How to Edit Dramatic Portraits in Photoshop

this episode is sponsored by Squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make your next move with Squarespace so as I said in the last video if a bunch of you were keen to know the editing process behind the mentor portraits I'd make a video so this is that video thanks for leaving the comments just to let you know what I've done before this all I've done is taken the images into Lightroom I've done some very basic tweaks just to bring out as much detail as I can so when I bring it into Photoshop I've got that to work with I've exported a JPEG I know that's horrendous in many people's minds I usually edit through JPEGs and a lot of you will insist on 16-bit tips to get as much information as possible if that's you go for it I do find times where there's banding in the background or something because I'm using a JPEG and I need to go back and fetch that TIFF but generally 95% of the time JPEG is good enough for what I'm doing so that's the way that I work in its saves file space just to key you in on this tutorial it's not really an entry level of beginner tutorial I need to move quite fast and this would be a two hour long tutorial if if I had to explain every little thing that I'm doing so I'm gonna move quite quickly I would I would sort of pitch this a more intermediate to advanced photoshop but if you're a beginner you can still follow along then you might just sort of jot down questions you have next to you and then you've got some googling to do afterwards to fill in some of the gaps but hopefully you'll find it helpful and also just wanted to say thank you so much to those of you who took time to leave comments and especially to share around the last film that I did it was quite a personal one for me and the fact that you've all jumped on and being so supportive and encouraging has really meant the world to me so thanks for them so let's jump in okay so I've got this photo of Sergio open in Photoshop this is the first image from the film and I'm gonna just start playing through so the first thing I want to do is I want to check my crop and this is a general rule I use myself I want usually my my upper third to sit on the eyebrows I want the left and right thirds and this is just general rule ease myself to to just frame the face slightly so something like that and then usually what I do is I would pull this bottom third up to the chin if I'm going in for a sort of quite close-up portrait it's just a little formula I use but for this one I'm going to just bring it just sort of around about here and include some of that neckline so just using my arrow keys just to nudge a little bit and I think I want to be right about there I'm just checking that the width distances from I so that thirds are about the same and sitting on the eyebrows so that looks good to me that's kind of where I want it and I can always bring in it a little bit if I want but I think that looks around the crop that I want to have okay the next thing I want to do is I'm going to create a blank layer above and I'm going to come to my healing brush here and I'm going to make sure that right here where it's which shows you which layer you're actually working on it says current and below it'll automatically default to current layer just make sure it's current and below otherwise you won't be doing anything so putting my healing on a separate layer here making sure that my brush is 0% hardness it's got a lot of feathering on it and I'm gonna go in and just start to take out just little distractions I'm not really I'm not doing a beauty retouch here I'm not trying to take out you know any kind of floor I'm just going in to remove anything that I would find distracting looking at the image so this hair here stands out as something that sort of just across everything else I want to remove that and little things like so the eyebrows that are crossing over as well and probably going to remove those and all I'm doing is I'm hitting alt to select an area that I want to work from very similar to the clone brush and I am painting over from that area and heating brush it's the same process as using the clone brush but the clone brush will take across anything it sees so if I clone from here to here it would take across this light skin to the dark skin but if I'm using a healing brush and I select here and clone to here it's not going to take across a me undo that it's not gonna take across the color across to here or the light versus dark it's just going to take across the texture so it's a good way to just kind of remove any kind of distractions but keep the color underneath the same just little little bits like this I'm probably going to just take out some of these as well just because I might just cause a bit of a distraction in the final image and looking around let's see that looks good to me just these little hairs over here that doesn't look good let me just find a better place to copy from okay I'm gonna move quite fast I would take a lot longer on this but for the sake of this tutorial I don't want to spend too long or it's gonna get very long so looking around that looks pretty good alright now what I need to work on is the hair I'll probably do that on a separate layer so again just new layer exactly the same situation here so using the healing brush again I'm just going to take out some of these strays around the edges that are just kind of sticking out a little too much for me let's just see if I can grab this edge here and make that make a bit more sense that's good coming in taking some of those out you know watch sometimes you get these sort of fuzzy faded edges I don't want to totally neaten it up it's not really the point of this image I want it to feel a little bit rough and ready and I'm I'm not like I said I'm not doing a beauty image okay here where it starts to do this and you can see you get this kind of halo Noro sort of fuzzy glow here I need to switch to my clone stamp tool here because I need to actually copy across everything because the computer is trying to work out how to get rid of that and