hi this is Mike, your instructor and welcome back to advanced Photoshop and with this lesson we're going to be
learning some advanced photo retouching techniques. now many of you have had some basic
experience retouching photos, but sometimes they can prove to be very
challenging. and photo retouching is a common task in Photoshop used by photo labs and photographers so it's an
essential skill. so here we're not only going to learn how to
do some advanced photo retouching techniques but we're also gonna show you how to do some hand tinting, or hand tinted color effect.
we're gonna start out with an antique picture which I've titled dust and downloaded from
blackboard. here's our picture. it's an antique photograph, a scanned image
and you can see it's got some issues - let's zoom in on that a little bit
and you see that it's got lots of dust spots on it. there's some
scratches over here on the face that we'd now like to retouch.
and the picture over the generations has turned kind of a
yellowish color so we want to restore this to its original image quality. now you might have used like the clone stamp tool to retouch pictures in
the past but as you can see with all these dust spots here you'd spend an enormous amount of time trying to retouch those so we're gonna do this in a bit quicker way, the more efficient way, and when we're
finished retouching we're going to hand tint it. if you look really careful you
can see that there are parts of the picture where there are very subtle shades of
color. you see that there's a little bit of tint added to the lips and cheeks and the dress is green. well, this is of course a
black and white picture taken in the 19th century before there was any color methods and what photographers
would do is after they printed the photograph
they'd come back in with oil paints and paint in a really thin transparent coat of oil on it to give a
little bit of realistic color and so we'll do that in Photoshop. we're gonna start out by duplicating the layer. let's go to our
Layers panel and the reason we're duplicating this is primarily because we want to keep in
line with non-destructive editing practices
as we've mentioned before. and if I do something to the image which perhaps my customer doesn't like
or if i make a mistake that might not be repairable then I can always go back to my original
image because the original pixels are still preserved.
so i'm just gonna press alternate command J or option command J if you're on a Macintosh.
command J would've just copied that or jumped it to a new layer but
holding down the Alt key gives me an opportunity to give this layer a new name. let's call it dust and scratches. now on my dust and
scratches layer I want to apply the dust and scratches filter but in
case I have to come back and make changes to this image I'm going
to convert the dust and scratches layer to a
smart object. right click on the blank part of the
layer and choose convert to smart object. then I will go to filter, noise, dust and scratches. now in the dust and scratches panel drag your radius slider all the way to
the left and also make certain that the threshold slider is all the way to the left. and you can zoom in a little bit if you'd like in the preview window. now what I wanna
do here is drag this radius slider to the right until those dust spots disappear. and I'm thinking that at about 5 pixels they're pretty much gone. actually probably
around four pixels. if I drop it down to three I'm seeing too many
of them still so let's go ahead and set that at about four or five pixels and i think we'll be just fine. now of course having done so we've lost a lot of our detail in the image so I'm gonna take
the threshold slider and i'm gonna drag that to the right just
until those dust spots start to reappear. and I think there's a whole bunch of them
right around on her jaw there so i'm just gonna drag this up. and we're getting a lot of them starting to pop back in now so I am thinking probably around 14 pixels. well, let's try 16 pixels. I think that's
going to work out pretty well for us. that looks pretty decent to me. and i'll click OK. if it turns out that that's not correct, i can of course come back into my dust and
scratches options just by double clicking on the dust and scratches
label underneath my Smart Filters sublayer. okay so now we see we got rid of those dust and scratches, or at least most of the
scratches are gone, but the dust is definitely gone, but there's been a trade-off. you can
toggle this layer on and off again and you can see even though we got rid of the dust specks, we did that at a price. in other words, what we've
lost here is the sharpness in the eyes and the sharpness in the hair and other details like in the clothing
or now nice and fuzzy which we really need some part the
picture to be in sharp focus and in a portrait
the eyes absolutely must be in sharp focus even
if nothing else is. so the way i'm going to correct it is with a
mask so on my dust and scratches layer let's click
on the add layer mask button. now what I'm gonna do is Press D on my keyboard to reset my foreground and background colors to their
default settings, black and white, but then i'll press X to
swap those colors so that my foreground color is set to black. then i'll got to my paint brush and
i'm gonna choose a brush that is nice and soft. set all the--the softness-- or the hardness, rather, down to 0 percent and then I'm gonna drop the brush size
down a little bit here. i'm gonna zoom in on my picture and
i'm making certain that my layer mask is active. you see that it's filled with white
paint. i'm gonna be painting with black paint on the
layer mask and that--that's--what that's going to do
is it's going to cut a hole in this mask to reveal the sharper image in our background,
our original image back there. now you wanna make certain too that your opacity for your brush is set to 100 percent. and we're just going to paint over the parts, the eyes, make them nice and sharp once again. you see how that sharpness is returning. what's happening of course is the-- as I mentioned, the background layer is
now showing through this layer at the top. if I turn off my background layer you see the part of the dust and scratches layer that is masked off.
