10 Photoshop Tips and Tricks for Photographers

well hey everybody welcome to this Photoshop tutorial brought to you by cut vidcom today i want to talk about ten things that in my mind are must know features for photographers in photoshop it was a little difficult putting this list together because I could have gone very basic and just gone with like baseline here you got to know this about adjustment layers or sharpening or smart object or whatever I decided just to pick ten things that I have found have either changed the way that I have worked as a photographer in Photoshop or just been like massively helpful in various and sundry types of ways let's jump in and check out the ten things that I think you ought to know if you're a photographer using Photoshop in any capacity let's get started now number one I want to talk about lifting the black point or tweaking contrast into them with with levels with curves and with selective color so it's a very like instagrammy type effect but it can really lead to being able to do a lot of different color grading treatments and things like that when you're working with your photography and it can just be fun to play with even if you don't end up using it let's try levels first here add a levels adjustment layer you lift the black point by dragging the black output slider not the input slider not the one that cranks up contrast this one kind of decreases contrast so it's like flattening out the photo reducing contrast you can actually incidentally also drop the white point if just your whites are just too too much we can also go to like blue here and just crank some blue into those shadows and you can see we start to get this very you know just very blues and the shadows faded type of look let's shut that off let's try doing it with the curves adjustment layer curves is I mean it looks very different but the principles are the same you've got your black point if we lifted the black point here by clicking on this point you're dragging it you can see we lift just if we take the we take all the blacks in the image and just say look you darkest of black pixels in the photo become more like you know ninety percent gray you'd be surprised at what it does your photo it it really kills off a lot of contrast but it gives you this faded washed out look one things we can do though to combat this is we can like pull down here on our mid-tones make these a little bit darker maybe like bring this bring this the darks up even a little bit more right let's go a little crazier photoshop's behaving a little responding a little slow here for me you can see we've really washed this out his skin looks really red and yellow though so I could go to like my color channels go to like the blue channel we're going to keep this quick and easy so just hit the little finger roll tool we know what do we want to do we a well yellow is the opposite of blue therefore we want to boost some blue in his skin so I'm going to click and drag upward a little bit there we go doesn't look too pink but maybe there's a little bit too much magenta in his skin now magenta is the opposite of green so to get rid of magenta what do I do well I add green so I'm going to click like here in the bridge of his nose where it's very red I'm going to drag upward introduce a little green I don't want introduce too much green because that's going to look really really bad on the skin just a little bit we're just looking to combat and just kind of ping the magenta a little bit and then we'll finish the magenta off by reducing the Reds a little bit so again grab that finger roll tool and just pull down a little bit to get rid of some of those Reds and look at that really cool skin tone there's before there's after we've totally changed the tone in color of the photo we've just given it this very washed out faded look I don't know it's really neat I just kind of kind of dig it and by the way you can do a lot of those same things by utilizing the color channels here in your levels adjustment layer as well the last little adjustment layer I want to look at is selective color here this is a sleeper down here at the bottom of the colors you have whites neutrals and blacks if you go to blacks you can just straight up reduce the amount of black in black so if I reduce the blacks that are in blacks you can see I get this really faded effect one of the things I can also do is play with cyan magenta yellow now remember the opposite of yellow is blue opposite of magenta is green opposite of cyan is red RGB CMYK so if I want to like put more blue in the shadows I get rid of yellow so I pulled back on my yellow slider so I'm getting this really cool blue up there I can just introduce a little magenta as well to just kind of give it a little kiss of ink and then I can either increase or decrease the scion depending on the style I'm going for and we get just a number of different toned images all done in very different ways with very different adjustment layers so lifting the black point and tweaking contrasts until it levels curves and selective color acting immensely helpful and useful and the so many things you can do with these adjustment layers I just had to throw this in and lead off with this tip and I think what we should do is talk about luminosity masks next luminosity masks are this is going to be a king for you especially if you're a landscape photographer as of course I switch over here to a portrait of my friend Chelsea what we want to do is target the highlights we know that like the highlights interface need to be brightened and spruced up a little bit we're going to create a very simple luminosity mask to target just the highlights interface now you could be saying hey you can go select color range and you try to select that stuff in her face really reduce the fuzziness and you can see you're going to get a reasonable selection and you can even come in here and just say like hey choose the highlights and then you can you know restrict or increase the level of highlights I've never I don't know it's never really come to me naturally doing it that way I've been doing it using channels for the longest time and I love what you can do with channels over here in the channels the channels panel you can load a channel as a selection by hitting command option and the number of the