Lessons

Lesson Info

Eliminating the Negatives in ACR

I was talking about eliminating negatives that are in your image will sometimes I need to eliminate the negatives and photo shop here's a simple image this is a picture of part of a neon sign that's what the neon bone yard in las vegas and this isn't what it looked like when it came out of camera let me show you what it looked like when it first came out of the camera take me just a moment to get to that all right this is what it looked like when I shot it that's the raw material waiting for me to meld it here in photo shop in so it's a matter of deciding what's my vision for this image you don't always have one sometimes you just play around and see if you can make it look better but oftentimes I'm trying to just present what I think is most interesting in the image get rid of distraction no and so on so let me see what kind of processing ended up applying just using camera if I cancel this and go back to photoshopped this was my end result from camera what this tells me is I went for...

a very graphic look because I just like the shapes that were there I didn't care if he knew what you were looking at or not I just wanted something interesting I see a tremendous amount of black in the image that tells me that in kamerad there's a slider called blacks and I most likely lowered it a tremendous amount to get a lot of black in the image there's also a tremendous amount of contrast so I most likely increase the contrast slider a tremendous amount but what I want to just talk about is what would I do after that once they get it into photo shop well when I look at this image I look at it and think about what really attracted me to the scene when I picked up the camera and then what is there other than that that somebody else might look at that my brain doesn't care about where didn't notice when I was taking it so what my brain liked about the image was this nice curve coming through the image going all the way up there loved that I didn't mind this little part coming in here but I really don't care for this stuff here I don't care for that stuff there I don't care for this I find those are things that if I could have moved my camera to get rid of them I would have when I was in the field so all I would do here is create a brand new layer and since this stuff is already full of black I would paint with black and just cover those areas up if that was not blackness in those areas instead there was detail I might instead use that feature we used on the panorama a few minutes ago I might select the area just a little bit around the object I wanted to get rid of and I would have chose content aware phil let's see it will probably do find right now in this image I could just make a selection with lasso tool like this and it let's see phil isn't available that's because this is a special layer it's what's called a smart object we haven't really talked much about smart objects but I'm going to get rid of it just make it is if I just open this from camera that's what it would usually be like now let's try phil content aware see it figures it out and come up here phil content aware but sometimes it will think that should look like a piece of neon because that's what's in the surroundings like right here if I get this to come in and get it careful right where it touches it might eventually get confused and puts me on in there but this is the technique that I would use if this was an image that did not contain black in those spots it would've figured out from the surroundings what it thinks should go in there if that particular piece wasn't there well that's what I do with a lot of different images and I want to show you how I might go through and optimize a few images show you a few techniques and photoshopped that I find to be overly useful so first I'm gonna optimize the raw file because that's where all my images start if you ever seen the open an image in not open it through camera it probably means have already adjusted it with camera eye for the most part never ignore camera rock because this is where I can usually get the highest quality out of anything because they could get all the way back to the original data my camera captured so what I'm going to do in this particular image is I'm just going to make it a little bit more colorful you by bringing up vibrance see if I could get the color of their robes to come out you see when I bring this up it's getting more colorful in the robes I might also decide to make it look just a little bit warmer see if I get some warmth in their face so if I bring up that just a little bit my temperature slider all right and maybe try contrast and clarity of c what it ends up doing tow our image but what I'd really like to do in this image is I find my eye likes looking at bright things and dark things often feel like the receding kind of away from my my I I feel like they're kind of being pushed away from the camera and the bright things air coming forward more at me in most photographs so what I would really like to do when I was shooting here what I would have liked to do is this building the would that it's made out of was extremely dry and I would have loved to have grabbed water and just soak the building because it would have made it much darker in made them stand out but they wouldn't let me do that so let's see what we can do in photo shop well the problem is any kind of slider I apply right now will affect most of the image and it's not going to just effect this area so I'm going to go to the adjustment brush at the top of my screen right here and with the adjustment brush I'm going too zero out any weird settings I applied last time and I'm just going to guess at what kind of a change I'd like to make in order to dark in the wood because when I moved these sliders nothing's gonna happen on the image until I start painting so I'm just going to guess that I want to bring the exposure down to make the building uh darker I'll move my mouse on top of the building now I'm gonna just start painting darkening up that building problem is when I get over towards the kids they're there with this kind of brush I'm gonna get a bunch of over spray on them but first notice how much they stick out once I darken their surroundings because your eyes usually drawn to more the bright elements in a scene so they're starting to jump out the background is starting to become a little bit more secondary but I think I've darkened them up a bit on the edges and let's see if that's the case I'm going to move my mouse on top of this little pin pins right there uh and when I get there it's gonna put a red overlay on top of the areas of the image that I've painted on usually come on now usually it would end up doing it if it doesn't for some reason then in the lower right there's a check box that's called show mask usually moving your mouse on top of that just hovering on it would show the mask automatically not sure why it's not doing that right now but I'm going to turn on the check box instead of the lower right called show mask and that'll do it for me so wherever you see red on top of the image right now is where it's changing the picture and I think I got some red on his elbow and I got some red and some