Why I stopped everything to retouch my portfolio from scratch with AI, Generative Fill & Remove Tool

this video is brought to you by avoto a professional AI photo editor that lets you perform routine tasks quickly and sync your edits with other photos in just seconds welcome back everyone in today's video I'm going to go over why it is that you should stop doing what you're doing right now or at least after the video is over and redo all of the edits in your portfolio and post them to your website the reason is is that there's never been a time that's better to retouch your photos than today the reason is is that there have been so many advancements in AI over the past six months that we can make our images look better than ever before and so I put my money where my mouth is a few weeks ago and I redid the portfolios on my website for headshots and fashion and I'm going to redo the ones on there for a lifestyle and my sports galleries as well very soon and so in today's video I'm going to talk about the entire process that I used which included grading the photos in capture one then taking the photos into a voto AI our sponsor and doing the bulk of the retouching and then using Photoshop beta to clean up the images using generative fill content aware fill and the new remove tool then I exported the photos and uploaded them to my website and did the SEO there are 42 images in my headshot and fashion galleries collectively and I retouched over half of them from scratch and this entire process only took two days the reason why I didn't touch all of the images and and redo all of them is because many of them are photos that I retouched over the last six months or images that I shot for clients and they handled the retouching and contractually I'm not allowed to touch those images or some of them just looked good and they were done by professional retouchers over the last few years and I was able to do this entire process in two days where in the past they would have taken in five days and my work has never looked better than it's looked before but let's talk about why it is that I decided to go on this journey a few months ago I went to my website and I looked at my fashion and headshot portfolios and I just left feeling a little disappointed I wasn't really sure why I I just felt like looking at the images that in my head I felt like I was better than the work that I was seeing collectively in this one place and that's when I sort of had the Epiphany that I could go back and redo the edits on my fashion and headshot Galleries and it wouldn't take me very long at all and I would get a lot of bang for my buck so to speak revitalizing my portfolio in just a few days so that's what I decided to do now that I've completed these two Galleries and uploaded them and looked at the photos I feel a lot better about my work and I actually feel like it represents me and the reason why mostly is it just didn't look as finished as I felt like I could make my work look today and because of that those sour notes that I was seeing just brought down my feeling overall about the gallery but then after I did the retouching I felt so much better about myself and my work by going through the process so the one thing that was part of that though was that over the years I'd retouched my work mostly in Lightroom and this isn't necessarily a knock on that program but what I did was I would pull the saturation down and pull the contrast down and that was between about 2015 and 2020. that was the look that I was going for then when I switched over to capture one in 2020 because the R5 came out they didn't have the color profiles in Lightroom I decided uh that I would start going with a more filmic sort of look using their Beyond film Styles and then also used a higher contrast look but I was just changing the way that my work looked over time and and that's why it felt so much better uh those newer photos felt much better than the older photos because I just sort of updated my editing Style so the first step in the process was locating all of the original images and after I did that I made an evaluation as to whether or not the images really needed to be retouched or if they were fine just the way they are but after I looked at all of the images I decided that about half of them needed to be retouched and the very first step of the retouching process is color grading so we're going to start off by looking at our first image here in capture one this is the photo that I shot on April 14th of 2018 and so it's it was shot with the 5D Mark IV you'll see right up here at the very top of the screen on the right it shows the 5D Mark IV and it's using the curve Auto and normally Auto is film standard but like I said earlier I've started to have a more high contrast look so I'm going to switch this actually to eye contrast now the next thing that I would do on this image is I would go over here to the Styles Tab and I would come down and I would find the Beyond film Styles and I would use the color ones and I usually use the K100 most of the time and I feel like that one looks best out of all of the options here and so let's go ahead and use K100 I'm going to apply it as a new layer then I'm going to go back to the exposure Tab and I'm going to pull down the opacity to about 50 that's where I have it most of the time one of the things that this style does is it pulls down the black so I'm going to zero that out right here it's negative 17 by default I'm going to make it positive 17. now I'm going to click back to the background layer so my film look is floating on top I'm going to go back to the background layer and I'm going to make a little adjustment to the exposure it's looking a little dark and the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pull up the black tones because one of the things that I started to be more aware of over time was preserving those black details so I'm going to use the black lighter here and pull this up I might look at the histogram and just sort of decide you know do I have detail in this dress so if you look at this number right here at