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Advanced Retouching in Adobe Photoshop

In a previous lesson, we explored the basics of retouching. And with Photoshop's newest tools, things have become so much easier. But on occasion, the kind of more automated and easy tools for doing retouching where Photoshop does much of the work, they'll fail you. And when they do, you need to know how to fall back on some more manual techniques where you need to do more of the work. And so let's explore advanced retouching techniques. Let's start off here in Adobe camera raw right now, you're looking at a small portion of an image. I can't show you the whole one because it's for a client and you can't see the the whole image. But it's the best example I have of a problem you can encounter and that is if you ever take a picture of woven fabric. But when you do it, you use a camera that is designed more for landscape shooting because most cameras have a filter in front of the sensor that actually softens the image a little bit and it's sometimes known as an anti aliasing filter and th...

at prevents this from happening. But if you buy a camera that doesn't have that. You can end up getting a sharper image and a lot of landscape photographers buy that kind of camera. If you use that kind of camera and you shoot fabrics, then you can get a more pattern. So let me show you how to deal with it just in case you ever run into this, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go to the masked adjustment feature. I'm gonna grab the brush tool and I'm gonna come over here and paint, then the adjustment that I'm gonna put in is to come down here way to the bottom where you're going to find a choice called detail. And within detail, there is a choice here called more. And if I bring this up, watch what happens to that and you'll find the colors blending in with their surroundings. I'm trying to find the lowest setting that gets rid of the moring, then I can paint over the additional areas you don't want to paint over absolutely everything. Only the areas that have the issue since this is a small cropped uh portion of image, I could paint across the whole thing, but I wouldn't want to do things like paint across somebody's eyes or a ring that they're wearing because it would make the colors if there are two colors touching each other, didn't make them start to blend together. Now, sometimes I need to put more than one of these uh onto an image and that's because the more was more aggressive in one area than another. And I think I see a hint right in here where I still see a hint of kind of orangish yellow that looks like it shouldn't be there. Well, all I need to do is create a new mass adjustment using a brush and then paint over that area where I still see a hint of it come back down to moray and just crank it up a bit higher. There we go. And therefore you don't have to apply an aggressive amount to the entirety. If somebody's outfit, you can apply a lesser amount to the majority of your outfit and then a larger amount to just specific areas where it was more intense. But that is the more slider here in camera. Now, let's deal with shiny skin and just shiny spots in general. This is a picture of my wife Karen and I don't like on her forehead right here where it feels a bit shiny. So what I'll do is create a brand new empty layer. Then I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna choose the healing brush tool. The healing brush always tries to blend in and match the surroundings directly outside of where it's been applied and you have to tell it where to copy from. So I'm gonna tell it to copy from right here in the center of her forehead. I'll do that by option clicking. That's all clicking in windows, then I'll just double check that up here in my options bar that it's set to current in below. And I'm gonna apply this right on top of that trying to completely cover up the shiny spot. When I do that looks kind of dull there and it just doesn't look right because we're no longer seeing the three dimensionality of her forehead that before that shiny spot educated us about. So all I'm gonna do afterwards is lower. The opacity of the layer. I'm just gonna click on the word opacity of my layers panel and drag to the left to let some of that brightness show through. Oftentimes I drag it all the way down and then slowly drag it up until I noticed that it doesn't feel shiny anymore, but it's still brighter than the surroundings so that it still helps define the dimension of her forehead. In this case, another thing I can do is come over here and use the remove tool. And let's say I didn't like the bright spot to the right of her nose that is on her cheek. Well, I'll just continue working on this layer that has an opacity of 60%. The remove tool doesn't know I'm doing that. So when I use the remove tool, it will still try to remove things, but it will only be able to apply 60% of the way. Therefore, 40% of the original image will still show through So I'm just gonna paint right here to tell it to remove that bright spot. If I had this layer turned all the way up to 100 you'd see that area completely gone. But the fact that I have it down at 60% makes it so it's lessened and I can come in here and apply this in all sorts of places. And let's say down here, I don't like this bright area here or some bright areas there using the remove tool. All I'm gonna do is paint over those bright areas and most of the time that would cause them to completely disappear. But because that layer that I'm working on is set to 60%. I still get the shape of the skin, the dimension of the skin and I could do that in all sorts of areas. You can even overlap objects like this because the remove tool usually knows how to maintain the edges on objects. And so usually you can get away with that. If you want to see what I've done, I'll turn this off and back on again. I've toned down some of those areas, but the remove tool on occasion can give you weird texture and I think I see a hint of it here. If I were to bring the opacity to this up to 100. Yeah, I got weird texture. If that ever happens, then what I do is I just switch over to either the spot healing brush or the normal healing brush. The spot one doesn't make you pick an area, it chooses an area for you and I'm just going to paint over that and it will copy from somewhere in the surroundings and therefore replace that odd texture that that tool occasionally produces. Then I could lower the opacity layer back down to 60 I'm not gonna see the odd texture. And now let's get into more difficult images. If I attempted to retouch out this vent up here, using the version of Photoshop that was available just two short years ago. Uh This would take me a very long time because this pattern that is on the ceiling has very specific and I it would be obvious if it did not continue appropriately. But now with the newer versions of Photoshop, things like that are relatively easy. What I'm gonna do in this case is I'll come over here to the tool known