- [Glyn] Okay, so in this video, I want to take you through
the retouching steps that'll take you from here to here. Okay, so this is the
final retouch picture, and I actually took this
whilst I was presenting for The Flash Centre in Elinchrom at the recent SWPP Event in London,
which was in January 2017. I promised those folks there that I'd take you through the retouching. Now, in regards to this picture, if you haven't seen it already, if you dive over to my web site, I've taken you through
a little blog post here which goes through exactly
how the picture was lit just using one Elinchrom Rotalux Octa. I'll also put the link to that
in the description part of this video over on YouTube, as well, but I want to take you through
some of the retouching steps to get to this final image here, when we've originally
started with this one here. So, if there's any techniques that I kind of brush over quite quickly, I'll include those at the
very, very end of the video so you can click on them
and actually look at those particular techniques
in a lot more detail, but I do intend to go
through this fairly quickly. All right, so let's have a
look at the picture, then. First of all, I don't have any kind of systematic kind of workflow where I always do certain
things in a certain order. Generally when I look at a picture, whatever it is that
sort of stands out to me that needs fixing, that's how I work and I'll work on that one first. Now, when I look at this one here, straight away we're presented, I was working very quickly,
didn't use the old grey card, so the white balance
is what I want to fix, so I'm just gonna go to the basic section here over on the right hand side. I'm using Lightroom. Click on the white balance tool, add a grey background behind, so I'm just gonna click to
the side of our model here, Louis, on the grey background, and that's gonna give me a nice starting point for the white balance. The next thing I want to do then, I want to crop it down. It's got this area in
the top left hand corner, so I want to get the crop tool by pressing R on the keyboard. I want to hold down my shift key, click on the top left hand corner, and drag downward so it actually drags it in the same
aspect ratio just there, so something like that will be fine. And then over the basics panel, what I'm going to do now is
just take the shadow slider and bring it up quite
a way just to sort of bring a bit more detail
into those shadows. You don't need to go too far, because it can not look too realistic, but maybe around about
the 50-ish kind of mark. Sometimes when I do that, I might need to bring the highlights down, but I don't think we really
need to do that in this image. Then, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to go down to the detail tab and add a
little bit of sharpening. Now, for me, my own tastes when I'm actually working on male portraits, is the amount that I use for sharpening is generally around about the 40 mark, and then I want to hold
down my option key on Mac or alt key on PC, click
on the masking slider, and it obviously goes white, meaning all of the
picture's been sharpened, and I'll drag it over
to the right hand side to bring in black, which is the areas that aren't being sharpened, and kind of get it to
a point where I think the areas that I want to be sharpened, mainly Louis and a little
bit on that stepladder there are going to be sharpened,
nothing on the background, which takes me around about the 80 mark, something like that,
on the masking slider. Now, if we move further on down, we'll go to lens corrections. What I will also do is I'll put a tick where it says remove chromatic aberration, and I'm also gonna put a little tick in the enable profile corrections, as well, and you can see, it just
reduces a little bit of that vignetting that we're getting on this particular lens here. Let's just take the vignette slider and drag that out just a little bit more, just to reduce it to around about there. Let's have a look what that does for us. That's gonna add it, so
let's take it to the right, just to decrease it just a
touch more, something like that. Now, one extra little thing I might do is just get my Wacom pen here. I'm going to click on the adjustment brush and I want to bring the
exposure up just a touch and I'm gonna paint over his face just to bring up a little bit more of that exposure on his face there. The lighting pattern is
exactly how I want it, and again, check out that video so you can see how I did that. Just want to bring a little bit more lightness into the face there so it draws the viewer's
eye straight onto it, so something like that is fine. Now, I'm going to send
this over to Photoshop now to carry on, do a few more little things. There isn't much that
we've actually done here, so I won't be sending it
over as a smart object. Instead all I'm going
to do is go to photo, editing, and choose edit
in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017. That'll then send the picture over as a normal, basic layer,
not a smart object, so I can then continue with my retouching. Okay, so here's our picture of Louis. Let's just zoom in on him now, so zoom in, and the first thing I want to do, I don't like to use the
spot remover in Lightroom. Between you and me, I find it quite laggy. It really does seem to
strain the computer, even though I've got quite
a high spec computer, it does seem to go quite slow. So what I want to do is
I'm just going to grab the spot removal tool from the toolbar over on the left hand side, and this will do a very, very quick job, just get rid of that little
