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Lesson Info

Retouching Product Photos: ­Eliminate Flaws and Enhance Details

Okay so now inside of my chair group which the chairs looking awesome right now what we want to do is we want to go ahead and start retouching our chair so going to create a new layer inside here and we're gonna go ahead and retouch some of these areas now re touching a chair or other object is going to be relatively similar to retouching person's face look at these areas as quote unquote like blemishes what will be similar as it's now if you are if you work for let's say like an auction company and you were going to be selling this chair and you wanted to show the chair and it's real condition just live very well so it looks nice and fancy expensive but you want to show what it actually looks like you probably should not be going about and getting rid of all this stuff because we're not in that setting right now we're teaching how to do product photography retouching we are going to go through and fix a lot of this stuff so we're going to do this here but just keep in mind that this i...

s not always the right answer sometimes this is uh well I guess I would just be false representation your product so been thinking like the you know big macs that you see like in the ads and then like you get one in real life there's a lot of retouching going on so what we're doing here is I'm using the healing brush tool basically to sample areas and then paint over top of very similar areas, so if I want to get rid of these blemishes, I'm gonna sample where there are no blemishes and then paint right over top all right? So really, really similar to how I would be retouching skin now with products you can go as perfect as you want most of the time more perfect the better you know, clients will want something they still want things that look realistic, but they'll you know, every single little flaw in the if this were going to be on a like a site like herman miller, whatever it was you know, I would say in order to do this retouching job would be at least an hour or two of, like using the healing brush tool and clothes stamp tool to get this perfect. So we're going to show you some of those fundamental techniques down, but keep in mind, you know, I don't have like four hours to get into, like every single little detail but often time in product photography that's that's what a client will request they really want things to be absolutely perfect, so you'll be using the same tools healing brush cool, you know, to get rid of any any scratches and things like this um, which I'm not sure this you know that because this is a really nice leather on this chair of these scratches actually, maybe that maybe like a bonus sometimes, like, really wear and tear khun b a, you know, that can actually be desired in some products, like like old cars, for instance, like the original paint job is worth a lot more than a, you know, a new paint job, even if the original paint job isn't as nice as the new paint job, so keep that sort of thing in mind to sometimes these little defects can actually make things look a little bit nicer and add value because they're real okay now, when I'm using the healing brush tool any time that I'm inside of an area like this, I'm basically I have a lot of area to cover any type of blending that I need to do, but anytime I get toward an edge, if I'm going to use the healing brush tool in trying to paint over this edge, it's going to try to blend everything together when I let go so I don't want to use a healing ritual anytime I'm close to any of these edges, what I'm going to be using instead is the clone stamp tool, so we hit s for the clone stem tool. And I've got this really cool trick where we can actually see a preview of what we're going to be close stamping and you can get to that by going toe window down here to clone source and I can click this on or off, which is a show over late so without that show over lake, we can't see what we're doing with the show overly we can see what we're doing we're going to sample this and just paint right up there to the edge and if I need a sample right here I have a copy of my edge that I can just paint all the way up to there, all right? Perfect how's everyone doing so far? Yeah, yeah good, I like the energy in here yeah question is that the only time you switch between the the clone stamp and the when I'm hearing they're still pretty much pretty much the healing russia was so nice because it takes the color from wherever you paint in the texture from wherever you've sample so you really don't have to think like in this case I can just click there and it'll blended for me, but if I were to use the clone stem tool, it would probably you can see that it that little patch is slightly off as far as the color is concerned because it doesn't blend the things together not to mention if you you know, if you did have an area that you wanted to sample let's say I wanted to sample this area here, I could paint this area here in although they're completely different colors when I let go it's going to blend those colors back together with the clone stamp tool if I sampled in syrian painted there, that's stuck it's just going to look like that forever it's not going to try to blend back together, so because I can have things blend together so easily, I really, really like the healing brush tool. If you don't want to create your own sample point, there is a healing brush tool, these spot healing brush tool, which will choose the sample point for you it works were very well most of the time, I find that being able to choose my own point is a little bit more reliable, but if you're in a hurry and you can use thus the spot healing russia and it worked pretty well most the time yeah, good question, yeah, and then maybe just as you're working some kind of simple shin's first wal k brown photo, what penn and tablet are you using? And do you recommend yeah, I am using the welcome into owes pro small I love this tablet, it's wireless right now, I'm actually working wirelessly. I could pick this tablet up and, like there's, there's nothing attached there. No batteries in this pen. It's totally magnetic. Um, I've got a little usb receiver here on my laptop and the wireless. I was a little bit skeptical, to be honest, how well the wireless would actually work sometimes those things to cut out on you on dh when you're working on a tablet, you you wanted to be reliable. But it's it's actually been very reliable. I've been really impressed with it. There's no, like lleyton. See, it doesn't feel like there's. A difference between I've used a wired tablet for, you know, over five or six years. And this wireless, it performs justice. Well, it's very, very good that's. Very impressive. Yeah. It's. Very good. Um, yeah, and I actually prefer this small size. A lot of people. When they first go for a walk in tablet, they'll go a little bit larger. And I find that if you have a large tablet, you kind of have to move your hands so much to get anything done. And I actually this is kind of funny because you, khun you can enable or disabled part of your tablet, so if you look at the screen my top left of my tablet is right there on my screen so that's the top left of my screen you can see it there on the monitor and you couldn't see my hand placement now I was I moved my hand down right over there this is actually the bottom right of my screen so what I've done is I've disabled the majority of my tablet and if you look really closely you can see there's pretty worn right there so the reason I do that and I'll show you guys how to