as the object selection tool hoping that it will recognize that as an object. When I hover over it, you're only gonna see a pink outline like that. When you hover over objects. If you have the object finder turned on up here, then I'm just gonna click there that selected the area and then to replace it, I'm just gonna right click and I'm gonna find an area called delete and fill selection. This is only available when you're in the tool that I'm in. Right Now, when I choose that, it's gonna take the selection I currently have, it'll expand it a little bit to ensure it includes all of that object and then it will attempt to remove it. Well, that didn't do a very good job. So let's choose undo. And instead, what I'm gonna do is expand the selection myself. I'll just come up here to the select menu, I'll choose, modify and I'm gonna choose expand and I just need to expand it far enough to include any shadows or anything else that's around there. And looking at the darkness on the right and left sides, I'm guessing around five or six pixels is what I'm gonna need in order to get out there all the way and include that dark little uh perimeter that's there. Then instead I'm gonna come up here to the edit menu and I'm gonna choose generative fill. That's where it's gonna use artificial intelligence. And you could describe what you want, but instead I'm just gonna hit generate. So it generates something based on the contents of the rest of the photo. And that's it. It generated three versions and I can cycle through them over on the right side. I'll click on the second one and I'll click on the third one. I think either the first one or the third one. I'm thinking the first one is the best. Then the only other thing I might need to do is zoom up because the top of my wife's hair looks somewhat oddly shaped. If I were to turn this off and back on again, you can see what it used to look like. And that's because we have a layer mask here that is limiting where the new retouching appears. And if I view it as an overlay by hitting the backlash key, that's right above the return or enter key on my keyboard. Do you see how far down it extends into my wife's head? Well, I'm just gonna grab the paintbrush tool, I'll paint with black and I'll use a relatively hard edged brush and I'm just gonna say do not apply or this with a layer mask means hide the part on the retouching layer that is right in here. And by doing so, I'm gonna bring back in my wife's hair. If she had complex hair, I would probably use this uh tool over here, the object selection tool to select her and then tell it to fill with black. But I think I'll do fine there. Then I'm going to hit that backslash key again to turn off the mask and we'll turn the eyeball back on. Now, the top of her hair looks more appropriate anytime you have something obscured by nice straight lines like this, that is when the remove tool will shine. If you have a complex area, you might want to turn off and remove after each stroke. Therefore, you'll be able to click on one spot and hold down, shift and click on another to make a straight line. And all I would need to do here is cover up the entirety of this brush. If that's what I'd like to remove, and I might also cover up this bucket and there's also a table in there, then just press return or enter. And if it messes up, all you need to do is paint over an area a second time and it'll give it a second chance to fix an area. We can even try it on an image like this one. I'll fast forward until I've painted over all of these little fence. This is a chain link fence. Once I think it got it all covered, I'll come in again, I'll hold down the option key which takes away and I'll make sure I'm really close on areas that have more critical detail because I don't want to give Photoshop the opportunity to retouch too much of the image. I only wanted to retouch where it's truly needed. And so I might snug that in a little closer and now let's press return or enter and see what it does. Is it perfect by no means. But now I can go over areas that it's messed up on and give it a second chance. And in many spots, it will be relatively easy to fix. I might just retouch out that whole thing. See if it can figure out that this is supposed to be around headlight and use a smaller brush as it messes up and give it a chance to fix smaller and smaller areas until it might look right. And there'll be some areas on an image as complex as this that it never gets perfect. And so I would have to, for instance, here, possibly copy from the other headlight and put it over here and maybe up here where the RV is be more specific about the windows and do some manual to be touching there. Uh But overall when it ends up retouching, oftentimes, all it takes is a second application in an area to get it to touch things up and make them acceptable. Well, I don't know about it for you, but that didn't feel like advanced retouching to me. So let's get on to some truly advanced things. How is it that I can fix up here with this kind of awning? It's been flipped upwards. Um That wouldn't be an easy fix necessarily. And let's say I tried the artificial intelligence based thing and it just didn't give me what I wanted. Well, the obvious thing would be to copy from this side and use it over there and let's figure out how we could do that. I'm gonna come in here and use the clone tool and I'll go to the window menu where I'm gonna find a choice called clone source that's gonna cause this to pop up and this is gonna give me a huge amount of power and control over what I'm doing. So, what I would like to do is I'm gonna copy from right up here before I do, I'll create a new layer, of course to put it on and I'll make sure that the tool I'm working on is set to current and below. But then I'm gonna come over here, get a larger brush and I'm gonna hold down the option key and click right there to say that's where I'd like to copy from. I do want to have a choice up here called aligned turn on and that's gonna cause it. So if I ever apply this somewhere, like let me just apply it in a random spot like this with a line turned on, I can let go of the mouse button and I can click again and it's everything's aligned. If I go down here and apply a little bit and later on, connect the two, even though I'm clicking multiple times, it all lines up, let me choose undo a few times and show you what would happen if I didn't have a line turned on and I'd gone up to this corner and option clicked. Well, then the very first time I applied it, I get this and if I let go, it would reset itself and start over again from that spot. So there'd be no way for me to apply this in multiple pieces where all the pieces align with each other. So I'll choose undo a few times and I need to have that aligned turned on. I don't believe it's turned on by default. All right. Now we have the tool set up just right. Let's make sure we have option clicked over here. But then I wanted to flip this like a mirror before it applies it over there. And I can do that right