Lessons

Lesson Info

Retouching: Workspace Setup

let's start at the beginning we're going we're going to set up late room and photo shop and adobe camera raw to get started on dh I am not exactly going in order by subject matter but instead what I'm going to do is a lot of times bring up a photograph and address tools as they're needed for that photograph so for those of you watching at home you just have to watch the whole thing you know all the tools but we're going to covering like so many different tools and what I want you to know is if you're tuning in at different parts I'm going to show you how to do get rid of color cast in like six different ways or something like that because sometimes it works with one photograph or not another because of the color in the scene or because of the person's skin tone or so really you need as many tools available to you so you can figure out which one's going to work and unfortunately it often comes with trial and error and practice and figuring out which tool is going to be right for what I ...

still end up you know did this selective color work nope okay let's try and who saturation that didn't work so I'm trying to give you as many tools as they can possibly give u s you can solve these problems all right so let's pop over here first head like that wait did that this morning and we're going to get over to that later but I thought you'd like that hipster portrait it actually totally relevant to our class so just just trust me all right so first thing that you want to do is we talked about on day one that you need to make sure your color spaces are consistent throughout and you also want to make sure that the way that you are exporting from adobe camera raw or light room to photo shop is under control meaning you're controlling the color space as well as the bit dad that was the file type and all that so if this is wrong it messes you up so uh first place you want to get this all set is if you're in light room you go to light room and preferences maybe okay like truman president preferences and then you want to go to external editing and external editing is saying when you go ahead and you know he can right click and se edit photo in or you could do photo at it in it's saying when you go ahead and open up a photo that way how should we process this photo because usually just pops up in photo shop without asking you any questions and the questions that should ask you are actually handled here so these air what my settings look like for the way that I've chosen to work it's going to be tous adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight sixteen bit and three hundred dpr three hundred resolution and this is where you would change all those different elements what I do think is interesting since we talked about color space is the first day take a look I know you guys probably can't read it but if you do this take a look at what it says next to the color spaces for example if I say so yes rgb says it's letting you know I started to be color space cannot encompass the full range of colors available within leg room and then when you go to pro photo it says sixteen bit pro photo is recommended choice for the best preserving color details in light room so it is actually telling you that I choose for simplicity's sake I usually choose to go with adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight and that's pretty much all you have to set in light room when it comes to the opening of the file and photoshopped there's not a save button so just in case you're confused it saves it already and then another place that you're going to need to change things would be an export so you go to file export all right so you do have already a couple of built in pre sets that are included right with white room but you can also create your own so it has things like exporting for email exporting to dmg so what I recommend is that you add your own preset that you create a preset for files that you intend to be printed for example because you can change the color space and the bit deaths and the file type for how your lab prefers if you work with a lab and then create another preset here for exporting for files that you intends to edit later in photo shop because otherwise you might not have the right color space and what not so for me well I need to make sure I do is down here where it says image format I would need to be in tip for psd adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight bit death of sixteen bits and then you can save that and you can go ahead and add that as a preset so over on the left hand side if you go down to the bottom where it says ad you can name it whatever you're going to be using it for so get that set up right away so that you don't ever accidentally export file incorrectly you can't go back so if you export it as s rgb and an eight bit and then you open up in photo shop and say oh you know what let me switch it to rgb and six that you can't do that it doesn't have the information to expand okay so make sure you get that set up all right the next place that we need to set things up is going to be in I'm going to grab a raw file here all right so I'm gonna grab a raw file an imminent click and drag it into photo shop and what it's going to do is it's going to open adobe camera raw for me so that is a cr and what you want to change is going to be in the bottom of the dialogue box at the bottom of the menu here so if I click on that blue hyperlink at the bottom I want to make sure that my color space is going to be the same especially if sometimes open in a cr and sometimes open in light room it's going teo mess up your workflow so we want to match it so I'm going to change my color space teo adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight bit depth sixteen bit and I'm all set take a look at this right here open in photo shop as a smart object we're going to touch on that later so when I say okay remember the smart object saying this is what I'm talking about so I can hit okay and now we'll open correctly in photo shop let me just open it up and I will talk about settings in photo shop okay so many many of you probably seen the error that you get sometimes when you open a file and it says this is not the correct color space I never quite knew what that meant and asked you what you want to dio and so what it's asking you is it saying ok the color space of the file you're opening doesn't match the color space that you told photoshopped to