you can see there a little part that i missed so i'm gonna mask
that off too. turn that back on. now let's go ahead and get other parts of the picture sharp. the nostril should be
sharp, the lips, the curls of her hair. probably some hair back here would be
nice. the edges of the hair would be really good if it were nice and sharp just to give some
definition to it. bring that sharpness back in and the lace on her dress, let's make that nice
and sharp. i bet now you're noticing probably
something else is happening. as I'm painting that sharpness back in i'm picking up once again these dust spots so in this case i'll press X on my keyboard and that's going to swap
me back to white paint and then i'll drop down my brush size
to where it's really small and i'll just paint over those and that's going
to restore the mask on those areas and this won't take very
long at all because I didn't really have that many dust spots that popped back in. now I need to fix those scratches up on the
cheeks and here's what I'm gonna do to do that. I'm gonna merge these two layers into
one but I want to preserve the original
layers so i'm gonna use a shortcut that you won't find in any
of our menus up here. i'm gonna press Control alternate shift and E, or command option shift E on the Macintosh and
what that does is it merges all these visible layers into one layer but it preserves the
original ones. if I had just gone over here and chosen merge layers from the drop down menu it would have merged the layers into one layer but it would have also
destroyed the original layer. so this keyboard
shortcut is really really handy. that done, I'm going to go to my healing
brush tool and I can just press J to get to my healing
brush tools and shift J will allow me to toggle through those different tools and
the one that I wanna get is the Healing Brush Tool itself - the little
band-aid icon, not the spot Healing Brush Tool. and what
I'm gonna do is move my cursor-- let me just get on the right layer.
let's get onto our merge layer here. i'm gonna move my cursor over into the
forehead were we have nice clean skin tone and i'm gonna hold down my alternate key of course or option on the
Macintosh and i'm going to click. and then I'm gonna
move my cursor over to the scratch portion here.
drop my brush size down a little bit. and i'm just gonna click and release or click
and make really short strokes. and what Photoshop is doing here is we're borrowing these pixels up in
here and we're blending them with these pixels down here. again this is gonna work really well if i just
click and release or if i just click and drag a short ways. and we're just gonna get rid of those scratches on the face. and we've got some down here. now were into a
darker area of the skin so I'm gonna hold down the Alt key and click in a clean section of skin over there and then retouch the areas that are dark. you got some scratches on the fingertips,
let's take care of those. adjust your brush size as you need to. any other blemishes you see we'll take
care of those as well. let's take a quick look at the
background too. you see there's some-- it looks like there's some areas that are
kind of moldy back there so let's clean those up. okay I think that takes care of that. so you
see that very quickly there we have taken care of our dust scratches. now need to correct that yellowish cast that has occurred through the aging in the
photograph. now the way i'm gonna do that is I'm
gonna use the average blur filter on this-- on a copy of this layer and then change
the blend mode and invert the color and that's going to
neutralize this yellowishness. first of all, let's go to
layer 1, the one that merged and let's go ahead and rename that - let's just call that repair.