here in clone source. All I need to do is click this icon right here. That means flip horizontal. So when I click it, now, when I look inside my brush, if I get a bigger brush, you'll see that it's that corner just flipped horizontally. Then I want to put it over here. Well, let's get a smaller brush just so I can see how the top edge and how the left edge line up and try to get that to be lined up just right, let's say about there. Now I'm gonna click and then this might seem a little odd. I'm gonna choose undo because I just wanted to establish how far over to put that. But I didn't wanna yet put anything in because I think when I put something in, I might want to use a larger brush in just a few other settings. So now I can kind of get a preview of what would happen here within my brush if I were to apply it. And let's see, how it lines up over here. Well, I noticed that bottom edge of the, um, awning that's there isn't quite lining up. Do you see how inside my brush it feels a little bit higher? Let's see up here. It looks like it lines up down there. It's a little higher that tells, I mean, this might need to be scaled up a little bit in order to get it to, uh, a line down there at the bottom to scale something over here, I can click on either the W or the H the number that's next to it because the two are linked together and then I can move my mouse over here to get a preview and I use the up and down arrow keys. And what I'm doing is editing that number that right now is set to 100. I'll just use the up arrow, up arrow and see if it helps to get it to be a little higher. But then when I do that, I don't see these stripes lining up. You see how the vertical edge right here of this one in my brush. It doesn't line up. And I think what I'm gonna need to do is scale it horizontally in order to get that to line up. So over here on the right, I'm gonna unlink these two so it doesn't change the width and the height together. All I gotta do is click that symbol and then I'm gonna click up here on the width. So that's what I'm working on and I can scale it. Well, I'll move over here to get a preview and I'm just gonna use the down arrow key to change the number and tell that lines up and I think I'm close to getting it to line up right there. That's pretty good. It's probably the best I'm gonna get. So now that's lining up pretty nicely. And the only thing is this bottom portion, I'm not sure how it's gonna line up. I can get a big brush and find out. So there's what it's gonna look like. It's gonna come over and let's see if it ever lines up. I'm looking at the right edge of my brush as I bring this over and I'm seeing if it ever gets close to lining up. Come on right there, I think. Do you see on the right edge of my brush right about there? It seems to line up that tells me how far over I'm gonna apply my retouching. I want to apply it until it lines up with what's already here. So let's see if we can do that. Well, first off, I might wanna scale the width again because if you look at the stripe that is above my brush and you compare it to what's inside my brush, it still doesn't line up about, you know, the, on the right side of my brush. So I just use the up barrow key, see if I can scale it. So it does there, it does. All right. So I think I have this set up because the top edge lines up now all the way across here. Uh, when I come down, this bottom edge seems to line up and when I get here where these little, um, the bottom edge of the awning goes up and down, up and down, eventually I found a spot right about there where it seems to seamlessly blend in with the other. And I just want to remember where that was because I'm gonna apply the retouching up t right there. All right, let's get a smaller brush. So I don't get too big of a change and I might as well start right where it lines up. I'm gonna click right there. I'm gonna drag to the left and as I do, you'll see a little cross here move on the screen. That's where I'm copying from, but that's being reflected so that I can get it flipped like that. And for now I'm just gonna keep going and I'll go a little further than I need to as far as going down and let's just go all the way until we get the whole awning, go all the way to the top and make sure we fill in the middle here. And I can let go because we have a line turned on and I can click multiple times because everything will remain aligned and I'll do that until I think I've gotten that whole area like that. I do notice right there. It's not lining up. It's a little bit too low. My guess is it lines up a little bit earlier. But I think overall we're not bad. So now what I might do is stop using this tool and instead just work on my layer and all I need to do is grab the eraser tool or make a selection. Let's see if this tool, which is the object selection tool can select our awning. I'm just gonna click on the awning and see if it gives us a selection. It did, but it's not exactly what I wanted. I think it's just kind of giving me the edges. That's because up here, sample layers is not turned on. So we can only see the edge of that layer and not everything else. Let's turn on sample all layers and then see if it can find this, I'll deselect, it doesn't look like it. So I will just manually trace like this to tell it what I want. What I want is for it to get this kind of scalloped up and down thing. Well, through there. OK. It kind of got it. And then what I would like to do is hide the area that is down here, that's beyond the awning because that's where it doesn't match up with the original picture and doesn't look good. Well, I'll just select inverse to get the opposite and I can either use a layer mask or just the eraser tool to, uh, get rid of that. And for me, for now I'll keep it simple and use the eraser and I'm just gonna come in here and erase that part that is beyond the bottom of the awning because I didn't need to change it. I'll get rid of my selection by tying command D then I just need to fix this part doesn't quite line up. Well, I could use the remove tool. Uh, it usually lines things up or I might be able to just delete little part of this until it lines up. Uh, it's up to me. Uh, well, I think I'll use the remove tool to see if it can figure it out that there's so many straight lines in here. I'm gonna really challenge it because that's a lot to keep lined up. Maybe I'll see if I can get it over there. That doesn't look too bad. And right here I see a little broken thing. So I might end up seeing if it can fix that. Yep. And then the only other area is probably right here where this is ending and it should join this blue line. It doesn't quite look right. I don't know if the remove tool will be able to figure that out or not, but we can get it a chance I did clean it up, maybe I'll just go a little bit higher and I'm gonna say that that's good enough or I could always choose undo and do a little copying from over here to try to get it to blend in over there. And all I need to do is make sure the scaling and the rotation and all that