Lesson Info
3. Setting up a Game Plan
Lessons
Lesson Info
Setting up a Game Plan
So let's get into the actual retouching process. Now the best part about CreativeLive or anything like this is the fact that no matter how much information you cover, you can always rewind, and go back and repeat everything, so I think it's phenomenal that we can cover so much but yet still have the time to kinda pull back and look at everything in case you forget something or you're like, what was that thing he said, what was that setting, that tool, so keep that in mind in case I go too fast or anything like that. So, today we have an image that I'm going to be working on from my dear friend who graciously lent his images and he was able to give us something just to play with. And Scott is amazing because he's also gonna be presenting here at Photo Week but more importantly, his specialty is portraits and I figured that with portraits, this is something that most people take, whether you're wedding photographers, whether you're beauty photographers, flash photographers, you do take a...
lot of portraits through the course of your career. And portraits are really identifiable because they all kind of present the same common type of problems. Now I used this image because A, it wasn't the easiest image because sometimes when people are doing demonstrations, they're doing easy stuff and you don't really get the scope of how powerful certain techniques are, so I figured if I can do this image, within an hour and still talk and explain everything, then I've illustrated my point, that it's possible, right? And if I fail then I'm sorry, it's my bad. So before I work on any image, there's certain things that I like to do. The first thing is that I always like to kind of make a game plan of what I'm gonna be tackling. And I say game plan because it's hard to resist wanting to zoom in here and start working right away. You should never do that, you should never just open an image and then just start zooming in to 100% or so. And the problem with that, is you just never know exactly what you need to fix or what you don't need to fix. I have this image open, normally during the retouching process, I'll usually open in Capture One or Camera Raw whatever it is that you have preference with but I use Capture One for processing just because the colors are a little bit more pleasing personally, and then export it and start working. But since we are talking about retouching specifically I'm gonna talk about that, but in case you're curious about the Raw process, on my website I have a lot of education for Capture One and my CreativeLive courses and all that so if you go to www.solsticeretouch.com and check out all my stuff or just Google my name you'll find my website and I have an education tab with anything else you wanna know so if there's a topic that's not covered today, or you want to hear more about it, you can access it there. So, with setting up a game plan, I usually will start by making a new layer, and when I have a new layer set, I'm gonna start by taking my regular brush, setting it to 100% Flow and 100% Opacity, and I'm simply gonna be illustrating what I'm seeing in my mind. Now the retouching process typically goes through a few different steps. The first step is always gonna be my cleaning up stage, I kind of like to clean up everything generally. And what I mean by cleaning up is, obviously everything needs to be cleaned up. But specifically with the Healing Brush and Clone Brush. 'Cause if I can do anything that is texture related or blemishes or stray hairs, I'll do it here first. And then I'm gonna jump into evening out skin. So first we're gonna separate by cleaning up skin with blemishes, any texture issues or flyaways, or anything that's distracting to the eye. And then I'm gonna jump into actually evening out the skin, so then you Dodge and Burn, any transitional issues, and then after that, we'll talk about color variations. So that's kinda my work flow, generally speaking. Now let's say I have my new layer, and in blue I'm gonna be marking everything that is going to be stuff that I'm gonna be healing. Now the first thing that sticks out to me is going to be the flyaways. So I have a few flyaways that are going across the skin that I wanna take care of. Aside from that, the next thing I'm gonna be taking care of is going to be the skin work. Now when it comes to the actual texture itself, I'm gonna be focusing on the blemishes. So I have a few different bumps here and spots and stuff that I'm gonna be kind of removing with the Healing Brush. The Healing Brush's gonna be the first stage. Right, so I'll take care of everything with the Healing Brush. And what happens is, after I take care of things that are blemishes or things that are raised above the skin, what we're left with is basically skin that's a little bit more subdued, where we have mostly clean even texture to work with to even it out. The next thing I'm gonna do, is with my Clone Brush, let me set a new layer here, I'll put this to yellow, is really gently, with a low flow, I will effectively be using it to kind of soften up subtle areas of texture that are a lot more prominent in some areas than others. Because the name of the game is uniformity, you want to make sure everything's a little bit more uniform and sometimes what happens is there's some areas where the texture's really pronounced and I like to subdue those areas specifically just a little bit. And the end result is that with these two steps alone, you'll see things start to come together really nicely. So for example, any time I see an area like this, where I have harsh transitions, I'm gonna gently use my Clone Brush, to very gently transition that out so that way when I go with the next steps, it's gonna be easier to work. Now this is very subjective, you know there's many ways to retouch an image, so if you find that you see something you don't like, obviously you don't have to do it or use it. But I think it's quite important to see some variations. Now typically once these two stages are done, the next stage after this is going to be my Dodge and Burn work or evening out transitions, and that allows me to make portraits look really beautiful at the end of it, without being over done. The goal of today, is creating a portrait that looks realistically her, but still beautiful without being overdone. 'Cause sometimes when you have too many tools, it can become really easy to over do things. That's what we're gonna focus on today. Okay? And what I'm gonna be specifically evening out, is areas like the under eyes, let's use a pink color here, and just really dark patchy areas. I always like to keep the image zoomed out when I'm looking at stuff like this because it gives me a perspective of what I really need to focus on. And you can see some of these little dark patches here. Okay? So usually with these steps, you can visually see where the image is gonna go, and I think that's really powerful because if you can see before even working, you're able to have more confidence in your steps, in your approach, but also you can reflect back on what you've made as a game plan. That way you're not really over doing or anything. Yeah? So I'm gonna merge these two layers together, I'll hit Command-E or Control-E, it's gonna put everything into one little layer and I'll double click on the name and call it my game plan.
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Ratings and Reviews
Elizabeth Mesley
This is a really wonderful class. Clear instruction - the only thing is that I wish there was a bit better explanation about liquefying and what the purpose of using that tool is. However, wonderful class overall!
Paloma Aviles
He is fantastic, the best online teacher you can have. You learn a lot from him, he made easy photoshop. I recommend his course 100%.
Anastasia Roschina-Kulakova
Retouching is my favourite part of the art process, and here I found really nice and helpful tips for an easier workflow! Thank you!
Student Work
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Portrait Photography