it's not doing a great job so when I get around the edge here I probably do just want to clone instead of actually healing brush just so I can bring across exactly what I want to in terms of the colour as well so just taking out some of those probably this one as well again just alt selecting where I want to sample from and then clicking across so between here and brush and clone brush let's just take out some of this as well because it's a little bit too long and that's looking pretty good if i zoom out now yeah I mean I quite like this still a little bit fuzzy over here but I've just taken out some of the distractions so literally if you see if I hold alt and click on the bottom layer it takes away all the other layers I just taken out some of the distractions I haven't really changed a lot but it's just kind of taken out some things that I think might distract from the final image okay so next thing I want to do is to sharpen so what I'm going to do is hit command alt shift E on a Mac and it would just be ctrl alt shift E on a Windows computer and that creates a stamp visible layer which just takes everything you've done underneath and puts it on top so I've got an action which I usually use for sharpening but just to show you how to do it from scratch a simple way to sharpen is once you've got the stamp visible layer if you come over here to filter and you go down to other and high-pass this is how you use a high-pass filter and basically here this will give you this is on his lips here you can see if I can move it around it's going to show you particular areas that you missed so you see what I'll do is I'll put it on the eye because that's gonna be the most important for me and I want to change my radius here you can see if I pull it up a long way it's just going to look crazy I wanted to look grayed out and I want the lines to be very fine on it but not too little if I pull it down it just turns to gray so pulling it up I probably want on this image about 1.5 that's the kind of look that I want to go for hit OK and then I'm gonna come down here to overlay and basically what that's gonna do is sharpen everything up so now if I turn this layer on and off that I've just created you can see what that's doing its sharpening everything but I don't want the whole image sharpened so I'm going to create a mask on this layer I'm gonna hit command I to invert the mask and change everything to black and I'm gonna come to my paintbrush tool I'm gonna change is 100% flow 100% opacity so I'm literally just painting this on make sure that I've got my hardness down to zero so it's a nice feathered brush and I'm just gonna paint in the features that I want to sharpen I often use this on Beauty portraits as well because I don't like to smooth the skin at all but I found that if you do the opposite if you sharpen the features and leave the skin as is it has a subtle sort of effect of smoothing the skin because you're you're sharpening the features against the skin and they come out sharp in comparison but you're not actually smoothing the skin so if you want a subtle way to do that I found that's good so I've just painted over you can see on the mask here that I've just painted over the eyes and just nostrils a little bit and on the lips and just on the hair that's in focus there and all that's done is just sharpen up the features now what I'm going to do is again command alt shift and E and because this this image I want to accentuate some of the age and features as well not in an unkind way but I do want to bring them out I'm gonna do exactly the same again I'm gonna get a filter high-pass exactly the same high pass that I had before so I can just use the the shortcut at the top come down again to overlay I'm going to apply this mask again and hit command-i on invert and I'm going to come to my brush again now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in and this time I'm going to sharpen lines on the skin but because it's on a separate layer what I'm gonna do is dial this back a little bit I don't want it as sharp as the features and that's why I'm putting them on separate layers so just some of the lines around the face there so turning that on and off you can see it's just sharp in those but this layer I'm probably gonna set to about 48 percent 50 percent somewhere around there so it's half as sharp as the actual features that I want to bring out so now that I've got the detail that I want in there and things are popping the way I want I'm going to start working on just a couple of the features the first thing for me or in terms of individual features to work on the eyes the eyes and portraits are super super important so the way that I work with eyes I use kind of a two-fold process and a little trick for you so if you come down here and you you add a curves layer above and then you set this curves layer to color dodge okay it's gonna look horrendous that's absolutely fine seen a hit command + I to invert that mask and get rid of everything now I'm gonna come to my brush tool set on white and I'm gonna change my flow to 3 percent and flow is nice because it helps you you can paint over the top of itself and build up the effect slowly which I quite like so it's only kind of come through at 3 percent on every stroke but if I do it twice at 6 percent 9 percent so I can intuitive kind of painting the effect I want now I'm gonna zoom right in on this eye and what I'm gonna do whoops too much my little Wacom tablets freaking out of it so now with my square bracket Keys just a nice shortcut for you to change the brush size I'm gonna bring the brush size right down I'm gonna come in here and I'm just going to just the lighter portions of the iris I'm just gonna paint them in a little bit more again if you go over it a couple of times it's gonna bring it out even more but just a little bit it's gonna bring those out so there we go and I'm also going to just punch this cache light just a little bit and Plus this little reflection on the bottom if I turn this layout on and off you see what I've done there it's just bringing through the color a