is right. So let's look at the other choices we have when we're using a retouching tool and we use this thing that's called clone source. Now, it works with both the clone stamp tool, the and the healing brush tool. You can use either one of them. If you want to reset this back to what it used to be. There's a little u-turn symbol here which would reset all this stuff or if you want to keep it just in case you need to come back and do that same kind of cloning again. Then up here there, there are five icons and this is where you can have different sources. What that means is this is gonna remember that I copied from here and that I applied it that far away. And when I did, I reflected it horizontally and I scaled it a little bit in each direction, then I could click there and it just reset everything in here. So I could clone now from a different spot and use different settings. And if I wanted to ever get back to what I had previously, all I'd have to do is click here and it would dial in exactly those settings again. Let's try it on this document. Now, in here, I'd like to get rid of this tree and to do that, the trees covering up a bunch of windows. Well, these windows should be very similar to these windows and this side of the top of the building should be pretty much identical to that side except for reflected. So therefore, I might be able to copy from right here right where this joins the vertical part. So I'm gonna option click right there. Then over here in our clone source, I'm gonna tell it to flip horizontal. All right, then just to establish where it should align, I'm gonna get the vertical that's inside my brush to match the vertical that is here on the image underneath. And then I'm gonna move down until I think that rooftop is in the right spot. So therefore, I have two straight lines aligned. One would be the top of the building and one would be that vertical part of the central portion. And then I'm just gonna click the mouse and it's not that I wanted to replace that area. I just wanted to establish that that's where things should line up so I can choose undue after that. And when I choose undue, it still remembers that that's where I clicked. So now that will remain kind of anchored in that spot. Now, I might move my mouse out here to see where's the edge of the building and what happens when I get down here? Oh, look at that. It's not out there. Far enough interesting. That means this side of the building is actually wider than the other. That could be because of the way the camera was positioned or it could have been the design of the building. But what I'd like to do is scale this now. And if I move up and down, I can see that old uh little, what do you call this, the shade that's there? And it's almost lining up. This needs to be moved up the tiniest bit. And if I get out here, it's just not far enough out. So let's see how I could scale that. Well, I'm gonna scale it horizontally to do. So up here, we have this w for width and we can change it as long as this lock symbol is turned off, I'll click on the number that's there. So it's active. And therefore if I move my mouse out here, I can use the up arrow key to change it even. So I'm looking uh somewhere other than where that number is and I'm gonna get it to get out there just the right amount. And let's see if that makes this right. It's close. But this, I wish was the tiniest bit smaller. So I'm gonna go here to the height and I'm gonna see if I brought that down, the tiniest emit, would it line up? And it looks like it's gonna be close, but it's a little high on one side, a little low on the other. That's the difference between 199. Uh, I can see if I can type in 99.5. I don't know if it'll take that 0.5. If it does, then, yeah, it did. Now that perfectly lines up, I can't tell the difference between what's in my brush and what's on the image that's underneath. Therefore, I should be able to apply this and it'll line up right there. It'll line up right here. Let's confirm that nothing messed up back up here where we initially line things up that looks good and it looks like we got the top of the building. Therefore, I think I could use that to come out here and replace this whole side of the building. Let's see if it's true. I'm gonna create a brand new layer to put this on and let's click here to apply this. See if I could paint down there and I don't know why I need to replace it all the way out here. So let's choose undo and only apply it really where it's needed. I see that this seems like the angle is a little bit off. Do you notice where here it lines up? But over here it seems to droop down. I think that means the angle is off a little bit. So right here is an angle setting. If I click on the angle setting, then I can change it. If I click and I might want a larger brush to be able to see this. So I can see what's going on. And if I do up arrow, it's going to rotate clockwise. I'll try to get that. So it looks parallel with the other surface. I don't think you can see what I'm seeing in my brush there. But after making it rotate, so it looks like it's at the right angle. It's a little too tall. So I can click here on the height number and then I'll use the down arrow key to see if I can get it down. And I think I need it just a little bit higher than that. So 98 point, let's see if we can do 75, put that in, it rounded off to eight, but that's pretty close. And so now that seems to be good. Make sure it still lines up up here. Seems to. And let's give it a try. I'm gonna paint right here where the tree used to be gonna paint right up to there, gonna paint right over to here and it doesn't quite line up. So I'll just keep going all the way to completely replace that and we'll come in here and I'll just kinda see if I can replace this whole section of the building based on the other side. But what we can do is we can rotate, we can scale, we can flip horizontal. There's also a similar icon for flipping vertical and then apply that in our clone tool. Now, I don't know if it's gonna line up right here because I didn't try to get that. So I might do a separate uh application for that. But let me just get the least the middle of this done like that. Also, I didn't try to get this to line up. So I might want to use a different setting for it, but I just wanna make sure I have a pretty good take on it now if I wanted to remember that because I might need to come back to that to touch some stuff up. I'll just click on the next clone course over so it clears all this out and I can have another area to work with. Then for that, I could either copy from here or copy from this middle one in order to get over here. If I look at it, this area is thick, that area is skinnier here, they're even and here thick and skinny. So I think it makes sense to copy from here and reflect it to put it there. So I need to just pick a reference point here. In this case, I might choose where this line touches this horizontal line. All I'm gonna do is hold down the option key and click right there. Then up