Photography Masterclass | Photoshop Tricks that Every Photographer Should Know

[Music] [Music] hello everybody welcome to my photography master class my name is terry white worldwide photography evangelist here at adobe it's my pleasure to be streaming to you once again on master class friday here on adobe live uh i want to thank everyone who's watching from all the different places you might be watching from if you're watching this on twitter if you're watching this on facebook if you're watching this on youtube that's awesome but if you want me to see your questions if you want me to see your comments head over to be.net slash uh slash adobe live and that's where um that's the one chat that i'll be able to pay attention to for the rest of the stream all right uh oh yep wrong mic sorry how about that is that better okay sorry about that and uh if i if i was on a pre-stream and you didn't hear this uh hear me as well is because i hadn't moved my mic over so once again uh welcome my name is terry white worldwide photography evangelist um here on adobe live and again if you are watching this uh on another platform head over to be.net slash adobe live and uh you'll be able to um uh i'll be able to see your comments and just like people are saying hey you were on the wrong mic because i hadn't moved this one over yet yeah that was it okay so with that said thanks everyone for joining me and thanks for the mic tip i you know wouldn't want to be silent or very quiet throughout the rest of the stream but uh we are here all right so today we're going to be taking a look at photoshop tips and tricks for photographers the um the power mic placement the photoshop tips and tricks for photographers and [Music] just we're going to start actually with one of the things i left off of last week i promised i would show it this week and i left off last week and i didn't show it so i'm going to show this one lightroom thing and then the rest of the hour is going to be all photoshop all right with that said thanks for joining me and let's go ahead and dive right in now that we have the mic in the right spot all right let's switch over to my desktop i've got my desktop up now we're going to go ahead and i'm in photoshop and switch back to lightroom just for a second because again i promised a lightroom uh trick for or actually i left off last week without showing this one thing and this one thing we were talking about last week how to start your lightroom year off right and um one of the ways to do that is to move photos that are in lightroom that are like maybe you did a project you did a shoot you edited it you distribute it you get you did everything you need to do with those photos but they're sitting on your main hard drive and you just don't need them on your main hard drive anymore because you're done with them like you don't want to throw them away but you're they're taking up space on the primary drive and maybe you want to move them to a nas or a network drive or a backup drive or not a backup drive but an external drive so here i've got a external drive this is a western digital i'm going to go ahead and just plug it in and when i plug this drive in we're going to see something amazing happen all right it's lighting up i know it's plugged in and the amazing thing that happens is that's a joke nothing happens because lightroom doesn't care that you plug the drive in unless you've used that drive before it doesn't know that that drive is for lightroom in other words it's not going to waste time looking at drives that you plug in unplug day in and day out that you've not ever not ever used with lightroom why would it waste its time looking at that external drive so but if i go to my operating system here let me just bring up a finder window if i bring up a finder window there it is new external hard drive it is right there so on this new external hard drive now you would buy your drive you would format it for your platform you would do everything to get that drive ready but the one thing you probably want to do on that drive as well is put a folder on it for all these images that you're going to move to it from your main drive so i'm going to create a new folder on this new external hard drive and this new folder is going to be called um let's just give it a nice name pictures from the past okay so that way we know it's not the main pictures folder it's the pictures from the past folder pictures we've used before pictures we're done with we don't want to say archive we don't want to say anything like that because we may still use them we just don't need them on the main drive alright so now external drives all set up it's formatted it's plugged in it's got the new folder on it but lightroom doesn't know anything about it what i need to do is i need to add that drive to lightroom so lightroom does know about it and the way you add a drive to lightroom is actually in lightroom classic we're talking about sorry lightroom classic is you do it in the folders panel in the folders panel you click the plus sign and you add a folder and it will come up and ask you add a folder where which folder do you want to add and that's where you go navigate to that new external hard drive and we've already we've already created the folder if you hadn't you could create the folder right now but we've already created the folder this is the folder we want so i just open it it's empty and we're just going to choose it now once i do that look at what happens in the folders panel it comes up and says oh you've added a drive to lightroom that it will now keep track of from here on out called new external hard drive and if i twirl that down there's one folder on it called pictures from the past now you might remember hey jason levine what's going on buddy uh and jason by the way is going to be doing his master class later today on something audio and video i haven't looked at this topic yet but i'm sure it's going to be something cool on audio slash video all right with that said um i've opened that folder and by the way when i twirl that drive down you'll notice that it just simply says pictures from the past because that's the folder we added just now but if we go back to that drive there was another folder on there called other again lightroom