do that in just one second the reason I do that is I can keep my hand in the same place and literally I just do this and I can cover my entire screen so what allows me to work very, very quickly slights like movements right there are going to love what you do all of my retouching so I'm keeping this hand in the same place I'm not doing this and if they sold the tablet there was you know, it's also got touch capabilities if they sold the tablet love you know that was just that large that would totally work for me as well. So I'll show you how to do that because it's it's a really it's a really great way where you can work very quickly so you want to open up your preferences I'm gonna go to my walking tablet here in my mapping I'm going to choose the tablet area by default it set to full it's going to use your entire tablet area, and you can see a little preview of what I've got it set now to it's a portion, so this area equals the screen it's very well designed the interface, so the tablet area you choose portion, and then you can just click here and dragged the actual area you'd like to be visible or usable on the tablet, or you can actually click to define the tablet area like aiken, click and drag here as well. But for now, you khun, you can move this guy around and define where you'd like that to be visible, so everyone's going to have their own preference? I really like the fact that I don't have to move my hand just about at all in order to use my tablet so far, sure, so far, I've only seen that the pentagon being used with architectures or product is still your go to for humans. Good question, ok, anytime you need a very well defined edge, I would say the pen tool is your best bet now when it comes to cutting out hair, especially here like mine, you don't want to use the pencil because the pencil is going to give you a really nice, smooth, hard edges. And that's perfect whenever you're you know, going to be in an architecture photo where you have such hard edges or with a product photo where you need them to be so smooth, you know, cutting out of things like your car would be great if you were cutting out someone's hair or like a cloud or a tree something that has a lot of feathering in a lot of fine detail for the edge you want to use a different tool something like channels that would help you cut those things out a lot better so with people generally what I'll do is I'll do it in two steps I'll use the pen tool for the majority of a person, but when I get to their hair I'm going to be using channels to cut those out so yeah, definitely use the pen tool but not for the entirety of a person just the areas that are salted look, you know, edges of clothing and things like that yeah, andi again it will take a little bit longer, but in my opinion it's always well worth it. All right, we're going to do is just a little bit more and then I just had a pretty cool idea I want to take some of the texture that's in this chair and apply it on too the background here we go, I think it'll be really cool way had a request from shell bp nine twenty six maybe with one of these flaws won the person also said what if you want to diminish a flawed to make a product look nicer in the photo but not be completely dishonest and pretend it's not there okay my suggestion in diminishing a flaw goes like this let's just find a good flaw that weaken weaken diminish here did too good of a job here we go let's let's go with that guy up there okay, so this one up here it's close to the edge but if I if I use this soft or a small size with my healing brush I think I can I think I can take care of it so we'll sample this area here and we'll go ahead and paint right up there so I would go ahead and take care of that as you would normally take care of it okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to go to it's been a little while there we go we're going to go toe edit and then down here you're going to see fayed healing brush now this is not just fade healing brush this is the fade command which is very cool and photo shop basically what it does is it fades the last thing you did so if you use a brush tool this would not say faith healing brush it would say fayed brush tool so shift command f is going to allow you to fade now. The reason this is great is I'm not adjusting the capacity on the whole layer, okay, I congestions to fade this part, so I used the healing brush, and now I'm able to fade this out and check that out. I've got a real time preview of what it looks like. Not only that, but oftentimes, especially if you're using something like the brush tool you can actually, and I'll show you this in a moment you can change the blending mode of your brush stroke as well, which is very cool, so if you do want to get rid of something but show that it's slightly their faded out and it's only going to affect that last action that you did in that amazing let's, see with a brush to war paint right over their shift command f and you can see I can change the blend mode of my brush stroke as well. If I wanted to go toe, multiply or overlay well, that would actually work a lot better if I was on on a layer, so shift command f there we go, changed it to multiply so you can see even after I painted, I can change the blend mode. Over whatever I painted onto the object and it would just be that broad strokes so it's a very, very useful command and that's a great question thanks for bringing it up all right, very cool so these air the principles at work and you can see we're already looking a lot better let's just look at the before and the after here we've got a lot rid of a lot of our major blemishes okay? So to keep going on this and obviously I'm not going to spend the next hour doing it but it would be a lot of more of that and digging into these fine details the next thing we're going to do is I'm going at it would actually take some of the detail off this chair and we're going to apply it to our background radiant which is going to be very cool all right to do so we're gonna make a new layer and we're going to turn that into a stamp visible so shift option command eat which is basically a copy of everything that I see on my image. Ok, now we're going to make a selection around an area that actually has a nice texture so we're going to select out this area of our chair and I'm gonna get control of command j to duplicate that onto a new they're so basically I've got my texture of the chair now on a new layer I can go ahead and delete that stand visible there all right, everyone pretty clear so far what we've done ok, now we're going to control our command teat and we're going to scale this up a little bit so we've got that texture we're going to bring it down there we go, we're going to bring it down over top of my background all right, there we have so on top let's make sure that it is on top of our red okay, so on top of the red we now have the background now we can use a number of blending most actually get this to blend in with what we've got on our background so just which the lending loans quickly even hit the wiki on my keyboard never hit shift plus and minus on my keyboard and that's been allowed me to just jump through my different bloody was so we can see color dodge that actually looks really cool here we go this is overlay so we can see the texture of the chair visible in the background which also in my opinion adds it adds to the image because it doesn't make it look like it's just done in photoshopped that is actually looks like it's a real texture let's go ahead and make this a little bit larger there we go what do you think about that? I think it's pretty great