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Photo Retouching in Photoshop

Lesson 15 from: Adobe Photoshop CC: The Complete Guide

Ben Willmore

Photo Retouching in Photoshop

Lesson 15 from: Adobe Photoshop CC: The Complete Guide

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

15. Photo Retouching in Photoshop

Learn to do more advanced photo retouching in Photoshop with blend modes, the magic wand tool, the adjustment brush and more.
Summary (Generated from Transcript)

The topic of the lesson is advanced retouching in Adobe Photoshop CC.

Q&A:

  1. How can you remove colored fringing in an image using blending modes?

    You can create a new empty layer, use the paintbrush tool with a soft-edged brush to paint over the areas with fringing, and then change the blending mode to "Color" to apply the color from the new layer to the brightness of the underlying layer.

  2. How can you automate the process of removing white splattered paint in an image?

    You can use the magic wand tool to select a few paint marks, go to the Select menu and choose "Similar" to select similar areas, and then use the Content Aware Fill feature in the Edit menu to remove the selected paint marks.

  3. How can you fix moiré patterns in an image?

    In Camera RAW, you can use the Moiré Reduction feature in the adjustment brush to reduce or eliminate the colored artifacts caused by moiré patterns. Alternatively, you can duplicate the layer in Photoshop, change the blending mode to "Color", blur the layer to blend the colors together, and then use a layer mask to apply the fix only where needed.

  4. How can you retouch fabric that has bends and drapes over an object?

    You can use the Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop to bend and warp the fabric to match the background. By placing pins on specific points and manipulating them, you can shape the fabric to align with the background. You can also use a donor area to clone and paint over the fabric to cover up objects or fill in missing areas.

  5. How can you use the Clone Stamp tool to retouch fabric?

    By holding down the Shift and Option (Mac) or Shift and Alt (Windows) keys, you can use the square bracket keys to change the size, the greater than and less than keys to rotate, and the arrow keys to reposition the cloned area. This allows you to scale, rotate, and reposition the cloned area to match the fabric in the image. The topic of this lesson is advanced retouching techniques in Photoshop.

Q&A:

  1. How can I copy and paste from one area to another in Photoshop?

    You can use the Option (or Alt) + click method to copy from one area and apply it elsewhere.

  2. How can I reset the settings in the Clone Source panel in Photoshop?

    There is no specific keyboard shortcut for resetting the Clone Source panel, but you can click on the U-turn symbol to reset the settings.

  3. How can I flip an image horizontally or vertically in Photoshop?

    You can use the flip icons in the Clone Source panel to flip an image horizontally or vertically.

  4. What is the Clone Source panel in Photoshop and how does it work?

    The Clone Source panel allows you to set and adjust the settings for the cloning tool, such as offset, width, height, and rotation angle.

  5. How can I separate detail from tone and color in Photoshop?

    You can use the Frequency Separation technique, which involves duplicating the original image, blurring the duplicate layer, and then using blending modes to separate the detail from the color and tone.

  6. How can I automate the retouching process in Photoshop?

    You can use actions to automate repetitive tasks in Photoshop. The class provides a set of actions, including one for Frequency Separation retouching, which can be used to simplify the process.

  7. How can I use the Vanishing Point filter in Photoshop for retouching?

    The Vanishing Point filter can be used to define the perspective of an image and make retouching adjustments that align with the perspective.

  8. How should I structure my layers when combining retouching and adjustments?

    It is recommended to place retouching layers below adjustment layers in order to avoid conflicts and ensure that adjustments apply to the retouched image.

Next Lesson: Warp, Bend, Liquify

Lesson Info

Photo Retouching in Photoshop

We're back with Photoshop CC, the ultimate guide, complete guide, actually. And we're on week three. And the topic of today's discussion will be advanced retouching. And since that we covered the basics of retouching in on session, we need to give you a break, so mentally you could have time to practice those things and get used to them a little bit before we get into a little bit more advanced ideas. And so, as usual, we're gonna jump into Photoshop, spend as much time as we can there so that we maximize what we can learn. First, even though the problem we have with this image is not immediately obvious, we'll learn how to fix this with a simple solution. In this image, you're looking at a statue that's inside of a stone bell shaped thing at a religious site. And I noticed some colored fringing around the edges of things. Sometimes that colored fringing, do you see the red up near the ear that's here? Sometimes that can be gotten rid of in Camera RAW. In Camera RAW, there's a checkbox...

