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Retouching Images in Adobe Photoshop

Let's start to explore the retouching capabilities we have in Photoshop. Now, in this lesson, we're gonna get into the basics and in a future lesson, I'll show you how to do much more advanced techniques. Now, some simple retouching can be accomplished in Adobe camera. It is limited in what you can do. But let's start there and then we'll jump over to Photoshop here. I am in Cameron and over on the right side, we find our tools. One of those tools is supposed to look like an eraser. And if I click on it, that is known as the remove tool. When I'm using the remove tool, there are three choices for what mode it should be in. And then below each one of these, we have some options. I'm gonna turn off this check box to begin with and let's just click between them and you'll see the options change. For each one with this, we're gonna have a size for our brush and for some of these a feather setting. When you wanna change those, you're welcome to change them over here or if you just move your...

mouse on top of your image, you can use the same keyboard shortcuts you would use in Photoshop, which would B the square bracket keys on your keyboard right above the return key, at least on a Mac to change the size and holding down the shift key and using those same bracket keys to change how soft the edge of your brush is if you need it to fade out somewhere. So let's take a look at these particular controls. Let's start with the simplest. The simplest is known as clone clone is gonna copy from one area and put it somewhere else and that's all it's gonna do. It's not gonna do anything to attempt to make sure the brightness is appropriate or anything like that. So what I could do there is come in here and if there's an area I want to remove, I can just click and let go on it or if it's not a circular kind of area, I can click and drag. And when I do that, then camera is going to figure out where in the surroundings it thinks it should copy from and wherever it shows it's gonna copy it and then put it over there on the right side, there's a check box called Show Overlay. And if I turn that on, then we can see where it's copying from. And if I dislike where it's copying from up here is a button called refresh. And if you hover over it, you'll see a tool tip and that will show you the keyboard shortcut for the button as well, which is one of the slash keys. It's the slash key that leans towards the right. So if I don't like the area copied from, I either hit the refresh button or I hit that slash and it will force it to pick another spot. If it never picks a spot that I find to be appropriate, I can also click within this and manually drag it to where I think would be the best spot to copy from. And then let go. If you want this overlay here to toggle off and on. If you hover over it again, you'll find a tool tip. And within that on the far right, it tells you the keyboard shortcut for toggling on and off and that's the letter V. Uh If you happen to use lightroom, lightroom has a similar uh features that pretty much exactly the same. But the keyboard shortcuts can be different. The one for refresh is still the same. But the one for showing that overlay is just the letter O which to me is much easier to under to, to remember I should say uh than the that you have here in Adobe camera. But I just thought I'd mention that in case you're using uh lightroom or lightroom classic as an alternative to this. So that is the simplest tool. The problem with that tool is that if you have a hard edge brush, then oftentimes you'll be able to tell exactly where you applied it. Because if you were to zoom up on the area where you did your retouching, it's going to have this very crisp edge and I can see a circle right here, at least right in this portion in that portion, uh that makes it more obvious. So anytime I end up using that tool, most of the time, I'll have to bring up this setting called feather to soften the edge and therefore blend it in so that you don't see a crispness to the edge. And it is this is the tool that I use the least when I'm here in Adobe camera raw. So let's move up from that tool and go to the next one over which is the choice called heel. That's the equivalent to the healing brush in Photoshop. And the difference between it and the clone tool is when you use it, it does do some extra work. It's still gonna copy from another area of your image. So if I come over here and click on this area, um But in this case, the feather setting is not necessarily critical. Even if I have feather turned all the way down, it will be very difficult to see where the edge of that brush was. And that's because healing always tries to precisely match the brightness and the color of what's surrounding an area to show you that let's retouch in areas using something we really shouldn't meaning things that are inappropriate. Uh I wanna come in here and let's say I wanna retouch out this area right here. And when I do, instead of having a copy, I'll type the letter V to see where it's copying from. Instead of having it copied from here, let's copy from over here. And now if I don't show the overlay, you can see what's going on here in that we have the texture, you know, the variation and brightness from this area up here