only pays attention to what you tell it to pay attention to so we told it to pay attention to that one folder pictures from the past and that's the only folder it cares about on that drive so that means that you could put other things on that drive but lightroom is only going to care about that one folder now that you got that all set up that's all you need to do to move images from one drive like my internal laptop drive or my internal desktop drive that i want to now clear some space and move those photos to the other drive all i have to do now is go get those other photos which i had here we go i was i was i have 248 raw files from um an atlanta shoot i did just around town july 2019 back when you could be around town and around people and all that so just uh just shooting around the city in 2019 i don't need those photos on my main drive anymore so i'm just going to take that whole folder atlanta july 2019 summer and drag it to the pictures from the pass folder and let go and this is the most important part of this process is happening up here in the background right now it's not copying those images it's moving them so once this progress bar is finished it will have moved that entire folder all the images and videos and whatever's in it all the retouches all the data everything that's in it to the new to the new external drive now that also means that i need to now be responsible for backing up that external drive because those are that's the only place those images will be because they're not on the internal drive anymore and if i don't back up that external drive and something happens to the external drive or the external drive gets lost or gets damaged or just gets corrupted or whatever then those images are gone for good so keep in mind when you're using lightroom classic you're responsible for all your images no matter where you put them now you might just say well terry couldn't you plug the external drive in use the operating system and just copy the images over to it and then deleted them from the old place yes but then lightroom wouldn't know about it you would have to come back to lightroom and tell lightroom hey i've now moved this folder to this drive and you'd have to reconnect it not a big deal but it's just so much easier to let lightroom do the whole thing in one step and i don't care it's just going at the on the background i can keep working i don't have to do anything else but once it's finished lightroom will now know that they're on that drive it won't ask me any questions there won't be any missing folder or missing image icons all the data will be there all the edits will be there everything will be there from one folder to the next and more importantly those 248 raw files or whatever they were will not be taking up space on my internal drive anymore that's it and i could have selected more in one folder you don't have to do one at a time you can select 10 folders at a time move them all to the external drive or the nas or the other network storage or whatever you want and now this question did come up last week as well i didn't get a chance to answer it um network drives so i indicated that it could have been an ass yes your images can be on the network drive but your catalog should not be on a network drive so does that make sense your catalog should always be on a physical drive connected to your computer the images themselves can be on a physical drive connected to your computer in your internal drive or um on an ass so or network drive so um that's it that was the tip that i did not have time to finish last week we don't have to sit here and wait for that to finish we'll check back in on it later but that's just now moving and you can even see the number go down on this drive uh they're going down 151 150 it's moving those images one by one over and you can see the number go up on the new drive 101 102. so it's moving them one by one and once they're all there they'll all be there and not taking up space on this drive anymore all right that's it that was the lightroom tip left over from last week now let's go ahead and dive into um some photoshop all right let me bring up my photoshop notes of what i wanted to cover there we are okay let's uh pop over to photoshop and in this um i got this one image open i'm not ready to do this one tip yet just yet but let's go ahead and pop over to um to my adobe live library there we are and um i just want to point out i've shown this particular image before i think i have let me just drill down to a background first [Music] there it is there's a background i want i've shown this tip before with this actual this actual image before but when i showed it last time uh photoshop had not had the update that it just re just recently got so i'm gonna drag this image over one more time so uh so by the way so we're switching gears now we just got out of lightroom we just did the last thing and now um we're switching to photoshop tips for photographers so really what i'm showing you for photographers that just say hey i just use lightroom i don't even know why i would ever use photoshop what's photoshop going to do for me that i can't do in lightroom that's what the rest of this time is about all the stuff i can do in photoshop that i couldn't even begin to to do in lightroom i just did one of those things i opened up an image i drug another image on top of it so i'm now compositing which i would not be able to do in lightroom i can't combine multiple images together on top of each other unless i go to the book module but then i wouldn't even be able to cut them out or anything so there's one layer on bottom that's the cityscape and then the layer on top now again i've shown this exact model from adobe stock before and i've shown that background before but what's new is obviously i'm going to cut out the background this teal color what's new in this particular instance is that when i go to select subject which is where i would always start with something like this select subject's been enhanced over the last year to now pay attention to hair and pay attention to portraits normally you would do all of that work in selected mask and you still can you still go in there to do to do the final processes but instead of doing 80 to 90 percent of