be functioning in so what do you want to do do you want to leave that file alone and just work and photo shop and things might not quite line up correctly or should we convert it to how photo shop is set up for you you just want to make them match so if you could get it set up correctly so it's over here it's under edit color settings when I go into color settings this is where I choose my color space and so whatever you're doing just try to keep a consistent so here for me it's adobe rgb nineteen ninety eight I'm already set up which is why when I opened that file as a zanardi b file it didn't give me an error if I opened it up said his pro photo I would get an error at that point okay so that's a pretty good place to start their um I did mention this briefly we're not going to jump in it too much but you in the first day I talked about something called soft proofing and it was ability to see how file would look when converted or when you went ahead and printed that file you could preview it for a specific printer on a specific paper source we're not going to get into that but just so you know where it exists if you go into photo shop on the far right where you go to view and then proof set up and click on custom what it does is it brings up this dialog box and when it says device to simulate that's where you would have what's called an I c c color profile installed so I could take a look and every single paper that I print on maybe I have haven't absence seventy six hundred that's like really really old but that's what I had and every paper that every single paper that I would purchase and go ahead and download that profile because then I can select it here so this is an absent metallic photo luster paper that I can preview I also mentioned the rendering intent so what do we do with colors that we can't handle that don't fit into the color space of this paper and I mentioned his perceptual and relative cola metric so there is a difference in the way that they function there's no right or wrong it's what everyone looks better so you just kind of got a test to figure it out but anyway when I hit this and hit okay it's not actually showing me what it looks like on the paper yet I have to actually turn that function on so you have to make sure you have this button proof colors turned on to see if there's a change this is pretty good because with that paper there was basically no change which means I'm going to be able to cover the entire tonal range and all of the color range off that file on the paper that I've chosen and metallic papers and lester papers do a really good job with color versus matt struggles with showing vibrant colors so you I kind of might make a choice on paper then based on the type of image that you're shooting something else that you want to check a cz well is I don't have in this image but if you click the gamut warning there's no nothing out of gamut here what you'll see is it'll highlight in gray any colors that cannot be printed at all by this paper and printer combination so it'll it'll flat out tell you you know maybe the bright colored shirt that person has on that's not going to print even close because of the paper and printer combination so then you could make some changes in saturation or just say that's ok the shirt color doesn't matter to me and let it do what it's going to dio so these are the very very basics of just get that right and that'll help a little bit something else that I wanted to address while we're talking about kind of the boring stuff you know the file settings and all that boring stuff to me is saving for web if you're going to be saving for facebook or saving to put it online the problem that many of us run into where things get all messed up and don't look anything close to what we intended is that we're working in adobe rgb we're working with really large files and so maybe we'll save out like you know twenty megabyte rgb file and uploaded to facebook and so we're asking facebook to manage that file but the end result is going to be smaller and it's going to be s rgb so facebook just does whatever it wants and that's why it comes out looking really really crappy so what you have to do is if you were going to be on uploading this to facebook and you know so you want to do something where you save for web so you're actually taking control of what it looks like so you're choosing how much smaller to make the image you choose the conversion to the color space you can create an action to do that you could also create an export preset but just very simply you would go to file save for web all right so let's go teo what I want to do is I want to be able to see the face of the subject so I can see the changes that I'm making as I'm deciding what information to throw out I want to see what the change is that I'm making are actually doing to her face into the image quality so I for my pre set or for my choice I know that I want j peg there's j lo medium and high and that's just has to do with compression smaller you want your if you're trying to have a quick load on a website then maybe you want a smaller file a jpeg small especially if you have a ton of images need them to load quickly versus maybe you have a website where you're going to be able to see the images full screen then you don't want to do a lot of compression on it so for me I'm going to do something with high and I'm gonna put my quality around sixty percent or seventy what this does is it actually cuts the file size like almost in half but it doesn't really degrade the quality as long as you don't go far below sixty this that's me personally I would say tested out yourself seventy's good sixty start to see a change you definitely see a change if you went teo fifty forty thirty so that's why I'm comfortable is around sixty the most important thing you do wanna have checked is this convert to s r g p you definitely want to convert us rgb for web it's going to give you a preview but I can see here I mean they're that's completely acceptable to me and it's not really degrading the quality and so is going to tell me now that I'm going to have a significantly smaller file than I had originally maybe originally I had twenty megabytes now I have one point six three facebook can handle that and so then you simply save it but well you always want to do with it a multiple versions so I have a full rest if or psd saved with all my layers you know rgb sixteen bit then I usually have a full rez j peg that in case I want a