and i'm gonna copy that layer. just press Command J. now when i do my color corrections I don't want the white background to be
considered by photoshop so let's-- let me zoom out here just a little
bit. I'm going to select the background with my quick
selection tool and then I'll invert my selection by pressing control
Shift I, or command shift on the Macintosh. then
I'll choose filter, blur, and average. and what that does is it takes all the values in that picture and it's like
it puts them in a blender where it just averages everything out. now let's invert these colors. so I'll choose image, adjustments, and invert, or press control/command I. now there is an adjustment layer for
that too but we're not going to need to concern
ourselves with it this time because I know that i don't-- there won't be a
situation when I would need to undo that. okay so what that does
is inverts the values. of course the complementary color of yellow is
blue so now you see that the picture is more of a bluish tone. then back in our layers panel let's
change our blending mode from normal to color. color runs off the list here
so we can't see it but it's down near the bottom, second one from the bottom. change it to color. and what that does is
it preserves the luminance of the image, the
brightness and the darkness and so all you see is
kinda the bluish cast of the image.
and then what i'm gonna do is take my layer opacity and i'm gonna pull
that down until that image is neutralized.
and it should be right at 50 percent.
now the color is neutralized but you see there's absolutely, well, no
significant contrast in the picture. you know, no real blacks, no real whites, so
we need to correct that. I can do this either
with curves or levels. I'm gonna use the curves
adjustment layer. so i've got my Layers panel, and create that adjustment layer for curves. in the histogram you see that we have no blacks because our data doesn't start until we get over
here into the dark gray area of the histogram.
now we see that there's no whites either because these areas right
here are not present in the image. the
lightest value is this light grey. so I'm gonna take this point right here,
which is my shadow point, i'm gonna drag that in until we get to the base of that histogram and then i'll take my highlight point and drag that in until we get to the base, just to the
base, of the histogram as well. and that sets my black points and white points and then I can click and
drag on the diagonal line-- i'll drag it up a little
bit just to brighten the image now this is an antique picture and oftentimes those older pictures they
deliberately used a low contrast rendering so you might-- i mean this is up to you,
but you may have a little bit of lower contrast than you might ordinarily
would, but in a-- in a contemporary image. okay? so we've kinda-- we've adjusted our
brightness and contrast there with-- with curves. now i'm looking at my picture and I still
see a little bit of that yellow cast in there which I didn't really notice before so may have to go into my
repair copy layer and increase that opacity of the blue just a little bit. I can double-click the opacity and just
press my up arrow key a few times maybe setting that to about 55 percent. don't want to get too blue - maybe
anywhere 53 to 55 will kinda neutralize that for us. the next thing I want to do is restore the
color to the image. as i mentioned, there are parts of the image
that were originally hand tinted, such as the green dress, her cheeks, and her lips. now to simulate this hand tinting effect
i'm gonna create a new layer. let's go to our topmost layer, our curves layer,
to make it active. and we'll create a new layer. Alt or
option clicking on the new layer button, we'll call this hand tint. and i'm gonna change it's blend mode to color,
just like what we did with the repair copy layer. and for my foreground color i'm gonna choose a green for the dress. I could go to my eye dropper tool
and sample the dress itself. then open up my color picker and you can see this is
the range of greens. this is the gren that we have chosen and i may just want to choose a brighter green.