the work in select and mask for the hair select subject is going to do 80 and 90 percent of the work selecting it right in the first place that's the big difference and there's also even a newer nuance to select subject i'm sorry selected mask that we're gonna get into so there's no there's no dialog box there's nothing you have to tell it to do you just simply say select subject and it looks at your image and adobe sensei figures out what the subject is now in the past you're seeing all these little marching ants around the individual strands of hair they might have just grabbed a group of the hair before like it just wouldn't know to even think about do doing the um the uh the individual strands of hair in the past now it's still missed some too like it didn't grab all the edges here and that's where selected mask comes in so if i go to my select menu and i come down to selected mask i've got it showing me on my view you can choose which view you want you choose an onion skin you can choose an overlay you can choose all these different views to kind of show you what is it really doing what's it not doing so forth and so on so maybe i want to see it on white and also and this is this is the big difference let me show the mask that mask is amazing compared to the mask i would have gotten a year ago because it would just would have there would have been no individual strands of hair this would have been big clobs of selection so they just select subject i didn't do anything extra yet it's already done an amazing job now but it's not perfect because we can still see little strands of blue we can still see some of the spot that got missed here we still see some of this other area now i said there was one little nuance that also got added recently and that is this area right here and the refine mode this is all new um refined mode now there's well first of all now there is a refined mode and there's a choice color aware so if you think your background is easily easily distinguished by color which mine is it's a teal background pretty easy to distinguish that teal color or object aware where um it's based on the object more so than the color because maybe it's a white object on a kind of a white background so the color won't matter as much but the object has very distinct lines so you can switch between the refined modes and it will guess which one it thinks um best cut choice for simple colors uh best choice for hair or or fur on a complex background so since my background is not complex i'm going to stick with color but just know you now have that choice now what's that refine mode for it's for using the refined brush but here's the here's the best part before i normally i would just start brushing like right away like i would just say okay now i gotta brush out all that teal color out of her hair but because select subject did such a good job i'm gonna do i'm just gonna turn on decontaminate colors first and then i'll only have to brush anything that's not captured by that so let's decontaminate colors this thing down here at the bottom which was originally designed for for example i am technically sitting on a green screen right now and depending on the lighting that green could be reflected in the edges of my shirt or in my hair so decontaminate means decontaminate that background color out of your subject so we see little strands of teal reflected in her hair well maybe if i just do decontaminate colors that might do most of my work for me let's try it and it did it didn't do it all but it got a big piece of it that i would have spent time brushing that i don't have to brush anymore now i still see some right in here where it was like uh you know they couldn't select inside the subject here and i still see a piece that looks weird right here but for the most part it did uh tim's always cracking jokes it did a good job making that selection for me so what we're going to do is we're going to go in and now now that i've gotten most of the work done i'm i am going to go into the refine edge brush which i'm already on and i'm going to start on where the background used to be and paint in now it looks like it it brought that blue back or that teal back it's just showing me a quick preview of where to brush and then when i let go it'll recalculate for me all right and go out over here get some edges but let's let go let it recalculate and there it is so it got all that out now over here where it just looks kind of like it missed the spot here let's just go ahead and just paint that out or brush that out i should say and let go all right and that's my that's my background cutout in a matter of seconds with the new portrait select subject as opposed to minutes and again a tip for photographers if you needed to cut out or remove a background there's just no way you're going to do that in lightroom it's just it's not a feature of lightroom it's just not possible now the other thing that you're going to get into once you start doing compositing so this is just another bonus tip is that once i click ok ok it did did an amazing job cutting out the background and it made it onto its own layer non-destructively so i still have the original i have the new layer with the mask i can hold down the uh uh the letter x i'm sorry i can hold down hold on hold on hold on sorry i can hold down there we go hold down my option or alt key to see that mask that it cut out i can hold down the shift key to see what it did and uh and that's what it gave me so that's the mask that it made based on um that select subject and selected mask all right so now what i want to do is i want to um even though i cut her out i want to make sure the background still or no i'm sorry not the background the foreground her looks more like she would have been against that scene the lighting of her is totally different than that scene because she was photographed probably in the studio against that blue teal color if you have similar colors on the select subject and what if you had similar colors with the subject and the background remember i showed that button that says make it object-based as opposed to color based so that would be for where it would on a complex background because complex means also that the subjects on the same kind of background are