called Removed Chromatic Aberrations. And that will often fix those, but sometimes it won't, because they become a little more pronounced. So this one, I'm gonna show you a simple solution. Just to let you know you don't always need to be too advanced when it comes to how you retouch things out. I'm gonna actually use one of the concepts that we had when talked about blending modes. So I'll create a brand new empty layer. And I'll use the paintbrush tool with a soft-edged brush. And when you're in the paintbrush tool, you can hold down the option key, Alt in Windows, to click on your picture to choose a color from within the image to paint with. So I'll come over here to an area where I see where we don't have the red issue, like right in this area. I'll click. And then I'm just gonna paint over the area where I see the red. I'll do the same thing over here. I'll Option-click in a nearby area to grab a similar color and I'll paint over it. And I can continue to do that with any other areas if there are any other color fringing. Once I've done so, if I would like so it shifts the color of what's underneath to match what I have on this layer, but we keep the brightness unchanged on that underlying layer. All I need to do is change the Blending mode, found at the top of my Layers panel. I can change it to either hue, hue will shift the basic color. But the problem with that is it keeps it just as colorful as it used to be. And so if there's any hint of color in there, we'll just shift the color but it'll still be vivid. I wanna set it to Color. Color is going to grab the basic color from this layer and apply it to the brightness that's underneath. Apply the color for this layer to the brightness that's underneath. And it's the brightness that really contains pretty much all the detail in your picture. 'Cause when you convert an image to black and white, it's not like all the detail goes away. It's within that black and white data that all the detail's retained. So I'll I'm doing there is painting using colors from the surrounding image that would be appropriate if the red fringing that was there was not present, and I used Color mode. So could look through the rest of this image and look for any other fringing like that to get rid of it. But, oftentimes, I find people literally retouching things out using normal retouching tools to get rid of that, like reconstructing the ear to get rid of it, when you don't always need to think about retouching tools. Instead, in this case, we're just painting with blending modes. So that was a simple one. Now let's progress into things that seem difficult. In this image, I would like to get rid of a good amount of the white splattered paint. So think about how much time it might take you to get rid of white splattered paint. Sure you could manually go in there with something like the Spot Healing brush, and paint over every single one of those strokes individually, the little paint strokes. But that's gonna take good amount of time. Let's think is there a way we might be able to automate this task, at least somewhat? Well, there's a couple of different methods I could use, one of which is I could use the magic wand tool, making sure it's at its default setting of 32, not some weird setting. And I could click on one of those little paint marks. And I might hold Shift to get more, and click on just a couple of the other paint marks in different areas of the image, because they probably vary in brightness a little bit, because in one area there might be a little less light hitting that part of the... This is a train car. So select a few of them to give Photoshop an idea of what kind of variety we have. And then I'll go up to the Select menu and that's where I'll find a choice called Similar. And that means look across the entire image for areas that are similar to what I currently have selected. And that uses the tolerance setting of the magic wand tool to say how much can we deviate from what's selected. Can we go a little bright, a little darker? If the tolerance setting for the magic wand is set to zero, it means we can't deviate at all. If we have it at the default setting to 32, then we can go 32 shades of brightness different than what we have selected. And it'll still do it. So if I select similar, do you see how we have a lot, not all, but a lot of those paint marks selected. Now we also have some other areas up here that I wouldn't wanna change. And I could, if I wanted to, type a letter Q to turn on Quick Mask mode, which would show me which areas I have. And with that turned on, I can either grab the paintbrush tool, or use other features to come in here and get rid of the red overlay where I don't think it's needed. So over here, that's some red, little red paint, that we wanna keep across here, up into there, in here in the middle. And I might look at a few other areas. Do you see up there? That's a big highlight where some light was coming through. And you can see how it's selected all the way down on the edge. Well, that's not a place I need to fix. So I'm gonna try to get rid of it. That is gonna reveal a few of the paint strokes but those are the ones, the only ones that hopefully we'll have to fix manually. Just getting rid of this on any area where it's not paint strokes. And I should do it up here where that little crack is in the top, 'cause it's not a paint stroke. But you can see how we have a lot of the paint strokes now covered with red. And that means that when I type Q to turn off Quick Mask mode, those particular areas are selected. Now I'm gonna use Content Aware Fill. That's what you get when you go to the Edit menu and choose Fill. There's a choice called Content Aware. But I need these selections to be touching the area that doesn't look like white paint, the area that's surrounding the white paint. So in order to accomplish that, I wanna make these selections the littlest bit larger than they currently are. 'Cause they need to be touching the color that should be there instead of the paint. So I'll go to the Select menu. I'll choose modify and I'll choose Expand. Just means make the selection larger. And one or two pixels, and in this case, I'll try two. Click OK. And now all of those selections just got larger. So hopefully now, instead of sitting there where the edge is touching that white paint stroke, instead the edge should be touching the surrounding color of paint. Now when I do most of my retouching, I try to do it in a non-destructive fashion so that it's always un-doable, so I'm not stuck with a certain end result. So I'm going to create a brand new empty layer to put my retouching on. So it doesn't happen directly to the original. That's actually gonna cause a problem. I'm gonna go to the Edit menu now. And I'd really like to choose Content, oh, sorry, I'd like to choose Fill and then choose Content Aware. That's what I want to do. But I fear that when I click OK, I'll get a very common problem, which is it just says it can't do it. And the reason why it can't do is because it's working an empty layer right now. Now I wanna end up with it as if it would work right now, but I'm going to force it to, how should I say it? I'm gonna have to work around it a little bit, but in the end, I will end up with exactly what I wanted, which would mean only the areas that are selected, being filled in with what should be there if those white paint spots weren't. So here's how I'm gonna have to do it. I can't work on that empty layer, unfortunately. Instead I need to duplicate the original layer. I'm not gonna do it with Command J, because Command J means new layer via copy. And if you have a selection active, it only copies the areas that are selected. So, instead, I'll just drag the layer down to the new layer icon. That's one way of forcing it to copy the entirety of the layer, even though I have a selection active. There are other ways to have that happen as well, but if had I typed Command J, which is kind of my reflex that I'd almost do automatically, it would've only copied the white specks, the areas that are selected. All right, so now we're ready. I'll go to the Edit menu. I will choose Fill. And I'll use Content Aware. I'll click OK, and hopefully it will work and be able to get rid of a good portion of those white blobs. I don't know if you can tell or not, but a lot of them are gone. I'll type Command H so you can see the after. I'll type Command H again. But what I don't like is that I have an entire duplicate of the original layer sitting up there. That doubles my file size. I would rather just have only these areas that are selected, just the little parts where I actually made the change on that top layer. Therefore, there file size would be lower. And when I visually looked in the layers, I'd be able to tell that there's a bunch of little specs here. Instead of looking at the layer, and going, "Why is there two versions of the picture here?" And I might not know. So here's how you get around the fact that it couldn't work on an empty layer. You duplicate the layer you really wanted to have it think about, like we did here. And when you're done applying it, you simply do this. Select Inverse. Select Inverse means give me the opposite of what I currently have. And then hit Delete. So we just threw away everything else. I can choose Deselect now, 'cause I no longer need that selection. And if you wanna see what's on that layer, I'll turn off the bottom layer, there's all the little spots. All we did is once we were done, we said, fine, select inverse. Give me the opposite of all those spots we had. And let's just hit Delete. So this is what I wanted to do in the first place. And it would've been great had I just been able to create our empty layer, go to the Edit menu and choose Fill and say Content Aware and just have it not complain. But the fact that it usually does complain makes it so I sometimes have to work around it. And that's my work around. Now I'll turn that layer underneath back on. And I would need to tackle some of these spots manually. And that would just mean going to the Spot Healing brush, making sure it is set to Sample All Layers, so that it can work with that empty layer. And then I would come in here and paint on whichever ones are leftover, but my job is much smaller than it would have been had I not already done, I mean, if you look down here at the bottom. You see the difference? And there's a chance I could have done more automation in that I could right now make an additional selection of the spots that are left at the bottom, because the ones I originally clicked on were the bright ones down there and I hadn't even noticed these darker ones. So I could go through the exact same process over again, targeting these, which are not as bright as what we had before. I'm not gonna do that right now, just 'cause that's not gonna teach you any more. It's just letting you know you might be able to do it in more than one pass. And the main thing is, up here, where this light is hitting here is where I would definitely have to do it manually, because the brightness of those areas, compared to the painted areas are too similar. I'd have to do them. Question? To this stage, could you go back and do the first thing you showed us with the color, paint with the similar color, and hit Mode. Oh, could I do that? She was asking about could I create a new layer, set that new layer to the choice called Color and then use the technique that I mentioned, which was to hold down the Option key, Click, and then paint over these. And the problem with that is when you do that technique, it uses the color of the layer you're painting on and the brightness of the layer underneath. Those specks are brighter than the their surroundings. And they're gonna stay bright when I do that. It's just gonna be those shifting colors so that if they weren't already bluish here, when I paint across it, they'll become the bluish I'm painting with. But they're not gonna change in brightness. So that wouldn't quite do it. If there wasn't any texture in the image, I could do the opposite. I could set it to Luminosity and do it. But even then they're gonna be the wrong color, so, no, that's just not gonna be a solution. But I'm glad your brain at least thought of it and was like, "What a minute." 