Lessons

Lesson Info

Intro Q&A

All right we have so many questions lindsay as always okay so like I got a quick one six you're talking about the portraiture there's old red eye says that he's been using the portrait professional's a standalone program are you familiar with how to make that a plug in and for for a photo shop c s five okay so porter professional how it works is you actually kick the photo back out to that program retouch it there and it kicks back into photo shop so it's not technically a plugging because it's not functioning within photo shop itself it's actually a standalone program which is really nice for example if you have um elements or maybe you don't mess with photo shop it all and you only have light room it works really nice because you don't need photo shop to act as an engine to run it so it can be totally stand alone great thanks for clarifying a question from thomas lindsay so after running portraiture on the back did you duplicate the layer with changes to the back and then run the fil...

ter again or was the filter run on a copy of the layer without the changes made okay, so I'll show you the two different ways to cover this and I'll try to put it I'm just gonna get rid of everything so you can see the two ways you can do it isthe if you duplicate your background and you go ahead and run it once let's say in this example I'll run it once for the back okay pump it up run it for the back make the selection of the back if I had okay if I had my transparency mask applied what it does it's on ly creating a lair with those pixels so if I try to run a photo shop again they try to run portraiture again it doesn't have any pixels toe work with if I'm selected on that layer so I do have to go ahead create a duplicate of the background and run a separate one for the highlights because it literally you're working with nothing if you're selected on that I periodically will kind of merged down emerged things down when I know that I like the change because of transparency mask is basically just a visual check for me I'm saying ok did I'm retouch any area to smooth out in areas they didn't want so I'll merge it down but yeah every time you run portraiture you do have to duplicate the background um whatever the most recent layer was if you want and then you can merge it or you can keep it um I try not to merge things that overlaps if let's say for example I smoothed out the eyes like I cleaned up underneath the eyes and then I did a skin softening above it that smooth that on the eyes I don't merge those two together because if I want to step back a little bit, I can but if they're totally separate for example, one was smoothing out the back and another was pimples on the face emerge those because they're not interacting with one another and that's the reason I do that again is to keep file size small doesn't matter if you have a super high tech high end computer put a lot of time I'm on the road and I'm using my laptop on and it can't handle, you know, fifteen, twenty layers especially if you have white room open and bridge and photo shop it just gives up it just was standing there and like I'm done so yes, I will duplicate and apply as necessary emerge down but try not to merge down said it prevents me from backing up in my process so lindsay, you see the transparency mask when you turn the eyes off that are below correct? Okay, because I've been using this program for a while and I've been where is it where's the transparency mask? I can't find it thank you and running out so if I turn off this bottom layer, then I can see it a useful trick that I want to show him kind of stepping ahead of myself is gonna be the next thing that we're gonna cover, but if you hold bolt and click on the very bottom layer of any photo your work walking on if you're working on if you click on the eyeball next to the bottom layer, it turns off everything above it so it's giving you a before and after of the entire thing so remember forever what I would do is click on the top and drag down when you have twenty thirty layers, you have to actually go with the scroll and you can quickly see it so it would be like doing this over and over again so what's going to work better again it's all an option click on the eyeball next to your bottom layer and it will give you of a foreign after what else we have ah, maybe question from a bit earlier when you're doing I think you're doing the cloning and so cagey fella ass eso is it this sort of the same as dodging burn? Or how would you compare that with dodge and burn okay for how I'm going to use dodging burn later is I'm winning his dodge and burn to bring out um, cheekbones and in the john. And so basically what I'll do is that khun dodger burn in order to enhance the highlights on the cheekbones and dark and down the shadows and that'll actually bring them out uh for which was she asking about specifically uh no, I think it was like how to use that, like you were showing earlier with using the clone to lighten and darken. Yeah, and so so it doesn't. So how it works differently with clone is what the clone stamp is doing is it's kind of like cut and paste? Okay, I'm saying it lightly, it's, kind of like cut and paste, and so if I put my clone stamp on light and it will cut and paste pixels, excuse me, but on ly fill it in the dark areas and lighting them up. If I have it on darken, it'll take those pixels, but on ly darkened down the light area, so it actually functions totally different, then dodge and burned because it's cutting and pasting pixels and filling things in versus if you, for example, just one huge dodge and burn under the eyes do just lightning and darkening. You're not cutting and pasting any textures or filling in. You were just lightening up all of the pixels under the eyes, so it functions to lighten, but it lightens as a result of cutting and pasting lighter pixels to fill in. Right? So I guess maybe the question's mohr from the higher level, the effect that you're trying to get. How would you contrast those