the same color as the background so in that case i would have switched to more of an object selection as opposed to a color selection so if the colors are the same then that's that's it alright so next up um the colors are not the same in this case where she's now on this background where she looks like she's nicely lit in the studio in the background of course sunset sunrise i can't tell but i think it's sunset and um let's go ahead and fix that so i'm going to go to her image and i'm going to hold down my command key and click on that mask when i hold down my command key or control key on windows and click on that mask it makes a selection of the mask but i don't want to select her she's already selected i want to now go to the background with that selection in place and duplicate that that silhouette of the background so command j pc control j which simply says make us make a duplicate layer of what's selected so what i just selected was just the the shape of her her mask on the background all by itself now i'm going to move that layer that i just cut out on top of her so now we see that mask on top of her and i'm going to do two things i'm going to first of all average all those colors on that layer so let's go to filter let's go to [Music] blur and let's choose average so take all those colors that the the oranges the white the dark colors and just average them into one color and that's the one color of the average of colors there simple enough next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to then set my blend mode to color because i want the blend mode to colorize her into that average now at 100 that's way too much because it's just making her look almost sepia tone or black and white but now i'm just going to go ahead and drop down the opacity of that down to let's say around i usually start at around 35 percent 35 and again this is the before where she's too bright 2 orange too toned down to a more dull color to match that background now someone said hey you could blur out the background too to kind of create like a depth of field and you could absolutely do that as well using a filter on the background but that's and again if you thought the toning down wasn't enough you could increase the opacity to kind of tone it down tone her colors down some more or if you thought it was too much you could decrease the opacity kind of bring back out some of that color but just just to keep in mind that's another way to kind of make it match or kind of make it look like she was against that background at the time okay so that was select subject and that was um removing a background and that was select and mask and that was the new modes in selected mask for color refinement or object-based refinement and then you've got of course the ability just to do a quick tip with averaging the color of the background on top of her and blending it in to kind of make her look more like she was against that background when it was photographed okay let's go ahead and uh i'm just going to close out of this can you speak on adjusting opacity versus fill sure opacity think of it this way think of let's say you had a shape of a heart and the heart had red fill with a black outline around it if i lower the opacity of that heart layer i'm lowering the opacity of everything the red and the black outline if i lower the fill i'm just lowering the red the black outline wouldn't get adjusted so that's the difference between opacity versus fill okay now let's go ahead and close this and she keeps popping up because we're going to use her in a minute but we're not going to use her just yet let's go into let's talk about a little sky replacement [Music] all right i showed this one this image before i don't want to show it again let me grab a different one let me grab a different one not that one no not that one not that one not that one i could show that one that would be a good one to show but i thought i had one earlier that i popped in here just for the sake of this example i guess i did sorry guys i i had an image that i wanted to show off but apparently i did not put it in this library all right well well um it's bugging me because i know i put it in this library so i know it's here i'm pretty sure i did give me one more second nope not there okay let me just open it this way then there it is that's the one i want to show okay let's go and open it up i knew i had it now this image is begging for sky replacement right it's just the sky there is no sky it's just uh kind of a just a white bluish nothing now the the last image that i did show before was this one and i'm going to show you the differences of why i when i first used this image for adobe max why this made such a great image so let's just do a quick recap sky replacement is a new feature in photoshop that again can't do this in lightroom can't you if you're a photographer and you want to replace skies this is the place to go when i go to sky replacement it's going to first of all default to the last guy that i used and what makes this so amazing is that i didn't touch the the image up front it masked out the bridge it masked out all the suspension ropes it masked out all the trees and it it figured out what the sky was and shows me a preview of what it would look like replaced and if i don't want to use that sky i can go in and just pick a different sky so like like i can go pick um let's go pick that one and i get that sky and again it's doing all that masking all that up front work for me and figuring out what the sky is now if i change the time of day let's say we do a sunrise or sunset it even starts to affect the foreground and colorizing the foreground for me as well now if you've got a if you've got a keen eye and you've been looking at this the entire time or maybe you saw me do it last time you notice there is one thing that's not changing so sky replacement doesn't do doesn't do reflections so if you were doing a shot of a mountain over a lake the reflection in the lake would still be whatever sky was originally there and in this case we've got windows the windows are still showing the original sky because it doesn't do reflections however the photoshop team did for this until the until they make it automatically do reflections they did give you the