channel select command option - I'm sorry not just a channel but the the luminosity the luma values of this image if you will are what are being loaded here in the composite RGB Channel when I hit command option or ctrl alt and the number two so I've loaded this as a selection you can see like her dress is almost entirely selected it's very bright it's white most of the stuff appear on her forehead great we've got some bright spots on the rocks behind her wonderful how do I make this a selection that saves well create a new alpha Channel here hit command or control I to inverse your to invert excuse me the colors within that selection - commander control I don't want to actually be select don't hit anything just that and you can see we have what looks like it's not really quite the red green or blue channel it's a little bit different than all of them we can actually restrict this a little bit more though by holding down our command shift option keys that be control shift alt on the PC and click the RGB composite channel again you can see it's restricting even more so let's create a new channel again hit command or control I and you can see it's a little bit darker that's kind of cool let's hold down command shift option or ctrl shift alt and click RGB once more and we're going to create another new channel commander control I to flip the colors and now I'm just going to deselect command or control I because I've got a really stricted channel remember if we were to convert this to a mask straight-up white is the stuff that shows through so in theory we're going to get a ton of adjustment applied to her dress and a little bit applied to kind of like the brighter parts of her skin and less and less as it falls off like here and the sockets of her eyes or in between her lips or beneath her nose I'm going to use alpha 3 so actually going to load this out of the selection commander control and just click on the thumbnail for that I'm going to turn my composite channel back on selected the red overlay it's because we still have alpha 3 selected hits a little eye ball to shut that off go back over the layers and let's try applying let's just go with the curves adjustment since we already were messing around with curves and I'm going to pull up on this and you're going to see her dress is going to get brighter yes but we're also seeing the side of her face change so one of the things I can do here is I can just close my properties panel and maybe I really don't want to affect her dress at all in which case I can either go into my curves mask here or well I probably won't do that let's just grab the brush tool to keep it simple a big soft edged brush you can right click and just go 500 pixels soft edged brush make it even a little bit bigger if you want paint with black and I'm going to paint over her dress with this large soft edged brush and it's going to get rid of basically all of the brightening effect you can see over here in the mask I've painted over this with black and I'm just getting rid of any bit of adjustment that's going to be messing with we're altering the brightness values of her dress so if I alter option click on my mask I can now see on maybe I could just clean that stuff up a little bit I can now see the stuff that's actually being affected in fact that can come here under the skin just beneath her neck and I can even come up beside her face as well so really our curves adjustment is applying a little bit of the rocks just because we're kind of too lazy to go in there and paint that stuff away but mainly her face I can alter option click on the mask to get back out to my normal view and if I shut my curves layer off turn it back on it's just a nice little pop in the highlights very subtle very beautiful subtlety is what you want lots of little subtle tweaks and adjustments when you're retouching your photos is going to equal a great photo in the end it's the massive sweeping changes like think liquify to like make somebody's butt huge it always looks terrible it just it looks flat and funky and the stuff around it is all messed up and distorted of subtlety if you do lots of subtle liquification changes all the sudden you can shape and craft somebody's body into something really beautiful same thing when we're attacking highlights and shadows this is not the only place I mentioned that this is great for landscape photography so I get this photo from Vermont this guy is well exposed for the dynamic range in this scene was huge I was shooting with just a standard DSLR camera and I wasn't able to get an exposure that exposed the foreground as beautifully as I saw it and didn't blow out the sky so I chose a point in the middle where I knew that my sky was going to be exposed for properly and I figured I could come in and use luminosity masks to bring brightness and contrast back to the foreground here's how we do this let's go to channels let's load the luminosity here alright a command option or command or control alt - depending on if your pc or mac and i'm going to create a new channel and again we're going to that hole that little song-and-dance again commander or ctrl I to invert and to invert the mask and just fill that with black or white or whatever I'm gonna hit command or ctrl D to deselect so at this point really my adjustments they don't have to go to the sky but the sky is the brightest part of this channel so I need to invert the entire channel by hitting command or control I now you can see all the white down here so if I apply this as a layer mask we're going to get a ton of adjustment here in our foreground not so much in the sky we are still going to get quite a bit in the sky though because this ranges from like a medium grey to just darker than medium grey back to medium gray to lighter than medium gray which means we're going to get a lot of adjustment in terms of brightness pumped into the sky so we need to kind of adjust our luminosity mask a little bit let's create a series of luminosity masks here so let's let's command or control click our RGB channel up there and then let's let's go command shift option control shift alt and click to kind of make that a little you know kind of constricted a little bit create a new channel command or control eye to create that channel but it's actually pretty good let's command shift option