two when you when you're just trying to the effect that I'm trying to get because if you go ahead and there are some techniques you can do for burnt burning and dodging where you're protecting highlights and shadows that's like another kind of advanced area but if I just burn and dodge underneath the eyes it will lighten or darken everything and so what you get is you get time just a light halo area and then thie texture will generally get if you go darker maybe it'll get more intense I'm trying to get rid of some of that texture trying to fill in the shadows make it be more smooth but still haven't be realistic so you're cutting pixels that fill in the dark areas but it does so in a realistic way versus burning dodge just lightens air darkens it doesn't actually fill in textures especially as a lot of people have texas under the eyes you don't want it tends to be kind of that speckled texture or it tends to be kind of those heavy bags so it leaves it there so it's realistic but fills it in where is burning dodge? Just lighten your darkens thank you way have about eighteen minutes so we have more questions but do you want to keep going on the altar questions? I want to make sure everybody's okay? I'm good page so earlier you showed us actually with this image the uh the I've eins question from shauna was when would you use lightened clone and when would you use d saturation? Okay leyton ok, so light and clone we have to be careful of with the eyes is the biggest issue is when people have a tana veins you start getting rid of what makes eyes glossy and look riel um so if you see that you are going ahead and you're trying to clone and they're just starting to look flat, you're probably better off kind of leaving the veins and then just de saturating out the reds pulling out the red so they're still going to be there but if you're having a lot of trouble kind of cloning them out it's a better bat for you to make it look realistic and I also know notice in some eyes two you get like blue salia blue in this I I don't know somebody out there tell me why you know let's somebody out there sure knows why it sometimes they're blue in the eyes, but what you can do is if you select the eye here I'm going to feather it so I want to give myself a softer edge so you don't see that harsh edge so if I go up tio select, modify and feather give it ten pixel feather so it just softening that edge if I go over to my adjustment layers again, click on my dress miller's I could go to hugh saturation and what I can do is aiken target that area so if I go ahead for example and just de saturate and so where is the saturation? Just pull out the color uh it looks ok, but it looks a little gray, right? So if I'm just trying to get rid of that blue I can actually go into a specific color and de saturate so in this instance I would go appear to master and I can either select blue or science and I usually I don't quite know which one it is that you have to try both often it is both. So if I go to sayin I conducive to saturate that and notice you know this is fully saturated so it did make a difference. I can also go into blues and pulled it out and if I do buy before and after I got rid of kind of that blue haze the same thing works with um if you're looking at the red around the eyes here I can go ahead feather that I mean I just made a selection using the lasso tool so it's over here third tool down it's also shortcut l lasted so long I can feather same thing go to my half moon cookie you saturation and I could go ahead into those reds and pull out a little bit of saturation into the red so five de saturate just a little bit it doesn't make them disappear but it makes them less obnoxious basically and I could go ahead and we've talked about before so I created a mask wherever it's black it's hiding that effect wherever it's white it's showing that effect so I could grab my brush on white and I could also kind of paint introduce some of the reds in the eyes there and I could paint it over here to reduce a little bit of the reds in the eyes so that's I mean that's basically the difference if I'm having trouble just kind of cloning it out and having it look realistic than auntie centric color and then if somebody has really red eyes regardless I'll go ahead and pull out color I wanted you under do one work well my question I yeah let's see a couple of here um let's see? Okay back teo plug in peru asked do you generally do your adjustments in photo shot first and then use the portraiture plug my khan on or off okay okay so beth through ask do you generally do your adjustments in photo shot first then use the portraiture plug in or other instances where you that used the portrait reply gan and then go back to making the adjustments and photoshopped. So tomorrow morning, a little bit I'll talk about my work flow and how kind of the order I do things, but to give you an overview now, uh, I think my image and it'll either be an adobe camera or light room, and I'll get my exposure right and my contrasts and my color so that's where I start, then once I bring it in to photo shop, um I get rid of blemishes, and I do some general cloning, and I will mess with anything specialized color that I have to dio and the kind that latte I have kind of three last steps that I end with, um, portraiture is kind of a third to last step. And then after that, I usually do liquefy because liquefies your actually warping pixels and moving them so it's it's a destructive process, so usually kind of save that till a little later, and then the final thing is any sharpening that I and to do again because it's a destructive process and if you sharpen something and then you try to make changes to it later that sharpen and the degraded pixels become more obvious, so I try to take care of everything cloning and spot healing and, um, changes to the dress or whatever that I need to dio, and then it goes portraiture on dh then it will be liquefied and sharpen so those things kind of come at the end of anything with levels and