ability to use a brush which is right here on the sky replacement panel you have a sky brush and you have a mode for that sky brush in the upper left corner here it's set to overlay 50 by default and i'm going to change mine to normal just because it'll work faster but now i can go in and i can start brushing i'm not taking my time to go in the individual window panes by any means because i don't have enough time to do that but as i brush i'm now brushing in the sky that's technically behind this building which is really not the reflection but it would make it look more realistic and of course you would take your time and go in and do a good job of the brushing i'm not doing a good job of the brushing because i don't have time but uh that's how you would fix the reflection in your skies where it did not um where you had a reflection if you didn't have a reflection you'd be all set but if you have a reflection that needs to be fixed they do give you a brush for it and if you want to increase the opacity you say you know 50 is not enough you can go in increase it to whatever you need it to be and away you go and again you would take your time zoom in you do every pixel and get it just right okay once you're done with this and you click okay oh and and by the way since we're talking about tips and tricks so the next thing that you would do is you would let's say you don't like any of these skies because when you go into this you're going to have one or i think two or three categories you're gonna have blue skies spectacular and sunset so you're gonna have all three of these these are the ones that come with photoshop but if you create your own folder series guys and you click the plus sign and this is this is a downside to this unfortunately you can only go get skies from the operating system like you can't bring them in from a library you can't bring them in for lightroom they have to be in a you know on your hard drive somewhere so i created way back when uh when i was first showing this feature i created a folder of skies there it is and i could go in and i could go ahead and start grabbing these skies i think it makes you do them one by one too which is also a pain in the butt but let's say i go ahead and open up that sky you can name it i don't remember what that sky looks like and there we go i brought in a sky that looks kind of cool not for this image but it looks kind of cool and there it is so you can bring in as many of your own skies as you want okay sorry about that next um so that's the tip for bringing in your own skies so let's say i go back to the sky we had i don't remember which one it was it was probably a sunset i and remember i don't remember maybe it wasn't spectacular yeah okay we'll live with that okay once you click ok it's going to give you a layer group of all of those things that it did including your masking so you you can go in and you can um you can see where you painted you can see how badly you painted on the left side there just hold down the option or alt key and clicking the mask to see it and of course it's a mask so you can always go back and repaint it properly but you've got your sky you've got your group and you can always turn that group off to get back to the original sky or turn it back on and when you turn it off and go back to your original background that means that you can bring up another sky replacement so you can have multiple sky choices in your photoshop file until you decide which one you like best so keep that in mind as well all right um that's cool because you can make it surreal with no with a non-sky imagery as well yep uh having many skies in your folder will it slow down photoshop no it will not slow down photoshop because they're just it i mean it might slow it down a millisecond when it brings the folder up to show them to you but it's not going to slow down photoshop overall because it's not looking at that folder until you bring up sky replacement all right uh could tell us the next illustration because 10 10 brush work uh this will look good for the with the hair lady in front too okay yep all right so um that was what i wanted to oh that wasn't what i wanted to finish showing the sky replacement this is what i want to talk about as well now this was the image i was looking for and this was the one i want to show with sky replacement and this is this brings illustrates a uh best practice about sky replacement this image just worked beautifully i could pick any sky i want and it just works so well that's not going to always be the case because it's also going to depend on the quality of your image this image is kind of taken at just a time a day you know just the sky that just wasn't that great of a a nature day like the the mountains are kind of bluish and there's a haze over them and it's just all kinds of weird stuff going on here so if i go up and choose sky replacement it might not look as magical so let's go see it'll it'll do what it's supposed to do but what i'm saying is you have to be very careful about what you pick so for example it picked that it's doing its job it did kind of or you know give me a little orange here in the foreground but i would have to make sure that i'm really careful about the temperature down here because this was more of a bluish cooler time of day and this looks like a nice warm sunrise or sunset so they don't really match for the person that's really paying attention so you might need to go in you might need to tweak things so if i go to the temperature and make it bluer now it's starting to look more realistic but not totally realistic if i go warmer then that's totally way off because it just doesn't match that mountain range now i could always go into the mountain range and adjust that after the fact if i really wanted to use that sky but just also look at the light on the ground it just it's it's just not the same so be careful when just because you can pick anything you want doesn't mean you're going to it's going to work if you know what i mean it's just yeah it's a beautiful sky it doesn't just really doesn't do this subject justice it's it's just not gonna be as good so let's say i pick uh kind of a better day sky yeah that could kind of work because the colors match the it looks more realistic