we don't want to get it too intense, nothing really saturated like
this, but just kind of a soft-toned green. and i'll paint over her dress with my
paintbrush. so what I want to do is make certain that I don't paint over
into the white area so I need to make a selection and drop this out. so let me hide this
panel for a second. i'll go to my quick selection tool, select the white background once again, invert the selection - control shift I or command shift I. and keeping that selected on my hand
tint layer-- again, i'll go to my paintbrush tool. making
certain that the brush opacity is 100 percent, we'll paint over that dress. now it's gonna look a little intense right
now. that's because we've got the brush
setting, brush opacity, at 100 percent. but not to worry, i'm gonna come back to
that and change it here and the reason I'm setting that at
100 percent rather than at 20 or 30 or something a little bit
more subtle is that if I've got it set at maybe
fifty percent or something like that and i put one brushstroke down and then
i paint another one top of that, you're gonna see those brush strokes overlap. you won't see that if it's at 100 percent. and what i'll do to control the intensity
of the color is once i've finished painting, i will then drop the layer opacity down to an appropriate
level. okay so here is my green. I can pull that opacity down to about 30 percent or so and see how you have a nice soft green. I'm gonna move up to her cheeks, switch
my foreground color to a nice rosy hue. and just little bit. that's probably a little bit too strong.
in this case here i may want to create a new layer for the cheeks. I think I'll do that. that way I can control the color of the cheeks
separate from the color of the dress. so here we kinda-- oops, we gotta change our blending mode back to color. okay, again I get pretty heavy-handed here; i'm doing
this intentionally because when I drop the layer opacity, in this case here probably about 25 percent will do the trick. it looks natural. and maybe I'll choose something a little bit
darker for the lips. i think i could probably keep those on the
same layer because they're about the same brightness. and again let's tweak those-- that layer opacity. actually
i think probably around fifteen percent in my case will do the trick. do a few final adjustments. there. what I've just done is i've dropped the layer opacity of the green dress down to 10 percent
because once I saw this at 100 percent in my window here it
seemed a little strong and I've got the cheeks down to about 15
percent. so at this point I can deselect and there is my completely restored image. okay now let's open up the Walt
Whitman picture which is on Blackboard. and here you see
we've got a similar situation we've got an image if Walt Whitman that
needs some repair. dust spots and all kinds of other things going on that need to be fixed
but it's got a particular problem that our other image didn't have and that is the-- about the upper third of the picture has really low
contrast; the bottom third does not. so what we
gotta do is correct just the contrast on the upper third
without it affecting the bottom half. and we're
also going to apply a vignette to this. vignette is a kind of a darker area around the edges and corners of an image which
focus your attention towards the center. when we're finished with our image it should
look like this. you see that the contrast on the upper third has been improved. we've got the vignetting
applied to all four corners. all repair has been made
and also we applied a little bit of colorization to it because the original
image was just kind of a really bland black and white. we just add a little bit of color -
kind of a sepia tone. that gives it a lot of life. so let's go ahead and get
started. I'm gonna copy my background layer by
pressing command J and on this first step, this is where we're going to
increase the contrast in the upper third. I'm gonna create a layer mask for layer 1. now with my newly-created mask active, I'm going to press D on my keyboard just to make certain that my foreground and background colors are set
to their default settings of black and white. if they're not there already. I'm gonna
go to my gradient tool. from my gradient picker I'm going to choose foreground to
background. I'm gonna choose the linear gradient, setting the opacity to 100 percent and make certain that reverse option is not selected. i'll zoom in so i can
show you what i'm getting ready to do here. and starting at the top of the image i'm gonna click and drag down
and then i'll have to press Shift so that I can draw a straight line. and i'm gonna drag my cursor to just below his chin like that. and that
creates a gradient mask. now if I turn off my
background layer you see that I've only got the top third
or so of the picture is revealed; the rest of it
is masked off. so now with my gradient mask created I'm then
going to create an adjustment layer for levels to improve the contrast, but I only want to improve
it over the top third of the image. so here's how I'm going
to do that. i'm going to press my control or command key and click on that layer thumbnail. that's gonna load
that part of the image as a selection. remember
anything that's black in the image will be masked off. so i't's only selecting the upper third of the image. now I'll go to my adjustment layers and i'll choose levels. I could do this with either curves or levels, but i'm gonna choose levels. and in the histogram I'm gonna take the
shadow slider and i'm gonna drag that until it gets to the base of my histogram on the left. that's setting my black point.