'Cause that's what I love, when you get into Photoshop where your brain just starts going, "What, what if?" And you start thinking about different possibilities. Then you just gotta investigate 'em and find out why they don't work. And then you hone your skills more so you get better at it. So anyway there's our quick fix for at least a good number of the white white paint spots. I've done that also, same fix, when somebody had a black and white photo that had aged over time. And think he got mold on it or something. And it had a whole bunch of brown blobs all over the picture. And the brown blobs were different in color than the black and white photograph that it was on. So I used... I could've used what I did here, which was the magic wand and then Similar, or I could use the command called Color Range to say select the ranges of color that are brown. And once it's done, expand it one or two pixels so that your selection's not touching the brown stuff, it's touching the surroundings. And then go in again with Content Aware, Fill, yeah. Here, we have a unique problem, which will only happen to you on occasion. And that is we have what's known as a moiré pattern. This can happen when you have a camera, digital camera that doesn't have the anti-aliasing filter in front of it. If you look at certain cameras, such as the Nikon, is it the D800 from Nikon, there's two version of it. I think there's then, and I could be wrong, 'cause I'm not a Nikon shooter, but there's Nikon D800 and then there's the D800E or something like that. One of them has this anti-aliasing filter in it and one of them doesn't. Most cameras do. And it makes your image actually look softer. It softens all your images, so why the heck would you want this filter in front of your camera sensor? Because it prevents this problem from happening. And, therefore, since a lot of people shoot people that have fabric, most cameras have an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. But to get the absolute sharpest image, ideally, you wouldn't have that filter in front the sensor. But in that case when you pictures of certain fabrics, you might get this kind of problem, which is where I see these weird colors showing up. It's a very similar effect to, if you've ever seen two screen doors, you know the screen door you have on the front of your house. And you take the screens out of 'em and you just kinda stack 'em next to each other and rotate the angles. You see these really patterns forming, those are moiré patterns. And it has to do with the grid of pixels that make up your camera sensor interacting with the grid of the weave of the fabric, kinda doing the same thing. It's kinda weird. But if I come here and I use the... I'm in Camera RAW at the moment. And in Camera RAW, if I got to the adjustment brush, and the adjustment brush is found out the top of your screen over here near the left, this right here. To get to Camera RAW, you can select any file even if it's JPEG or a TIFF, and you can, in bridge, go up to the File menu and choose Open in Camera RAW. If you have a RAW file, you just double click on it, it would bring you there automatically. But when it comes to a JPEG or a TIFF, you'd have to, in Bridge, go up to the file menu to get to it. And when I'm in here, if I use the adjustment brush, there is a choice in here called Moiré Reduction. I'm gonna bring this up, first I'll bring it up all the way. And then I'm gonna paint in here. And as I do, you should find those weird colored artifacts being reduced or eliminated. And then what you can end up doing is once you've gone through those, is you can lower the setting to see what is the lowest setting that actually gets rid of the problem. Just be careful when you're painting that you don't paint over areas where two distinctly different colors touch each other, because it will soften the edge between two distinctly different colors. You wanna paint over the areas where it should look relatively consistent in doing this. Now if, for some reason, you don't have the newer versions of Camera RAW that have this feature in here called Moiré Reduction, then you have an alternative method you could use. The alternative method would be to open the image all the way into Photoshop. And in Photoshop, we can duplicate the layer. I can do that by typing Command J. The duplicate, you're gonna change the blending mode on it to a choice called Color. So what that means is use the color from the op layer, but use the brightness of what's underneaths. And then you blur that layer, the top one, the one where it's using the color. And tell those little bands of color that is in there blend together. There they're starting to go away. 'Cause all the detail's in the brightness. And we're just messing with the ch here. You could then if you noticed any areas that are two distinct colors touching each other where they start to blur together. You could mask that, so it only appears where the problem was. But if I turn off this, there's before, turn it back on, there's after. I'm not sure how good that'll go out over the video feed, because it is an odd thing that... With the compression of video, if it'll be easy to see or not. But you can see the difference there. Let's try something that should be quite difficult. In this image, I would like to remove one of these objects. The problem is if I try to remove one of these objects, what's behind the objects? We have that fabric that's got stripes in it, right? And not only that, if you look at it, let's say I wanna remove, I'll just pick one, this red one. I think the red one will be difficult, 'cause I notice the fabric. Can you see it's got a like little bend to it here? And when I look for areas to copy from, sure I can copy from down here, but that area of where the fabric is, it doesn't have this little kind of V-shaped bend that's here. So it's gonna make it more difficult to use. And it's not that I need to retouch out this exact shape, it's that sometimes you need to do retouching over areas of fabric that drape over something. And they have bends to them. And sometimes we need to do that. And this just happens to be the image I had that I thought was obvious. When it comes to if it doesn't line up, it won't look right, if those stripes in the background don't do it. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to select an area that's down here where I can find a relatively large area of clean textures, the fabric that should be there. I'm gonna copy that to its own layer by typing Command J. I'm gonna move that up here to cover up the thing I'm trying to retouch out, which is the red, what are these? Baskets or whatever you wanna call 'em, bowls. And I'm gonna just put it up there in general, close to it. Then we'll zoom up. And we'll start to look at that. And if I just turn off the eyeball we can compare the striped background here in the layer that I've chosen to use, in there and what's underneath. And I notice that shape-wise, it's not gonna work at all, because I can see what's underneath. It's coming upward here, where it reaches a peak. Comes down there, it comes up again there. And we don't have that quality here, do we? Well, we're gonna have to make that quality, so let's figure out how. And this'll be a preview of something we're gonna cover in another session. We have a session that has a name similar to warp, bend and liquify. Well, we're gonna need to use some of that technology so I'll give you a brief preview of what you would learn in that session, 'cause that's part of what we need to do. So the first thing I'm gonna do is try to get whatever color line in here is found in the top layer to line up with what's underneath, at least in one spot. So if I move this over, for instance, do you see the white line coming through here? I'm gonna pick a white line in here to just line up with it. So right now my eye is looking right here. Do you see that edge? THat's the edge of the piece that I'm using right here. I see that white line. I'll use Photoshop's Move tool, and just move it up until it lines up right there with the line on the layer that's underneath. Next, I need to make sure that horizontally, this has enough striped fabric to actually cover up with what I want. So what I'll do is lower the opacity of this so I can see the basket that's underneath it that I'm trying to get rid of. 'Kay, do you see the red one? That's the one I wanna get rid of. So I need to move this over so that right now there's not another basket there. Instead, it's stripes. And I might need to move up further. I'm gonna try to find where can I have a clean enough area of stripes to use that. When I was moving this up and down, I moved it up that high, because I could see, I know it's very hard to interpret when I'm doing this, but when I was moving this, I could see a white line moving up as a moved it. And I was moving that white line up until it lined up with what's in the underlying image. More around there. Not easy to visualize when somebody else is controlling what's happening. It's when you're moving it yourself that it's easy to know where you're looking and therefore why you're moving it. But I could see that there was a white line moving up and down as I was repositioning this. And I could see a white line that was not moving below it. And I made sure the two aligned. So if you wanna see what I was doing in the end, this line right up here ended up being the white line I saw moving. And I moved it up and down until it lined up with this white line in the image underneath, while at the same time, making sure that the entire red basket in the end had the stripes over it. That make sense, kinda how I was thinking? Now we need to bend this to match the background. Now before I bend it to match the background, I'm gonna turn it into a Smart Object, because if I don't turn it into a Smart Object, the bending that I do will be permanent. And if I mess it up a little bit and I try to come back and fix it later, it'll be a lot more work. But if it's a Smart Object, if I mess up the process, and I need to come back to it a few days later and fine tune it, it'll be easy to do, because the bending that I do will not be permanent. So I'll convert it into a Smart Object. Next, what I'm gonna do is go to the Edit menu. And you know how we've been able to use Free Transform, where we can rotate and we can scale? Well, there are other kinds of transformations, one of which is called a puppet warp, puppet warp. Think about what you could do with a puppet. Can't your grab its arms and move 'em however you want and grab its head or whatever and just move a puppet around. Well, here, puppet warp means that I can now come in here and bend this by clicking on it. We'll see. Usually I believe the first time you use this, a check box at the top of your screen will be turned on called Show Mesh, meaning it might look like this when you first try. I'm gonna trim off the check box at the top off my screen called Show Mesh, because it makes this look very busy and I don't need that. And what I'll do is on the right side of my screen, where I can see the various stripes that are there, I'm gonna click on a few of those stripes, like here the white stripe. Click, can you see a little do that was added? That's known as a pin. Now I'm gonna go down a bit and click on another one of the stripes. And I'm gonna go down a bit and, let's see, here's a white stripe. What I'm doing when I put down those pins is I'm saying, "Hold these areas still." So when I bend other things, these areas are not gonna move. It's like if I had a sheet of fabric in front of me and I had you hold a few fingers down on the fabric, while I move the rest of it, those stay stationary. I can move them by grabbing them and pulling on them, but I'm just locking a few of them in. I'm also gonna do the same on the left side, where this white stripe is, I'm just gonna click on the left side of it. Maybe come up here to that same yellow one, click on the other side of it, go to the white one, click on the other side. I'm just locking them in to say, "If I move other things, leave these points where they are." But now it's hard to figure out exactly how this needs to be bent, because I can't see the stripes behind it. In order to be able to see the stripes behind it, I'm gonna lower the opacity of this layer. And I can do that while I'm in the middle of this thing called puppet warping. I can just click on the word opacity and drag it down. And that's where I can start to see that I'm having some issues. On the right side of my screen, look at the white line near the top. Do you see that here it is pretty darn close to matching where the white stripe is on the other image. Can you tell that they're kind of on top of each other? Because that's where I lined it up when I was repositioning it. Then I see the white line continuing over this way. But the one that's underneath it, I can see it, it's right here. It doesn't look right. So I'm gonna grab the pin that's there and I'm gonna pull it down here so it goes right on top of the white line that I can see. Then here you see that the white line underneath is dipping, but this one is not. So I'm gonna click where I think it should dip and I'm gonna pull it down there. Here I see where the white line should go up. So I'll click within that area and I'll pull the one I'm using up. And I can add many of these as I want to warp this. Isn't that cool? Now I'm gonna do that for a few more of the lines. If I do it for one of the lines near the bottom, of the lines in the middle, then it'll probably get everything pretty much bending in a somewhat similar way. So next, I'm coming down here to the yellow line, 'cause that's where I next see these little dots that I added. One of the reasons for the dots is also to remind me which line is on the layer I'm working on. 'Cause it's kinda hard to tell. Is it on the layer I'm working on or the layer underneath? If I put the dots on them already, I know where the dots are from the layer I'm working on. So here I see the yellow. And I look at the yellow out here beyond where that is. And I see it coming in, and it looks a little lower. So I might grab that and just move it down a little. I come over here and I can't really see where the yellow is. It's too hard to tell what's going on. So I'll skip that for now. And I'll come down to the white one. The white one, I can see where the dot is compared to the one that's underneath it. This needs to come down, like that. Over here, I can see where my dot is. I think it needs to come down. And it needs a bend right here. 