or ctrl shift alt click RGB once more create another new channel command or ctrl I that's pretty good as well let's do it one more time here to constrict even more and great and I'm just going to command or ctrl D to deselect so I'm just going to invert each of these luminosity masks that we've created so you can see they're all varying degrees of just how much of like the clouds and the foreground they show what I'm looking for is just a perfect level of I'm going to really brighten up the foreground and not really affect the sky now of course as we make the foreground brighter and brighter the sky also gets brighter and brighter so I think actually for the purposes of this we're going to stick with our original alpha Channel I'm going to turn everything back on and these are just selections we're saving don't overthink it you know let's just channel how does it work all that stuff it's just easiest to think of these in this case as a saved selection let's go back over to layers I'm sorry let's command or control click that alpha channel alright and let's go back to our layers and again we'll slap a curves adjustment on to this and let's begin brightening this up so we're going to brighten it brighten up right in it now as I brighten it we're going to lose a little bit of contrast I want to be able to pull back down on the darks to increase my contrast but overall I want this to be a brightening adjustment we're really brightening up the foreground so there's before there's after look at how much the sky is being brightened though so one of the things that I like to do especially in a case like this and actually real quick in curves let's just mess around with this let's increase the reds maybe here in the foreground decrease the greens a little bit just give it like a very slight drip of magenta and also decrease the blues just a teensy teensy bit she's going to give us some great color in our foreground here now one of things that I do want to look at is part of the value of this luminosity mask is and we've explained it here but if which is why it's taken as long as it has to get this luminosity mask but if you come into a new image just BAM select that luma Channel and create a bunch of different levels of luminosity mask and you've got it but one of the great things about this if i zoom in here like we need to obviously brighten the foreground I'm zooming right back out of the zoom in we need to break the foreground but we don't really want to brighten the sky if I shut my curves up I can see that he's still in brightening the sky a little bit too much too much for my liking I want to preserve the brightening in the foreground get rid of the brightening in the sky here's the point I'm trying to make see how this detail on the top of the trees this is what makes it so difficult to do that with luminosity mask it selects it in seconds if I alter option click on my mask look at all the detail along the tree line that we have it's so perfectly selected because it's just doing it through the our channel fit well not really through the color channel so what law I guess yes through the color channels but really through the luminosity values here in the image alter option click to get back out of the mask the Alpha Channel viewing mode back to our image we want to get rid of the the effect that this is having on the sky so let's we can alter option click on the mask here or select the mask and you can actually use an adjustment layer on the mask let's go image adjustments levels and we can just bring the black point up to bring that up and what it's going to do is darken the sky now I don't like doing this in here because I can't see what it's doing to my actual image I just want to do that so you can see it I'm going to alter option click book not to create a clipping mask let's alter option click the mask itself I still the mask selected I'm going to do the same exact thing image adjustments levels and now I'm going to be able to tell like hey look look at how much darker this guy got look at that as I cut off that brightening the sky gets much darker I'm going to go to right about there I don't want to do damage to my treeline hit okay you can see before and after and like 95% of our effect is here on the foreground so using these luminosity matte luminosity mask it's so helpful for selecting vast areas of shadow highlight mid-tone or literally anywhere along the way you can select any of those points using luminosity mask and just create these super elaborate complex masks really really fast definitely something I urge you to look into and play with because you can combine channels and they'll use apply imaging calculations there's so much that you can do with luminosity masks if you're a landscape photographer luminosity masks are an absolute must-have there's before there's after and we do it so fast with luminosity masks and we can just command or control click our current mask if we want to really slag off of this and just open up the brightness here of the foreground even more and we correct some of those shadows a little bit add a little contrast back in you can see there's before there's after we go in and just make huge changes to a landscape photo and we can do it with relative ease because of luminosity masks so I feel like if I say luminosity masks luminosity masks one more time I'm going to self-detonate let's take a break here I want to let you guys know I'm selling a course over on site vidcom a link should appear up in the top corner of the video if you're watching this on YouTube like a little icon with the letter i' in it selling a course on my site it's all about advanced retouching I really advanced but it's retouching photos a variety of different ways beauty photography food landscape just regular fashion portraiture all kinds of different things kids we cover all kinds of stuff in the course use that link head over there pick it up if you feel so inclined it really helps us keep doing what we're doing here at tot vidcom helps me crank out more and more and more videos moving onward and upward getting bigger better faster stronger everything like that let's get back to this we're only 2 2 tips and we got eight more to go so let's make this go fast let's jump back over to Chelsea once more I'm going to get rid of the curves adjustment