the top this is the number out of 255 somewhere around 13 is detail so if you want detail in that dress you've got to bring this up a little higher maybe around 10 and you can see there's detail in that part of the dress and it fades to Black which is probably normal what about this part of her leg 17 so there's still detail almost all the way down her Shin maybe we'll just bring this up to about 12 and we'll bring the Shadows up to about five okay that should feel pretty good all right the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new layer and I'm going to add a vignette to it and so what I'm doing is just using the radial tool I'm going to put it over her face I'm going to pull this Inner Circle in which sets the Feathering to 100 give or take and then that's going to give us a what we're going to do is I'm going to pull down the brightness overall in the image which should just affect those mid-tones and I'll pull down the highlights a little bit and then what that should do is that should just force the viewer's eyes to go up towards her eyes so I'll turn it off and I'll turn it back on so we're just creating a little bit of a vignette if I press h for the hand tool I'm going to zoom uh use that to double click on her leg here I'm going to look back at the shadow details and that still is sitting at 13 so it does have some detail uh throughout those tones and I'm just going to pull the Shadows up on this layer of the blacks up maybe on this layer just a little bit okay I think there's enough detail in there I don't want to go too far but I do want some details and I think this is ready so let's go on to our next step which would be taking the images into a photo and we're going to be looking at a different image for that step so this image here of unique has been retouched fully in a photo I want to show you though what it looked like before and so this is what it looked like directly out of capture one so you can see that here in the before she has a fair amount of acne and that's totally gone in the after and this can be accomplished in just a few seconds with just a few clicks in a photo and that's one of the great things about the software I'm actually going to show you now what it looked like when I retouched it almost 10 years ago it took me about three hours to get this image completed or retouched and I had to learn a lot of new processes in order to do it I just remember that it was very involved I don't know if it was frequency separation or something like that but whatever it was it was what we had available at the time in 2013. fast forward to today and I was able to retouch this photo in a photo in just a few seconds so let's go back here to the software I've got another version of the file that has not been retouched at all a photo lets you set up your own preset and so once you have these steps dialed in that I'm about to show you for your taste you can save that and apply that to images in the future that's what I did during this process but I'm going to show you how I did this image sort of Step by Step so in this window the software has already figured out that this is a female subject I'm going to pull the freckle and acne slider all the way to the right and you're going to watch it instantly take away almost all the blemishes I am using a Mac Studio that was about three thousand dollars last year give or take so it's a very fast computer but I think most of this is happening with cloud computing so just keep that in mind it may not actually be happening on my machine hey was very fast when I did this on a laptop the next thing you can do is pull up this oily face slider and that might help us a little bit but she looks pretty matte you can pull down forehead wrinkles but there are none you can change the eye wrinkles so I'm going to bring that up about halfway you can also pull up the dark circles under the eye and I'm going to bring that up about halfway next thing there are smile lines on some people you can remove that but we don't need it here one thing I always do are neck wrinkles I normally remove that in post so I'm going to pull that up quite a bit and you can see that those went away and now let's zoom out and see what we're looking at here all right I think that looks pretty good now we're going to go on to the skin retouching I'm going to use the Dodge and burn feature I'm going to pull back in on her face here I'm going to use the Dodge and burn feature and I'm going to pull that up about two-thirds of the way I'm going to bring up the body and skin smoothing about two-thirds and that should reduce a lot of those blemishes and I forgot a step earlier so I'm going to go back up to the top grab the body blemish slider and I'm going to pull that all the way to the right and you'll see the rest of those blemishes mostly disappear and then you can unify the body complexion a little bit so we're going to do that too so I'm going to pull this slider up a little bit I'm going to change my skin tone something I feel is more appropriate for her yeah that looks pretty good and now I'm just going to zoom out the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring her eyes up a little bit that way we'll just brighten those up I'm going to go into the makeup tab there is a highlight and Contour tool like here as well I'm going to pull those up about two-thirds well first of all let me back out of those let me zoom into her face so you can see how this works I'm going to bring that up about two-thirds and that's going to do highlighting contouring like we would see in makeup so that's how that looks after the fact and I think this image is pretty much ready to go here's the before and here's the after it never gets old it's pretty amazing to see and if we zoom out here is the before and here's the after and it was just that simple there's another feature though in a photo I want to share with you and that's symmetry rise so I'm going to click on this picture that I have here of David all ready to go and I'm going to show you the before and I'm going to show you the after so you can see how that head