'Kay, then I can add as many of these dots as I want. It is hard to visualize it here. It takes practice to do so. We do have some other choices, let's see, I watch this yellow one. The yellow one looks good, looks good until maybe about here. So I'll click there to lock it in. And over here it needs to deviate. It needs to go downward, I think, if I'm looking at the right line. And so I'll pull it downward. Add another one, pull it down. And I can do this as many areas as I like. Sometimes it becomes harder to visualize, so you just bring the opacity all the way up to see your end result. And then bring your opacity all the way down to compare it to say that's what's under, that's what I've done so far to try to visualize. Or you can also change the blending mode while you're in here. Wasn't there a blending mode that compares two layers and tells you where they're different? I think it was Difference mode. I can use that. It's not ever gonna turn solid black, because these two layers will never be exactly the same. But it might give me an idea of where they deviate the most. But that's where you might wanna try the other modes that are in this section to see if any of them let you better visualize this. Not that one. No, so either exclusion or difference. 'Cause then I can kinda see this overlapping, even though they're not two white lines anymore, it's kind of a gray line on top. I can somewhat see it. Put it back to normal. Now, for now, let's say that I think I've transformed it enough where it's getting close. The next thing I'm gonna do is press Return or Enter or I could click this check box to say I'm done bending it. I can always come back and bend it more. If I simply come back up to the Edit menu and I choose Puppet Warp, once again, it will bring back all those dots and I can still reposition them as if I never left. But, for now, I'm gonna click the check box here to say I'm done. And I'm gonna add a layer mask so I can decide where this shows up. Right now we just have a big rectangle and I need it to only show up in one spot. So let's add a layer mask. When I add the mask, I'm gonna have it add a black mask. And I do that by holding down the Option key, Alt in Windows. Now with my paintbrush, I will paint with white, because white allows me to only... You know, that's what allows me to make that layer show up. And I'm just gonna paint on top of the red basket. Go all the way around the red basket. 'Cause we don't have to have the whole thing look perfect, we only need it perfect where we're covering up the red basket. Now I'm starting to get something else to show up there so I'll switch over and paint with black to hide parts. Let's hide that little part. Now those are the areas that I need to work on to get them to line up right. Does that make sense? So now I can go back to Edit. And I actually have to click not on the mask, but on the main image. 'Cause I thought I wanted to work on the mask. Edit, Puppet Warp. And it's gonna show me all the points. We're only viewing part of the layer, though, but I can come here and say, well, let's lock in that white line. And this line obviously needs to come down, so let's grab it and see if we can pull it. I might need to grab a little further out. I wish I could still see the part that's extended off into space, but... There I can bend it down. I can grab this yellow one. And it could be that this one dot here I had in the totally wrong position. You can click on any dot. When you have a dot clicked on, you see it's got a little white dot in the middle, that tells you that's what you're working on. And if you hit the Delete key, you'll say I didn't want that dot, you know, that kinda thing. So it could be that sometimes you need to delete a dot. But let's just add a few more, try to pull... Oh, come on, too close. 'Kay, yeah, you only have to have 'em near... If you get them too close to each other, it can mess things up. And it might be that I have a few too close together here to mess me up. Pull this up. See, it's lining up with the white. Pull this down. Get it to line up with the white down there. And I'm getting pretty good this, yellow doesn't quite line up so I'll just click there. There we go. You're getting the idea, though? I'm kinda working it. Right here is where we have a mess-up, and I think it's 'cause I have a bunch of dots near each other. And I can't see all the image there, 'cause I've got the mask hiding things. So I might just wanna re-do parts of those, meaning I could click here and hit Delete on a few of these, just kinda simplify this. I need to redo that. And so I just come in here now and see if I can maybe pull this up a little, pull that part down. There, it seems to be lining up. And this look like it could continue on if I had enough. So I think they're starting to get close to aligning. So it look like most of them are getting somewhat close. I'm gonna say good enough for now, because we still have a little bit left to do. I might need to go back to my mask at this point, and paint a little bit more. Let's see, if I paint with white, I can get areas to show up. And I can see a few areas where I can see the edge. Okay. Let's see what we've done thus far. I'll turn off this layer. There's before, there's after. I could see the yellow line that is going through the top of the basket's not lining up a little bit. So I go back to working on the image itself in Puppet Warp. Right there, that needs to go back. There we go. Return or Enter to say I'm done. And I could continue refining it like that. So for now I'm gonna say that the part of the fabric that's bending around and stuff is fine. It could be better. I just need to spend more time. But the problem I have now is that down here, if I turn off my retouching, do you see that the basket kinda bumped into this one? And because of that, I think it was distorting this edge a little bit, or something. I need a clean edge there. And so I wanna do something to see if I can fix that. You see what I'm talking about there? All right, so let's try it out. I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer for that part. And there's a couple different ways I could attempt to do this. I could select an area, a donor area, copy it to its own layer. I'd usually turn it into a Smart Object. Then I could rotate, scale until I fit in there. That's one method. If you wanna see what I'm talking about I would just say I'm gonna use this as my donor. I make sure I click on the layer that actually contains that, 'cause just typing Command J doesn't mean it's thinking about what I am. So I click down here, Command J. Then put that on top of my layer stack. I could use my move tool. Bring it over here. I'd usually turn into a Smart Object before I type Command T. But for now I'm only showing you the basic idea. And while it's in this, I can always lower the opacity of it, or I could put it in Difference mode to see how does it line up with what's underneath. And I would try to get it as close to it as I can. Then I would add a layer mask. In this case, I'll add a black mask. Remember black mask means hold down Option, Alt in Windows. I can grab my paintbrush tool then and I'm painting with white. And I'm gonna try to paint it in only where it's needed. It's not exact, so I can use my arrow keys if I am in the Move tool. Arrow, arrow, arrow, get it over there. But then we have a little bit of stripes hanging out so I work on the mask. Grab my paintbrush tool, paint with black. And with a relatively hard edge brush, say take away those stripes. Take away the red stripe. Are we getting close? You get the idea of you do that. But I wanna show you an alternative, so I'm gonna actually delete that layer. And here I have an empty layer that I wanna do it on. Let's see if there's any way we could do this just using retouching tools, where we don't have to do layers that you rotate and transform and all that. There might be a way where somehow we can just make our retouching tools much more useful. I'm gonna go to the Clone stamp tool. That's the tool that just blatantly copies from one area and puts it somewhere else. And I'll go to the same donor area. I don't know if it's the best donor area or not, because the lighting might be perfectly right. You might need the highlight to come from a different angle. If so, look at all the other baskets on the screen to see is there a better donor area. But for now, just for purposes of demonstration, I'll choose here. I'm in the Clone stamp tool. I'll hold down the Option key, Alt in Windows. And I'll click there to tell it that that's where I would like to copy from. Now I'll get a bigger brush just to show you that that's where it's about to apply. But now when I put it over here, it's not gonna be the right angle. 'Cause it's the same angle as where I got it from, right? So if I get a bigger brush, you can tell it's pretty obvious it's the wrong angle, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of method to just tell Photoshop that I'd like to maybe stare at it, rotate it. Look at it. Can you see it rotate? There's a way of doing that, which I'll share with you in just a moment, once I get it rotated around far enough. Usually not quite this slow, but feels like it's a big ship I'm trying to turn. (laughs) But now do you see how that might be a little more usable as far as that goes? Now it'd be really nice, though, if somehow I could instead tell it to get bigger. Wouldn't that be cool? You can make it bigger somehow. Well, check it out, it's getting bigger right now. Or if instead I could tell it to get smaller somehow. 'Cause then if it's further away from the camera, or anything like that, it doesn't matter, because I can scale it up or down and get it to be the right spot. Or what if I could just nudge it one pixel at a time. You guys interested in how I'm doing this? (laughs) All right, I'm using my keyboard. On my keyboard I'm holding down two keys. The keys that I'm holding on a Macintosh are Shift and Option. On Windows, it would be Shift and Alt. Then if I wanna change the size of what I'm cloning, I use the square bracket keys, the same ones you might use to change the size of your brush. But I'm holding Shift and Option, and then the brackets. Then, if I wanna rotate it, I'm using the greater than and less than keys. You know, they look like sideways letter Vs. And that will allow me to rotate. Then if I wanna reposition precisely, I'm using the arrow keys on my keyboard, along with all of those things, the whole time I'm holding down Shift and Option. And I'm changing which other keys I'm adding. And by doing so, it allows me to scale, rotate, reposition, whatever it is I'm trying to copy from. Now I haven't even applied that, yet. I mean, I haven't clicked to apply it. So what I'll do now is get a smaller brush so I don't have to put that big chunk in there. I was just using a larger brush so I could see how it lined up with everything else. And now I'm just gonna click and I'll paint it only where I think I'll need it. Like that. That's on its own layer. And so I could either add a layer mask, or just use the eraser tool to get rid of the extra stripes that were added. So I might just grab the eraser and say let's get rid of this extra excess I didn't need in there. 'Kay, and I might need to do a little bit more. Under here there is some red. I can always adjust this layer. I don't know if you remember we did a session on color adjustments. I showed you how to make yellow flowers turn purple. I could tell it to make a red stripe turn black by saying work on reds and bring the luminosity all the way down. And suddenly this little red stripe that I can see through the webbing there would turn black and would blend right in with what's behind it. Anyway, that kinda stuff. But for now I'm trying to teach you about the retouching tools. And how if we hold down Shift and Option on a Macintosh, then we have some extra keys we could add which will allow us to scale if we use the brackets, rotate if we use the greater than and less than and reposition if we use the arrow keys, which is really helpful, I think. There's one problem with it. There is no keyboard shortcut for reset to normal. What that means is the next time I come over here and attempt to retouch, I come here to this price tag and I say I want to Option-click to copy from this particular area and apply it somewhere else. You see the tag is rotated, scaled and whatever. There's no reset keyboard shortcut. Well, that means we have to know what the keyboard shortcut is a shortcut for. It's a shortcut for this. You go to the Window menu, there's a panel called the Clone Source panel. And if I go to Clone Source, let's see what we have. In here, we have settings called Offset. Offset means how far, horizontally, that's the X and vertically, which is the Y, did I move between where I originally Option-clicked to tell it I wanted a copy and where I am right now telling it I wanna apply. And when you use the arrow keys that we were using, it was changing those to numbers. It was saying make the offset between where we're copying and we're actually applying it change a little bit. Then here is a width and a height. And the width and the neight you notice has a change symbol saying that they're locked together. So if one changes, the other does too. And if I do Shift-Option and I use the bracket keys, do you see those numbers changing? Because that's what we were changing. Here, I'll do the arrow keys just so you can see those other numbers changing. That's left arrow, right arrow, up, down. You get the idea. We're just changing those numbers. Then there is a choice in there that right now says 61.8 and that's the angle, how much you wanna rotate. And I'd id that with the greater than and less than symbols. So all we were really doing was changing these settings. The settings I find numerically are not very useful. It's when I can visually see things rotate. And that's why I started you with the keyboard shortcut, 'cause if I start you with this most visual people just gloss over when they see numbers. They're like, "God, is that math?" you know, kinda thing. And I didn't want you to do that. I wanted you instead go, "Ooh, where's Post-It? "I can write down these cool keyboard