here my clone source, I'll tell it to flip horizontal like the mirror and then I'll come over here and see if I can get this little um shade area and this edge to line up. So I come up and down like that I click and then choose undo clicking and choosing undo locks in that relationship. Now, if it's off the littlest bit, if I get in here and that's just the littlest bit too high, I think then what I can do is right here is an area called offset offset means how far from the area that I originally option, click to copy from. How far over did I move before I clicked? And if I want to change it, all I need to do is here. Click on the X. If I want to move it horizontally or click on the Y, if I want to move it vertically, I think I wanted to move, move it vertically. So I'm gonna come in here, I'll use the up and down arrow keys and now I can move it within my brush. You know, I'm gonna get it to precisely line up and that looks pretty good and it looks like the width is about right in that I don't need to scale it. But let's see what happens when I get up here at the top. It looks to me like it's moving towards the right. Do you see how it no longer lines up there? Let's see if it moves towards the right when I get here too. Yes. It looks to me like the angle is off. So I'll click over here on the number for the angle and I'll use the up and down arrow keys and that pushes it clockwise. I need to go the other way to get it to line up and right about there, it seems to line up, let's see if the other side lines up. It's pretty darn close and up here at the top, it's close as well. So I think I've gotten this to line up relatively well, even this window lines up somewhat. But in this case, if I apply this, the brightness over there might be different than the brightness over here. So I might want to get it to blend in with the surroundings. And that is what the healing brush do does. If you switch between the clone stamp and the healing brush, it still remembers all these settings. And so now I can try to come in here and retouch that out, but I do need to go over the entirety of it in order to get that healing to work, right, because it blends in with its surroundings. And so I'll just see if I can get up there, I'll go all the way to the top. So that line remains consistent and I'll see about that one. Remaining somewhat consistent. Maybe. Now I might need to go all the way down because I can see it not lining up right where my mouse is. So I'll just go all the way down to there and all the way up. I thought I was gonna get away with just doing part of it. All right. So now we got that, take a look at that. We have cleared out a good portion and at this point, I'm guessing I can go to a simpler tool. I can probably use the remove tool. The remove tool would have done a terrible job there because there wasn't enough of the building exposed in order to have it really know what it should be doing. And so I'm gonna come over here now and see if we can get rid of this trunk coming down here. And I'm guessing by the windows, it might mess up. Same with where the railing is, but you never know. Let's zoom up and down here at the bottom. That doesn't quite look right. I can't really tell what's going on there, but a lot of the other areas looks fine. This does not if you look, we have a V shape, kind of a X shape, V shape, X that should be a V shape and it's not, uh, but let's see if we can touch up some of these other areas just by getting a smaller brush and giving it a second try. That area I think was covered up by the tree. So I'm not really sure what should be there. And any time it's that kind of a situation when you use the remove tool, it's gonna mainly try to keep straight lines consistent. And if it's really more of a nebulous area where you really don't know what's supposed to be there, I would usually switch to making a selection like this and then I would use the choice that is known as generative fill because that uses artificial intelligence. And it usually has a better idea of how to construct like the edge of a building based on the rest for the building, that kind of thing. In this case, it thinks we want a column, but remember it gives you three versions and so we can switch through the three and see if any of them look appropriate. If we look on the other side of the building, we can see there was a column here, but we can't really see what the corner was. So it's a matter of choosing what you think would be best there. Finally, for this area down here, I'm gonna go back to using my clone stamp tool. I know that's supposed to be the shape of a V because it alternates there's one right here I could copy from. So I will option click at the base of it. But before I do, I might switch to my next clone source. So I don't mess up any of those other ones. Therefore, I could always go back and re clone from those other areas. But I'm gonna option click right here at the base. Come over here to apply it now, just to show you other settings there, you can get fancy in here right here is a little pop up menu and this is for the overlay. The overlay means what I see in my brush as a preview. Well, I can't tell when this really lines up with things under there like this. And oftentimes I end up using a smaller brush just to see how it lines up. Well, I'm getting a no symbol right now because you can't do this directly on that layer. I have to make a new one and now I'll get rid of my nose symbol. But let's look at our preview options here. I can sell it to use darken lighten or difference mode. If I use Darken mode, it's gonna change the appearance of what I see inside my brush. Whenever whatever I see on top of or in my brush overlays with something else. Now, it interacts with it. So I can more easily tell when this bottom edge lines up. And if I move side to side, I can more easily tell when the circular kind of area lines up. That's because it's using something known as darken mode when I think I got it just right. I'm gonna click and then I'll usually choose undo because I only wanted to establish that positioning, then I can change from darkened to normal. Uh And now it looks normal. When I put my brush over here, I'll get a smaller brush and let's just see if I can. Now come in here and put that in the top edge isn't quite right. Although if I go far enough across it looks fine. So then to give you a better idea of what all these icons were at the top, let's say I messed something up. Uh I'll just create a new layer to mess it up with and just, I don't know, I did something and screwed it up and imagine that was directly on the layer that contained my image. Like as if I had no layers, then I'm gonna put in some retouching. I'll go back to my clone stamp tool and I wanted to remember those settings that I had dialed in at the time when I did my retouching over here. Well, if I can remember which of these icons was active, it will bring me back. If I click here, I'll just move my mouse over here to see. Does it line up? No, the building looks too far to the