I want to talk about non-destructive healing and cloning and also the cloning panel so when you're using any of these tools like the clone stamps will write the way it works is hey we can just hold down alt or option key select from her forehead there and we can paint another eyeball into or select her eyeball and painted into her forehead of course helps up the opacity of the tool is turned all the way up you can see you're just going to kind of clone one area of your photo or image or graphic or whatever to another the healing brush on the other hand it does much it sort of does the same thing except that it helps try to blend in whatever you are cloning so you can see how yeah Shore its cloning the eye but it's really trying to blend all that skin around it together particularly helpful here she got this her spray Tim was just wearing off so like I'm using my healing brush tool the healing brush the Spot Healing Brush I don't use as much healing brush tool you hold down alt or option to select a skin tone area and you can just like paint over little blemishes in the skin it's really like magic it just works it's so quick and easy this isn't a tutorial on The Healing Brush tool however I'm going to undo that because the way I use the Healing Brush tool is up on a new layer I'm going to call this blemishes and I like to and this is vital you want to make sure that the sample drop down menu is set to current and below this is going to allow you to sample from bits of the image that are not your current layer stuff below so what does this mean well it means that like if she says hey can you just get rid of my my little necklace I can say yeah yeah sure no problem and I you know we go through get rid of it and and she comes back to me a week later and says ooh you know what I really kind of want that back well guess what I've saved the document I've closed at a closed Photoshop I might have gone a vacation between now and then I can just come in here into my blemishes layer and I can get rid of the blemishes layer or mask away part of my blemishes layer or selected with the lasso tool and delete it point is I can get the chain back whenever I want I can also do stuff like reduce the opacity of my blemishes layer to only kind of get rid of part of the chain now that doesn't make sense with something like a chain of course but it does make sense when you're doing something like getting rid of these lines in her forehead so I can grab my my healing brush here alter option and sample and I can just paint over these lines and just come through here and get rid of every little line that I can find right this works remarkably well on elderly folks as well trying to get rid of the wrinkles hey you know what if you're 90 95 years old and I can make you look like you're 85 that's you know that's a that's a great a great little adjustment to be able to make with a portrait you've shot so we get rid of all the lines maybe that's not necessarily most realistic a way to go about doing this we can also get rid of bags into the eyes right I noticed she doesn't really have any but once you've done massive change like this you can use your opacity slider and just back it off a little bit and really all we've done is just kind of softened those wrinkles in her forehead right you can see we're just softening everything up so it just helps it give you have options what I'm trying to say when you do your blemish removal up on its own layer I'm just going to select all and delete to get rid of everything I painted onto that layer you leave yourself open to lots and lots of different options when you work in Photoshop that way so that's the way I like to use the clone stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool now I mentioned the clone stamp panel window clone source the reason I want to show this is because there's a very very important little feature in here this angle option let's say I want to take her hairline and get rid of this little bit that's sticking out here well what I can do is I can use the clone stamp tool and this might not be the best the greatest example in the world we're going to go with it anyway I'm going to just select your hair here and I can make my brush bigger and I can see that if I were to just start painting the hair is still moving in this direction I need the hair to be moving either like straight up and down or over in that direction so I can use my rotate feature here and you continue in this little overlay of kind of how much the image is rotating and I can see what I'm going to paint it's almost going to be more straight up and down it has to be rotated even more though let's go 40 50 degrees there we go something like that and I can just paint the hair in just like that and we've kind of automatically applied this rotation which is going to allow us to sort of correct that hairline a little bit now the color and blending of it is absolutely hideous and really we should probably bring her hair out more than take it in but the fact is you can use this little angle adjustment as you are cloning this is super helpful if you're working on a horizon line and there's maybe a little mountain or a bump and you just need to like rotate the tool a little bit you can do it so quickly and so easily with the angle options in the clone source panel so that's Kyle Ike to use the clone stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool let's stay here with Chelsey moving on to the fourth thing that I think you should know how to do targeting subtleties in skin tone and colors specifically in skin tone something that can be really really helpful if you're photographing somebody who's very red skinned or maybe they got too much of a tan could be helpful in getting rid of the remnants of her tan that are that are very very noticeable but the way that I like to do is the way that I typically do it most is with the hue/saturation adjustment layer so it's like two saturation here and what we can do is right off the bat we can try just choosing like reds and see what happens when we desaturate you can see it does all kinds of horrible things and I actually would probably urge you to avoid just a desaturating especially when you're working with skin tones usually the issue is a matter of hue there's a little bit too much red or it's a little