darkening down and highlights I do first same thing which I will talk about a little bit later again it's painting in those highlights and shadows to pull out the face that would come before portraiture because it changes how it looks. You've lightened up some areas where now maybe you can see detail that you couldn't see before so that's a whole part of the process but what I'll do tomorrow is besides instead of going slowly and talking about different tools I will just do some retouch is and I think we might have the ability to show what keystrokes I'm hitting it might pop up most of what you see is if you all of a sudden see different things being duplicated on the side of my panel I'll tell you when it's part of important part of the process in general it's for teaching I'm trying to show you before and after andi that's what you'll see things kind of disappear not it's not actually because I duplicate every single time and lead it's let me show you before and after um here's the wrong way to do it I showed you I deleted it here's the right way so tomorrow you'll see it's smooth without the wrong way right way before and after since you're doing portraiture after you're doing all here re touches on each layer you compacting the emerging the layers and then running it on so you see you khun okay so of musa teaching where have to repeat the question I don't need sorry okay um oh so the question was basically in another way if she's saying is if you have a lot of different layers below maybe some of them have different capacities for example and so you might not see them all in that change on dso there's a shortcut on the list that I think is what shift if it's on there it's a merge all to a top player just do it naturally on dso what it'll do is emerge everything put it on top layer but it keeps all the layers beneath and then you can apply it to that that's also why it comes kind of at the end is you don't need teo because if you merge everything and flattened and then run it you can't go back and and all that hassle so yeah it's it's better to do it at the end and you can kind of merge things together so I'm going to jump away from portraiture for a second because here's the thing I'm going to be honest every I think it's what two hundred dollars or something for me as a professional I make that back instantly like I absolutely makeup back instantly in the time it saves me especially if I'm not doing a lot of really tight close ups if I'm doing kind of ah whole bunch of middling shots why does seem to smooth out the skin even it up keep the detail I mean it it saved me a ton of time but I hate going to classes or seeing someone speak where they say you need to buy this retouching plug in and buy it because you don't you could do things by hand and you can off typically what hand is better it just takes longer I mean almost always the hand is better it just takes longer so I'm going to show you a couple by hand retouching examples use a couple of couple photos here I'll start first with kind of a more beauty example on how I get that too a perfect skin retouch and then also show a couple normal people examples instead of and she is still normal but you know what I mean highway steal bags they say not normal people with their no people there just really pretty normal people so I'm going to delete all my layers here that's why I'm doing this was the end spot I'm gonna duplicate the bottom so we're going to zoom in and take a look how she was photographed was a beaut dish centered and very high up and so that is why it carved out kind of hurt cheekbones there, all right, and also her jawline. But if you look in her eyes, you can see that it was lit with three pieces of white foam corn. I'll be using this example again or this same lighting again at the end of the day for for the shoot to pieces of foam core on either side of the face and one underneath. So it's one light and three white reflectors and uses all the time for beauty. So anyway, if I look at this photo and kind of break down what I need to dio, um, I would go ahead and do what I said before, go ahead and clean up blemishes, big blemishes that I know that I'm going to need to remove, so maybe that is going to be on the left, my spot healing brush, I can select it and anywhere I click this's a beauty image I'm not worried about if she wanted that mole or not, if it's a portrait I worry about if she wanted that mole or not, go ahead and click through and I get rid of any larger blemishes. And if there's any of them that I see that don't work, for example, click and it made a weird texture. I try a different tool, I try clone, I try the patch tool but I kind of go with whatever is easiest first and then if it doesn't work I'll switch to some things again I'm trying to save time so I'd click around and I'd get rid of any blemishes that air distracting to me. All right, so something like that I also know something that's driving me crazy are these these little wrinkles of the little love veins in the eyes? And so I could clone that out, but I'm pretty sure in this instance, if I tried the spot healing brush or the patch tool, it should get rid of it, so right now I have my spot healing brush and spy only brush when I heard the tool, I thought you could only click to get rid of you can't actually drag I mean it's called spot, so if I click and drag let's, see how it did and it did mo kei so I might go in and switch over to the patch tool so that I could click on the patch tool selected and move it so I'm just I'm trying to make my life easier. I do the tools that are easiest first if not I switch to something else same thing I'll come over here, select the vein in her eye and get rid of it so that was bothering me had to get rid of it was gonna go crazy all right? So looking up here is there anything else I'd want to get rid of? I consume up and I'm looking at the detail in her forehead and that's a lot of work so I'm starting to think to myself what can I do to maybe even that out so what? We're going to get