left. I go to this one. Does it line up? Yes, that's the one that was active at the time I did that retouching. So I could then retouch that out if it was messed up, although I didn't never retouch down this far. Um, anyway, all it's doing is dialing in these settings once again. So it's thinking about the same spot. That option, clicked the same spot where I lined it up in all the settings involved. You don't have to use these, you only needed to use them if you think you'd need to go back and use those settings again. Otherwise just stay on the first one and just leave it there the whole time. But I'll throw away that layer because I didn't really want to mess up my image. All right, I need to finish off my image with the corners here. How the heck am I gonna do that? Well, what I'm gonna do is make a selection and if you're in the uh lasso tool, you can hold down the option key and then let go of the mouse, but you keep the option key held down and you end up making straight lines and I'll select this edge here and anytime you're really not sure what should be in there, it's not obvious. Then I would usually use generative fill because that will use artificial intelligence. Just leave the text empty, hit generate. Remember you get three versions. So click between the three and if you don't like any of the three, just hit generate again, you'll get three more. I wouldn't say any of those are by any means. Perfect. But at least it gives me a starting point for what I might wanna have in there and then I can manually apply retouching. Let's do it on the other side to see what it comes up with. Click between our three versions. And I think it did a much better job there than on the other side of the photograph because it gives me a pretty good idea for what I can have. And then all I'm gonna do, at least on the left side is clean it up. I'll just create a new layer to put on top to control my retouching and I'll end up using the remove tool and I'll say remove this little detail here and I see it put something gray here because it thinks there should be another one of these and I'll just paint over that. So it gets rid of it down here. I don't like that little part and I might not like that soul window sitting there then for this end over here, that doesn't look right. You can see where the railing kind of ended there. And now it's just put in randomness. Uh What I might do is use my clone stamp tool. I might copy from an area like right here, I'll just option click right here and I do want to make sure that up here, all my settings are zeroed out. So I'm not doing any weird rotations or scaling and I'm just gonna put it over here on the end, get my brush to be large enough where I can see that last circle that's on the right edge of the brush and I'll line it up with a circle that is existing on the railing to just kind of complete it. Get it the right height about like that click to establish it. Then choose undo because I didn't really need that big. And then I'll come in and see if we can use that to establish the end. And maybe right where the end is here, bring that all the way down to the floor, smaller brush somewhere into there. And now finally clean it up using my remove tool to say, OK, remove this little piece of stare, remove that and I might leave the end. So it knows where the straight line should be. And then after it's established that end, clean it up here up here at the top, just see what happens if I tell it to remove that all the way up to this window, it doesn't make sense to have a railing there. And then right here, if I turn that off and back on again, I I need to have that touched up. So clone source go to the last one that looks good, come over here and touch it up. So now this whole left side I think is fine on the right side, I'd have to do something similar to get this ending of the railing to look right. It might be that I copied from the left edge of the photo over here, flip it horizontally and apply it there and then use the remove tool again to clean up this stuff or use artificial intelligence for smaller areas. We went kind of crazy on this image. But the main thing is you know, you have a cloned source panel and if your cloning tools ever act weird, click this little u-turn symbol in order to reset all these settings back to normal. Now let's look at one last advanced retouching technique. This one is known as frequency separation. And if you're watching this lesson from start to finish and you just keep going, you might want to take a break and come back when you're fresh because this will take a little bit of mental um freshness to really understand what's going on. But in general, this technique is going to take an image and separate it into two parts. The two parts will be the fine detail on one layer and on a separate layer, we're gonna have all the colors and the shading like the things that define the shape of something and it's known as frequency separation. It thinks of it as if the fine details would be known as high frequency in the chunky details. Overall kind of shading of the image would be the low frequency information and you're separating it on two separate layers. So you can retouch those two layers independently. Let's take a look. First, I'm gonna do this manually. You'll never have to do it manually. But at least you should see the process and then know in the downloads for this course, you should get some actions and if you install those actions then you can automate it. And so the second time we apply it, we'll use actions. And that's how I do this. Absolutely all the time. I never do it manually. But just so you know what the action does, here's what it does. So I have my original picture right here in the bottom. Then I simply have two identical copies of it. Therefore, all three of these layers right now are absolutely identical. I'm gonna hide the top layer and work on the middle one. What I'd like to do with that layer, the one that's called low frequency is I wanna blur away all of the fine detail. And in my case, I wanna blur away all these kind of seams that are on these tiles that are here, but I don't want to blur it so much that the three dimensional quality of this wall disappears. I wanna still be able to see where it undulates. So let's try it. I'll choose filter blur Gaussian blur and all I'm gonna do is bring this up until I can no longer see these little grout lines that are in here, but not so far that I can't tell the three dimensional quality of that wall. So when I get to about here, if you look here, this is a zoomed up preview. And if you click, you can see all the ground lines. And when I let go, I can't see them at all. When I look over here at the main image, I can still see the three dimensional quality of the wall. And I can tell it's undulating, it's not perfectly smooth. And so that's what I want. Usually I want to find the lowest setting that does that. So I might end up experimenting there. I can see grout lines. If I look in here, I can see a hint of them and I can definitely