where I told it to copy from, but it still adjusted it to make it. So it precisely matches the brightness and the color from the surroundings. So even with that, this is much closer to being acceptable than you might usually expect. And therefore you don't have to be overly careful with the area you copy from when it comes to thinking about if it's the right brightness or color, you mainly want to think. Is it the right texture, the variation in brightness because that's really what's being transferred there. Now, even after I've applied that, as long as that's the last retouching idea, I can switch between these tools because I might decide that healing wasn't the best tool for that area and I could go back to clone and you'll see it change. Now, it's still copying from the same area, but you can see that clone just blatantly copies and doesn't do anything to get it to blend in. Whereas healing makes it match the surroundings. If you don't like the retouching, you decide to bail on it, you can just hit the delete key and that will delete whichever one of those retouching areas is currently active. Then we also have another tool over here known as the remove tool. The remove tool is the most sophisticated one. And what it can do is with most other tools. If I were to do retouching that came up and bumped into another object, oftentimes it would mess up in those areas. Here. First, let me choose undo here. Let me use the middle tool, the healing tool and just see if I can get it to mess up. Sometimes it's hard to get it to do that. But yeah, I figure if I overlap that enough when I let go, I can see that that edge right there is kind of an abrupt change to it. It still looks somewhat acceptable. If I look in there, I can tell it's copying from right up here because I see that shape repeated. Well, let's change it now. So that instead of using the heel, it uses remove with remove, it's much more intelligent. It can figure out that this line has a curve to it and that it shouldn't be broken. And so it will invent new information to fill in there. It's still in general copying from the surrounding image, but it doesn't have to copy all from one area like the other tool, two tools do. And so I find it to be much more useful when you need to bump into or overlap an object in that it will try to keep a line continuous where the other tools wouldn't be able to. So I'll try to remove an area over here that comes in and just kind of touches that leg and if it doesn't do a good job, remember, you have refresh, refresh means given another try there, I think on the third try, it's much better. But if I were to use one of the other two tools in that kind of an area, it's just gonna blatantly copy from an area in the surrounding. And I can tell right there that it copied from right here because I can see this little dark spot and I see it repeated right there and it's just not appropriate. Sure I can hit refresh and it might eventually pick a good spot. But I kind of doubt it because I don't know if there's a spot at this angle to copy from. Then that's when that tool on the far left becomes pretty darn useful. The only problem with the tool in the far left is it does have a tendency of repeating things. So if there's some sort of texture in the surrounding, you might find it used over and over again. So when it comes to very simple retouching. I usually use the middle tool to start with and then I switch to the tool that is on the right when I run into an issue where I need to bump into the edge of an object. And when I use the middle tool, the one called heel, it doesn't do a good job. And so that's somewhat of how I think about these particular tools. Now, before we get into any more about it, I'm actually gonna get out of this image and let me show you a way you can a, you can adjust or retouch multiple images at the same time. So here I have three images, I'll select all three. All I did is click on one and hold shift and click on the last one. Then I'm gonna double click on them. If they're a raw file, if it's not a raw file and I wanna go to camera raw, I just need to come up here and say opening camera raw because if they were JPEG files or Tiff or something else, it wouldn't automatically force it to go there. And I'd have to choose from here. Then on the left side, I can see the images as little thumbnails. And if I want to affect all of the images at the same time, I need to select them all. I can either type command A for select all that's control A and windows or this one's already selected. I could just hold, shift and click here and I'll get all the ones in between the one that has the brighter border. That's the one I'm currently viewing. Now. This image doesn't really need all that much retouching. But what it does need is the sensor on my camera was not clean. At the time I took this picture. I think the camera I was using didn't have automatic sensor cleaning where it shakes the sensor because this was captured well over a decade ago. Uh So I'm gonna come in here to my retouching tool and I can see one sensor dust spot right here. It just looks like a little slightly darker circle, can see another one there and another one there. And for that kind of a stuff we don't need the tool on the far left. I find that it is best when you have a lot of detail and you're bumping into the