tilt happened that was happening using the symmeterize feature so I'm going to go ahead and find that we're on our male face here all right so over here under the facial reshape section I'm going to go down here to symmeterize I'm going to turn it off and I'm going to turn it back on so you can see how that made a huge difference in the shape of his face I'm going to pull the sliders down to zero and pull them up one at a time so you can see what they're doing so the first thing is the upper body slider I'm going to slide that to the right and you'll see how that changed his neck angle a fair amount then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the facial symmetry slider and pull that to the right and that should further develop his features and get them to be more in line and what would we what we would consider to be symmetrical so just here's the before and here's the after and you can tell how this tool is great for making people look their best if you want to check out a photo click on the link in the description for a special offer so the next thing we're going to do is take these images or different images into Photoshop and I'm going to share that process with you as well all right so I've got this image of David here open in Photoshop beta I forgot to say that earlier it is Photoshop beta that we're going to be using today the first thing I did was use the liquify tool well first thing I did was set up this plus pattern if you will and then I used a liquify tool to push over the zipper on his sweater and to change the neck to get it to be symmetrical right up and down in the middle so you can see what that looks like I then did some cloning and that sort of thing and I actually mapped over the left jaw muscle but our camera right uh no camera left jaw muscle indent I took that and put it on to the left and then back in capture one I converted this to black and white and you see the final image here the next image I want to talk about is also black and white I've got this photo of Akshay here I've already done all of the skin uh retouching I just want to show you the generative fill part for this image so I'm going to zoom in here on his waistband and we're going to look at what that looks like so you can see that the top of his underwear is just sticking up here so I'm going to grab the polyagonal lasso tool I believe that's what it's called and I'm going to draw an outline here of where his underwear um is a living in the photo and I'm just going to outline it a little bit here and I know that from experience or at least videos I've watched that on Jenner to fill were supposed to go over the line just a little bit to give it a little more to work with I'm going to make sure that I'm on the top layer here of all of my changes and I'm going to click generative fill and then I'm just going to click generate and we'll let it do its thing this tool is great when you need to fake something that isn't there or wasn't there in your original image you could use the Clone tool to sort of figure this out but that would take a lot of time and probably not be as accurate as the generative fill tool now keep in mind generative feel fill typically I believe does 1024 by 1024 blocks so it's not going to be very high res when you do something this wide in the shot but I don't think it matters because there's not a lot of detail down here and I don't think anyone's going to notice so now looking back at the computer I'm pleased just looking at my first frame I'm excited to see that that muscle there that V muscle right there on his hip it's there and the generative fill there here's the first option here's the second option that doesn't have the V here's the third option no V here's the fourth option no V so let's look at this first option so I can see that there's a little bit of something there left over near the belt loop so let's look at just this layer alone I see it's there I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to call it clone cleanup and now that's on top I'm going to make sure that it says sample all layers and I'm going to use the remove tool but more on that in just a second but here's a sneak preview if I just go over that and let it do its thing bam it disappeared so that's great here it was before we fixed the underwear and here it is after and if we zoom in you can see the difference in the results here's before here is after and I think that looks really really good all right so the next thing we're going to look at here is this picture of dyron it's already been retouched but I'm going to turn off this top layer and we're going to start over so as you can see there's a lot of things in the shot that need cleaned up you can see some fill cards and a few light stands and that sort of thing so we're gonna do that here it is after I finished and here it is before and now I'm going to turn that layer off we're going to redo it we're going to do it right now I'm going to make a new layer I'm going to call it clone and heal blown heel and we're going to press enter all right now I'm going to zoom in here just a little bit on this top left and you can see that there's this lag here I think that's what's going on in a few years I don't remember I'm going to grab the remove tool over here I'm going to come up here to the top and I'm going to make sure that it says sample all layers and I'm going to make sure that it says remove after each stroke that's normally selected by default but there's a reason why you might turn that off I just put my layer that I'm making my new layer I'm putting it right on top of the background I don't know if that makes a difference but maybe it does because you know we've got that old layer under there I'm going to just go over my flag here with the remove tool I should have used a bigger brush but that's okay we're going to hit enter or I don't need to hit enter but it's just going to start doing its thing as soon as I stop and that looks fantastic now you can see that there is this rope here that's on the light I think that's a little distracting we'll just go over it and let