then i'll take the highlights slider and drag that until we get to the base of the
histogram on the right to set the white point. then I'll take my mid tone slider and
adjust the brightness and I'm setting it at 0.79. and back in my Layers panel I can toggle
that off and you see how my levels are only affecting the top third of the
image because we had only loaded the layer mask as a selection. so we've improved the contrast in just the upper third of the image. next i'm gonna merge
these layers just like i did before, control alternate shift and E, and I'm gonna rename this merge layer Walt sharp. and then i'll copy that layer and rename it dust and scratches. and we'll use the dust and scratches
filter as we did before to get rid of the dust and scratches.
again, I'm just going to convert this to a smart object. I'll just
kinda breeze through this because we've covered this already. looking for the areas where there's lots of dust. and filter, noise, dust and scratches. set everything to 0 and then bring the radius out. looks like it's just
going to be a little bit. right there. 4 pixels. and then we're gonna set our threshold up, increase it until those dust spots start to come back. then i'll create a layer mask. switching to black paint and a paintbrush.
i'll then paint in the parts that I want to be sharp, which include these buttons on his jacket -
i want those be nice and sharp. sleeves, any other details. I'll let you kinda determine those. but again it's a male figure so we want
to have a little more sharpness than we would if it were a female subject, but we definitely want
those eyes to be sharp. get those nice and sharp. get that hair nice and sharp, eyebrows, the rim on his hat, so on and so forth. and then in the background where you've got
those larger areas over here, you can clean that up using the Healing Brush Tool. make certain that
we've got the layer thumbnail selected for that.
clean those up. now I'm not gonna show you every single
one to do otherwise it's going to make a really long video, so i'm gonna pause the video while i
clean this up a bit. okay, so I finished that retouching part; it's looking pretty good. the next thing I would like to do is
create that vignette. and that's, again, where we darken the four
corners and usually a little bit around
the four sides as well. and the way I'm going to do that is by
creating a dodge and burn layer. now we've got dodge and burn tools but I don't really care for those very much.
for one thing, it permanently affects those pixels and it just kinda makes things look kind of a sludgy gray. here's our dodge and burn tool right over here, but again we don't usually use those.
there's a much better way to do dodging and burning and that's with
a dodge and burn layer. so i'm gonna create a new layer which I will
call dodge and burn. and, before i click on OK, I'm going to change
the blending mode in the new layer dialog to overlay and then I'm gonna put a checkmark where it says fill overlay-- fill with overlay neutral color which
is 50 percent gray. and i'm gonna click OK. now i could have done
that manually too. just create a new layer and change the blending mode to overlay but this
is a little bit quicker. and then go to my paintbrush tool and use a large soft brush. i'm gonna zoom out here a little bit too and with my layer opacity set to about 10 percent, I'm just gonna gradually paint in these corners. actually i'm gonna set that to about 30 or 40 percent. 10 wasn't quite
strong enough. and you see as I paint with black paint it's making those edges and corners darker. notice how large my paint brush is too.
we want to use a large brush to do this. and you can see on the layer thumbnail how its painting it with black which is the
purpose filling it with gray. now why doesn't the gray show up on our layer? that's because when we set the
blending mode to overlay, well, overly ignores gray pixels - we only see black and white. so i'm gonna create my vignette
just by darkening these corners and the edges a little bit. now if it's still not dark enough,
which in my case it is not, i've got-- i've painted that as opaque as I can get it
and it's still not dark enough, I can copy my dodge and burn layer.
now it's twice as dark as it was before and then I can lower the layer opacity
to get it back down to something that i-- a little more manageable.
and then if i want to lighten an area, i switch to white paint. and see
how it's lightning those areas there that got away from me just a little bit.
so, again, my original dodge and burn layer here, then i copied it because it wasn't
getting quite dark enough on the top even though I had maxed out my brush setting. and then I used white paint to lighten up these areas where it got too
dark and of course I dropped my layer opacity. one more thing I want to do and that is
to create a little bit of a sepia tone.