little bit and just lightening some of those lighter portions I'm also gonna lighten this one a little bit great so now I want to come across through this eye and do exactly the same process just those lighter portions and this is just accentuating the iris hopefully this would be you know if the light was catching slightly better it would have exactly the same effect I just want to make sure that the eyes are filled with light in the right places so if I turn that on and off now you can see what it's done is just giving a little bit of a color dodge to those colored portions there so that's the first step for the eyes second step is I'm going to create another curves layer and you'll notice I'm not actually editing the curve I'm just changing the blending mode of the curves layer it has this effect now if I go down and change this one to screen it lightens the whole image you can see it looks terrible and a lot of these areas you can start to see like the sense of falling apart in different places again now just come on die and get rid of the whole thing same thing again I've got my brush set on white to paint on the mask and to reveal and I'm at three percent flow so I'm going to build up this effect and this time slightly bigger I'm going to just paint in a sweep like this on the iris you'll often notice on an iris that the edge is quite is often darker before it hits the white of the eye I want to keep that dark line so I don't want to paint over there and I don't obviously want to line up the pupil I just want to sweep that fills underneath the I hear underneath the pupil in the iris where the light would be catching and again the same here you can see where the light was already pooling in here and all I'm doing is just a sweep like this just to bring it through okay so now if I turn that layer on and off you can see what that's done it's just bringing that light into the eye a little bit and it's a little too strong so I'm gonna dial it back to like 70% 80% there again I just want to see with this bottom layer I put on as well with a color dodge how much of that I want probably one about 80% so those are my eyes really really important for me in a portrait I need to be drawn to the eyes in the image it's very very key okay so now what I want to do I've kind of got everything looking the way I want generally in terms of cleaning things up the eyes are popping i've accentuate at some of the lines in the skin the features are looking good I'm gonna do something which is going to I wouldn't normally do on a portrait but for this kind of portrait I want to bring out the grittiness of the portrait I want to make you feel earthy I want to make the lines on the face feel rich and deep and this is a little trick if I do again command alt shift and E to create a stamp visible layer so I was just stamping everything above the layers I've created below and I'm gonna go to image adjustments and I'm gonna come down to black and white now on my black and white and we'll do this again at a low stage where we actually convert this to black and white I want to play with my reds and yellows in particular and you can see what that's doing to the skin if I put these push the Reds up you get this kind of very glowy skin I want the opposite I want to bring out the skin texture and the detail so if I pull these red down you can see what that's doing its really kind of accentuating those lines and if I push the yellows up a little bit it's gonna make that even more contrast II so pulling the Reds down and just tweaking a little bit until I get all this kind of nice detail in here now we see that looks terrible I wouldn't push the image out that or maybe like that but it's not really what I'm going for I'm gonna hit okay and then I'm gonna change the blending mode of this black and white layer to soft light and what that does is it I mean it looks like it's ruined the image and killed all the detail but it's pulling out all this detail lines in the face so if I add a mask to this layer again command I and get rid of that so it's all black now what I want to do is take my brush tool I'm gonna set it to 100% this look terrible initially make sure it says nice soft brush I want to go in and just paint this in on the skin on the face so it's gonna look bad at the start it's gonna look too hectic obviously because I'm at a hundred percent on everything I'm gonna get even on the eyes there as well I think you're bringing this around just painting this in on the face if you want to just so check what you're doing you can bring in your your mask overlay here that's just your your your backslash key and you can kind of see what your mask is doing again just bringing it in on there and the skin any skin that I can see I know so many of you panicking it's looking terrible that's fine I'm gonna dial this way back in a second I'm gonna bring in the hair on this one as well just because I like what it's doing the shadows all right so now take that off okay so if I turn this on and off you can see it's it's good it's way way too strong you can see what I'm trying to do though so now what I want to do is take this right down to zero on opacity on that layer mask and I'm just gonna dial it in a little bit and see where I want this to kind of sit and that mm maybe maybe about thirty percent on this one again I don't copy the numbers that I use I'm going to take you back to 25 actually don't copy the numbers they use you have to do this sort of stuff by feel you have to work out how much is too strong or too little I added to the other portraits from this series and I found I needed different numbers on every one I had to dial it in by field to get them looking the same and another trick I use by the way just as an aside is that if while I was doing this series I would pull in as a reference another image next to it so I was making them feel like each other and it's especially important when you're doing a portrait series and trying to make the set feel like the images feel like each other okay so that's looking good what I want to do now is I want to start to work just to bring