too pink you can shift it back so if there's a little bit too much redness you can you can use shift it a little bit here towards the orange or shift it and I'm saying shifting it toward the orange because the center point is really working with the colors down here so if I pull it to the left it's going to give me more orangey yellow if I pull it to the right it's going to give me more pink right so it's got more pink more orange so but this would be something that's a very subtle adjustment one two three ticks in either direction you can see there's before there's after so we just help neutralize some of that greenish yellowish cast and your skin in fact we can even go to yellows and say locate yellows we really want you to be a little bit closer to like a reddish orange colors in her skin all right so you can see there if I pull through the greens we're getting this crazy greenness we really wanted to be more in the direction of red so it's get like negative five there you can see before and after we're just changing your skin tone we're really not messing with much of the rest of the photo now that does beg the question what if there's a big giant red car behind her or what you can do because this is an adjustment layer you can mask everything so you can fill the adjustment layer with black commander control eye and just use your brush tool and paint with white over let's say areas that you know are definitely skin tone like her face and here at the top of her chest and her neck underneath the dress a little bit where you can see your skin through the sleeves we could paint in those areas and that will ensure that we're still affecting the image so the mask is telling us a work on the skintone area roughly and the color options within hue/saturation are specifically targeting reds yellows you know magenta as you can go into magenta even now a way to you can get even more refined and this is just a throw a quick side tip into here we can right click and convert our image to a smart object we can go filter Camera Raw filter now here in Camera Raw we can go over to the HSL sliders and HSL gives us a couple more sliders so we get reds oranges orange as an addition to Yale there's going to be a lot of orange in your skintone right I can shift like you I can shift the saturation I can shift the luminance or the brightness of it I've got my aquas and purples and so I've got some additional options here in the Camera Raw editor I can hit OK after I've made a change because it's a smart object I can always double click go back into it and also because it's a smart filter I can use this layer mask and do exactly what we did here with you saturation where I feel it was black and I just paint over her skin tones to just make my Camera Raw HSL adjustment attack her skin tones and you know work with skin tones work around skin tone it's all about subtleties and skin tones you can make huge changes and do a lot of good to your images by just tweaking and adjusting those subtleties but a lot of sometimes you'll just have somebody who's you know I've got the crazy red sunburn on my face and I just you know I can you lessen it can you just make it maybe not quite so red this is how you're going to go in there and do it target the Reds use the tools the Photoshop gives us the target the Reds and work with that color specifically really helpful really and so cool when you get the hang of it and actually before I go on I should mention here in hue/saturation when you're working with this like here in the red channel you can use these little eye droppers and say like a look I want to select I want to keep adding to the reds and oranges that I'm selecting you can just go through and kind of expand how much of this color you're selecting you can do it manually or you can use these color eyedroppers and you can just expand or contracting and say look I really don't want to mess with skin tones that match the stuff up here on her forehead you can see it contracts the area of hue that we would be swinging when we do something like that so that's just a little tip for using hue/saturation on the hue/saturation adjustment layer in general alright so next up we're going to talk about face replacement we're going to take this girl and we're going to put this guy's face onto her so we're back to this guy once more here's how we do this actually this is a technique that a buddy of mine Hastings Ramirez from Photoshop training Channel great guy hey sue so wish you're here on the east coast I'm sure we'd hang out a lot more but Philadelphia is about 3,000 miles away from Oakland anyway this is a technique that I learned from him it's got to be the best technique out there it's just amazing let me run through it really really quickly you grab the lasso tool and cut the face out which you're looking to paste in place so I'm going to use my lasso tool here but boom cut that out go to my background there commander control J pop it up onto its own layer grab my move tool and I'm going to drag it to bring it right here over to the girl layer now it's always you know best practice to work with a face probably this can be bigger than the face that you're you know like his face is much bigger than hers so I've got a lot of data I'm working with it's bigger than the one I'm pasting over I'm going to reduce the opacity of his face and I'm going to you know move this so his eyebrow or his eye really is over her eye over there and I'm gonna hit command or ctrl T to free transform move my center point into the middle of his eye and hold down shift and option as we shift and alt on the PC and just scrub the size of the face down we really want to make sure the face is small enough that it fits on her face it's going to look really weird like if the lips are way down here and her chin is you know a quarter of an inch away from the edge of the lips not going to look realistic at all so you got to get the sizing right I think that's about good is that going to lift this up I'm really watching the lips here that's going to help sell it even if the face is a little bit taller than hers because I can always like squish it down a little bit I can you make it a little bit narrower we can we can rotate it by double-click this commander control T again we can rotate it a little bit kind of move it right right