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Lesson Info

Detailed Retouching

Welcome back. We're this is kind of where we left off. We're working on brightening up this this photo bernard here, and we before, before our lunch break, we were looking at the difference between using that red channel luminosity to lighten the skin or just cranking a curve over the whole thing. We were getting pretty good result with a curve. One of the big differences is that this curve, now being applied in luminosity mode, is brightening up everything globally. So it's also brightening up the the blue shirt and thie red channel in benassi trick is more selective. It's actually on lee working on the skin. So this has a lot of implications when you don't want to alter all the other tones, and you can avoid doing some masking in this case by using this this approach so let's, kind of look at this. Examine that that channel mixer thing again, um, gonna go into the channel mixer? Remember how I said, normally we would like the total to equal one hundred. Well, now I've got this channe...

l mixer in place in luminosity mode, and if I push the brightness of the red channel, uh, I could go past one hundred, right, and get, you know, more of a brighton in effect, and I'm I'm working. I'm brightening the skin faster than I'm brightening. Anything else? Ok. So the big problem here now I met one, you know? One. Thirty three percent, and I've already blown out my highlights here. Well, this is where we can subtract the blue channel. Because the blue channel bright, the things that are really bright in the blue channel are just the highlights. He's, mostly dark everywhere else. In fact, let me only just close this now, we'll look at the channels because really, examining the differences between the grayscale channels can help you a lot deciding what you want to do. So if I look at the red channel, uh, my highlight is probably pretty much the same brightness in all three channels. I go to the green challenge. See, the highlight hasn't changed in brightness, but the skin is getting darker, and in the blue channel, the highlight is the same, but the skin is, like, really dark here, it's almost black. Just some of the the lighter highlights on the face or showing up, and the sweater is a lot brighter. Ok, so knowing these differences, we can play around with how the channel mixer is blend is constructed in a way to kind of target different areas in the image, so turning this back on, I've I've brightened the red channel and brought the level of skin way up but I've blown out that highlight let's go back into the channel mixer and subtract blue so I can subtract blue to bring that highlight back down to where it wass so you see if I have subtract almost the same amount of blue uh I'm bringing this highlight back down but I haven't altered the skin that much I've softened the contrast a little bit taken out some of the shine on the skin but not as much as uh bringing that highlight back into range where I want it so I still have quite a bit of bright ning here and most of the action is happening in the skin I have darkened the sweaters a little bit with this move but now compare what we've done with this to what happens if we brighten up everything see how the background the sweater everything gains brightness all it globally over the whole thing but here are brightness is sort of targeted it's just the skin in fact everything else is kept very subdued so it's I'm actually getting kind of targeted control over the values of the skin using this technique you might say well but I like I like the brighter blue sweater uh and we can we can achieve something very similar um with another adjustment with another channel mixer adjustment so now let's look at where the yeah image lives right now after this channel mixer adjustment the chance of the individual grayscale channels going different so are red channel is brighter uh green channel blue channel I still have quite a bit of brightness even though I have darkened it um with the last channel mixer adjustment this blue is a lot brighter in the blue channel makes sense right that's where we're getting the blue color from the brighter blue so uh we can do something kind of interesting here we can put another channel mixer adjustment on it and this time in our preset instead of using you know the red filter orange will use the blue black and white with blue filter which gives us one hundred percent of the blue channel apply that in luminosity mode okay now just ignoring what's happened in the face I'm really brightening up that blew that blue sweater but I don't have to use this channel mixer adjustment over the whole image because it's a layer so like him I could play with it I'm going to invert the mask of this layer so I'm gonna turn the mask black so I'm just gonna do command I now have a black leather mask and I've hid that adjustment from everything so this is where I can get into like painting with light so we're going to paint with light in photoshopped layer here it's the blue sweater is a lot lighter in this channel mixer adjustment so I'm just going to take and emphasize that rim light by painting like that and we can do the same thing here it's really not affecting the background because the background is the same brightness in the blue channel it's neutral back here are numbers thirty five, thirty four, thirty three pretty close to neutral I'm going to put a final curve on the end when we're done kind of adjusting the tonal relationships to set my black point my white point all that kind of stuff but really that since this is neutral it's the same in all three channels so I can paint right over it and it's the same brightness in the blue channel all I'm doing is is painting a rim light