the focus into the center a little bit quick trip to curves here and other curves now on top I'm going to change this the blending mode on this curves layer there's a number of ways you can do this I'm gonna start getting into dodging and burning now but I mean one of the ways is obviously just to just to start to pull down your curves I like to use a little trick or actually change the blending mode of this curves layer to multiply okay because you end up leaving a lot more detail in this as well obviously way too strong but I'm going to go command I so it changes it to black this is why masks and learning how to use masks in Photoshop is so key because you can't just apply an effect you have to apply it to the particular areas you want so it's changed the black at the moment I'm on my brush soft brush white and I'm going to change my float back to three percent I want to paint this effect in I'm going to zoom out a little bit for this one and I'm going to change the brush to quite a big size again square bracket keys is a nice shortcut to change your brush size now I'm going to start to brush this effect in just on the corners and what this is doing is obviously creating a bit of a vignette but it's just doing it in a way that's sort of a custom effect and it's not going to be and I just applied globally but I can do it as much or as little as I want I can slowly paint that in so just a subtle thing I've just start to pull the focus to the face and I'm going to pull the opacity back just a little bit about 80% maybe you can see it's just pulling your focus into where I want you to be looking which is that face and just darkening down some of that shirt especially okay so that's looking pretty good and now what I want to do is I want to work on the shape of the face and to do that this is your global dodging and burning and people have mixed feelings about what I'm about to do because they'll they say that it sort of creates a particular sort of look that can look very fake and I agree if you overdo this it does look fake but if you use it subtly which I do in a lot of my portraits it gives a slightly painterly look to your to your photos which I quite like so again use this as little or as much as you want but if I create another curves layer above here and again I'm going to set this to multiply which is going to darken live in write down command I is going to invert every pick up my brush tool and I'm gonna use my bracket key so now what I've done is this this multiply layer is gonna darken down as I paint it so what I want to do is sort of accentuate the shape of the face that's already there so these shadows here I'm going to slowly just paint white in and just deepen the side of this face down against the under this cheekbone a little bit around here I'm gonna darken down the neck as well just in general just while I've got this brush on just because I don't want as much focus on this lighter portion as this lighter portion I'm gonna just shape some of the forehead here as well just on the edges here around the side and then just underneath this cheekbone I'm gonna bring in the shadow a little bit under the chin here okay now maybe just on the edges of the nose here and underneath and those where the shadow already is maybe underneath this top lip a touch down the sides of the nose just to sort of pinch their nose in a little bit I'm not changing the shape I'm just accentuating the light that's already there okay and that's probably all I want to do I don't want to deepen this that starts to be sort of an unkind edit in my mind so if I turn this layer on and off you can see it's just sort of pinched in those shadows a little bit if you want to see kind of what that's probably a little bit too subtle for you to see there but you can kind of see just pinching in those shadows a little bit and I'll leave that for now I'll probably Dahlia pass you back in a second let me create another curves layer above and on this one I'm going to do the opposite I'm gonna change this to screen which is gonna make everything very bright and hit command-i to black out that mask and I'm going to paint it in slowly again white brush three percent flow so I can paint it in slowly and now I'm doing the opposite now I'm working on the brighter areas so the forehead here I want this to be brighter I want this sort of ridge of the nose where the lights catching they're let's accentuate that a little bit cheekbone very nice it's sort of into the X of where where the eye sits in the ocular region you can just start to bring out the shape the shape of the skull and the face almost and catch that light again the chin here probably this bottom lip just a touch and just above the eye here and then I'm just going to give the eyes a little sweep just a little pop just for themselves as well and that I'm going to give a little sweep on the handle in as well okay so this is very subtle effects if I if I turn this on and off now you can see what that's done and that's that's looking pretty good and it gives a slightly painterly look I find but I quite like the look so turning these to dodge and burn layers off that's the burn layer and that's the Dodge layer just accentuating the light that's already falling on the face and I'm actually not going to dolly a pasty back I often would dial it back a bit but I don't think it's too strong I painted it in quite subtly so I'm going to leave that as is okay next thing I want to do is work on just the background a little bit and I'm going to add a bit of a texture so I'm gonna go into my pictures I've got a folder full of textures which I've collected over the years and I'm going to go to I know the one that I was using was this color shift once I'm not open the texture and pull it on to my portrait here okay yes--it's we're going to want to change the formats and a slightly different format that's absolutely fine okay I'm going to go to edit transform and I'm going to flip this clockwise zoom out and then I'm going to just pull it into the center a little bit and then I'm going to hold alt and shift just it doesn't change