where you think it needs to be to move it into place there we go and I should also add this is a nice photo to work on because her hair is out of her face I can see her entire face the photo of him is great because yeah his hairs out of his face I can see his entire face so it's going to work well with the face layer here and I can just name the layer face there we go increase the opacity back to 100% now we need to do is match the color so we need to make sure that he is going to kind of sort of blend in a little bit so I'm going to command or control click on the face and it's important that we do that because we just want to select colors really within her face right within this selection here that we're going to use to match his face to her face we're going to use the command image adjustments match color and here in match color we got to do a couple things first we got to say hey source we want it to be girl that's the name of our document girl dot jpg and the layer specifically is gonna be background because we're copying color from her to him ok and now this is really bad it's super blown out and bright and colorful in all kinds of stuff that I don't want it to be so I'm going to tone down the color intensity a bit I'm also going to tone the luminance back back back a little bit and then I'm going to begin to fade it a little bit I don't really use neutral eyes that kind of you know for all intents and purposes makes it black and white I'm going to keep fading it here until it looks about right increase the luminance suggest a touch something like that looks good and here in the image statistics I've got used selection and source to calculate the colors and also a selection and target to calculate the adjustment that's why I loaded the face as a selection hit OK and we're going to have our face colorize nicely now before we do anything else let's go select modify contract and just contract this selection by 10 you know 5 10 15 20 pixels this all has to do with the size of your photo 10 or 15 pixels works with most reasonably high resolution photos go ahead and hit OK it's going to pull the selection back we deselect now so commander ctrl D to deselect select a background image and hit command or ctrl J to duplicate it now remember I just had that selection we can go select reselect it's going to bring back that little selection let's hide our background layer and we're going to hide the face now we have her selected I'm going to delete key it's going to punch a hole right through her face commander ctrl D to deselect and now we're going to use this space to sort of bridge the gap if you will you can see we can see a little bit of her eyebrow we can clean that up with like our good old Healing Brush tool or something and he's got facial hair there's a lot of problems here realistically speaking the texture of his skin isn't nearly as smooth as hers all kinds of stuff like that we're going to suspend that we're going to spend our judgment on that for a moment now with these two layers we're going to select face hold down shift select that background and we're going to go edit Auto blend two layers and in here I'm going to choose panorama seamless tones and colors content-aware fill transform transparent areas and hit OK I'm going to give Photoshop just a moment here and you're going to see it's going to blend this face in kind of scare really good it gives you this new layer that's merged and on this layer we can do some things like get rid of that little bit of nonsense there I'm not even to create a new layer for this because this isn't really a serious project but you can see I can get rid of that little bit of something something up there I can get rid of that really hard edge there just helped I smooth things and then of course I mean it's ridiculous because he has no facial hair and she had this beautiful smooth skin and you know you can just go around and and and smooth any edges now the edges are can just they're super pronounced because the faces are so different but just imagine if you're using this and you have maybe a one portrait session that you photographed and somebody's blinking in one photo you need to swap their face in the other look at how can you imagine how amazing this would be if this guy was photographed standing right next to her under the same light all the same conditions everything it would be amazing so I can just shut this off and you can see there's before there's after auto blend did do some funky stuff with the background what you can do is in order to save the merged space just apply a filled layer mask so layer layer mask hide all and then we would just take our brush tool and paint with white just over the face and we would just show that blended face over top of her and that was maintain your the integrity of your background and everything like that there's before there's after and you can see it does a really really impressive job even though this face is just massively different than what we were working on for it's actually pretty frightening looking alright let's get away from that terrifying facial replacement thing that we just did Chicago let's talk about color technique Chicago one of my favorite cities here in the United States and this photo shot over the river very very blue it's very blue so one of the things we can do just quickly to correct color is do something like slap a curves adjustment layer on this and grab this middle eyedropper the gray eyedropper and just select something in the image that we know should be gray like this concrete little edge probably should be gray let's click it and you can see just how much that warms and cleans things up we could do something like maybe you know the side of this building should be gray and ball doesn't really do much of a difference beyond that because it's already really really corrected a lot I can try down here it's going to add a little bit of green to it I don't really like that you can see a quick before-and-after now this is a fairly easy image to correct because like you know concrete is probably gonna be gray we've all the gray over there and gray doesn't have color in it so if the gray has like a heavy blue color cast well the rest of the image probably has a heavy blue color cast because that's how color works let's talk about an image here