shortcuts, 'cause you're using numbers. You just couldn't see the numbers. So if I did it here, I could either click on the number and type in a new one, Or I can click on what's next to the number, the actual like heading of the number in drag, That would do it. You can click on the W and drag, just another way changing them. And do you see this little symbol here that looks like a U-turn. That's the reset. So I said there was no keyboard shortcut for reset, at least none that I know of. There's no shortcut for this so we do need to open this panel and click that when we want things to go back to normal. Then the next time you use the tool, it acts as if you haven't rotated or scaled. There are a few other special features within this panel. Couple of 'em would be these two icons here. And they will flip things horizontally or vertically. So sometimes you have a window. And the right side of the window has some vines covering them. You need to retouch those vines out. If you could copy from the left side of the window, that edge, and just flip it horizontally, so it's a mirror of itself, you could use it to cover up the vines on the opposite side of the window, because the two edges of the window are usually about the same. That type of thing. Or it would be in this instance, where it would be a possibility, well, if I couldn't find clean areas in some things, I could say why not copy from this piece here to apply it over here. Well, in order to do that, it needed to be flipped the other direction, right? So if you wanna see that, I'll Option-click here to copy. And you can see how it's normal first. Then I'll click that little flip icon, flip. And now you see it going the other way. So now you could come over here if that part actually needed to be retouched. And then use the keyboard shortcuts I mentioned to possibly rotate it if need be, or scale it to get it to look appropriate. We don't need retouching there. I just wanted to pick a spot to show you. So you get the idea that flipping can be useful? Flipping can be useful also, you're trying to retouch somebody's eye. There's glare one one side of their glasses but not the other. Well, you might need to copy the side that doesn't have the glare. Flip it and use it to replace the other eye. You know, that kinda stuff. So those are useful. If you wanna get very fancy, you do have up here different clone sources. Let's say I had set it up where I was copying from that area here as I mentioned, and I had hit flip and I was going to apply it over here. And I got it all lined up perfectly. And I clicked to actually start applying it. Choose Undo, though. So this is all lined up ready for me to use. And then I decided, no, I need to come up here and retouch a different piece. I need to retouch that little piece off like I did earlier. If I switched the second clone source, all it does is it means it remembers the settings that were typed in here. So we can have a whole 'nother set being remembered. So in this case, I wanna use this tag, let's say I wanted to copy. And I needed to put it as the price on this one. So I got all lined up there, started to put it in. 'Kay that's my second clone source. Now I can switch back and forth. I'll choose Undo just to get rid of that. Watch, I'll go back. You see these guys? I'll click back on the first one. All it did was type in the numbers that were here before. And that means now it's thinking about flipping horizontally and moving over a certain distance. It's set for me to go back and rework on whatever that original area was. I think it was here, where this should already be lining up. It's already lining up. Where it thinks I'm copying over here, flipping, it remembers. And if I come back up here to that name tag, it's not currently set up for it, but if I switch to my second clone source, it is. See that? It's rare you need to use that. The time you need to use that is when you have an extremely complex area, where you need to copy from all over the place to get in there and fix it. And so when you copy from this one place, you use one clone source. When you copy from here, you use a different. And you can switch back and forth to say "I need to return to it." Its rare that you would need to do that, but it's nice to know it's there. So I would say for 75 plus percent of the people watching, you'll won't use those. But for about 7% of the people watching, you'll be like, "No way! "When I do those complex retouchings now, "where I have to go back and redo all sorts of things, "I don't have to start from scratch "every time I change where I'm cloning from." Then you'll love it. But for most of us, I hate looking at this panel. I just wanna see the image get bigger and smaller and rotate. And that's why I started you with the keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts were holding down Shift and Option. And then with those two held down, we used brackets for scale, greater than, less than, for rotation, arrows for moving. And then the only time I need to look at this panel is to click the Reset button, or if I wanna flip something. So let's see, I don't know if we did a perfect job here or not, but you see a red basket disappearing. And if you never saw the original, would you know that those stripes aren't quite right? Unless I'm clicking it on and off like this, I notice the white one at the bottom isn't perfect, if you wanna get picky. You see, it's got a little right there thing, little divot, so fine, puppet warp it. Was that the divot? Fix it. That's why it's nice to have it as a Smart Object, so you can do that. So now let's see if I screwed up the other areas. Yeah, it's moving a little bit, but... Hopefully that gives you an idea where if you're working with fabrics and such, hopefully you got a clean area to copy from. If you don't, sometimes you have to construct those clean areas, meaning that I could create a chunk of supposed fabric of this size by grabbing little parts from all over in this document and just lining them up with each other to kinda construct an artificial, clean area of fabric. Then move that up there and start distorting it. It's not fun when you need to do that. But sometimes you have no other alternative. You know, a client gave you an image, they paid you to retouch it. What're you supposed to do? Tell 'em to go give you a piece of clean fabric to work with? Sometimes you have jobs that you don't wanna do, but you have to. So was that an advanced retouch? Is that good enough to be called advanced? But we haven't really done much on people. Aw. Everybody says that. I just don't shoot a huge number of people, that's why you won't see as many pictures of that. Let's somehow figure out how to separate the detail in this photograph. And by detail, I mean things like the texture of the skin that's right in here, the little wrinkle and crease marks in the skin, the texture, the pores of the skin. I wanna separate that from the color and the brightness. So we have them two separate. If we have the two separate, then we can change the brightness and color of the skin without worrying about the texture of the skin getting messed up. And we can come in and retouch out some of the textures we don't like. And the color's not gonna be as screwed up. It's a interesting technique. Some people call this technique Frequency Separation. I hate that term. It's like saying Gaussian blur instead of adjustable blur. I think of it as separating detail from tone and color. That's what I'd call it. In order to accomplish this, we're going to duplicate this layer, so I'll do that by typing Command J. And then I'm gonna name these two layers we have. I'll name the top one Detail, 'cause that's where I want all the general find detail in the image to be contained. And that's all it's gonna contain is detail. It won't have any color in that layer. Then down here, the bottom layer I'll double-click on, and I'm gonna call it Color. You could call it Color and Tone if you want, but I find Color is good enough. Then I'm gonna make that bottom layer active, the one called Color, and what I wanna do to it is go to the Filter menu and choose to blur it. What I wanna do is blur the fine detail away, whatever detail I get rid of from this layer is gonna move to the layer above. Whatever I get rid of from here is gonna move to the layer above. So right now, if I look at this previous, you see the really fine detail in there. I wanna bring this up until that really fine detail goes away. But I don't wanna bring it up so high that I can't recognize objects, like where it just looks like a blob. So I still wanna be able to see some stuff. So I can click on this image and I still see a little bit of fine detail here. Continue bringing it up. Right now this is not updating the main image because of my Layers panel. We're working on the layer that's underneath. And the top layer is normal and it's covering things up. If I were to turn off the eyeball on the top layer, then I could actually see this. But I didn't do that before blurring, so I'm only using this previous as my guide. Let's go down here and make sure here face doesn't have the fine detail. Doesn't it look like all the fine detail's gone. When you click you see the before. When you let go you see the after. So this is about how I want it to look, where the fine stuff's gone, but you can still recognize stuff. The number that you use won't always be this number, so don't write it down. If you have a very small image, a low resolution image, it will be a very low number you apply. If you have an extremely high resolution image, taken from a really high end camera, you might need a higher number before all that fine detail gets thrown away. So I'll click OK. We just did that to the bottom layer, the layer that's called Color. So if I hide the top layer, you see what's underneath, this is what that bottom layer looks like. Do you see the fine detail just isn't there. And I could probably blur it just a little bit more. In fact, let me choose Undo now that I can see the whole thing. I'll put it just a little bit more, 'cause the creases on his forehead, I just want him to blend a little be more. So it's just a little harder to see. Okay, then we have the original image up here, at least a copy of it on top. And what I want Photoshop to do is compare those two layers. And I want it to subtract what's on the bottom layer from what's on the top layer. And if it subtracts it, that means all the color that's on that bottom layer is gonna get pulled out of there. And all the other stuff similar to that. So what I'll do is with the top layer active, I'm gonna go to the Edit menu. I think it's under Edit, although it might be under Image, it'll take me a second to look. Nope, it's under Image. And I'm gonna choose Apply Image. Apply Image is where you can go to say kind of like copying and pasting one image onto another, Apply Image will let you do that, but it gives you some extra options. So if I choose Apply Image, this comes up. My picture doesn't look too good. It looks kinda complicated, but if you just know what to put in, you don't have to know anything about it. You just type in the right stuff and you'll get the correct result. So, first, it wants to know which layer should I compare the layer I'm working on to. I wanna compare it to the layer that's been blurred. So if you look at my Layers panel, you see the layer that's been blurred is the bottom one and it's called Color. So I'm gonna change this menu here to the choice called Color. This is just the name of all my layers right here. So now I'm telling it to compare the layer I'm working on to the layer that's underneath. Next, I have to tell it how to compare it. And these are my choices. These are blending modes. And the section of blending modes that are usually down here, we have one called Subtract that's special to this command that you don't find when you're usually working with layers. But with Subtract, it needs to know kind of a baseline of what it should end up with. And you do that by typing in a number for offset. When offset is zero, you get no light, zero light. If you were to increase offset, you would find your end result gets brighter and brighter. And the highest you can bring it to is 255. That numbering system is the same numbering system that you find in the info panel. And if you wanna get exactly 50% gray out if, which is what I want, you type in 128. 