edge of objects and sometimes with areas like this, it doesn't produce quite a smooth of a result. So that's when I use the middle tool, healing brush. And I don't usually need my feathering to be turned up because it's gonna adjust things and make the brightness match. So I'm just gonna have my capacity in 100 I feather at zero and then I'm gonna adjust my brush size. So it's just the littlest bit bigger than the circle. Ideally, it would be just the tiniest bit bigger than that circle. But when you have a background, as simple as a sky, it's not like it's gonna matter if it's a little bit bigger. So I'm just gonna click there and let go. I'll go to the next area I can see click and I'll get rid of the ones that I can easily pick out with my eyes. But I bet you there are other sensor dust spots in here and I want to be able to find them to do. So you turn on this check box that's called visualized spots. It has a keyboard shortcut, it's a letter Y. And if you click on it, now you get a different view of your picture and you also have a slider that you can move around. And what you want to do is move that slider until it makes those sensor dust spots which are little, usually little circles uh more prominent and easy to see and you can retouch them out while you're in this view. So you can just come in here and click around like this. And if you ever see one of them with that, when you click, it does not disappear. That usually means that this tool copied from another one of the sensor dust spots in the surroundings. But so remember you have that refresh button and you could force it to pick from another spot. So I'm doing this and since I have all three images selected over on the left side of my screen. Uh it is applying this to all of those images at once because the dust that was on my camera sensor usually is only gonna change position uh when I change the lens of my camera and I kept the lens on the whole time between these. And so therefore, I think it uh ended up with those dust spots all in the same spot. Now, I think right up here, I thought I retouched out that spec. So I think that might be where it copied from an a uh existing spec. Let me find out, I'll turn off visualized spots and I'll turn on show overlay and I can see there's two little retouches there if I click on one. and let's just go here and turn off that overlay. Think that might have been the one I'll turn on visualized spots. Yes, it is. And all I'm gonna do is hit the refresh button and tell it to copy from a different spot. And then if I turn off the overlay, yeah, I'd fixed it, I should have done that right away right after I noticed it. So if you click on a spot like this one and you notice the spot is still there, just click the refresh button right away or use that slash key on your keyboard, the one that leans towards the right, I'll turn off visualized spots now that I think it got rid of that. And if you ever do this where you're trying to retouch out sensor dust spots and you're doing it to multiple images. You have to be very careful because they're gonna show up mainly where you can see uh usually areas like the sky where the sensor dust spots end up getting backlit. That's when you'll be able to see them. It doesn't mean there's not sensor dust spots up in here. It just means that they're not prominent. And so you're not gonna be able to notice them. Well, if I switch between these images, now, the problem is one of those sensor dust spots might have been right where one of the balloons was because the balloons are changing position in each shot. If I just click between these images, I could inspect them. And when I do that, the other ones will no longer be selected. So now I could work on just these individual images and I just need to click between them and it might be useful to turn on the show overlay checkbox because then I can see exactly where those retouches are. So I can see up here that a lot of them are overlapping this balloon. Now, I could turn off the overlay and just inspect that. And I can see right there, this white line, the seam and the balloon is no longer there, it's broken. And that's because there's some retouching in there. Well, you usually only need to do the retouch over areas that are like the sky. So if you have the overlay turned on, here's how you can delete those things. You could hover over it and click and then one of them will be blue. That's the one that's active and you can hit the delete key or if you have a bunch of them, like I do hold down on your keyboard, the option key that's alton windows and for the length of time you have it down, your mouse is gonna look like a pair of scissors and you can click on one of these just to delete them or you can even click and drag to make a rectangle and delete all the retouch spots that are found within the rectangle. So I might end up doing something like that. And then this one I should probably inspect because it might be on a piece of detail. So I could zoom up on the image. I'm just typing command plus the same keyboard shortcut you would use in Photoshop and I'll turn off show overlay and that looks fine. Then I'm gonna go to the middle image in there. I can see there's some retouching done on top of the balloon. So again, I'll hold down the option key. Alton windows circle around the ones I don't want. And