like happy couple where maybe it's a little bit more difficult to find just an obviously gray point like we don't know if that wall was actually gray when we photographed this scene or not now you can use something called a gray card which the subject would just hold up and you know there's a box there that absolutely 100% should be gray and you can just use this gray eyedropper boom click and you've color correcting your image sometimes you don't have the luxury of doing that and here's how you correct images and help find a gray point within the image what you do is create a new layer and then you go edit fill and we fill this layer with 50% gray next we set this layer to the blend mode of difference we grab my eyedropper tool I've got a little sampler down here I'm just going to shift drag that to get rid of it I'm going to show you exactly what I'm doing here next I'm going to apply a threshold threshold adjustment layer so remember we got 50% gray set to the difference blend mode now here on threshold I'm going to double click and I'm going to pull the threshold level way back until I'm just seeing like the first bits of black happening so like right there is probably where the first bit of black comes through so I'm going to zoom in on that little bit grab my eyedropper tool and I'm going to shift click to drop a little crosshair there I'm going to just close my information panel and I can shut off my threshold and my 50% gray layer and I've got that little bit of area to click on and what I do now is grab my little curves adjustment layer grab that middle gray eyedropper and click right in there and zoom out and what we should get is an image that neutralized that looks very blue but we're neutralizing that greenish yellowish color cast you can see it's pretty effective if we don't like it well the first thing I would encourage you to do is just hang tight for a second because your eyes will adjust to it and now if we go from this very blue image back to this greenish yellowish one this looks really bad but this didn't look that bad when we first opened it did it color correcting can be tricky which is why it's nice to be able to do a little bit of color correction kind of by the numbers because it can be helpful to lean on Photoshop a little bit as your eyes are sort of trying to self-correct Photoshop will help you out and if you still think it's just too blue you can always reduce the opacity a little bit and mingle the two a little and get a nice balanced image out of your little color correction technique process or whatever you want to call it so moving along from color correction or speaking of color I should say let's talk about vibrance and saturation so let's add a vibrance adjustment layer this is going to be a quick one what's the difference we've eye brands and saturation it's pretty important well if we increase saturation saturation increases everything with reckless disregard it doesn't care about skin tones colors where it's doing what it just boosts the saturation overall which is a great thing but in an image like this we've got these people in like her skin it looks like she's been put in the microwave in him it looks like he slept on the tanning bed overnight so we want to just set the saturation back to zero vibrance on the other hand boosts saturation but it lends some respect to skin tones now you can see these people still look a little half-baked because like they're getting a lot of this greenish oranges reflected light from their environment you know this this you know light from the walls and maybe the plant or whatever out of plants probably not big enough to reflect that much light but they're getting a lot of reflected light but you can see a huge difference between vibrance and saturation so something sometimes I like to do is boost vibrance a lot like 50 60 % and then reduce overall saturation a little bit it can give you a really nice mixture of colors and just kind of pull back on some colors that need to be dulled a little bit while still boosting the the color and tone of some level at the tone but just a color of some of the images some of the areas of your image so make sure you play around with the vibrance and saturation sliders and use them together there's nothing that says you can only use one or the other you can always mix it up you can boost saturation and reduce vibrance for instance and see what kind of effect you can get and maybe if that works better with the color in your particular photo they're very practical uses for that when you're using saturation or vibrance here in Photoshop let's move on to number eight this is something that's pretty cool it's actually jump over to this photo here let's say I'm sharpening this image but I want to reduce the noise that's out in these big open areas I'm going to use Camera Raw sharpening because it allows me to really hone in my masking now something like filter sharpen smart sharpen does have this reduced noise feature which is going to allow you to kind of kill off noise in these you know massive areas of lots of solid color we're applying a ton of sharpening will do nothing but sharpen the noise in those areas there's there can be a more kind of visual way to do this though we're going to use Camera Raw editor as I mentioned a moment ago I'm going to convert this to a smart object it's kind of force of habit when I'm using the Camera Raw filter filter Camera Raw filter right here and here in the Camera Raw editor I'm going to come over here to sharpening now I can just apply a bunch of sharpening and it's going to sharpen her up and all that good stuff it's also sharpening the noise now I have this masking slider here if I hold down my alt or option key while I slide the masking slider it's going to show me the areas that will no longer have a huge amount of sharpening applied to them they're solid black where's all those white lines and stuff all over her that stuff is still going to be sharpened very nicely so I can keep dragging this until I feel that I've sufficiently sharpened her while not applying wayward sharpening to these large areas of just blank color that all it's going to do is sharpen up that noise now you can also hold your alt or option key here when you're adjusting the detail level and also the radius detail so you can really see the