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Retouching: Mixed Lighting

let's talk about smart objects and why you might want to use smart objects way back when I did nature photography like when I first started that's what I did I photographed like landscapes and like bugs and mushroom now it's a little bit different but what I would do is I would photograph you know that like I said that that lake with the beautiful sunset behind it but in my digital image the sky was way too bright and the foreground was way too dark and this was before hdr or like the very beginning where it didn't work so well so what the solution was as we would double process things we'd open up one image with a sky looks perfect and another image with the trees in the foreground looked perfect and just kind of blend them together so I can do that here is well to do this I am going teo hit photo edit in open as smart object in photo shop what a smart object is it's basically giving me this file as a rot image so I can make any changes I want whenever I long which is really cool so t...

o take a look at what that comes into how that plays into this ceo has that little icon in the bottom right hand corner there if I double click it opens up adobe camera raw for me so I can keep making changes to exposure and adjustments um weight balance anything that I want in this instance what I might say is all right let's do one exposure for her face maybe maybe they're ok but now what I can d'oh is I can make another layer that's a smart object and now just exposed for her dress and it can combine the two of them what you need to be careful of this is the mistake that I would always forget is you can't just duplicate this smart object if I just duplicate it and I make a change it changes the other one as well you have to duplicate by right clicking and say new smart object via copy now I can make changes to them independently of one another so if I click on that cobbler I could go in here zoom in and making exposure and contrast based on the dress save some of those highlights there whatever you want to do something like that and I can hit okay so now I have the dress looking great what we're gonna do is we're going to add a lair mask and so we're going to add a lair mask and that's by hitting the rectangle the circle next to it hitting that and I'm gonna actually put a black mask so I'm gonna hold the altar option key it's gonna actually just hide that hole there but now since there's such contrast it's actually really easy to make a selection and I could use like my quick selection tool there are defined edges so I could quickly just can't trace around this dress I might do a little bit of refining but you'll see really quick really easy could make that selection now if I click on the mask and I paint white now the dress comes back in and so that is what I would do if I have some part of the frame extremely overexposed and then I can look at that and say okay I think the dress looks a little gray and I think I went a little bit too far doesn't look like a wedding dress anymore that's fine I can double click again and I can back off of health how underexposed I went maybe uh maybe brighten it up a little bit too there and it will update it will hold the same mask and everything and now to look more natural and I'm able to bring that detail back in the dress but this is great for like drastically different situations and also when there are two people in the same photograph that need different adjustments because what my mind used to go to so I opened up in photo shop just regular and then fix it there the problem is is once it's opened up in photo shop you had to make a decision and you made it into a tip for example or a psd no longer raw file so you don't have all that information to work with you can't pull down the highlights as much or bring up the shadows or let's say you have two people on a picture ones in tungsten light tungsten light and the other one's in daylight if I brought that up in photo shop and tried to tweak it I'm stretching a lot more with that information and it's going to be a lot more difficult teo achieve with smart objects I can go ahead and with one version of it I could make it tungsten balance and then the other version it could make it daylight balanced and then I can just mask and put the two of them together so smart objects anytime there are things in your scene that don't match think I should do smart objects that'll help you out eh so that would be exposure white balance color anything like that contrast you can use smart objects the thing that you want to know is that since you are working with a raw file you can't actually modify it like you would think like you can't you can't re touch on it like if I go in here and I say okay well let's um let's re touch those highlights on her face if you look I have a big you can't do this sign is telling me that I'm not going to be able to do it I can't sample because it's a raw image you can't change those pixels so you have two choices one thing I can do is I can create a new layer and I can use current and below and now I can clone now it gives me the ability to and it puts those changes into a layer above them so it's not actually changing the file so it's above it and I can make all my changes is the other thing that you can do is when you are for sure pleased with the changes you've made you can do your command option shift e take it all squish it down put into a top player and it will still hold those two smart objects on the bottom but now you can actually make the changes like liquefy and spot healing and all that that would have been difficult to do this way so any extremes that you want to fix try smart objects it gives you a lot more latitude okay just a clarification from katherine how did you update smart object was that the last time that you just said how I updated it is all I have to do is pick which image I want to update and if you double click on the icon on his own layer by double click on it it clicked on the wrong part for double click on it it brings up adobe camera raw and then you can make changes unfortunately it's not exactly in real time so I get a hit okay and take a look and see how it did but I can kind of put them side by side and judge if I want to if you don't use light room what you would do is you open up your raw file and then you can click here on the bottom where you're making your changes the color space and bit death when you click on that this is where I can click open and photo photo shop with a smart object so in case you're not comfortable with using light room all right so similar in concept but not the exact same idea is using virtual copies in photoshopped sorry in light room all right so how light room works is light room is not actually making any changes to your photos in fact your actual files aren't in light room at all later miss simply creating j peg reference that are basically like ingredients