they're gone. I might need to inspect these two that are really close to the balloon or I could simply delete them and then turn on that show, uh, spots choice again to see if there's any spots there. But this one looks like it's outside the balloon. So it should be fine. In this one. It looks like it might overlap the balloon, but it looks like the area copied from might be fine. So I'm gonna turn on that turn off that show overlay and I do see that that is a problem. It looks almost like the color of the balloon is being pushed out this little light kind of area. So, uh that's one that needs to be redone. So I'm gonna show my overlay and I'll option click on that to get rid of it and I'll just zoom up to see if there's actually a sensor dust spec that needs to be dealt with and I can't see one. So I don't see why I'd need to apply retouching in that area. And so that's the only thing to really keep in mind is that um if you're gonna get rid of sensor dust specs and multiple images at once, inspect them individually afterwards to see if there's any spots that will cause issues because it's mainly in the sky where you're gonna notice this uh little sensor dust spots and if the sky is in a different spot and each shot, then you might need to modify it. All right, then I'll give you a tip. Let's hide our little overlay. So we're only looking at the image as a whole and let's say, I don't like the composition of these balloons. I really wish this balloon was kind of down here. Well, we can actually move it the way you move it is, you come in here and you paint over the entirety of the balloon like this. Then when you let go, it's gonna try to remove the balloon. Well, we want to see where it copied from. So I'm gonna turn on show overlay and I can see these two shapes. So now what I'd like to do is I wanna generally reverse the position of these two shapes or at least take this one, which is where something is copying from and put it on top of the balloon so that we'll be copying from the balloon. And then this one, when I put it down here will determine where the balloon ends up. So I think I want the balloon somewhere about there and now let's move this, which is where it's copying from and we'll just move it on top of the balloon. So now we're copying the balloon and putting it down there. I'll turn off show high uh show overlay. The problem then is we got two copies. Well, you can put retouching on top of retouching. If you have the overlay showing up, then it's not easy to do because when you move your mouse on top of one of these areas, it thinks you want to reposition it. But if you turn off the show overlay check box, then it doesn't know there are any retouching spots there and it'll let you retouch on top of an area you've already retouched. So therefore I can remove the balloon. And now if I want to reposition everything, I have to turn on show overlay so I can get to this and I can move it around wherever I would like. And so that's kind of a little way where you can trick light room or Adobe camera raw in this case into allowing you to rearrange things. I occasionally use that for simple things like moving one single white puffy cloud in a sky because it's in an inconvenient area like I wanna crop in on my image and I don't wanna crop into the clouds. I want to move it down a little bit. Well, that's how I accomplish it. So just in case it takes you a little while to get used to that, let's do it to another image. Just so you can remember, I'm gonna do this and paint all the way over what it is that I want to change. Usually I have to leave a little extra space around it to make it easy to reposition and I'll let go, it's gone. Turn on show overlay so I can see where it copied from and I'm just gonna take this, which is where it thinks I want to retouch and put it where I want it to move the balloon to then grab the other end. That's where it's copying from and put it on top of the balloon. Finally to get rid of the original balloon, turn off show overlay and then you can apply retouching on top of retouching to have it finally remove that balloon. And if you show overlay, then you could click on this and put it wherever it is you want. And because we're using the healing brush here, it's going to adjust this so that this blue sky that is surrounding the balloon will automatically be adjusted to make it the right brightness. So I could put it over here with a sky as its brightest in a look fine. Or I could put it way up here where the sky is much darker and it's going to adjust it. So I'm not gonna be able to tell I moved it there. The balloon will get a little darker because it's darkening the whole thing to match the surroundings. But it does allow me to put it just about anywhere and it automatically matches the brightness. All right, I'm gonna hit done here. So we done retouching those images. Now, I'll grab another image again. This is a raw file. So if I double click on it, it'll open it in camera raw. If it wasn't, I just go up to the file menu and there would have been a choice of opening camera raw in here. I want to get rid of these legs that are in my photo. Uh I'll go to my remove tool and this is the kind of instance where the tool on the far left will be essential if you're able to do it at all in here. Because the other two tools simply copy from another