see them over here. But once I get it up to about here, I can no longer see them here. And over here, I really can't see them. So I'm gonna click. OK. That is known as the low frequency information. It's the overall color and the overall shading of all these objects. Now, what I want to do is get all the information that got blurred away and I want it to here on this top layer and to do that, all I'm gonna do is make sure the top layer is a copy of the original picture. And I'm gonna ask Photoshop to compare this layer to what's under it. We're gonna do that by going to the image menu and there's a choice called apply image when you choose it, this comes up and there's a bunch of stuff in here. A lot of it we're not gonna use. Let's move it over to the side. And first source means what document is the thing you're gonna compare it to. Well, it's in the same document. It's just on this layer down here. So I don't need to change that. Then layer is what I wanted to compare it to. And I'm gonna set that to the layer we blurred. That's the layer that was called low. The part called channel just completely ignore. Then down here, this menu means how should I compare it? And right now when it says normal, then all it's doing is completely copying what's in that layer that's called low and putting it in the layer I'm working on. So now this looks like that blurry version, but I don't want it to work that way. What I wanted to do is subtract whatever is in that blurry version from this. So that if it compares the blurry version to this, it says OK, what did the blurry version blur away? And it's showing me here the grout lines and things. The only thing is it's really dark. Well, there's a setting here called offset. And if you set it to 1 28 1 28 is halfway between zero and 255. And that means this represents 50% gray. So now most of this image in here is 50% gray and we need that. Then there's something called scale and I usually type in the number two and that makes it. So it's not too much contrast. So you're not gonna have to remember any of these settings because you're gonna get an action that does it for you. But what this is doing is it's comparing a normal version of the image to the version you blurred. And with these fancy settings here, when I click on, OK, what I now have in this layer is all the stuff that got blurred away earlier in this technique. Then I want to combine these two layers together in a special way where it reconstructs the image. And all I need to do is have that top layer active and change the blending mode on it. I'm gonna use one called linear light and when I do the image is going to look exactly like the original, the original that's down here doesn't need to be there, but I have it there. So I can always compare whatever it is I do with these layers to that original. So right now let me hide those two layers that are up top and show you the original. So I'm just gonna option click on this eyeball. See if you can see any difference. Here's the original picture. Here's it constructed out of those two layers, original two layers, I see zero difference whatsoever. Then let's hide that original image and see what our image is made out of. If I hide the top layer, there's the stuff we blurred, it doesn't have the grout lines in it. And if I view the top layer, that's all the ground line that got blurred away. So this is now made out of what is known as the high frequency information, which is the fine details and the low frequency information, which is the chunky detail kind of all the colors and the tonality, put the two on top of each other and you've constructed your image. So now let me show you how you're gonna be doing this. All I'm gonna do is revert this image to its original where it's just as if I opened the picture and have done nothing to it whatsoever. Then what I'm gonna do is open the actions panel, you'll end up being able to get a set of actions that will be called something like Ben's frequency separation actions. I haven't saved them out yet, but um you'll get those and when you get them, if you download them and the file ends with the letters Z IP, you'll likely have to double click on it to extract the contents because that means the website that you downloaded it from, uh couldn't handle the file type that is needed for Photoshop. And so we kind of put it in a wrapper of a different file format that it could handle and you just need to double click to extract it. Then to install it, you can come over here to the actions panel. Just go up to your window menu up here and there. You're gonna find actions. You can go to the side menu over here and there'll be a choice within the side menu that is called load actions. And if you feed it that file you downloaded, you're gonna have some new actions in here. And they will include these three actions. The action I'm gonna use is the top one. And all I'm gonna do is hit the play button. I click on its name and down here I hit play and all it's gonna make me do is choose how much blurring I want. Remember I'm bringing this up until I can't see the fine details which in my case here were the grout lines. Then all you're gonna do is click OK? And it just did all the work. So on the bottom, here's your original picture untouched. Then you have one layer called low and that layer has been blurred with the exact settings you chose. And then here's the one that has all the detail in it and it's called high or high frequency. Now, let's see what the heck could we do with this? Well, let's look at that blurred version of this and what I wanna do is select this wall and smooth out these undulations that are here. Well, so in order to select the wall, it's gonna be easier if I can see the normal picture. That's one of the reasons why that normal one is at the bottom because then I could come in here and use a selection tool like here, the object selection tool and just tell it that I want to select this general area right here and I can kind of tell it not to get my wife's leg in there and kind of go like that and see if it can figure it out. For me. It did a pretty good job. If I need to take away, I can hold down option as you usually can and just maybe not get this little edge here, maybe not get the bottom part either, but it's close enough. And then all I'm gonna do to get this area to look smooth because that's what I want is I need to be working on the layer that's called low. The only reason we looked at the original image is to get the selection made. Then in here, I'm gonna blur it. So I'll just choose filter blur Gaussian blur and I'll just bring this up and tell that wall I can, you know, down here, I can see the little undulations and I don't want undulations. I want it to look smooth. So I'm just gonna bring it up until it looks just nice and smooth like that and I'll click. OK. It's not perfect because up here at the top, uh part of the color of the sky got in there like up here at the corner and such, but it'll be good enough to give you the concept. Usually I would use