there as well I'm going to use my spot healing for anything that's big still okay clicking and I click around so I would do that I don't think I need to much more than that I've gotten rid of a lot of a lot of the detail that I don't want I'm also checking I can't see any wrinkles on her neck but I look down here and there's a lot of texture I don't like a swell so I'm going to keep that in mind perfect okay, so the next option that I can dio is has anybody ever heard of sharpening or ah skin softening using high pass okay that's something there's a couple different versions and so this is one thing I'm gonna show you another example um sharpening are softening and sharpening using channels we're going to start with the high pass here so I would look at her and I would say okay couple other things I might want to fix is that forehead um I would try to even it out and I think I would use a little bit of clone and so what I'm looking for I'm saying okay, so first of all, it's a little bit bright, so I know I'd want darken it down, but the problem areas are darker, so what I will do is I will clone first to fill in the darker areas and so all kind of like in them up and then I'll go ahead and clone the whole area darker if that makes any sense. So what I'll do so pop over to my clone stamp and I need to use layton because I need to light in those blemish, you know, some people would say, ok, why don't you go in with spot healing? I know for a fact by the way I use this tool that it will have a problem because it's a hot area of high contrast, if you guys have tried to retouch, I'm going to go in here and you'll start to see edges so I know that it's it's a problem already, so I will use my tool on light and click around do lower opacity, click around a little bit and just fill in some of those problem areas, so if you watch, you could do this, you know, just kind of smooth it out for a little bit and so it maintains detail, but it fills in the problem areas no shame before and after so you can kind of see because the detail there but it kind of evened it out a bit and then I can always duplicate that layer if I want the whole thing darker, I could grab clone now on darker and I'm going to grab the pixels from the left hand side of the face and lightly clone them in on the right to get rid of that hot spot for this particular lighting set up if you have a beauty dish here, okay? If you have a beauty this year it's at an angle I'm trying to carve out the cheekbones to the jawline the light is closest to the top of the head to the forehead, so if you use this set up, you will get hot spots on the forehead even if persons faces even slightly sweaty. But regardless if it's especially if it's a caucasian person the lightest part of the face is closest to the beauty dish, you'll have that effect. So a lot of times you do have to fix it in photoshopped makeup artist alas and have them coming with powder try to darken it down a little bit but granted most of time you have to come in here just with dark and just a little bit and just darkened it down this mitch no kind of just darken it down tiny bit okay, so what I'm going to do next and I think we're almost time for a break is I am going to clean up underneath rise and then when we come back after I finish this I'm going to show you skin smoothing skin softening using high pass so let me just fill in her eyes so the same thing we've been talking about over and over again my clone stamp since I'm filling in I'm lightning a dark area I can switch it to lighten I can come in here and watch how it'll keep the textures but it fills in so it still kept that detail without over smoothing it but it made it a little less distracting so I fill in under her eyes same thing front around her face and I love to do the same thing if there's any like really blotchy areas around the skin I just keep it on light and I'll come around and say ok, blotchy area on the skin you know anything that I think is distracting I'll click like for example, right here is a little bit too dark for me I'll click and it will lay in it up how we doing? Good perfect ok make sure nobody has any questions all right? You see my spot healing to get rid of that all right, so what we've done so far is basically decreased that highlight kind of smooth it out and filled in the bags under her eyes a bit and then got rid of major blemishes so the next part that what we're going to dio what I'll do is I'll say the words and then we'll actually go through it in detail so this will be the fast version and they will go through it step by step what you do for the high past is you duplicate the background you invert it and so that's command I oh okay command I looks all funky doesn't make any sense whatsoever you have to flip your blend modes and this is the first time we're gonna talk about blend modes with claire we're gonna flip our blend mode too soft light okay? And none of this makes any sense and so you see it done it doesn't make any sense you duplicate your background, you inverted it, you change it's a soft light you went up to filter other than high pass and like I said, we'll go this in detail later good ten pixels that's just the good starting place and so if you're looking at before and after case is starting to look more like a real photo alright and then you blur that seems like it makes no sense but you'll see in a second is what you just did is you actually blurred pixels and when you blur the blur it makes it sharper like that's, that's what it is. So I'm going to go to filter, blur, goshen, blur and see how the blur it actually came. Sharper watch. I blurt it. If I increase it and do it before or after blurring, the blur makes it sharper. So I'm gonna pick something around here, and then you're using your lair masks and an adjustment there. So we'll go through that step by step, and so I will paint on that blur that we just applied. So that is the quick run through of how the high pass soften works. We're going to go through it, step by step when we come back.