area within your picture and move it over. It just happens to be that the heel tool will adjust the brightness and color. So it matches the surroundings. But here we have very precise information we need, we need the grout here that is in between uh these tiles or stones, whatever they are. And if it doesn't line up right and isn't the right content, it's just not gonna look right. And the only one of these tools that would have any chance of doing that would be this one which is the remove tool. So I'm gonna just click here and see what it's gonna deliver for me the first time I give it a try and it might not be perfect. Be sure you also get any shadows for the objects you're attempting to remove, then I'll let go and let's see what it does. Well, I don't think it did all that good because the grout lines don't quite match up and that I can still see a little hint of the foot. Well, first one thing you should check is if you've done any cropping on your image, if you've cropped and there's something up here beyond the edge of your image. When you end up using these retouching tools, it's thinking about the full un cropped image because it doesn't know if a few minutes from now you're gonna go grab that crop tool and come up here and add space back to your document. In this case, I hadn't cropped the image, but that is one thing to think about any time what whatever you're trying to retouch is touching the edge of the image. Remember, you can usually come in here and hit refresh right now. It's not available because I switched to the crop tool and back and therefore that little retouching spot that was in there is no longer active. So I'd have to choose show overlay and I'd have to click on it. So it changes to blue, then I could hit refresh to see if it could do anything about it. And I'm just not impressed with it. So I'm gonna hit delete to remove that area. And let's see if you can do anything over on this side to these areas, making sure I'm getting the full shadows and all the way up towards the edge of the photo. And again, that just doesn't quite feel right. It's better though, I can see it did notice that there was a grout line here and it is somewhat continuous. Well, in this case, you see these kind of shadowy areas that are here most of the time that happens because they didn't go far enough and include the full shadow that was there to tell it to remove it. But it could also be because it sees these people over here in their shadows. And so therefore it thinks that it should be something like that. So over here there's a little tip, it says command drag on photo to select custom source. That means a custom area that it can copy from. So I'm gonna hold down the command key. I have it held down right now and I'm gonna click and drag like this to say, why don't you copy from this stuff? And therefore it shouldn't see the shadow for the feet that are over on the right. I'll let go and should recalculate it using that area. But it looks like I still have those little shady areas and I don't know that I like the unresolved as much. So I'm gonna type command Z to undo because I think most of this looked fine. The other thing I could do is come over here and turn off the overlay by turning off the overlay. I can put retouching on top of retouching and therefore I can go right here and just tell it to redo the one spot I didn't like. And if I need it to try again, just hit refresh and if you need to kind of tell it where to copy from, remember you can hold down command and say, copy from something over here and then it will attempt to, sometimes you just need to try more than once. But I'm gonna start over in this because I've been using this tool in its most basic way. So let's get rid of those retouching spots. And this time I'm going to turn on something else that it says use generative A I, generative A I is where it can use artificial intelligence to try to figure out what should be in this photograph and it doesn't have to really be based on the surroundings. And so what I can do is turn on use generative A I and then in here, I do notice those shadows did extend a little further. So I probably didn't get the whole of them, but I'm gonna go like this, see if I can cover that all the way out to here, all the way up there about like that. And then I'll let go. Now it assumes that I might want to paint on more than one spot and generative A I takes a little bit of time for it to calculate. So it wants to be able to uh allow me to come in here and paint over all the regions that might need that type of adjustment or retouching. And let's just say I didn't want this thing in this corner. And so I put one over there as well. The other reason why it is allowing me to paint on more than one spot is so I can evaluate what I have and decide that hey, I might not have gotten the entirety of the shadow that's here so that I can get a smaller brush and maybe paint there. Or maybe I want to force it to use the tile that is in between these guys' legs here. So on the right side, you see how it says add and subtract. Well, you can click on subtract and then paint on your image or just hold down the option key, the same key you would use in Photoshop to take away from a selection. And then you can come in here and say I want to keep this area in here and that will somewhat force it to put