mark on his nose just there. That's perfect. Just a little cheek. Nothing else I want to do. I don't want to make him look to perfect. Male portraits always look, in my opinion, when it's got a little bit
of kind of grunge in there. Not totally perfect, but that's fine. Now, the next thing I want
to work on is his eyes. I want to use a technique
that I call amazing eyes, and you'll see at the
very end of the video, there will be a thumbnail where
you can check out that video to show this technique
in a lot more detail, but what I want to do is I
want to go to the quick mask. There's a certain way that
you need to set quick mask up, so if you haven't seen that video, make sure you check it out. Then, I'm just going to get a normal brush and I'm going to just select the area of the eye that I want to brighten and also add a little bit
of colour in there, as well. So, just come over here. I like to use quick mask
because it's a very visual way of me actually adding into a selection. Just get [Inaudible]
there and a little bit in. Like I said, I'm going
through this quite quickly. Let's just go there. Okay, come out of quick mask, and we get our visible
marching ants selection. To brighten the eyes up, I'm going to use a selective colour adjustment layer, change the colours to neutrals, and to brighten them up,
first, we'll use a blend mode. And over on the right hand
side of the blend mode I'm going to use is linear
dodge, and when I click on that, you can see the eyes go
really, really bright, but the great thing is because we're using an adjustment layer, we've also got opacity
so we can bring it up or bring it down to get the
exact kind of look that we want. Now, that we're using
this selective colour, and you'll see this in that video at the very, very end of
this that you can click on, you could also then come
in and use the sliders to change the colour of the eye, as well, but this look pretty good actually. You can see his nice brown eyes. If I add a bit of contrast,
we'll go from neutrals to blacks and take the black slider
at the very bottom here, bring it over to the right just for a bit more contrast in there, like so. That's looking good. Let's just zoom out a touch. I might take that
opacity of this layer now down to around about maybe
50%, something like that. Actually, maybe 40 is good. Now what I want to do is I'm
going to add a blank layer and I'm going to call this one eye sharp, oops, eyes sharpness, and here, I'm going to
actually sharpen the eyes. I like to do this within Photoshop, and I'm going to use the sharpen
tool over in the toolbar. You can see we've got the blur tool, sharpen tool, and smudge tool. If I use the sharpen tool at the top now where we've got the options bar, obviously each tool has its own unique options that you can use. Got the blend mode set to normal. The strength, generally around about 25 to 30 is what I'll keep it at, but because we're using a blank layer, we need to have some pixels
that Photoshop can sharpen. At the moment, all it's
seeing is a blank layer, so you need to make sure
at the very, very top here where it says sample all layers, put a little tick in there so it allows Photoshop to see below that blank layer and find some pixels below
that it can then sharpen. Once we've done that,
let's just have a click. We've got this sharpen tool, there we go. So now what I'm going to do
is just click down on the eye and brush over it without lifting off, one, two, three, four, five times. Whatever I do on that eye,
I'll also do on this eye, so click down without lifting off, one, two, three, four, five. Now, you might see on the video before and after, before and after. You've got to remember that when you're using the sharpen tool, it kind of works like a spray can, so if you imagine now when
using a spray can of paint, when you press down that nozzle
and you from left to right, if you don't let off
or release that button, the paint is going to build
up and build up and build up, and that's exactly the
same as the sharpen tool. Once you press down and keep
going over the same area, the sharpening effect
is going to increase, so whatever you do on on eye, make sure you do on
the other eye, as well. All right, so let's just again,
go in very, very quickly. The next thing I'll do is just maybe do some dodging and burning, so now what I want to do
is I want to go to layer, new, layer, and here we'll call it D and B for dodging and burning. I want to change the blend mode here from normal to soft light, so I'm going to do some
dodging and burning on skin, so I think of soft skin, so we're going to use this soft light blend mode. When we do that, we'll get
this little check box appears where it says fill with soft light, neutral colour 50% grey,
and we'll click OK, and we'll click OK in there to do that. Now, without that blend mode, all you're going to have is a grey layer. We need to have some pixels that we can make brighter or darker, because obviously we're
doing dodging and burning. This has now given us some pixels, but we can't see the person beneath it. That's why we need to change it from normal to something like soft light, which is a great one for doing skin because the grey goes, but
the pixels still remain so that we can now do
our dodging and burning. Now, I'm going to go and choose my dodge tool over in the toolbar. At the top of the options here, the exposure's set to 10%. I tend to go below 10% or around about 5%, something like that, and always make sure that
you put a little tick in this protect tones checkbox just there. Now, I'm not going to
go all the way through the actual dodging and
burning process here, but basically what I like to do is add highlights where