128, that's halfway between zero and 255. So halfway between no light whatsoever and as much as we can use. When you use Subtract, though, I need to turn in a number for scale. And if I have it too low, it's gonna be too dark. Usually I need it at a number of two. So you need to remember these settings if you wanna be able to reproduce this. We've blurred the layer called Color, which is underneath. We're working on a copy of the original image, which is on top. That's the layer we worked on when we went to the Image menu and chose Apply Image. We're telling it here which layer to work on. Layer is called Color, that's the one that's been blurred. We're telling it to subtract two and 128. And we can click OK. That's the detail. You see all the color's gone? And if I look closely at this, do you see the detail we've blurred away from the other layers sitting in there? Isn't that the detail right there? So it's weird. We have the detail here and we have the color intone here. Now somehow we need to get them to combine together so it looks normal. How do we do that? Well, we have blending modes. And if you remember anything about the blending modes sessions we had, that these blending modes are divided up into different sections. And there's a reason for that. There's usually one particular color that disappears in each one of those sections. And the section that's the largest, down here, makes 50% gray disappear. Well, the majority of what's in this layer is exactly 50% gray, 'cause I typed in the number 128, which is halfway between black and white. And we're gonna use a choice we have not used yet. It's called Linear Light. And now the image is back to normal. And now what I've done is I have effectively separated the fine detail in the image from the color and tone in the image so that I can work on the two separately. And the end result over here looks like my normal photograph. You see the detail that's there that we blurred away from the bottom layer? It's being put in by the top layer. So what can I do when I'm in here? Well, if I work on the layer that's called Color and I just grab the paintbrush. You know how with the paintbrush you can grab a color out of your picture to paint with? Remember we talked about that? How you could just hold down the Option key and click to grab something? Well, what if I grab a color like up here or out there and just Option-click to say I wanna paint with that. Then I'll lower the opacity of my brush so I don't paint with it 100% of the way. If I did, it would be way too obvious, but even if I did, look at, I'm painting with just the paintbrush. Do you see detail in there? Let me show you what I'm talking about. If I usually created a new layer on top and I just paint it with a paintbrush, this is what I would get. I would get a solid color, right? But because I have somehow gotten the detail to be on its own layer, I'm not working in the detail. I'm not gonna mess with the detail. And so that detail, if it turned off, you can see all the detail go away, that's not gonna change, regardless of what I do to the layer underneath. So now I can just come in here with paintbrush tool. I grab a color from the surroundings to paint with. And even painting at 100% opacity, I can do this. And look at all the detail still there, 'cause it's on a separate layer. It's crazy. And so that means I probably don't wanna paint at 100% because I wanna make subtle changes. I'm gonna bring the opacity down to 20 or so I can build up an effect. And I'll just come in here and that little bright spot on her skin, I'll come in there and paint right through it, like that. Maybe I'll grab a color from right over in here. And paint through there again. And I don't have to worry about the detail. It's all in a separate layer. All I'm affecting right now, if I turn of the detail layer, is this stuff. That's where the brightness is coming from, that's where the color is coming from. This is all I'm changing. Isn't it a different way of thinking? Kind of weird. I can also do retouching where I could just retouch this out from this layer. Or if I find it's on the detail layer, from that one. But if we have things like the color of the skin we don't like, that kinda stuff, I can grab from an area where I do like the color. I can bring up here, just start putting it in. It'll bring in both the color and the brightness. That's a little too much there. I'll lower my opacity. There. And I don't have to worry about the detail. The detail is separate. I can try down here. I doubt I'll blend it in perfectly, but I can try grabbing from over here and just blatantly painting over here. My opacity is down, so it's gonna take a few paint strokes. Probably wanna grab from over here, 'cause this part over here is quite a bit different than this in color. So I'd have to blend between the two, kinda putting this in, grabbing some from over here, putting it in. Grabbing some more from over here, then kind of blend it together. And I should be a little more careful than I am as far as where the blend happens. I mean, heck, I could try to select the whole thing. I don't wanna get down to the white part, because I don't want that to blend in. I'm gonna get a soft edge around here. I can choose under Select and Mask, Feather. Okay, so put it like that. I don't want my selection to extend into the white at all, because I'm gonna be blurring this. And if I haven't extended into the white, that part could get blurred. So I'll type a letter Q and I can see just the littlest bit of a red overlay there. So I'll just paint to get rid of it. Get off of there. My opacity needs to be up there. Okay, so anyway I have that area, if I turn Q off, select it. Let's just try to blur it. Now usually if this is a normal picture and you just blur a picture It looks blurry, doesn't it? But here the detail is on a separate layer. So we can't blur the detail by working in the layer that's underneath. It has no detail to begin with. So I'll type Command H to hide this. And let's just see, I don't know for sure that it'll look right, but let's try just blurring it. You see what just happened? I'll turn Preview off, before, after. But what didn't get blurry is the pores. Look at that. Because where are the pores? On the layer above. If we're able to isolate it onto the layer above, then I can do that kinda stuff. Doesn't that make working on images a little different when it comes to retouching? Now I don't know about you, but I did not enjoy going through the process of getting to here. I don't think that like three months from now you're gonna be going, "Oh, I remember that. "It was, let's see, when you subtract "with an offset of two, and 128 for the..." I doubt you remember that. So that's why if you purchase the class, I'll choose Revert here to get back to the original picture. And if you wanna see, I'll choose Undo. Do you see what we've done? See her tan line? But this is the original picture. When you purchase a class, you get a set of actions and actions automate things. And one of the actions that you get is called Separate Color from Detail. So then you don't have to remember this junk. Instead, you just click on the name of the action and you just click Play. And what does it do? It even tells you to blur this to get rid of the fine detail, 'cause you might not remember. And when you click on Continue, it bring sup the blur dialog box. So you could come in here and figure out which setting would be best for it. And when you're all done, you click OK. And it automatically sets things up for you. And it even leaves a copy of your original image down here, which makes it easy to just compare what you've done to the original. But you don't need that layer, you can throw it away. But it sets it up for you. It went through the entire process and it guided you what should you do when it asked me to blur. And so that's what we end up having. You also get other actions like when we did a technique called High Pass Sharpening. There was also some weird stuff. When we went through it, let's see, what did we have to do? We had to turn a layer into a Smart Object. We had to apply high pass. Then we had to somehow get high pass into one of the blending modes. And then we had to go back into the high pass settings to actually see what we're doing. Well, it would do all that for you and just High Pass would pop up. It would already be applied the way it needs to be, without you having to remember any of the details. I pretty much, if there's something that I can make with actions that's gonna make your life better, I try to include as much of that as I can with the class. And that's called... In the industry, that's known as Frequency Separation Retouching. I called it separating detail from color. Sometimes you have some issues where you need to retouch out let's say the sign that's here. But where exactly are you supposed to copy from? Because the stone tiles that are here are at an angle from the camera so that they're getting smaller as they go further away, they're getting larger as it goes closer. You did learn that we could come in here with our retouching tool. And it might work to do something like the, probably the healing brush, to come in here and choose an area to copy from, let's say about here, Option-click. And you could move down to over here and see if you can get that to line up. And get a big enough brush where you can see how big is that stone compared to where you're about to put it. And you could try using the keyboard shortcut that scales things. And say, well, how much smaller would I need to get it so the grout lines line up? Somewhere around there? Does it look like the grout lines are starting to line up? So then you can get a smaller brush, 'cause you don't wanna apply it that big necessarily. And you come in here and... Not sure if that'll work across all of these, or not, because where the grout lines are I might have to paint all the way up here to replace the whole grout line. The reason why it looks weird right now is remember anything with the word healing attached, from our basic retouching session, always matches what's directly outside of where you've painted. And so if I only painted halfway across the sign, it's still trying to match the color on the left, of the middle of the sign. It's only once I get all the way across the sign that'll it start trying to blend in with those surroundings. Down here, I might run into, on the left side there's more room before the sidewalk, where I'm copying from, than what I need over here. So when I hit the sidewalk, it's just gonna not quite do it right. But that's okay, I can always just retouch those two parts separately. But don't know if I got my grout lines set up just right, but it's not bad. Right? So that was using the technique I showed you before, which was using the Clone Source panel. And I scaled down to 75.5%. Just remember, to reset, you gotta click that little arrow in order to get this to work normally next time. I always reset it right after using the tool, because it might be a month before I need to clone again. And I might not even think about the clone source, 'cause I didn't need to rotate or scale. And I'll just be going, "Why is this looking weird? "What's wrong with me?" 'Cause usually (laughs) that's what you think when you're working and something's not working. Sometimes there's wrong with you, like when I tried to find the, what was the paintbrush and the Camera RAW, my brain was totally blanking out when it was right in front of my face. So that's one way we could do this. There is another. I could instead turn this into a Smart Filter, or prepare it for Smart Filters. All that means is Smart Object, turn this into a Smart Object. That's all this command does. And then choose something called, ooh, it's grayed out right now. If something's grayed out in your Filters menu, it might mean that you image is in 16-bit mode and that particular feature might not work in 16-bit mode. I'm gonna change to eight. I'm gonna see if the fil-- Yeah, I wanted to use this filter and it was grayed out. And that was because my file happened to be in a mode called 16-bit. So if you ever find filters grayed out, they just don't work, look and see, go to the Image menu, choose Mode. Are you an eight or 16? What these modes mean, we have a bonus video that describes them in detail. But 8-bit means as much information as a JPEG usually has, which is 256 brightness levels. 16-bit means thousands of brightness Levels. And sometimes that's a bit too much for some filters. Let's try that again. No, in this case I can't do it on a Smart Object. That's why (laughs) it was grayed out. I thought I've done this in a Smart Object before. This is called vanishing point. Vanishing point is called vanishing point because it thinks about perspective. And perspective is when you get vanishing points. To use this feature, I'm gonna click on the four corners of something that would be a rectangle on the surface that I wanna retouch. The larger the thing is, the better. And so you see the sign is a rectangle, isn't it? So I'm just gonna zoom up on that, standard tools for zooming work in here. And I'm gonna click on the four corners of that sign. I'll use the inner part of the sign. That just educated Photoshop about how perspective is distorting the sign. It now knows the vanishing point of that sign. It can extend those lines out into infinity and somewhere they'll cross. That's the vanishing point. And it knows where that is. I can grab the sides of that and pull it out like this, and can see if it's anywhere close to being correct. If this continues to line up with whatever's on this surface, it's close. It shouldn't line up where the sidewalk is, 'cause the sidewalk's not flat. We're on a hill here. But if it lined up with the bricks, then this would be fine, but it doesn't. So I might need to use a larger area. I'm gonna press Delete to get rid of that. And let's try a larger area. What I often do is combine multiple rectangular objects together. Do you see two windows that are the same size? Those two windows look to be installed at the same height so that you could visually, most likely, grab a big long board, push it up against the bottom of one window and it'll probably line up with the bottom of the other. Same with at the top. That's my assumption. And so what I'll do is with that tool on the left called Create Plane, it's the tool that's active bey default active. I will click on the four corners of those two windows put together. In fact, I could go for all four windows, act as if they're all one. As if the whole wall is a window. But, for now, I think this'll be good enough. Now this, I don't care that I'm exactly on the corner down here. I care that the lines that you see on here are parallel with the sides of what I'm working with. And right here the edge of that window's cut off in the photo. So I'm just moving this left to right until the line that is being rendered there looks to be parallel with the window, even