Lessons
Rethinking Retouching
10:36 2Basic Retouching Workflow in Lightroom
10:17 3Correcting Color Issues in Lightroom
07:56 4Small Blemishes in Lightroom
05:20 5Removing Distractions in Portraits
05:19 6Retouching Eyes and Fly Aways
20:42 7Reducing Shadows in Lightroom and Photoshop
08:56 8Liquify in Photoshop
03:32Lesson Info
Correcting Color Issues in Lightroom
Correcting color issues we know about white balance we know about trying to get correct color but then there's issues that happen regardless like with open shade like in this case umbrellas catchy this weird blue light from the sky in the background and it's coming through and also as a side note this is a trick I learned from one of my friends is the wedding photographer that if you're she didn't wedding in a bad environment bringing umbrella because you just block it out and all of a sudden you have great environment you know I was like that's amazing and that's what that's how it but then I took that that thought too much kelly slater and the surfboard was my umbrella right? So I'm retouching on camera and so what I want you guys to do because sometimes what happens is people are like retouching look everything's over retouched or I don't want to do that either do I? But there's a deeper concept that I do want to do, which is make strong portrait ce and so that's what I'm constantly...
asking myself how could I do that? All right, so any of this one I'm going to need your guys help here because what I want to do is get to my hse cell panel so I need to do that via shortcut because I'm trying to be fast what's my shortcut someone from the audience yeah, command three thank you. So hit command three if I forget three, I just try to three four, you know, I'm just kind of jumping around them like, oh, there it is now I learned three because I tried that we have to do a little test you on that we know I think how this one works, you change color saturation and lew minutes I'm gonna go to hugh targeted adjustment to one, just click and drag down and so actually I'm not gonna do that as a mistake. It's a fun thing about lives like you make mistakes, which I love about the classroom because often, when I would make a mistake, a student would they, like catch the mist ache for you so you guys can catch my mistake, but anyway, in saturation, I'm just going to click and drag down, and we're gonna kind of pull that blew out of there so that backslash key that's a human so you can see this backslash key before and after we're starting to see we're just yanking you are pulling out selective color, which could really help us because what we tend to think it's like, what if we just add more yellow the opposite of blue, but then the skin tone goes crazy? What can't happen as well is we may need to bring something back to the eyes I'll talk about the eyes in my next folder but know that you know, we lost some blue and her eyes will talk about how we can bring that back I just want to stagger into it all right? One more thing in this first little basic introduction here is in this portrait window light, which I love and the reason why people like window light is because it's soft and it's inviting and when you put someone near a window they kind of open up a little bit, you know, at least I do you know, someone you're going to take my portrait you say stand next the window and look at it I'm like, oh that's like the world out there um, but here it's too harsh because my exposure's way over so I've made a rookie mistake s o in this case you know let's say we drop our exposure down and we start to kind of craft the image same kind of walk you know, as we go through these things when we're doing that a lot of times were doing sliders but there's also another way which on a highlight which are the common the period key so you can see on my screen as I tap the period he it's going through my various controls in the basic panel and kama goes backwards so I could go to exposure and then tap the plus icon or the minus icon to increase or decrease. Why the heck does that matter? Why not use the slider sometimes on an airplane? That's really handy, right vs like, you know, you're going the plane and you bombs bouncing around in the slider value is bouncing other times, it's nice to actually change the way you're doing something almost like this is gonna be bad for a second, but bad comparison. But woodworking. I love we're working on a really big tool, you know, let's say you're planing something down a big old plane but everyone. So why don't you small to see what happens and be a little delicate with so just a nice way to mix it up. All right. So problem with this image exposures. Okay. At least for the most part. Not amazing, but there's, that light in the background over here. So the eyes going to go here, right? So, it's, not our skin. That's a problem, it's. Not that I need to smooth that out. A remove blemishes. Just great skin and there's. Great light and minus my exposure blender and so, in this case, adjustment brush cakey. And from the effect pull down menu are gonna choose exposure, which is zeros everything else out and gives me a value here another way to zero out is double click a slider you khun zero out