printed or just a flattened file to send out two people maybe it's for reference or maybe a client that wants to take a look and then I also export one for web at that time just to make sure I'm giving facebook the best information to display my images so linda just to recap because there was a lot of discussion as you were starting out talking about color spaces and going through all that you work in pro photo or dobie rgb and then when you're exporting then you change it to the kgb if yes so you're saving for the web receiving for the web then you change it for us rgb at the end people like you definitely the next thing we talked about on day one that you definitely want to do is well is monitor calibration that something that you would want to do before doing any editing the one that I have here is the spider for elite and all I need to do is just set it on my monitor plug it in and the program runs and it takes about three minutes and it'll flash up different colored swatches it's going to look at it it's going to reference with those swatches should look like the actual killer I'm supposed to see and then it gives the profile to the monitor and corrects it so this is something some people are asking me online how much they are the one I have here is by data color the other one that I have is by x ray it's called color monkey display and you can get both of them these systems for under two hundred dollars but the question that I was getting online that someone message to me about was what do you get for the more expensive packages because there's a couple that are well over a thousand dollars when you get the higher and packages it's giving you things called like a there's a color spectrometer so actually reads the color of light which is going to allow you to profile different devices and you can profile scanners and you can profile and create your own sissy profiles for your printer and paper and you can do the same thing with projectors so the higher and you go you get it's more accurate but you also get just the ability to take the uh color management through every single device that you have for the way that I work that's not insanely necessary what I usually do is I make sure that my camera student crook white balance I monitor I uh calibrate my monitor and then I know what my lab requires for a file that's how I personally work so my question was about whenever you shooting fashion or clothing line do you not use the color monkey that lets you select the color of the fabric that you're using and make us watch out of that so I don't do that but what I do so this isn't an awesome leading okay what ideo is instead I shoot the color checker and I want to show you real quick why it would matter and so this is our portrait our portrait this morning okay uh so something like this so we posed outside of the creative live offices and we're shooting and it was early morning so it's like a little after seven so this is not even high noon harsh light we were shooting in direct sunlight and I've got my bright blue shirt on and we've got you know the interesting color chair and a lot of times if you're photographing in direct sunlight with bright colors your camera's not actually capturing what those colors truly look like so here's what you d'oh in that lighting situation you take a picture of the color checker it has to be in that light and he's facing towards the light that is the main light on the subject and that's what we were doing and so if you take a look you have to shoot it right side up with the people's faces correctly or this won't work on guy spent a ton of time having no idea why the plugin wasn't working and it's because it was upside down so you can't just give your subject the color checkers they hold this because invariably it's the wrong way that being said this is me in the morning I wouldn't upside down so that we had to go shoot again happens anyway so this is in the correct the correct lighting situation and it doesn't have to be your subject holding that it's just as long as it's the same laying conditions so we're going to go teo file export and this exists both for data color and for x ray so either one of those systems if you buy their checker they have a plug in for light room or that has they also both have a standalone software and what it's going to get you to do is you go online you can download this plug in the plug in's free and it'll look something like this so that when I'm using right now is the x ray passport color checker and what it's going to do is it's going to search that file and look for that pattern and already knows what to look for and so technically if you know that you shoot in the same lighting situation like maybe there's a church you shoot in all the time shoot weddings there all the time or maybe an event space or something you can actually shoot your color checker once and as long as that lighting is staying the same it's consistent conditions you could just keep coming back and using the same profile over and over again so if you're shooting a lot of the same things you could do that here some people that are very concerned with color would actually make a different profile for every different lighting situation and also for different lenses because different lenses will actually show color differently this would be more important or I would be more noticeable if maybe we're both shooting at the same wedding and you have a nikon system and I have a cannon system and you have a newer camera I have an older camera and using different lenses and they were trying to make those images match so if we shoot ah profile with each one of our cameras then we can kind of get the color to look the same so let me just say this I'm going to call this hipster sunrise that's not what you'd really want you really want to call it like cannon five d three sunlight seven a m and you put the lens is a seventy two hundred when you can name it as long as you want um forever conditions I'm just gonna call it hipster sunrise okay uh maybe I wasn't selected on the file straight again export all right so I export and all it does is it thinks for a second and it can take it can take a couple minutes but something else you want is to not have the color check or too small in the frame if it's really really small it also won't be able to detect it so it had no problem with this this is fine but you just don't want to be tiny in the frame it can't really read this watches so take maybe another minute