there's bright parts and darken down any
mid-tone or shadow areas, and that helps to add
contour to the picture, so let's just do a little bit, a little bit of highlight on
the side of his face there. Now, if I want to use the opposite tool, at the moment, I'm using the dodge tool, if I want to use the opposite tool, all I need to do is just hold down the option key on Mac or alt key on PC, and it automatically flips
me to the opposite tool, and that saves me from having to keep, having to change it over in the toolbar, so it's a really quick
way of working there. So let's just do this, and we'll darken down the eyebrows, something like so, a little shadow on that
side of the nose there, maybe that there, and
we'll just darken down a little bit of the old five
o'clock shadow just there. Now, I've only done literally
seconds worth there. I would spend a lot more time on this, but you can see when
we turn it on and off, if we turn that layer on and off there, you can see already in
seconds, we're getting some of the dodging and
burning effect coming in. All right, so let's double
click on the hand tool, go back to full screen. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a texture onto the background, and this is the way that I save myself around about six or 700 pounds by not having to purchase one of these textured canvas
backgrounds, and they're fabulous. I do want to get one,
but because I'm mobile, it can be quite expensive
and they do get creased if you don't leave them
hanging up all the time. So one way that I tend to do
this or fake this look rather, is by using a texture, and
this has been photographed. This is literally just a piece of concrete taken with my mobile phone, so I've got mine stored
in my libraries here, so let's just bring this up. Let's just go to my textures, drag this down so we can see in there. There we go, this is the
one that I want to use. I've called it my faux oliphant,
fake oliphant background. I'm going to drag that into my picture. That'll go on top of Louis. Let's just close that down. Now, because I want to
use this as a background, we don't have to worry too
much about stretching it out, so I'm just gonna hold down my option key or alt key on PC and drag upwards like so so it drags it the opposite way, as well, just to fill that canvas up like so. Now, this has actually got a
little bit of colour in this, and for this to look good, you don't really want to have any colour when you're using textures to add them onto grey backgrounds, so
I need to desaturate this. Now, if I go to the image
mode, adjust and desaturate, you can see the desaturate
is actually greyed out. I can't use it, and that's because I've actually got this texture
stored from my cloud library, and you can see a little icon in the bottom right hand corner. This would also happen
if you actually brought the texture in as a smart object. What we actually need to do now
then is rasterize this layer to make it into a normal layer, and the way I'm going to do
that is go to the layer menu, come down, and we're going
to choose rasterize layer, and that will just take it a normal layer. Now we can go to image, adjustments, and you'll see desaturate
now is available to us. Click on that and it removes
the colour from there. To get this onto the background,
let's go from normal. I like to use overlay, and that puts it all onto that back
textured background there. You can see if I turn
that layer on and off. The problem now is it's
actually on Louis, as well, so what I'm going to
do is add a layer mask. I'm going to get a brush with
a black foreground colour and then all I'm going to do is just paint it off Louis so the
texture is not on him. So I'll very quickly just come in and paint this off him, like so. There we go, come down here. Something like that, it's looking good. Now, you could if you wanted to, to check where you've done this, just turn that, turn
that layer on and off, see if you can see it appearing anywhere, which I can just on this
bottom bit down here. Or another great way to see where you've painted and where you've missed is actually to click, or press rather, the backslash key on your keyboard, and when you do that, it
gives us this red overlay, almost like quick mask, to show you exactly where you've painted. Whoops, so I need to
just continue to paint just in some of these areas just here. I'm actually going to
leave it on the ladders. I think the texture looks
quite good on the ladders, and you can't really see
it that much, anyway, so just bring it down to there, paint that little bit off there, as well. That'll do me, and just
go in really quickly. Yep, that's looking good, so now, press the backslash key again
to come back to normal mode so now we can see when
we turn that on and off, we've got it pretty much
just on the background and obviously on that stepladder, as well. Now, I don't need to use
this at full strength. I can also take down the
opacity of this layer, but before we do, I want to
click on the thumbnail of the texture and go to
philtre, blur, gaussian blur. I'm just gonna blur it just a little bit just to fake that look of depth of field. So we've got our values of two, that's enough, okay on that, and then I think I'll take the
actual opacity of this layer down to around about maybe 50%. It doesn't need to be a lot,
but that's just right for me. Yep, liking that. All right, now the next
thing I'm going to do, I'm going to create a
merged or stamp layer to the top of the layer stack, and I'm going to call this one topaz, and this is the only plug in generally now that I tend to use. It's called topaz clarity. It's an effect that's very,
