a track pad the kind of son my laptop here too control that screen so if I want that screen and put my finger down here look at the images a hole over here with the tablet and use the details so that's what I like I have the one that's called a sink teak I think it's called a sinti companion hybrid because it has a battery in it and so if I go off with my laptop I don't need to find accord to plug it into the wall to use it because if I actually unplug it for my computer it becomes an android tablet I don't like it it's an android tablets that's heavy for that it's not convenient for it but it is um nice tohave and here's that command by the way if I go to the window menu choose arrange new window right there and so this would be a new window I could grab this new window you see have two windows to the same image I could drag it over to the other screen in this one would be zoomed up to a hundred percent view when I'm working and on my big screen up here I'd have a fit and window version that mckay says uh so I find that to be ideal if I didn't have the luxury of the two kind of screen set up like that then instead I would just have a tablet to the right of my keyboard and I'd be using it but I really find the two screen set up to be much more ideal with that so I can see detail over all kind of the same time and then if I don't need to do detail work instead of just creating a picking out pictures to use in a slide show that kind of stuff what I mean light room you can also have a different set up on each screen and what I'll end up doing is on the sinti companion it's also a touch screen so I use my finger on it and with that I'll have a light room window over here that shows my library all the thumbnails and therefore I can just sit here and scroll through him I can tap on the image I want and then it comes up on this window ah full screen and I just used my little trackpad there to adjust all the sliders and camera because there's no need for the actual tablet when I'm just moving sliders around and therefore that's how it is in light room um so it's pretty cool setup and then sometimes when I'm on the road all I got is this like what we have right now it's just this is compact fits in my bag goes on a plane easy sometimes I bring that sinti companion but that doubles the size of my set up and so sometimes I don't I don't think I'm going to use it for a particular project it stays in the bus if I uh no I'm going to use it I'll bring it right um also they make the same tablet without the android thing in the battery it cost less and I'd use that if I never travel I'm just always in the office I was gonna plug