the actual shape and I'm going to pull this on to somewhere around I'm actually gonna flip this horizontally as well think flip this vertically rather kind of want this behind surgery so all this is doing is it's like a slightly textured organic vignette that I'm going to create now so I'm gonna go to my adjustments I'm gonna get a black and white and I'm going to just pull my Reds in a bit and yellows up just to create a bit more contrast I'm gonna go okay and I'm going to go to when it changes to soft light okay it's gonna make it look pretty hideous and obviously this is right over the top of the image that I want to work on I'm gonna go to mask and I'm gonna hold command eye and get rid of all of that now I'm gonna do is go in and I'm gonna paint this into onto the image with my white brush change it to 100% and I'm going to just put my actual mask on which you but just with backspace you can make sure you can go in and then you can see what you're actually painting and I'm just painting this onto the background behind him I don't need to be super accurate with this if you want to sort of go in and use the pen tool the mask stuff out I sometimes do that if I if I want to be very careful with this for the sake of this I'm going to move a little bit faster again I've got some out-of-focus shoulders and the rest of it so I'm gonna probably be able to get away with this a lot so I'm just going in I'm just painting I'm just painting this right up to the shoulder line I can go in and sort of tweak this afterwards as well again right around the face here I would normally spend a lot longer on doing this part correctly but like I say we don't really have the time so I'm just gonna move quite quick and just trust me that you will need to spend longer and probably mask some sections properly but again like little stray hairs being in this mask really doesn't bother me I'm not I'm not going for a proper separation because you'll see you won't really notice what I've done once once I've said it properly so right in here okay getting rid of all right so yeah again as long as you understand I spent a lot longer on that normally that's that's the idea now what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to make sure when I click on the layer again so that the actual gradient is selected or not the grain of the texture and not the actual mask and now obviously this doesn't work because you can see it's it's blurred out like the back of his head but this is sharp in detail so now I need to go into filter blur and I need to get a Gaussian blur to match the amount of blur that that would be if it's on the background and it's gonna have to be quite a lot so probably gonna go into about 33% there and all this has done is its created as if there's a slight glow behind him and you can obviously just stick a speedlight behind them and do this on the day but I wanted it to be quite a subtle effect if I turn this on and off you can see it's just had the effect of darkening down the corners and bringing a glow to sort of behind his head here I'm gonna leave this as is that's not like going and just so check it's not doing anything strange on the edges because this was a really kind of quick mask you can see because the edges are so blurred and because this is now so blurred at the background it's just really sort of pulling focus rather than messing with anything on the edges so that's all I've done on that I find it's a nice way to create a bit of a vignette but keep it with an organic feel if I start with the texture all right so we're getting somewhere I'm gonna go to working on color now I'm gonna go down to my layers here and select color balance and this is a formula I used for a lot of things I want to cool off the shadows and I want to warm the mid-tones and highlights so this is a little formula you can use if you want I usually go three and minus three so I'm adding a touch of cyan touch of blue mid-tones I'm going to go minus three and three I'm adding in a touch of red and a touch of yellow you can do five seven as much as you want our like a more subtle effect and then my highlights I'm just going to add minus three and bring some yellow into the highlights and if I turn that on and off you can see it's created a bit of color contrast little too much for me I don't to lose too much detail so I'm gonna Dahlia pasty into about 70% that's looking fairly good I'm gonna come down and select my hue/saturation layer I'm going to go to my Reds and I want to boost my Reds a touch so maybe for careful with the sliders on this because it they end up being so small if you're using them in the corner that if you move them a little bit it makes a massive effect so I like to excell them in with numbers I'm gonna punch my saturation on my yellows by three maybe I'm gonna bring my Blues right down I don't want the blue in the shirt I wanted to be more DC so I'm going to bring the Blues right down and also I can bring the lightness down on the shirt a touch as well I'm going to do the Shires as well just in case it's pulled anything in there as well that looks alright okay and if I turn that on and off you can see it's just pulled the shirt back a little bit but also brought a little bit more warmth into the skin there I'm gonna go and add another one and just punch the saturation globally by five I'm gonna see what that does let's have a look I'm looking at the skin in particular that's the important thing for me I want to make sure the skin is looking good yeah and that looks pretty good to me okay so I like that let's go to curves I'm starting to finish up now go to curves and create a little bit of contrast again so just pushing a little bit the highlights and maybe pulling a little bit in the shadows very very little bit because I don't want to lose this detail here that's looking good then what a this button here is bugging me okay so what I'm gonna do just just I've just noticed this now it's just kind of annoying me a little bit what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a curves layer little trick because it's actually the highlights