than that that sunrise sky like that i could fall for that i could say oh yeah that was the sky that was there that day so just be careful when you're picking skies that they actually you know if you're trying to replace the sky you want it to look realistic that doesn't look realistic uh you know this one may or may not that one looks more realistic that looks like that could have happened that day so ask yourself after you pick a sky um does it look like that would have been the sky that day and if the answer is no can i adjust it if the answer is no pick a different sky so just keep that in mind as well uh what tips would you recommend i just started photoshop which we recommend good starting points uh good starting projects to do uh just to get the hang of things um so someone's asking um just started photoshop what tips would i recommend to starting projects to get a good hang of things um i would say go watch my getting started with photoshop 10 things beginners want to know how to do i'll start there and i would say photoshop's mostly about making good selections if you want to get a good foundation learn all the selection tools learn all the different methods of selecting because once you get selections under your belt then it's so much easier to do so many more things so i would start with that video photoshop for getting started with photoshop 10 things beginners want to know how to do and then go from there all right um okay next up let's go in and let's take a look at uh let's go and grab search my libraries for a car okay so i have the stock image of a car and again nicely lit shot in a studio nicely i mean it's just beautiful image of a car if you wanted to add some blurring to the wheels if you wanted to do things like that that's again another one of those things you're just not going to do effectively in in in lightroom but easy enough to do in photoshop so for example in photoshop you've got this blur gallery so if we go to the blur gallery you've got field blur iris blur tilt shift path blur and spin blur so if we go to spin blur that gives me a spinny wheel i can go ahead and add it and uh adjust the size as the feather adjust the size of it there we go and there we go and kind of get it in position around that wheel and tilt it a little bit there we go and bring it in some more because we don't want to we don't want it to be on the non-wheel part there we go and now i have a little dial in the middle of it to turn it up or down so if i want to have more blur i can turn it up and i can also see the amount of feather that i gave it was too much let's bring that back out and i can also turn it down if that's way too much i can turn it way down and give just a slight motion blur in the shape of a spin now i'm obviously going to have more than one wheel so you can go ahead and click in another one and do the same thing size it way down and put that on the back wheel as well so just things like this that are just like i said not possible not a feature of lightroom are easy to do in products like photoshop where i just want to control not only the amount of blur but where that blur appears and this is just one of the blur gallery filters you notice that they're they're all in the blur gallery i've started with spin blur but i could add any one of these as well so i could say you know what i want a path blur as well to make the actual back of the car blurry if the car was actually moving in front of me so i could add that path blur and um get the controls for that so if i drill down to it there we go and then i could move the path of the blur oh sorry i didn't want to do that it's adding them unless still i'm clicking in the wrong spot there we go and let's make sure we move that one and again i got this amount slider so i can turn it down say not as much not as much and i can also say that the path is shorter so you have all kinds of controls over the amount of blur where you want the blur to be and what direction you want the blur to go in and how much blur you want along that path so if i stretch it out i'm actually expanding uh the path for that blur and i'm getting that blur more in the back but not so much on the front and i believe each point nope yeah each point has its own adjustment for the amount as well so i can turn it down in the back or turn it up yeah turn it down in the back and turn it almost completely off in the front and kind of get that motion blur in the back around especially around the mirror but nice and nice and sharp in the front we still got the the wheels and blur and you just create all these nice special effects in your still photos that this photographers just love to do this kind of stuff because it's it's not only fun but it just gives you it just adds that extra um to your images that um shooting a still car in a studio just wouldn't give you uh now if you were out on the track you could do this all in camera but we're not on the track we're in a studio so we you know we add these special effects after the fact so click okay and that becomes our um we'll give it a second render that will become our image now you could have also done this i didn't do this up front and i normally would you could have converted this to a smart filter layer first before you apply that blur so that once it applies it you would always be able to undo it so for example i can undo it now undo blur gallery but the tip that i would tell everybody is that if your filter allows it convert for smart filters first that will convert your background or your layer into a smart object layer and then you can run that filter that you just ran yup there it is and i click okay and now when it renders it i have a progress bar over here that you're not seeing there it is now when it finishes rendering it it will be in a more non-destructive state so there it is so now it's on a smart filter layer and i have the ability to always go back in double click on blur gallery to go back in and tweak the settings or turn something on or off or just simply turn off the whole thing and get right back to the original car as a non-destructive process so now i've turned the blur off completely off not done or turn it back on on on the wheels on the back of the car just fine so that's why i would always recommend