in uh grout lines and that kind of stuff. And I think I'll give you a little bit of extra over there. Uh And maybe I need to keep that little part, whatever it is, you can modify it. And then when you got it all figured out, you can hit the apply button and it'll take it a moment because it needs to really think about it and it sends some of the information over the internet and then back down again because that's where a lot of the A I is calculated. Then to evaluate the results, I'm gonna turn off the show overlay check box. So I don't see those things and just glancing at it, it looks pretty darn good. Well, anytime you use generative A I, you usually get three different versions to choose between and you can cycle through them right here where it says variations. Right now, we're viewing version one out of three. And if I hit the right arrow, I'll see the second version and I'll hit another one, I'll see the third version. But you have three versions for each and every area that you retouched. So you'd have to turn on show overlay, click on the second area, then turn off show overlay to cycle through the three choices for that particular spot to see which one you like. And then I could do it one more time for over here in the third area that I retouched and cycle through it. And each one of those I think is relatively acceptable and you're gonna get a much more sophisticated look and change in your image. So let's try that one more time. I'm gonna try to get rid of the newspaper that this guy is sitting on. So I don't want it to change too much of the picture. So I'm gonna go just beyond that. I do want it to overlap the surroundings a little bit but not too much. You just wanna make sure you do not leave even a single pixel of the um original image in there. And then if I remember correctly, if I don't want to use that mode where you get that red overlay and you can add to and take away from instead. I'm pretty darn sure that's what I want to get rid of. I think I can hold down the command key right now when I let go and then it's not going to use the review mode. Instead it's going right away, start going in and doing generative fill and holding on the command key is the same as a control key in windows. But look at that, that is pretty sophisticated retouching. Remember you got three variations, there's a second one which does not look good and a third one which also doesn't look good. So I'm thinking the first one, you can also get it to generate additional versions by hitting the refresh button and then it'll have three brand new versions and you can cycle through them. And I'm thinking maybe that first one, then you might be wondering what this means object to wear. Well, that works in two different ways. If I come out here, let's say I wanted to move the board that's here. Well, I could just draw around the edges of it and if it can recognize a shape that that's kind of defining it will fill in the middle for you. Uh But sometimes you'll get this. Let me try it one more time. Maybe I'll use a larger brush. There we go. You see how it decided there's an object in there. And so we're gonna fill the whole thing in. Uh, I'll choose undo because that's not really what I wanted to do. But then the other way this can work is you can completely cover an object and just be sloppy about it. Like, if I try to do his hand, I might be able to do a big paint like that. And do you see how it kind of got smaller and around his arm? But still, I'd have to take away from it because it is going across a good amount of his leg. But that's what object to wear does for me. Personally, I don't use that much at all because I like to really control what it's thinking about and too often it decides wrong and therefore I have to redo it anyway. And then it didn't save me any time. So the generative A I feature is amazing. The only problem with it is it takes time and therefore I only turn it on when I run into a challenging situation. So I might end up using it without that turned on first. And then if it messes up, I don't necessarily have to repaint over the area. You can turn on generative A I after it fails uh giving you a acceptable result when you didn't have it turned up. So let's click done. And now let's head into Photoshop first here in Photoshop. We have many of the same tools that we had in camera right over here is the clone tool, it's actually known as the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. And at the top right up in this area, you could choose how large of a brush and how soft the edge is. But the difference is that unlike in Cameron, where when I painted over something, it automatically figured out where within the surroundings to copy from. This tool does not automatically figure out where it should copy from. Instead, you need to uh choose where you want to copy from. So what you end up doing is you hold down the option key and let's say I wanted to get rid of these flowers and I wanted to copy from over here in order to cover them up while you hold down the option key, which I have down right now, Alton Windows and you click to define where you'd like to copy from. Then you move over to where you want to actually apply it and you see a preview in your brush, you click and then when you're dragging around to cover something up, the cross hair indicates what