more of a blur tool or something or I do this where somehow I, I made it. So this went back to normal right up here where I can see this dark area in the sky kind of blending. The other thing is a little messed up is I can see my wife's uh leg in here like a hint of it and that got blurred out as well, like extended beyond her leg. So there are a few areas where it won't look perfect, but let's deselect and now let's just put the top layer back on. All right, let's compare this to the original picture. I'll hide all layers except for the original and look at that wall before you could see it undulate and it wasn't smooth. Whereas afterwards, it's much smoother and it's only around my wife's leg where the blur extended her outward and where the color of the sky got pushed in this way that it doesn't quite look right. But overall, we smoothed that out. I could always go here and unlock that bottom layer, which is the original picture, throw it on top and then use a layer mask to control where this version is shows up and where the other does. So here I'll do a black layer mask. So we get our smooth result and then I'll come in here and just paint with white where I want the original picture to be used. And I think up here where, where that didn't look very good and I could try to do it around my wife's leg there. Well, what's that like an everyday practical use for that? Because I'm not gonna run into a building with undulating wall that I need to smooth out. Well, here we got a stain here. Looks like somebody spilled some water on their outfit. And the problem is this outfit has got fine detail. This texture in the fabric is known as a heather and I wanna keep that texture but somehow get rid of the stain. Well, what I need to do then is get all this detail that's here, that what you can call a heather and get it on its own layer so that I protect it and I don't change it. Then what I want on another layer is all this basic color that's here and the basic shading that's here. So therefore I can work on it separately from this texture. That's exactly what frequency separation does. So let's go back to our actions and let's go back to that choice that was called choose low with blur and I'm just gonna hit play. And what I wanna do here is bring this up until I can no longer see the texture that is in the clothing and whatever it is I blur away here is gonna get moved to a different layer. And I think once I get into about there, I can no longer see the texture of uh the clothing. So I'm gonna click. OK. And it'll reconstruct the image. So now the bottom layer is the original picture. I don't need that right now. It's just so I can compare it. and we've separated the image into low frequency where you can't see the fine detail and high frequency and look at that. That is the heather or the texture and it's consistent across all this. I can't see the stain at all in that layer. And therefore, I'm not going to mess up that texture. Let's work on the layer that is called low frequency. That's where I can see the stain, but it's so basic in here. All I need to do is make it so I can't see the stain. So let's just grab the paintbrush tool. I think I might be able to do it with just that. And all I'm gonna do with the paintbrush is I'm gonna choose a color from within here to paint with. I'm gonna choose the color out here where there is no stain. I can do that by holding out an option, Alton Windows and just clicking. Then I'm just gonna paint across like this and get that to have the color that should be in there should probably be using a slightly softer brush. So you don't see the edge. But let's do that while we're looking at the image as it normally appears, I'll choose undo and I'm just gonna turn on the top layer high frequency. Now let's try it, check that out. I'm just somehow making the stain go away and up here, I might need to be a little bit more careful because I don't want it to go on to her skin. Otherwise, the color of her skin will become the color I'm painting with. If you want to see it, I'll just paint up here. But the, the detail in her skin would still look the same. So I might need to do that. And down here, I have to be a little more careful because there's this uh little ring in here and it's shaded in there. And if I don't put that shading back up this way, uh I might remove the shadow, we can find out, I'll just grab a color from right here and it's not thinking about the image as I'm currently looking at it. It's thinking about only this now in order to get it to do that, what you need to do, come over here to your eyedropper tool and change your eyedropper tool to only look at the current layer. You might have had it set to all layers because that's what I usually have it set to. But when I do frequency separation. I set it to current layer so it will sample or copy from the layer that's currently active and it'll ignore that top layer and therefore it's looking at this and I just happened to be looking at it with the detail. So I'm gonna option click right here to grab that color. I'll grab my brush and I'm just gonna paint it in right here. Uh Then I'll do the same thing. Right. Oops, right here. And every once in a while I should option click to pick a color from the surrounding area that doesn't have the stain. I'll grab here and I'm just gonna get a smaller brush. So I don't get into the shaded area. If I do, you might find the shadow kind of disappears. You see that. What I would do is instead go for down here where the shadow was and use that. Uh Therefore I'll copy from here. That's the color I'm painting with. You know, there is what I'll, where I'll use it. Copy from here, use it there. Copy from here. Is it there and so on. And if that's too dark, just copy from the area where it wasn't dark. All right, let's see what we've done here. We are. Let's turn off these layers and look at the bottom one. There. It is with the stain here. It is without looks to me like it's only right about there where I still might need to do a little more. So I'll just option, click there and paint up here to touch it up when you're completely done. There's no need to keep these as separate layers unless you plan to come in and make additional changes and there's no need to have the original sitting underneath. So you could just come in here and say flat an image to say, hey, I'm done. But a lot of people like to keep their layers so they can show off to their friends and show them what they did and show that the image is made out of this blurry thing there. You can see the paint that I put in and how crude it is and then it is made with the fine detail put in. And if you turn off that bottom two layers, you'll see the fine detail. All right, I hope you consider that to be some advanced retouching. Now you'll never stop learning about retouching if you really need to work on complex images. But I hope that this particular video really got you on a level that was much higher than just intermediate or basic. And therefore you can use some advanced ideas.