especially with filters if you can do a smart filter layer first then that way you have the ability to change your mind later so if i save this as a photoshop file come back later that layer is there i can always go in and tweak it turn it off turn it on without it permanently affecting those pixels okay next up my list of things here uh even though it does have anything to do with really this particular image but just just so you know that you have the ability to to go in render and you have a lens flare because you know we're photographers we like lens flares lens flare is a really old filter and it's got some limitations like for example the preview windows this small window so you can't really see it on the canvas until you get done but you can move this lens this lens blur around you can even change what type of lens it is 35 millimeter prime 105 prime movie prime it looks more like um a star trek kind of lens blur you can change the brightness of it and you can just kind of put this anywhere you want and the reflections of it will also go wherever there's wherever you designate that they go based on where you position it now again this is not the best image for this but if you need a night sky with a nice lens blur in it you can do that as well maybe i'll crank it up just so we can really see it click okay and there's my lens blur now again um or lens flare i could oh sorry turn that lens flare off and give it a second it'll render it without it uh it's funny that i have to have to wait to see it it appeared instantly but now i have to wait to see it without it because it still needs to apply the blur gallery now without the lens flare and there it is all right but if i turn it back on should happen there we go um nope it's got a render because now it's rendering two filters together depending on what they would look like based on each other so that's why i'm getting these progress bars now but anyway uh what i was gonna show is once it's back on you'll not only see the obnoxious lens flare in the upper right corner but you will see really it's casting that across the whole image if we look at the bottom here you can actually see the effects of the lens blur a lot of times this is more of what you want than the actual lens flare itself you kind of like those reflections so that's why i like i might even move this further off canvas or turn it down more just to kind of create that effect of that lens blur but you have the idea you can go in and do whatever you want it's too saturated for that distance exactly so like i said not the best subject for this um but you have you have that option and i again turned it up on purpose all right next up let's go in and let's close this all that work and we're not going to save any of it let's close this let's close this and since she keeps coming up let me go ahead and jump ahead to this one so um portrait retouching one of my favorite topics and i should do more of that in 2021 but portrait retouching uh involves just again making people look their best which filter will be applied first the lens blur or lens flare or the blur uh tim it's it's actually stacking order so you can you can change the stacking order of those smart filters as well all right so let's go ahead and um zoom in and what i wanted to show here was a quick couple of tips about skin so she has a few temporary blemishes and the temporary blemishes i don't mind removing because they're temporary like you know in a week or in two months those those blemishes may not even be there so why have a photograph of something that is not there permanently a mole a beauty mark something like that that is permanent you probably want to keep but things like this that are temporary you probably want to get rid of now a lot of people will say oh you know duplicate the layer first and and since we're talking photoshop i will go ahead and do that but if this image came over from lightroom chances already have the original in lightroom i don't need to duplicate the layer just to have a backup but we'll duplicate the layer just so we can show our before and after all right so now we got the the background copy and we're gonna go ahead and start doing all our retouching on that i'm gonna switch to my healing brush uh spot healing brush that is and um the nice thing about the spot healing brush is you can just tap or you can i'm using a wacom cintiq here so if you see my hands cam you can see that i'm actually painting right on the screen so i'm just going to go ahead and remove those things right out of the image itself there's like a straight hair here i'm just going to just go ahead and paint that straight hair right out of the image and it looks like a line on her nose she's going to do that and just very quickly you can kind of get rid of some of those temporary blemishes and just smooth things out very quickly now a lot of people want to get into skin smoothing and i i use i very rarely use skin smoothing because in most cases the person doesn't need it if you if you remove the blemishes or the things that are making the skin look not smooth then you've already smoothed the skin and usually what makes skin not look smooth is things like bad lighting so if there's shadows or if the lighting's accentuating the blemishes then that's going to make the skin look rougher than it probably really is all right same thing straight hair here let's just go ahead and paint that one out and there we go all right so now let's talk about one of the one of the um one of the most popular skin smoothing techniques is a is a um it's a technique called um frequency separation i don't know why it's called frequency separation maybe one of the smart people in the audience will tell us why but it's called frequency separation and there's multiple techniques for this i'm going to show you a simple one and i always have to look at my notes because i don't do it every day and plus i even have an action set up to do it so even when i do it i'm not doing it manually um but if you want to get into frequency separation and and um and this technique um it's probably so you don't have to keep doing it manual it's probably easier just to go ahead and record it as an action which i have an action called frequency separation right here so