though I might not be right on the corner. There we go. Now if I pull this down, I bet you it's gonna stay lined up there. If I pull it down to the top of the sign, I'll bet ya' it'll be parallel with it. Pull it down here, I bet ya' it'll be parallel. It won't be here, 'cause there's a hill, that's not a level area. But if I bring this up to let it bump into things on that surface, it looks like it lines up with everything. And if I bring thing way down here and get it to the next window, does it look like it's parallel to the edge of the window? If so, this is accurate. And that's what I needed. The larger the area you do it with the better. And then I can pull it down as far as I want. It doesn't line up with anything down there, 'cause it's a hill, but that's fine. Now once I've done that and defined this area. I now can use some retouching tools over here on the left side, mainly the clone stamp tool. Although, there is a choice at the top where I can turn on healing with it. And now it's gonna automatically scale things based on the perspective that's in the picture. That means that I can come over here to any area I want I can Option-click. And then when I move it, if I move it way down here, really far away, can you tell that it's making it much smaller. Whereas if I moved it closer to the left side, can you see it getting bigger? The whole shape of my brush is getting bigger. It's distorting the image that I'm copying with in the same way that perspective would. So I'm just gonna turn Healing on, because I want it to heal here for a moment. Gonna line that up with some grout lines. And let's see, I'm not sure, I've never tried this image, but I can use it now as an alternative right here. When I let go it'll finish the healing. I might wanna copy then from this edge. I'm not sure though that the angle of this sidewalk is consistent. So I don't know if I'll be able to copy from there to put it here. Get a smaller brush. I wish it wouldn't put the crosshair in the middle, 'cause I can't see what's there. Yeah, I didn't get it exactly right there. But it's another way to get it to think about that. So if I wanted to, for instance, copy this window, I'll Option-click. And I'm just gonna put another one in here. See where. It should look like it's scaled appropriately for the perspective, even if I put it way down here. I have Healing turned on, which (chuckles) I don't need it to blend in with the surroundings that are outside. So let's try to put one way down here. I'm going a little too far when I paint. But you can see how I'm scaling it, right? But that's called vanishing point. You need to define the perspective that's there by clicking on the four corners of something. If they are consistently sized objects like windows, just combine a bunch of 'em as if they're one, click on the outer objects. 'Cause the larger the object is, the more precise you are. If you do it to a tiny thing, like for instance, I'll get rid of the grid we have, if I do it to a single one of these blocks, theoretically that should work. But if I do, and then I expand the grid to cover this just double check that it's appropriate, I'm gonna be amplifying any of the tiniest problems that are in there. And, in fact, you see that it's red? Red means unusable. And so that means I need to fine tune these corners. Yellow means it could be used, but it's not ideal. And if it returns cyan, there's cyan. It means that, yeah, I could understand how that would be a rectangle in three dimensional space. So if it's red, you're probably gonna need to fine tune the corners to get it to be more precise. But if I take something tiny like that and then I expand this, I won't touch the corners, I'll just grab the sides. This is probably not going to, in the end, line up with stuff. Although it's looking like it's not terrible. It lines up with that black line that's here. Lines up with that grout line. I might not have done too bad. I'm surprised, because most of the time you suddenly, you'll see it in three dimensional space, it'll look like it's floating at a weird angle. So, anyway, I'll click Cancel here. One thing about using Vanishing Point is it's kind of in the way it works, because most filters need to work directly on the layer that contains the picture you're working on. But with Vanishing Point, you can create a brand new layer first. Then go to Vanishing Point. Most filters would just look at that empty layer. And that's all they'd work on. But Vanishing Point will work on the entire document and will deposit the end result on that empty layer. Then, finally, how do we use our retouching along with other features in Photoshop, where those other features won't mess up our retouching, or our retouching won't mess up the other features? Let me show you a complex document. This is a picture of my bus. That'll be at my home in the next few months here, starting in the next few months. It's not quite done yet, but it will be soon. If you'd like to follow that project, go on Facebook and search for Creative Cruiser. Creative Cruiser, that's the name of the bus. And you can see it being finished off. Now this is a picture taken at a gas station. Let me show you what it originally looked like before I did any work on it. And then I'll show you my end result. So then let's turn on a few layers one at a time and see how it's kinda constructed. First, I have a retouching section in my layers panel. We'll talk about how the layers are put together as far as these little folders go when we talk about advanced layers. But you can create those folders at the bottom of your Layers panel. It's just a folder icon. And then you can drag your layers into them. And it's a way of organizing your layers. But, in here, if you look, I have three different retouching layers. I have one called Weeds-b-Gone. And that's all the stuff I obviously wanted to remove from the image. There was no question, I wanted to get rid of it. Then I have one called Declutter right. It might be right side, right edge. And then I have one called Remove Electric Sign, because they put a modern electric sign on this vintage gas station post thing. The logos in this image have been retouched out, 'cause we're not supposed to show logos in Creative Live. So that's why you don't see the normal logos. They were there in the original. So I'm gonna turn on this retouching layer. You can see how extensive the retouch was. I'll turn 'em off one at a time. So you can see here's my Weeds-b-Gone. That's the stuff I knew I wanted to get rid of. Then Declutter right side, so watch the right side of the image. In fact, you're not even seeing the full right. But you see there's like a plant there and some bricks and stuff. So I got rid of that separate. I wasn't certain if I wanted to or not, so that's why I put it on a separate layer. Then the removing of the electronic sign I decided to do on a separate layer. I'm not sure why separate, because I knew for certain I'd wanna do that. But maybe it was just to show you the absurdity of (laughs) the look of the modern sign on there. And there's that. But then above that, I have refinements. These are adjustment layers. And we had a session on adjustment layers. We also had a session on tonal and color adjustments. And I'm using the exact principles that we talked about there. In fact, when I look at all these, there are only two kinds of adjustment layers in here, and those are curves and hue saturation, which are the two main adjustments we spent the most time on. And so I can turn those all off, if you'd like to see. And turn them on one at a time. And you will see the image slowly change itself. Here, near the entrance just got brighter, some other things. But you'll just see it slowly get little refinements, little areas getting brighter, getting more contrast, to refine what I was seeing. As a whole, that's what that did. Then on top of that, I have tinted black and white. That's where I actually make the image go to black and white, completely. And then I decide to bring some areas back. And so do you see the trees here get a little bit of color coming back. Then here's where I want your eye to go, so I make that be fully colorful. And then here's some little area, I'm not sure what that is. I can find out. Oh, it's the lamps above the entrance. I wanted to get those to have more color. And then a little more with the green. But do you see how my image is structured? The original picture untouched is underneath. Directly on top of that is my retouching. And then above that, I build my refinements with adjustment layers. And if I do it that way, where my retouching appears below the adjustment layers, then I'm good to go. If, on the other hand, I put my retouching on top of the adjustment layers, I'm just looking for trouble. Because if I do a single thing in here, let's say I didn't like one of the clouds so I go over here and grab the Spot Healing brush. And I say "I don't like this cloud." So, fine, try to retouch it out. All right, it's retouched out. Now what if I decide that I don't like some of my refinements I made? So I just go over here and turn that off, turn this off, in fact, turn this off. Do you just see a big gray blob sitting there? It no longer matches its surroundings. It's actually a black and white sky. But I've turned off the black and white 'cause I chose not to use it. But by putting the retouching below the adjustment layers, adjustment layers always affect all the layers underneath. So as long as your retouching is part of that stuff under there, you're fine. And so I put my retouching directly above the original image. And, oftentimes, the bottom layer, if I remember to do so, I'll lock it. Therefore it can't be moved, it can't be messed with, so I don't accidentally change it. All right, well, this has been Advanced Retouching. I hope you guys learned a few concepts there that might help you get a lot better at it. Now, no Monday, we're gonna get into a fun session and it's called Warp, Bend and Liquify. And we saw a little preview of that today in that we took some fabric that had stripes in it and we bent it a bit. Well, that's the kinda stuff we'll learn there, but there's a whole bunch we can do in Photoshop anytime we want to bend or distort our images. Before Monday rolls around, you should head over to Facebook, because that's where we have our private Facebook group. And if you join the private Facebook group, you can talk with everybody else that's in the class. You can share images. If you're having a retouching challenge, upload your picture. Doesn't have to be a high-res picture. Just crop it down to the part you're having a challenge with, scale it down, put it on a Facebook post within our group and you'll suddenly start getting feedback from all the other people watching the class. I might have time to come in and answer your questions about it as well. But if I don't, everybody else, there's thousands of people in that group. And they'll start answering your questions, darn near before (laughs) you're done typing it. Find me on various social media and on the web in general at these sites. Otherwise, we'll see you next time on Photoshop CC: The Complete Guide.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Color Palettes
Edges and Textures
Hand-drawn Frames
Hand-drawn Graphics
Layout Templates
Practice Images - Lesson 18: Tips and Tricks
Practice Images - Lesson 19: Actions and Automation
Practice Images - Lesson 17: Advanced Layers
Practice Images - Lesson 12: Advanced Masking
Practice Images - Lesson 15: Advanced Retouching
Practice Images - Lesson 10: Blending Modes
Practice Images - Lesson 2: Camera Raw
Practice Images - Lesson 8: Color Adjustments
Practice Images - Lesson 5: Layer Masks
Practice Images - Lesson 4: Layers
Practice Images - Lesson 9: Retouching Essentials
Practice Images - Lesson 3: Selection Essentials
Practice Images - Lesson 14: Shooting for Photoshop
Practice Images - Lesson 13: Smart Objects
Practice Images - Lesson 1: Starting from Zero
Practice Images - Lesson 7: Tonal Adjustments
Practice Images - Lesson 6: Tools and Panels
Practice Images - Lesson 20: Troubleshooting and Advice
Practice Images - Lesson 16: Warp Bend Liquify
Practice Images - Lesson 11: Filters
Script Elements
Week 1 - Day 1 Homework
Week 1 - Day 2 Homework
Week 1 - Day 3 Homework
Week 1 - Day 4 Homework
Week 1 - Day 5 Homework
Week 1 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Bit Depth
Color Modes
Color Spaces
Logic of Keyboard Shortcuts
Pen Tool
Printing
Resolution
Week 2 - Day 6 Homework
Week 2 - Day 7 Homework
Week 2 - Day 8 Homework
Week 2 - Day 9 Homework
Week 2 - Day 10 Homework
Week 2 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Homework - Shooting for Photoshop in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Smart Objects in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Filters in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Advanced Masking in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Advanced Retouching in Adobe Photoshop CC
Week 3 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Homework - Warp, Bend, Liquify, in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Tips & Tricks in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Actions & Automation in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Troubleshooting & Advice in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Advanced Layers in Adobe Photoshop CC
Week 4 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Bens Actions Sampler ReadMe
Bens Actions Sampler
Bens Styles Sampler ReadMe
Bens Styles Sampler
Texture Sampler
Sharpening
Save for Web
Facebook Q&A #1
Facebook Q&A #2
Q&A #3
PSD Preferences
File Formats
Customizing PSD