on here pretty cool like the brush a little smaller so this lighting is in the image. I'm not kind of forcing that rim light uh, the shape of that rim light is still in the blue channel, right? So it's a different than just globally brightening up everything and then trying to paint it in right and I can be sloppy I campaign on the background and it still works so let's talk about on off, okay, pretty cool and this is before, uh, we have discovered that we could ask him to take his watch off, so, uh you know I can brighten up the watch you know since it's blue will just add a little brightness there um ok any questions on this there's probably something going on which way do you have a comment from our essay that says omg you couldn't do that uh yes yes you could do all kinds of things um okay so we're good to move move ahead all right so let's see what else uh what might I do here um you know, I was really looking to see if there was anything I really needed to retouch and this guy's got just such an amazing face I think that it's hardly worth it I even like this little scar over his eye I'd leave that there and that this brings up a point you've got to be careful that you don't remove personality traits you know from people so that little scar maybe important you know, little kind of feature even though we might consider that a defect he made be proud of that scar so you know you got to be careful about just removing things without consulting or without um checking that out um we can brighten his eyes and in this case I think probably the easiest thing to do is put a little curve on there so I'm gonna make a little curve adjustment and really I'm not worried about that speculate highlight but I do like to keep some contrast in and so I'm gonna brightened by moving the white point and I'm just looking at the eyes I don't want to go too far but moving making the curve like this is going to ensure that their local contrast it's his contrast is it can be so it it maintains that sense of deep black eye against the white people that kind of contrast again I don't want to use it over everything I'm going to invert that mask so command I and I've inverted this the layer mask to black and now we'll just we'll just paint in with white to bring up that brightness of those eyes ok just a little bit just enough to kind of put some sparkle back okay, so the the other thing that I've I'm kind of noticing uh right now is because we we have sort of applied all this bright ning moving in this part of the of the subject and we we masked off all this adjustment on this arm for some reason this arm looks to me like it has more color it's more saturated on this after we've brighten it up with luminosity it's looking a little less colorful than the arm is and I'd liketo kind of equalized those a little bit um and in this case probably the easiest thing to do would be to bring in uh hugh saturation justo bright saturate the red color of the skin um and so I will do that I'm gonna make a huge saturation adjustment actually do it over here so quick on his saturation over here created who saturation I'm going to do anything yet first because I want to get the mask in place so I'm going toe back in this layer here was where we did the channel mixer adjustment to brighton, the skin right this channel mixer and it has a mask in it that masked off that arm, so rather than having to repaint the mask, I'm just going to copy this mask into that into the end of that mask. So uh I think I could do this directly to spite dragging it yes replaced the layer mask so I hold on option and dragged from one mask onto the other layer mask and then I'm I can replace that layer mask with this one and I'm going to invert the mask actually, no, I'm not going to invert the because I want to apply the saturation move on everything but this arm so it's already massed off here and now I can go in and add just enough in the reds to kind of get the skin color toe be the same or similar, so I'm just ok just just that much is probably good subtle I think looks better with just a little more saturation and and now for my final edit in the in the image going to put the curve on and we're going to set our white point on black point. Uh, no riel white point in this image I can't use the side of his face is a white point, but we're definitely gonna have a deep black somewhere, probably down in here. So let's let's do that first, so reviewing from yesterday how we find the darkest tone in the image and and we're certainly know where it is you use that little threshold adjustment trick, so I put that threshold adjustment layer on it and I'm going to move the slider to the left and the last thing that winks out before everything goes white, we could kind of see here um, probably down here, well, shadow thing, um, I will get my, uh uh, color sampler tool and click right down there on place it on top of that shadow and I know that I'm not I don't really have a white pointed him, so I'm not going to even bother setting the white point. So my one sample point is showing me the black and it's it's not bad in terms of neutrality, but it's a little low after all we've done all these, uh, these moves with the channel mixer and stuff um it's always good to kind of do your last minute tweaks with a curve especially white point in black point at the end, so we're gonna put a curve on there and that black points too low s all start by just raising everything until that red channel uh, numbers at fifteen and then we'll just go in and put our other channels, so we get fifteen, fifteen, fifteen okay, talking this on and off on and it's, you can you can see it, you know? But this this will print with a little more smoothness, and we'll be able to see into the shadows a little bit better with