in this button that are really annoying me and I'm gonna take on my curves layer here highlights mid-tones and shadows obviously if I pull my shadows up it's going to crunch them if I pull my highlights down it's going to brighten them up what's interesting then is is the the bar at the bottom does the opposite if I pull from the left with the shadows is brightening up the shadows a nice way to kind of get a vintage look if you want it's just pull this up you can fade your shadows like this but you can also pull down your highlights like this so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull my highlights down quite strongly and then I'm going to fill this mask here with black and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come right down here and down to that bottom button that was annoying me just for those highlights there and I'm going to paint on the highlights this is gonna darkened down those highlights on there button just a little bit and it's gonna make it kind of less distracting in that bottom corner so you can see all that's done it's just made a slightly brighter and slightly darker down that bottom it's not as distracting the human eye is always drawn to bright parts of the image so I want to control when someone looks at a portrait of mine that you're spending your time looking at this face and you're not looking around all the other little bright distracting pieces around last thing I want to do before I before I push this color version out is go to levels layer and I want to check that I'm not losing a ton of detail so if I hold down alt grab my highlights and pull to the left you can see at which point I'm starting to lose and over exposes highlights if I if I let go here you can see that these highlights are blown out so holding alt I want to pull my highlights right over until just before they start to peak and that means I've got a good contrast but I'm not losing any detail so it's just brightened up those highlights a touch but I'm not losing detail holding down alt and touching my shadows I would imagine I'm already starting to lose because it's quite a low-key image so I'm going to keep those all the way over to zero and that's looking good great so if I come all way down to the bottom here and I hold alt and hit my background layer my little eye tool next to the next to the background layer it's going to get rid of everything we've done and you can see the difference that we've made so we've added contrast brighteners eyes sharpen the features worked on the whoops worked on the color a little bit and we've just sort of pulled some attention towards the face now I'd be happy with this that's great so I'm going to go save as and I would go to JPEG and I will call this Sergio and color and I'd export that as a JPEG maximum quality obviously and okay now you'll notice in the in video that I actually wanted to make sure that the final images were series of black and white so let me just show you how I did the black and white conversion on this I would go to my levels I would add an adjustment layer black and white adjustment layer now again what I want to do is I'd want to accentuate those features again and they're black and white but I need to be a lot more careful than when I did it as an overlay layer before so I want to pull my reds to the left a little bit just to bring in some of that detail that's looking pretty good and then I'm going to push my yellows just to bring some contrast back into this in and I like how that's looking to see what my blues are doing that's just affecting the shirt because I would blue in the shirt I'm gonna brighten them a touch just to keep the detail and that shirt the way I want see if they Saiyans are doing anything of that shirt as well probably somewhere around there that's looking fairly good for me I don't think we've got any green in the image so we're all right okay so that's you've already created a black-and-white layer it's looking pretty good now what I want to do is go to my curves again and I'm gonna bring in some contrast with my curves into this black and white again I don't want to lose too much detail I can't push the shadows more in the black and white I might think people forgive a contrast see black and white we're losing shadow detail more than on a color version so I'll push a little bit and then exactly the same again pull in a levels layer hold alt on my highlights to see if I'm starting to lose any detail I'm good so I'm dining left until I get to 247 ish 250 and that foreheads looking a little hot so I'm gonna make it 252 and my highlights and I know I'm safe and I'm probably not gonna pull my shadows at all just checking pulling them across yeah I'm already losing straight away so I'm going to leave that where it is so that's looking pretty good and that is my that's my black and white version again I don't want a vintage fade on this I'm going for a deliberately contrasting look and that's why I'm using this technique of pulling my levels in so I can make sure I got max contrast in this and now will it save it out as a JPEG Sergio that changes to BW and save that out as a full rent [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] they sent a Squarespace for sponsoring this episode if you need a new website or a domain they really are a great option especially if you're an artist of any kind if you're a photographer a filmmaker or a painter and you want your work to be presented in a very clean but very well designed environment just go and take a look at the list of the templates that they have and play around with them and you'll find they're really really well-thought-out I I like the fact that I don't have to think about the design side because it's not my forte but I can focus on the photography and I know if I post my work within the bounds those templates give me I'm going to look professional and my work is going to look great start your free trial today at squarespace.com and go to Squarespace com forward slash Sean Tucker to get 10% of your first purchase [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 324,198