area kind of on either side of contrasting edges where the camera editor will look when you're sharpening up your image so make sure you just try different sliders there's all kinds of sliders in here that if you hold down the alt or option key you're going to get a different view it's going to allow you to get a preview of some sort of what you're doing when it comes to sharpening eye noise reduction and things like that really really helpful and it will allow you to get really really beautiful sharpening when you're sharpening using the Camera Raw filter so let's move along to number nine and this is what we're going to use this portrait here of her this is a selective sharpening I like to use high pass sometimes for sharpening and when I do use high pass for sharpening this is how I like to do especially with portraits now like her face I don't necessarily want sharpen to the same degree as her hair and her hair maybe not to the same degree as this bit of her sweater here in the foreground how do we change this well here's what I do first I command or control I create a duplicate of my image now if I have a bunch of layers and a bunch of different things going on in here whoops like this you know what I'll often do is where we don't want the black and white layer is I will merge everything to a new layer holding down command shift option or ctrl shift alt make the letter E it gives me this composite of all of my layers and this would be my sharpen layer it's really just a layer from which I'm going to make selections though so here with the sharpen layer selected we're going to enter into quick mask mode but before we really do anything in quick mask mode double click on the quick mask icon and make sure you have selected areas ticked on not masked areas but selected areas hit OK now we're going to select quick mask mode to enter into it once more grab the brush tool I want a nice large soft edged brush make it a little smaller I'm just painting with black this is going to be the selection for her face it can be very rough does not it all have to be perfect we're going to go over paint all over her face because her face is going to be sharpened up in just a moment here I'm gonna hit the letter Q it's going to load that as a selection great I'm going to go select modify feather and I'm going to feather this I don't know let's go like a hundred pixels something pretty substantial and I'm going to hit command or ctrl J what does it do well it pops this very soft edged bit of the image up onto its own layer and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this to create a high pass adjustment so I'm going to convert this a black and white command a shift or ctrl shift you and then go filter other High Pass and here with this I'm going to maybe give it a radius of two points to something like that looks pretty good hit OK and I can set this to a blend mode well let's turn the underlying image back on sets into a blend mode of something like soft light so what we've done is we've just applied sharpening to her face and using that same technique jump into a quick mask mode grab your brush you could paint over her hair and you know soften the edges of that you could paint over her shirt soften the edges of that and so on and so forth and selectively sharpen your image till the cows come home and you get to sharpen every little bit exactly as you wish and you don't the worry about one giant global overall sharpening adjustment and living or dying by that let's move on to number 10 the last of the quick tips for photographers I said quick tips this can be a long video though the last of the quick tips for photographers and this is using Camera Raw to create finishing grain in your image so a lot of times photographers will add grain intentionally to images because it helps blend adjustments you've made it gets rid of like banding and images if you're really having to push or pull an image you start to get color banding add a little bit of grain add a little bit of noise it's going to help alleviate some of that here's how I use camera raw because camera rolls grain is so much nicer than the noise filter here in Photoshop create a new layer I'm going to name it grain doesn't have to be named grain but you know I'm trying to be a little little more organized grain and I'm going to go edit fill and I'm going to choose to fill it with 50% gray great next we're going to go filter Camera Raw filter and here in the camera roll filter we just go over here to the FX tab and we choose the amount of grain we want so we can go grain we can choose the size of the grain we can make it really soft or really crunchy I'm going to go really soft like poufy grain there we go hit OK and now all we do is we set it to a blend mode of either over layer soft light soft light and we get this beautiful soft very organic looking grain I can reduce the opacity if I like and this grain would blend together color and retouching and skin tone and so many things so beautifully so fast it's so easy and by the way if I converted my gray layer to a smart object I would be able to go into the Camera Raw editor and edit this grain a hundred times a thousand times if I wanted to as many times as I wanted to it would all be there for me to work with so that's going to be it for this one if you enjoyed the video please leave a little like on it also if you feel so inclined drop a comment below subscribe to my channel so you never miss an their Photoshop or photography or Lightroom video or tutorial or anything that has to do with picking up a camera and taking a picture so for ten quick tips or maybe not so quick this pretend just tips in Photoshop ranging from luminosity masks to selective sharpening and grain with camera roll that is it get it got it good so Daniel Dodson cut vidcom I'll catch [Music] [Music]

Channel: tutvid

Views: 71,383

Keywords: Photography, How to be a better photographer, Photoshop, Photoshop Tutorial, Photoshop CC, Photoshop Tutorials, Creative Cloud, Photoshop Tips and Tricks, Photoshop Tips, Photoshop Hacks, How to use Photoshop, Photographers, Curves, Luminosity Masks, Face Replacement, Replace a Face, Skin Tone, Color Correction, Color Correct, Sharpening, Camera RAW

Id: aNnaG0cafA8

Length: 43min 5sec (2585 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2017