that it's a recipe and so you have this recipe for how to make this photo look nice and you can change the recipe a lover but it doesn't actually affect the main image until you open it up in photo shop so you have the ability to do something called creating virtual copies which are just like oh here's another recipe for how we want to see this photo on dso what you khun d'oh is for example in this instance she has mixed light on her what I can dio is I can create two virtual copies one where I have the white balance for the left hand side of the frame the other where have the white balance for the right hand side of the frame so daylight and tungsten and then I can open them up and photo shop and blend them together and what is even better and even more successful when doing this is if you did what I did here I took one reading for the daylight and I took one four tungsten so if you had her face the tungsten light like this and I had her face the daylight light and hold it so what aiken d'oh if they can grab my eyedropper and actually already did it this is what looked like originally and grab my eye dropper select one of those neutral swatches it neutralizes it and that's going to be my judge for how to call their correct that the light part of her in tungsten and then I took a picture of this one same thing this is what it looked like before I hit my neutral swatch and warmed it up a little bit so how that'll play out is I can go ahead and take this photograph of mixed light and if you right click you can make to virtual copies or one of many virtual copies you want I'm gonna go one and two the first one let's say this one I want to be quite balanced for the daylight side so I'm going to select the picture that I white balance for daylight I'm goingto hold shift or control command and I'm gonna click on that photo and then I'm going to sink settings and the only thing I want to think is the white balance so if you watched the before if you watch that before and after lnc we can't do that it warmed it up a little bit all right now let's take a look at doing the exact same thing to the first one but this time we're color cracking for the tungsten side so I grabbed that tungsten photo the one that I color corrected for I'm gonna hold my command key and I'm going to click on that first virtual coffee and I'm gonna sink settings and the only thing I'm goingto have clicked is white balance and now it cools it way way down but now the right hand side of her is correctly white balanced so I have these two photos this one over here the skin tone is correct uh make sure I'm not selected there we got this one the right hand side of her is color corrected and the other the left hand side is color corrected what I would then dio is I would select both of them and if I right click I don't just open them in photo shop actually saved myself a step if you go to edit in there's an option that says open as layers and photo shop so it will actually open them up one on top of the other so now all I have to do is blend it and then there's a bunch of different ways you can blend it and we're going to kind of keep going onto those so we can take a look but just understanding that same concept so I could do the same thing and I could maybe make a selection using the original thing we did that are in the very beginning for getting rid of the readiness in her skin I could maybe make a selection of thie orange side of her body using that and then mask that away or I could try color range and see maybe with color range I can get specific enough to that side of her body and I can keep clicking to add to that maybe something there so I've selected ah lot of that area okay and then I could go ahead and paint white on the cooler so that it shows a little bit higher and start to neutralize that color and I think that's a little bit far so I can back off the a passage e so it's just tweaking and I can start to fix mixed light and that's what I would do on the face something I recommend though is well I definitely would use that if you can the great cards or the color checkers is references if not if you know one was daylight and tungsten you can try to use the presets if he didn't actually get a color checker but I also know that just because the color checker said it's the correct white balance doesn't mean it necessarily looks good on the skin you've got to be a little bit flexible like here if I totally white balance it it looks really great like very very very cool so instead I backed off of one hundred percent corrected and went to seventy percent so some of that warmth is still there so it's not overpowering warmth but it still looks believable we've got a couple questions coming in on the colored checker and how you actually used it in this process we had mr honey who says I thought you white balance the color check with swatch with the notch not the one at the bottom that you chose great question okay on the second row up there the far left is neutral and I could have could have selected that went to neutralize and in each one over warms up the scene but the entire bottom row is neutral swatches as well so I usually if I'm just trying to get white balance select one of those two center swatches and just holding a regular great card would've been fine I don't need to have the color checker but you would see if I ran the color checker on this particular image there isn't tungsten there's definitely going to be a color shift beyond just white balance some of those colors are going to show up a little bit differently so if again if I want accurate color I take this I'd run it through that program on dh then I could create custom profile and you too smart objects are sorry tio virtual copies open up in photo shop is layers and blend them that way so what would the life expectancy be a color checker or the passport so that I know over time they do fade and yeah so I have no idea what they're recommended a policy is I personally I have have two of them and I kind of have one for the road that gets beaten up more and touched by more people and so I replaced that one every year the one of my studio I did haven't replaced this much but if people are touching it a lot and they don't know better it's not gonna last that long but if you're very careful you'll last long time so lindsay phil birdie had asked does it matter which neutral gray we select on the checker and you said the two middle bottom ones yeah it's just there's been a medium neutral okay thanks and just a question for you you said that we could do the same thing in camera raw is that correct yeah so would you be able to demonstrate that for folks or do we have time for this particular one what you literally what you would do is you just have to open up camera raw twice and you have so it's not really any different this it's just easier because I can like match it but so I'm going to skip it just cause it really is the same thing you just open up camera toys process it twice