more and it says the color checker the profile has been generated lightyear must be restarted to activate the profile that part's a little annoying it's a huge deal eso we're going tow close late room where we started this is the important part of the confusing part do you like this really cute here thie important part is where the heck did you find this profile this color profile is not technically a white balance it's actually correctly representing the colors in the scene for that particular lighting situation and it matters more for people like me who were photographing fashion but would also be if your subject wearing a bright red dress in the middle of the day and that color is just crazy you would want to use this so we're going to find it is in the developed module which is basically what you're making all your changes to exposure and light room and things like that and at the very very bottom there's something called camera calibration and there's a standard profile that is usually applied to all your files but what we just did is he made a custom profile for this camera and this lens and this lighting situation so now I can select that so the one what I call it hipster sunrise okay so when I click that take watch my dress you see it and show it one more time so in this scene there wasn't anything too crazy probably would have been more dramatic a little bit more middle of the day but the color of my dress those shift so this is why if you photographing products or maybe you're photographing a subject with a car and the car is supposed to look the right color or something like that you definitely want to use the color checker profile for light room any questions on that one yeah there was questions of people have been asking about editing on your laptop and jewels and said I've heard that you should never edit on the laptop are you doing that just wants to know if you're doing that just because we're on credit live or would you yeah so so one of the things that when it when it plugged this in okay when I run my monitor calibration at the very end of the cycle once it's all created the monitor profile it actually shows me what colors I have the ability to work with on this monitor and it was about srg b which is pretty is pretty narrow and so if I'm trying to print to sign that khun cold more than men s rgb or if I want more flexibility and seeing color if I'm shooting an rgb and want to be able to actually see the colors on my screen the screen can't do it so that's one of the limitations of most laptop screens they're usually not going to be the highest and so you would want to go ahead and add it not on a laptop but instead on an external monitor if you do it right there's a couple ways you have to do this you can actually use a monitor and your laptop we just have to make sure it's hooked up right so that it knows which color profile to be looking at so like my friend eric they taught creative live with him he doesn't have a desktop or he might now he didn't when we were doing the book he just had a laptop and what he would do is it would all of his work would run off the laptop but when he was editing it was hooked up to a separate monitor so that he could get true color so that was definitely something you could do especially if you don't want to have to buy a separate computer maybe you'd just like to work with a laptop system and don't want to buy something else you can hook it up so that it will show you better color just a follow up if you're on the go travelling and you have a lot of work to do which is something that you probably have to deal with you need to edit on your laptop then you can you go home and double check that somehow on your monitor yeah and what would I usually dio is so I use photo shelter photo shelter is how I manage on my files which it is awesome I actually just made the change like maybe six months ago and the reason I'm saying this is because well photo shelter lets me do is it host my website but on the back end its file management so I can upload all of my chutes and then create private galleries with passwords that maybe allow you with this password to download small j pegs but you with another password to download the full rez original files so what sometimes I'll do if it's on the go I just want to make sure the color looked okay I'll upload it there and then either have someone back at the house or the office or somebody else just bring it up on a better monitor and say yep everything was good and it's just a double check before I send these out toe a magazine or client that there wasn't something I was missing along the way so I just wanted your opinion because like light room see adobe cc that should release the light room at four apple or the I pen and now they're talking about the release of the the photo shop app for for the touch screen caps or the mobile devices do you edit on your ipad or your mobile device so I personally do not do that I actually don't know enough information about the quality of them yet but I wouldn't do it anyway I would I would probably using thie ipad or things for would be proofing with clients in the studio so that it's coming up on their on their ipad so that they can see what's going on but that's not the end all be all it would be on a much higher and monitor for them to be able to do that but if the technology is good enough I'm not averse to it long as it's it's pretty decent I would definitely use it for calling like going through images and narrowing it down that I would have no problem with it because they've always got the history ram to make sure I'm not clipping highlights and shadows one from a photo maker who was wondering when when you do that save for web step it doesn't matter if we select optimized or highly optimized or bye cubic sharper yes so I usually just do optimized itjust processes that a little bit differently that's just the one that I've always been told so I don't know enough about the other settings but optimizes the one that I typically utilize sounds great and one more just last one huh when you use that when you create that custom profile where does that exist is that in camera raws that in light room is it in a photo shop who is it a standalone file so it is read by light room but it does create a file that you could use with a standalone program and it actually is a little separate profile but everyone else everyone for all intents and purposes will be accessing it they're like the easiest way to do it