a slider at a time and often what will do with this type of a tool is pain and brightness or darkness or contrast or whatever and with this, I want to talk a little bit about some of these settings and I'll do that in just a second cause this file you have a lot of space, but I just want to take this down and so I'm just going to go through here use a few shortcuts too, to change my values, but I'll talk about those in a minute, but although that doesn't just take the away from that bright area over there, it's not always about having super dark backgrounds I'm aware of that, but but I want you to start looking for those things ask yourself cropping so anything I can do expose your color is there a bright color that doesn't fit into the image over here? Think of steve mccurry's, afghan girl photograph most famous cover ever one of most famous photographs in the world what's interesting about it is a very, very simple photograph steve strives and I've talked about this to shoot photographs with two or three colors at most go back and look at that picture and see how many colors they're in it the fewer the colors you havin a photograph, the more colorful it appears it's a weird it's, a weird tweak on how we interpret that but it's it's true and what he's doing is by reducing his color power look at his portrait sor book of his portrait she reduces his color palette are still vivid, colorful images not this muted, you know hip kind of thing it's like beautiful rich colors but he's reducing that he's really aware of his edges. He's really aware of what's happening there and I want to took a portrait of stephen a conference was like steve, can I take your portrait and I set him up in a doorway and I was about to take the picture he's like no, no, no this one do any like made me move and he moved and it was this great little lesson and like how to how to change and I think what he was trying to communicate to me then was to simplify I was I was kind of like it steve mccurry, I just want to get the shot ever feel that rush like, oh my gosh, this person going to leave, but the people who are really good in post production and on camera bring the umbrella the surfboard moved suddenly or if they know the lights in the background there thinking yeah that's going to be with my little red circle I'm not worried about the other thing. All right, move on the details you guys fired up? Yeah question I've got a question about skin tones since we're talking about that and this is from lori how do you check to make sure your skin tones are correct? Are you just eyeballing it? Yeah, great question so I mean, I think that would be a phenomenal course, you know, because it is sort of that involved but long a short of it using having some sort of a device which gives you something to go against helps monitor calibration helps and then they're all are also some strategies and there's tutorials out there if you look at him but on seeing my k values for skin tones so so looking at ratios of percentages from science magenta to yellow so there's times where that's important and maybe if I were to give one tip because this course isn't really about all that I would say is digital capture reg the red channel over exposes, which is the biggest problems a lot of times bringing down red's if you're in a curve like bringing on your red point or urine hs l or something that can help you get closer to better skin tones
Class Materials
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Ratings and Reviews
Rebecca George
Chris is an amazing teacher -- and he's all about efficiency, which I LOVE. He knows ALL the shortcuts and he's so skilled at smoothly working in repetition as he's teaching, so by the end of the class I found that I had effortlessly learned so many important shortcuts and had shifted my editing into warp speed! Such a great class, as are all his classes
brad in glenwood
Not sure where all the criticism is coming from. It is a good source for a basic workflow to create realistic portrait retouching. Probably not for the advanced Photoshop user, but I consider myself an intermediate and picked up some very good tips that I will consider and definitely add some to my workflow.I think Chris gave some good philosophy for retouching in the short amount of time. If you want a more involved course with more info then I would recommend Lindsay adler's portrait retouching, but even then her course is given over THREE days! In under 1.5 hours for this lecture, did you really expect more for $19-29? By the way if you look in the upper left hand corner of Lightroom it says Adobe PHOTOSHOP Lightroom, so if you want to be technical he was using Photoshop for all of his retouching! Would you have felt better if he was in Camera Raw? It's the same thing!
grrjr
Lots of good information here. I just wish there would have been more of a walkthrough with the main image that is used for this lesson. It would be useful to see how he manipulated the color in the portrait of his friend for a beginner like me. I like the side by side comparison, but would like to know what else was changed in that photo besides getting rid of shine and softening skin.
Student Work
Related Classes
Portrait Photography