other areas but there was something that was helping me out trying not to get too much over spray I want I want to describe what that is and show you how I could get rid of uh the over spread so the top over here we have the choice that if I continue painting should it add to the area that's being adjusted or should have erased from it I'm going to tell it to a race from it so I might be able to get rid of some over spray then I could come in here with my brush and I could click on my image and start painting and as I do that red stuff would start to go away but there's an option in the bottom portion of the style log box that can help me out is turned on right now actually didn't realize it was on when I started it's called auto mask auto mask will attempt to reduce the amount of over spray you get on to other areas let's look at the way it works when auto mask is turned off if I come on to my image and paint I'm just painting where do you see how it's leading the red overlay from everything turn that off if auto mask has turned on then if you actually look at my brush and you look close at it do you see a little cross here in the center of it well photo shop is going to try to get it so when I click it pays attention to the color that's underneath that cross here and it tries to primarily get paint on the air the color that's underneath that cross here in not on things that are radically different from it so if I get that cross hair to be on red clothing and the surroundings out beyond it or not read then when I click and drag it shouldn't be removing much of this stuff on anything that's not read let me do this in such a way where it's a little easier to to see what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do this over for a moment just the painting where I darken the image just hit delete and I'm gonna turn auto mask off and do my painting this gonna say get this everywhere my little check box that shows the overlays turned on that's why you're seeing red here and then let's zoom up also I can change the color of that overlay a red overlay is hard to see on top of red outfits on the lower right of my screen rightward says show mask you see a little rectangle of red that controls what colors used in if I click on that I can change it any color I want let's put a color in there that's not found in the picture putting green in and so now it's overly easy to tell I got over spray all over the kids right now if I tell photoshopped that I want to remove I do that by choosing a race and I just come over here in pain on the racing but if I get over there right by the edge of their outfit I got to be absolutely precise because if I go any further out it's going to start a racing it off the background and that's not what I want choose undo if I turn auto mask on which will do now it pays attention to the color that's underneath across here and so when I click it sees that red is underneath the cross here and if my brush let's say it's really huge like this you notice that it's not extending way off into that background because it's tryingto automatically mask it based on the color that's underneath that cross there I do have to be careful though if I get into the deepest darkest shadow right here it's going to be almost black and some of the surrounding areas out there almost black so it would start deleting them that's what happened right over in here so I choose on do here and just try to keep that cross hair off of the really dark shadows if I turn off the mass so it's a little easier to see the end result I could come over here just keep it on top of the red parts don't go into the deepest shadows because the deepest shadows air similar to building that's there and I could come in here and say get it off of those guys got to be careful wears hair is his hair's close to black that's very similar to the surroundings out here so if I get it tio touch there might start the leading I saw a little bit out here so that's where I might want to use a smaller brush so that I don't allow it to by the way you can use the square bracket keys on your keyboard to change or brush size there right above the returner in tricky and your keyboard um it looks like a coup kind of half squares but anyway I might get a smaller brush for those areas where I want a limit where is this affecting things so I don't get thie over spray on the background there we g o so now let's see what we've done so far I'm going to turn the preview check box off in the upper right here was before the original image my eye goes all over the picture it doesn't really know other than the others to people there but what should I be looking at so when I turned preview back on though now that I've darkened all that stuff in the surroundings and here I might add a little bit I think I missed a spot right there but now my eye has a little better idea of where to look because there's one focus in the image and that is the bright stuff and everything else is starting to recede and get darker now there are some distractions and other areas that I might end up exploring I'm going to see if I can clean those up so a couple of the things they're first off of the top of the image I noticed a lot of yellow where the sun was breaking through part of the rooftop and putting in this color so let's see if I can deal with that in a few different ways when I'm in the adjustment brush here I'm in iq over and say I want to create a new adjustment meaning I'm done with the one I've just applied and I'm going to guess what I'd like to do to get rid of that yellow stuff well I might end up bringing down the saturation quite a bit and then I come up here and I'll turn auto mask off so I can paint freely and I'm just gonna paint across the top of the image so now that that's no longer overly colorful it has less of a tendency for my eye to flick up there because I find my eye is really drawn to the bright part of the photograph and then and strong to the colors in the photograph so I'm looking at where do I want my id to go and I'm trying to make sure that that is most likely a bright area most likely the most colorful area in the photograph and I'm looking at everything else saying is there any way I could tone it down so you're I might not go to it other things it might decide to do on this image our first off if I go back to my little hand tools I'm out of the adjustment brush I think I'm going to make sure that the doorway is nice and straight because lot of camera lenses will end up bending straight lines just a little bit and if I go over here to the lens tab one of the choices in here's first chromatic aberrations I'd leave that on from just about every image but also over here little check box called enable lens profile corrections if I turn it on let's see if it does anything to this image yeah did if you stare at that doorway after before the lines making at the door were bowing outward a little bit on the image and I turn this on it figured that out and straightened out the edge of the doorway the other thing I'm going to do is grab the crop tool in the upper left and at the top of the photograph there's really no interesting information up here so I don't know if that's really helping the image also this stuff in here with