I'm going to create an adjustment layer for hue and saturation and I'm going to click on the colorize option because
right now if I change my hue-- well, there is no hue in this
picture; it's purely black and white so nothing happens.
but if i click on colorize then it applies color to it and I can adjust the hue.
I'm gonna choose kind of a red color. and I could drag the saturation
up to see, you know, what color it really is but something kind of in the red or red orange range
and then I'll drop my saturation down to about 15 percent. it's a very subtle difference but its noticeable. that gives that little bit of life that it needs. just a slight sepia tone. you don't want
to overdo it or look too cheesy. okay? there's my finished Walt Whitman retouched photograph.
okay, let's do just one more and this one will be a color photograph that
needs some resuscitation. let's open up color correction.jpg. and as you can see there's really nothing good to say about this
picture except for the people of course.
the composition is terrible, the lighting is horrible, and of course it's an old color
snapshot taken with a box camera and the colors are all faded but we're going to try and correct
those colors and make it look as nice as possible. at least we don't have any dust
spots and scratches to worry about with this one. the best way to correct tonal imperfections is with curves and we can also use curves to correct our color imbalance as well. so let's open up our layers panel and we're
gonna create an adjustment layer for curves. again, you see that you've got your histogram down here and we can first of all see if Photoshop can create the corrections for us automatically.
on some pictures it can just by clicking on this auto button. some pictures you can't
and then you have to go in and manually do it. so let's go ahead and-- first of all we''ll go ahead and set our auto options so let's click this little
list button right up here. and I'm gonna choose auto options and in this panel that opens up let's click on where it says find light and dark colors, and i'm gonna click on where it says snap neutral mid tones, and click OK. now it's the same thing as
me having clicked on this auto button once i've got
those options set. and it corrected the tonal range quite a bit; did nothing
for our colors. but you could take a look at your red
green and blue channels here and you can see how it is automatically
adjusted. the brightness for those, the white points for them.
and you also see that you got this white diagonal line and that is for our lightness and darkness range overall.
of course our color is still off. what I'm gonna do is go over here to
these three eyedroppers here. there's a black one, a gray one, and a
white one, and I can use these to define black, white, and gray points that are in
the picture. I'm gonna choose the gray eyedropper, the one in the center, and I'm
gonna click on a part of the image that I think should be gray and then it's going to adjust all the other colors in the image based on
that one being gray. I'm gonna zoom in here just a
little bit. and I'm gonna click at various parts.
I'm gonna click on water and you see that that does a pretty good job - it defines the
water as gray and it brings most of your skin tones and
your other colors into their proper range. you might find another part of the image that
would be gray and oftentimes white that isn't shadow would be
rendered gray. let's click there. and that looks pretty good too. gives you a little bit more blue in the water
rather than having it be so dull. or there's a road over here, I can click on that because that should
be gray. and that's a little too on the blue side
so I'm gonna go back to this shadow part of his shirt and click on that. and you can see in
your histogram what is happening. it is adjusting the contrast of each of these channels. now I still think I need to open up my
shadows so I'm going to go to this white
diagonal line and i'm gonna pull that up to open up those shadow details. now my highlights are starting to get
blown out so I'll go to the upper range of that same
white line and we're gonna pull that down so we're lowering
the contrast. now I'm also taking this black point's slider and i'm gonna move that in just a little bit there. just like that until we get some good contrast. and there is our finished image. very quickly and easily corrected using curves.
you could do something similar with levels, but curves is gonna give you a lot more
flexibility. so submit all three of those pictures to me
on blackboard and I'll look forward to talking with you again.
this is Mike McRuiz.