that final adjustment than where we were here. So okay, so I would consider this now pretty much done. The only other thing would would be to check the color of the skin on dh as expected, it's not it's really pretty good with the darker skin you're sayin number will be higher. So looking up over here looking at those numbers twenty five, forty seven, fifty one so magenta and yellow again closer to each other and with african american skin it's better if they're closer, you get the magenta hires, I'm not looking really for a ten percent spread here, I'm totally fine with it, with that magenta being much closer here and the science value is going to be high um but uh at about fifty percent that's probably that's plenty high on its zx low enough that we're getting some good color in the skin if their science came up too high the skin would get kind of de saturated as well yeah about um does that curry into even darker skin I would say as the skin gets darker your magenta value is going to come up so probably if we look on the shadow side of his face everything is darker overall sometimes I find like the shadows naturally get a little redder in this case it's pretty much the same ratio but if it was if this tone was like a darker skin it was you'll see in the the other shots wait where he's more lit uh way can get a darker look out of the skin and still have you know uh enough ledge ability and features you know here you know half of this face is in shadow I don't want to let go you know too dark but yeah I'd say as the skin gets darker see here this part of the face um we're jumping around a bit much let's see yeah you know right here it's only four percent difference between magenta yellow fifty four fifty eight so it's still a little bit more yellow than magenta when it's really really dark I can accept equal magenta yellow but no never more magenta than yellow good religious looks to read okay, I have our requests from the studio or from the chat room or gary is from a studio's co uk who asked could lead please show how he would get more separation between the bottom hand on the guy's throat more separation between this hand yeah and his throughout his throat you know we like that uh darkening this area I I'm not I'm not sure he means gland in this lit part of the neck there is some tonal merger they're right that that's kind of maybe what we would concern ourselves with. Okay. Uh well, this is a pretty small area and that I think is a retouching kind of issue um there's nothing in the channels that's going to separate these two so that I don't have any slick channel trick here what I would do probably is just build a mask so let me go ahead and do I look at it it's something like this and let there's no trick way to select along that edge because it is it's literally the same value as the neck we can just barely see an edge there. So when I when I know I have a smooth edge like this that I need to delineate I mean he's the penn tools so I'll start using the pendulum put a place my first point and then as I move along with the pendulum on clicking and dragging out these sort of control handles to get a curve that follows the contras and unjust almost I have to almost guess where the edge of this hand so I'm gonna go ahead and kind of finish this out back up into here okay and we're going toe we're going to be dark and in this area probably just with a curve would be good enough so I'm just gonna kind of make a path that that outlines this whole area okay and uh I'll stick a curve on here that darkens let's see just just dark in this area something like that now it it made a vector mask for me I'm gonna throw that away since I had I had a curve in there to begin with let's go back and re select that now uh I'm going to add now since I threw away the vector mask I have no layer mask with this curve so I'm gonna put a layer mask in there uh just by clicking on the layer mask icon and I'm going to invert that layer mask so that is black okay I've hidden the darkening effect now this path which is really they're just for this edge I'm going to turn that into a selection so make a selection I'm I'll guess on a radius here maybe well maybe too because that is that's a sharp edge there so two pixels whenever I have a selection, that's got a feather on. I'm not quite sure how soft is that edge I'd like to visualize I'm going go to the quick mask mode just to kind of make sure all right, I think that this is sort of believable softness for that edge, so I just I just wanted to double check it. Now I'm going to paint into this area, which is going to darken just inside this election, I've got the layer mask, which is hiding the adjustment. This adjustment is actually darkening the whole thing, but I don't I only wanted to dark in this little area here, so I've made a selection using the path to or I get a nice smooth line here along the edge of the hand, and I'm going to now just sort of feather in gonna blow in with some of brush here, I'm going to paint into the layer mask, I make sure it's selected, I'm gonna paint with white big old, soft brush here on we're going to use a low opacity, so I'll bring my capacity way down so that I can gradually feather it in. Uh, I'm just going to keep brushing in here until I think I've got enough darkness and I'm kind of staying away from the rest. The edges of the selection, because I really only want that separation behind the hand there. Ok, now I'll just drop that that's election we could see tugging this on and off, okay, so, yeah, thank you, a studio says that you answer this question and thank you so much, all right, very good, so I hope that made made sense there. That's actually was a good call, but I think that really, that helps it brings the hand forward. That was a good call.