a little bright highlights coming through at the very top don't know that that's uh going to help because it's going to make my I go up there and look at the detail so let's grab the crop tool and here's how I'd end up cropping the image let's get it so these kids are mainly framed and really try to get it so you can concentrate on just them in the ornate surroundings about like that I might even pull this in just trying to direct the eyes so that there are not many choices as to where to look so now that I look at it I see really see the kids and I see they're nice framing around them and now I'm just like when I'm in the field I don't think I'm done I think what now kanai refine further to clean it up and usually in the field it means looking at the corners and edges of the frame because that's awful where they're confused some distraction I notice in the upper left there's a slightly bright area right up in the corner so go back to my adjustment brush I'll zero out any other weird settings and I'm just gonna bring exposure down a little bit and I'll grab a brush and just see if I can paint that in right up there once I've painted it in all just setting s'more to see where it would really blend in with the rest maybe I needed a smaller brush actually I'll get rid of that by hitting the delete key and I'll get a smaller brush because it needed less of a real soft big brush one arm or adjustments such visible oh it means I can't paint in an adjustment of nothing your sliders are all a zero move slider so I know what the heck adjustment you want that's pretty much what that said they should have worded it differently all right so I did that then if I search the rest of the images and decide what else might there be a distraction on at the very bottom of the frame do you see a yellowish green leaf sitting there well that's something that your eye will flick down and look at color is something your eye is drawn to so you're gonna look down there so what I think I'm going to do is a new adjustment and I'm going to bring exposure down as far as it goes and I'm just going to make the bottom of the frame the very bottom see if I could get it black then when you use the adjustment brush at the bottom portion here you have a choice called flow and this means how much of your adjustment are you actually gonna get on your first time you paint across something if you had flow it let's say ten percent when you paint on something you get ten percent of your adjustment and you could paint over it again and again and again to build it up well I'm gonna lower that down because I don't want this portion here to go all the way to black I'm gonna back off on it and say when I paint the next time only gave me thirty percent of what I asked for and I just come down here and paint again right in here too dark in that up in fact thirty percent might be too much but it's not too bad I might be a little more careful with how I paint but I think I'm getting it to the point where now my eyes looking at the kids in a lot of the distractions starting to go away I'll do another new adjustment and I might decide to bring my saturation down because the yellows that are in the surrounding image I'm going to see if I can turn them down so my eyes not drawn to any of the color that's out in here there's a whole bunch of other things I could do here if I really wanted to clean this up I would do another new adjustment and what I would end up doing is darken up quite a bit and I would actually get in here and be intricate I would come in and go right around all these little elements that air here and get them to stand out from this little detail that's around him what I'm generally thinking of is I've noticed in photographs that people look att all sorts of things that I didn't even know where in the picture facts sometimes they think that that was the subject of a picture because they're into stuff that I'm not and so things that I might automatically ignore doesn't mean they're going to automatically ignore it and so unless I do something about it to make it difficult to see make it less interesting look at then they're going to be exploring all those areas and so I usually come in here and fine tune this it all depends how much time I have and how important the images I find a lot of times when photographers they're starting out there like oh everything looks cool in here I want to include absolutely everything thing in their photograph in doing so it makes the photo have a lot less impact compared to really trying tio give the viewer only a couple things to look at now that was a little too dark is a little too obvious I've done it so just back off on the slider a little bit just figure out how dark can I get it before I really noticed that somebody photoshopped it that let's say so let's take a look at what we done with this justin brush here's what we started with after justin justin camera and here's how far we brought it right here in cameron it could use a little further refinement like I wasn't painting absolutely precise over here on the edges but you get a sense for how much I can do and it really helps at least it helps my I know exactly where I'm supposed to look I'm social look at their faces their colorful outfits and then after that explore a little bit of the detail in the surroundings that's the way my brain's working the way I'm trying to get your brain toe work I'm not sure if I'm successful there are not any questions on this one yeah so simcox had a question how much time do you spend improving an image in camera or photo shop the main thing is I get is much out of the image in cameras akin I would love to finish every image I ever open using only camera that would be great because it I can get the most out of my picture as faras moving these sliders it's when I run into something that is just inconvenient to do in camera or technically difficult to do in kamburov that I'm going to open the image in the photo shop and do it there instead but ideally I would do most of the stuff in camera if I need to do though intricate retouching uh or similar things I'm going to need to go into photo shop and I work in image until it either has uh no distractions no problems whatsoever in my eye knows what to look at that's what I'm trying to spend my time doing but if I don't have enough time that I go until I either run out of time patients or problems you know in the picture and that's up to you how long that's going to take it also depends how important that images cool all right another question that popped up from w h p they say is their third grade you can overlay with the crop tool here in camera raw similar to the crop tool in light room oh is there a grid you can overlay in the crop tool let's go over to bridge and open a picture and camera ah let's see any old picture when I go to the crop tool there asking can I get a grid here if I could it would usually be either under this menu see the choice called show overlay and there's my grid in the way I did that as I went to the crop tool itself it's both an icon that you click on and it's a menu if you click in the hold and there's the choice of called show over line so that hopefully is giving them what they're perfect for about on thank you