very difficult to replicate just by using Photoshop on its own. So let me just show you this. I'm going to go to philtre,
topaz labs, and topaz clarity, and there's a huge dialogue box here that's got loads and loads
of options available to us, lots of presets and lots of sliders. You see on the left hand
side here all the presets, right hand side, all
these particular sliders. We can actually dial in the
settings that we want here. Now, out of all these sliders here, I generally only use the very top two, micro contrast and low contrast. I'll take micro contrast around about 30 and the low contrast pretty much halfway, so 50-ish, something like that will do me. And then once I've done that, that's pretty much what I always do. Click okay, that'll process it. You can see the progress bar at the bottom of the screen here. That's gonna build up and send this now back over into Photoshop, and it's then that I can
decide whether or not I've either done too
much or not quite enough, but we'll just wait for that
to finish processing it. Now, back into Photoshop, and we can see now if
I turn that on and off, I'm quite liking that, actually. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, I might take it down to about 80%, something like that. Now then, the next thing I'll do is maybe a little bit of colourizing, and generally what I used to do before was use the nick collection. We had Colour Effects Pro 4 that you can actually
download for free from Google. I'll put the link in the
description if you haven't got it. It's free, so why wouldn't you, but generally now I tend to use
what's called lookup tables, and again, there's a video where
I show you how I use those. Those are found in the adjustment layers up in the top right hand corner here, so we've got the second row down, it's the far right hand corner that looks like a three by three grid. And to give you an idea of
the kind of thing I did here, let's just click on the
colour lookup table here. I generally only ever use the top menu and we'll come down to something like, let's say moonlight or
something like that. I'm going to load the
opacity to around maybe 20%. Let's add another one,
and just play around now just to dial in some kind of a recipe, so I want this one to be
quite a cool-looking picture, so we can go horror
blue, what does that do? Maybe take that down to 10%. Okay, I might try just one
more, make it nice and cool, and we'll go to crisp winter. What's that one do for us? That's quite nice. Take that down to 20%. Let's just put all these
three into a group now. We've got the upper one selected there. I'm going to hold down my shift key and click on the first one, so now all three of them are selected, and then we'll go to the flyer menu up at the top of the layers panel there and choose new group from layers, and I'll call that LUT for
lookup tables, and click OK. So now I can click that on and
off just to see if I like it. Great thing is it's in a
group, I can also dial it down, so let's take it down to maybe 70%. It needs to be quite subtle. Something like that's looking good. All right, let's just
create one more merged layer to the top of the layer stack and just sort of do some
finishing touches now. I might just dive back over into the philtre and camera raw. Let's just see what we can do here, so we do need to bring up some shadows. It's got the shadow slider, bring that up just a touch maybe. That kind of works. And do you know, I might actually use an adjustment brush just one more time and might just put a bit more exposure back on that face again. Now, just so you know
that when you've got, in your camera raw here when
you've got all these sliders, you might have them all
over the place like this. If you want to set them
back to the defaults so they're all down the centre there, all kind of going back to zero, you can either double click on each of the little dials
there to bring them back, but to do them very quickly all at once, just go to the menu at the
top right hand corner of camera raw just at the top here, and it says reset local
correction settings, and you'll see all those
sliders when I click on that, they all go back to zero, so it's a nice quick way of doing it. So, we've got that adjustment brush. Let's just bring up the
exposure a tiny amount and we'll just paint over
the face just a little bit, just there like that, so
we'll go there, dial in. Something like that's looking pretty good, and then we'll click OK. Now there were a few other
little things that I did, one of them, you'll bring
over my cartoon painting look. I generally add that to
about 99% of my pictures. I did do that with this one, but I reduced the strength
of it down quite a lot, but I do like to add that effect in. There is a video on that, as well, and I'll put that in the description part, but that's pretty much it. That pretty much takes you all the way through the retouching. We didn't do much in Lightroom, but if we just look at the original image, this is what's brought us from Lightroom. We've added the selected quality work on, oops, let's just do that. Don't know what's going on here. Let's just turn those off. We then worked on the eyes
and then we sharpened them. We did a bit of dodging
and burning, not much. We added a texture on the
background and we blurred it. Use of topaz clarity,
little bit of colouring, and then some final touches in camera raw bringing back in the shadows. If you've got any questions, by all means, drop a comment in the
comment section there and I'll definitely make
sure I get back to you, but I hope that's useful. Check out the video at the
end, and I'll see you later.