that's that's the one i normally use but anyway um what it is is i'm going to walk you through it so you're going to duplicate the layer twice so we did it we were on this we're going to pretend the background doesn't exist so we're going to duplicate the layer twice so command j command j so now we have three layers and again we're pretending the original one doesn't count because it doesn't we're using that as a as a before layer so now you're going to go to the middle layer and you're going to apply a gaussian blur to that layer so we're going to filter and we're going to go to blur and we're gonna go to gaussian blur and uh the amount again will depend a lot on the resolution of your image so in this one i'm just gonna do six pixels a very small amount of blur and you don't see it because it's on the middle layer because the top layer is covering it but there's the middle layer now i just turned the top layer off and so you can see that that middle layer did get a little bit of blur now you're going to click on the top layer and you're going to go to your image and you're going to go to apply image and on your apply image you're going to get a dialog box and again i never do this because i have to look at the settings because i never do this often enough to remember them you're going to go to layer you're going to go to your layer 1 your middle layer i should say so that would be my copy 2 in this case and you're going to blend mode is going to be subtract and subtract there we go subtract and then you're going to do your scale is going to be a negative 2 [Music] i did not oh wait no it's not going to be negative 2. it's going to be 2. i've got a dash in front of it scale is going to be 2 and your offset's going to be 128. and what it's giving you is this kind of grayish outline of your image all right i just want to make sure i got everything else scales gonna be 128 click ok um yup click ok and we're going to change our blend mode to [Music] linear light okay there it is and click on the middle layer and select an air area of skin okay there we go so we're going to select our middle layer so that that basically is just applying that sharpness on top of the image because what you what the reason why we're doing this technique is because skin smoothing should not smooth pores like this the skin should still look real after the fact so you shouldn't have it so that the skin is so smooth that it looks like a barbie doll just it looks like plastic so that's what that that main top layer is this purpose is serving so now we're going to go to the middle layer and this is where you're now going to be selective with your lasso tool and with your lasso tool you're just going to go ahead and select areas of skin that you would really want this to apply to so i'm just going to make a big selection here and you can hold down your shift key and select other areas so shift key oh hang on i got it on my lasso by mistake there we go shift key and there and maybe here as well all right so now we got those areas selected and of course you would pick and choose your areas uh we're gonna feather that by 15 pixels again so it's not a hard edge selection and we're just going to go to modify feather 15 and then you're going to apply gaussian blur this one's going to be a bigger gaussian blur filter blur gaussian blur and we're going to do 24. all right and again the amount will depend on you but if you think 24 is too much then you would make it less but what that will do and you can then you can see the areas where i didn't select so i didn't select that area but did select this area so this area got nice and smooth but we still see texture and again if you thought it was too smooth then you would just do less than 24 but you can see the areas around the nose that i didn't apply this to you can see this area down here on the chin next to the area where i did it so we get nice smooth skin but we still have texture and that's the whole point of doing of doing the frequency separation technique and you can really see the difference too because i didn't apply it on her neck so you can see like the difference of skin texture there versus there but the main thing is you still want to see texture on your image if you're not seeing texture on your image then that means that um you've gone too far you blurt away the details in the skin and that's what you don't want all right i've i got like a minute left and let's see what kind of what tip can i give you in a minute uh yeah let's um let's just go up here real quick uh really quick so a lot of times you know you need to smooth out eyebrows i've shown this tip before but really quickly we'll grab our lasso tool i don't really have a minute actually you know what never mind i'm out of time because i don't want to get in the middle of the technique and then get cut off and then have to finish it next week so we'll just do that that tip the next another time all right so with that said um thanks for joining me for my photoshop tips and techniques for photographers there's always so much more to show than i have time for and hopefully you got something out of this you can always go back and re-watch it and again if you're just getting started in photoshop go ahead and watch some of the previous photoshop sessions in the master class series uh that i've done as well as on my own channel i've got uh terry white dot tv i've got a how to get started with photoshop for beginners uh 10 things beginners want to know how to do so if you're a beginner you probably should go watch that as well all right next up is the uh photoshop daily creative challenge and then after that more master classes from all my colleagues here at adobe so cheers everybody all my fellow evangelists are gonna be up next and uh with that said have a great day have a great weekend three day weekend for me so yay cheers everybody have a good one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 4,963

Keywords: Adobe Creative Cloud, Creative Cloud, Adobe CC, Adobe Cloud, Adobe creative suite, #MakeAdobeCC, #AdobeCC, #ACCTags, Terry white, Photography, Photoshop, Masterclass, how-to, image manipulation, getting started

Id: AywVWbnWJKY

Length: 57min 0sec (3420 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021