Keywords: photoshop, portraits, retouching, dramatic portraits, how to edit a portrait, editing dramatic portraits, editing portraits, mentors, mentor portraits, sean tucker photography, sean tucker, adobe, adobe photoshop, editing in photoshop, dodge and burn, colour toning, sharpening, contrast control, using levels, using curves, healing brush, masking in photoshop, adjustment layers

Id: MvwFIZX3y_k

Length: 36min 10sec (2170 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/earthsworld]

Ok, just started watching this video and wtf Sean... he exports from LR as a JPG to edit his images??? To save space? Ugh. Strike one.

Strike two: he sets the healing brush to 0 hardness and a diffusion of 5... this leaves nasty artifacts in areas of transparency. With a feathered brush, only a diffusion setting of 7 works without making a mess of things.

On to strike 3: Highpass sharpening without desaturating the highpass!

Good grief. Horrible layer hierarchy... strike four.

Another strike: sets up his global saturation and then ruins it by putting a curve above which changes the sat.

Strike six-100: Saves jpgs of his final images and then throws away the layers! So if he decides later that he wants to make a new adjustment, he either has to completely redo all his work or he works on top of his double jpg.

The other thing i noticed is that most of the moves he's making in Ps could be done in Lr. As a best practices sort of thing, when you do a lot of color moves, it's a great idea to do those in Lr or Acr.

As always, photographers have some of the worst workflows imaginable.

2/10