Ratings and Reviews

Mary
 

Ben Willmore is exceptionally and intimately knowledgeable about Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, including Bridge and Camera Raw, and how they work together. He's also a wonderful photographer. That's great, but what's even better for us is that he's an incredible and generous teacher. He shares his knowledge and experience in an organized, thorough, thoughtful and relatable way. I envy his efficiency with words and ideas! He isolates hard-to-understand concepts - things we'd be unlikely to figure out on our own - and explains them in simple terms and with on point and memorable examples. I completely enjoy Ben's teaching methods and his personality. His admiration and appreciation of his wife, Karen, are telling of what a good guy he must be, and he's got just an overall pleasant personality. I love his amusement when something "ridiculous" happens during an edit! This bootcamp is fantastic and just what I need. It's only one of Ben's many CL classes that I've watched and learned from - they are all excellent. Thank you, Ben Willmore. (And Karen!)

Lynn Buente
 

I purchased this course ---SMART MOVE!--because, at 74, I learn more slowly and need more practice. While I've had some "novice" experience with PS, this course is moving me along in a totally different way. Most tutorials just tell you what to do. Ben tells you not only WHAT to do, but WHY (--or why not) and HOW. Understanding better can lead to using the practices in PS more fluently AND to greater freedom to be creative. I find Ben's approach to be kind of a "come as you are" session. No matter where you are on the learning spectrum, there is something to review, something new, or a brand new challenge. The relaxed manner of presentation is great, but doesn't minimize the content of the class. I appreciate the additional explanations and theory. These help to make total sense of the tools and practices of good editing. I would really recommend that, if possible, you purchase the course. The practice images, the homework, and the evolving workbook are great review and reference points. Personally, I have downloaded the classes by week so I can view, re-view, and stop, start, and repeat segments as often as I need to --which is often! Also, sometimes I like to view and work on one segment of the class at a time. My study of this course will be a LOT LONGER than four weeks, and I know I'll be referring to it as long as I'm a Photoshop user. Thanks, Ben! (And thanks to your wife for her contribution as well.)

Carol Senske
 

I've used PS for about five years in many of it's various versions. Learning on your won is a tough proposition, and I've struggled the whole time. Seeing work I admired and that inspired me to strive for great er things then not being ablr to figure out how to do them was a major frustration. The jargon was sometimes foreign, the complexity of the program overwhelming but I soldiered on and learned bits and pieces. A friend recommended Ben's course and I immediately came to CL to see what she was so thrilled about - I was amazed! Ben is down-to-earth, explains each step, gives shortcuts, defines terms, and shows how to accomplish what he's teaching. After two weeks I bought the class. I not only bought the Photoshop course but I added the Lightroom course as well. I'll do that, on my own, when things slow down a bit, and I have no doubt that course will help me even more than the PS course. I'm totally at sea with LR. I like Ben's teaching style, appreciate all the homework and extras included, and greatly appreciate the magnificent, easy to use, workbook by Ben's wife. I give my wholehearted endorsement for this course!

Student Work

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