go and it's gone okay now see that there's some conduit here the reason why you might want to untick this remove after each stroke is because you can draw a straight line just by tapping once on that side holding down shift and coming over here and hitting shift again and now I have a straight line I get to enter and then that will take away the conduit did a fairly good job I think I need to redo this section right here and I'll hit enter again and that looks better so now I'll grab my uh remove tool I'll draw over this light stand here it shouldn't be there I'll hit enter that's great this wheel is actually attached to the prop stand I think but I don't like it so I'm gonna go over it and hit enter gone this one enter gone perfect let's come up here to his face now see if there are any blemishes okay I'm gonna go over this blemish badivoto Mist with a remove tool hit enter and it's gone we could also do other things if he had a jagged hairline we could clean that up as well in fact let me go back to this photo of David and I'll show you what that looks like um really quick so you could see that there is a little Gap here in his hairline I'm just going to grab my remove tool and I'm going to click on the background layer and I'm just going to make a larger brush go over that really quick hit enter and Bam so that reasonably filled in his hairline we might just go over it one more time hit enter there we got a much cleaner and nicer hairline so you get the idea we also can clean up flyaways with this as well and it's just a fantastic Tool uh for retouching that I'm sure you're going to want to use in your workflow now the last thing I'm going to talk about is content aware fill this has been around for a while but it is something that we might want to you might not know about so I'll show you really quick what you could do so I go back here to my original image you'll see that the this the background doesn't go all the way over here to the right what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a selection of the drape over here we're all going to pretend together that I did it perfectly around this light in a very good way and I zoomed in all the way and my outline is perfect because you know I like to be perfect and we'll just include this little stand down here and we'll pretend that I did it perfectly on that edge of the stand and great we got our selection perfect I do have the retouching over here in the layers from what I did earlier for this demo I'm just going to click on the background layer with all that retouching I did earlier days ago turned off um now I'm just going to go up to edit and come down to Content aware fill now the reason why content aware fill is a better choice for extending the background like this than generative fill is that content aware fill is not locked into that 1024 or whatever small pixel count it can be quite large it's going to use the other things in the shot in order to fake it uh for you so we're just going to go through here and make sure that the light's not selected or that the floor isn't selected or she's not selected because we want all of the information for our shot to come from the blue background and not something else so if we just go over that stuff really quickly and make sure that we're only selecting the blue background then the content aware Phil should do a very good job of filling that in okay perfect I think that looks great of course I could have done a better job with my selection tool but that is a good demonstration of how it works and now I'm going to pull up on screen the image that I did back in 2018 and the image that I did in 2023. you can see that the image looks so much better today there's so much more space around the model that I was able to create with the AI tools and the tonality overall looks great and I love how that there's a huge quality improvement in this image between the old photo and the new one and I'm so glad that I took the time to use all of these new AI tools to polish my work and go through this process because now I can feel proud of the work that I've done over the years once the retouching process was over I exported the images and uploaded them to my website I also changed the alt tags on all of the images for SEO and got the correct order for the two Galleries and I also updated the images on my home page as well and now that I've completed this process I have a much better understanding a much better feeling about my work and I am going to be very proud to show it to people I can't wait to go in and change the lifestyle Galleries and the business headshot galleries as well and hopefully all of this will lead to better SEO better Impressions from potential customers when they come to my site and more closed sales and remember if you want to check out a photo remember to click on the link in the description for a special offer if you guys could please let me know in the comments if you have any questions and also if you could let me know how you feel about the remove tool the content aware to fill tool and the generative fill tool and which one you like for different things that you have to get done in Photoshop we have so many options now and each every person is going to have their own opinion and their own experience and I'm sure that we can share that with each other and learn from that process thank you so much for your time have a great day and I'll talk to you soon

Channel: John Gress

Views: 3,211

Keywords: headshot, profoto, elinchrom, studio, portrait, photographer, photography, fashion, tutorial, godox, model, how to, westcott, beauty, retouch, retouching, photoshop, skin, frequency separation, Lightroom, LR, lrc, adobe, color, grading, presets, profile, styles, kodak, fuji, film, look, analog, simulation, black, and, white, B&W, post, production, colour, ai, photo, editor, batch, best, processing, tools, head, shots, Symmerty, facial, capture, one, symmertize, remove, tool, content, aware, fill, generative, beta, AI, pack, style, evato, C1, beyond

Id: t67bcUOzxPg

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023