you're copying from and the circle is where it's being applied. And so any time you want to change to copy from a different spot, like to get rid of this little stuff I might copy from over here. So I option click or maybe over here and then I could come over here and attempt to retouch that out. But remember when you're using the tool that is known as the clone tool or clone stamp, it's not gonna do anything to try to blend into the surroundings in brightness or color. So I can see this little area I put in. It's a little darker than it should have been. I'll end up choosing undo and most of the time that's the tool that I want to use the least. Instead up here, we have a tool called the healing brush tool, which acts just like the one that we had when we were in uh camera raw. And with that, just like with the clone tool here in Photoshop, you have to tell it where to copy from and you do that by holding down the option key and clicking and it doesn't matter if I copy from an area over here that is brighter than the area where I plan on applying it because the helium brush will adjust what it puts in there to ensure it matches the brightness and the color of what's there. And therefore it doesn't even have to be the right color. I could come down here to this area of the brick. I'm not saying you should, but I'm just demonstrating that it's possible and I'll option click there and I'm gonna use it up here. And when I do, you'll see it's not the color of the brick that gets put in and I still retouched out an area. Look, I'll choose undo, there's what used to be there. There's what's there. Now, what it's doing is copying the texture from here and then it's figuring out the color and the brightness from whatever surrounding the area that we applied it in. Well, that doesn't mean you can copy from anywhere if I were to copy from here by option clicking and then let's use that over here. It's gonna look completely wrong because it's gonna grab the variation and brightness that's here and use it over here. So you have to be careful. But those two tools are what I used to have to use a lot of when working in Photoshop. And I just showed you them here because they work a lot like what you just saw in camera raw. But now we have much more sophisticated tools, especially this one called the remove tool. And it's supposed to work like the one that's also in camera raw. That's the one where I was able to clone right up against in a little bit over an object and it kept the edge of that object to be nice and continuous. And with this, you don't have to tell it where to copy from. So let's see what we could do. I'm gonna zoom up here where this window is and um there's a bag here that I don't want. So I'm just gonna click on it like this and I'm gonna paint over it and just let go and it's gonna figure out how to get rid of it. It noticed that there was a straight line and it thought that straight line should be continuous. It also saw that straight line and did the same. I do see one area I don't like, which is right about there. And so I'll just click on it again. Then here I don't like these bags. So I'm just going to click and make sure that I cover the entirety of the bags and it's ok if I overlap some of those surrounding areas and when I let go, it will figure out that this was a continuous line. And so it'll keep it that way and the arm it didn't do as perfect of a job on. But oftentimes, all I need to do is get a slightly smaller brush and just try it again and it will usually smooth it out. I see something in the background I don't like there, so I'll get rid of it. Uh I would like to get rid of these little, I think they're broom handles or something. So I'll just paint over them. You just gotta make sure you cover the entirety of them. Otherwise it will think that whatever is left behind, even if it's a little sliver of the original, that's whatever it puts in needs to look like it belongs with that and that can mess it up. So I'm gonna make sure I cover all of that and let go. And then just here on the tip of these, I might need to fine tune it and on occasion it'll mess up. I pretty much give it three strikes, three tries to, uh, fix something. And if it messes up all three times, then I switch to a different tool where I might need to do more of the work. I see a little orange thing in the background that I dislike. So I'll get a slightly smaller brush because I don't want to get too much overlay and I can go all the way across all of these leaves and let go. And it's able to figure out within there, what was, uh what was the object that was contained or covered by that? And it looks at the surroundings to figure out what should be continuous and it tries to uh fix those. I think it's absolutely amazing. Uh Let's try some other areas. Do you see all these little lines that are going around? All the wires? Well, I wanna get rid of some of them. So I just come over here and if I want to get rid of this one, I just need to make sure I don't leave any of it left behind and I can paint all the way across like that. Let go. And this is one issue if you use this tool. If you remember there was a choice when we were in camera where it could detect objects. Well, this does the same thing, but it's an option that you can't turn off and it just tried to detect an object and like make a, a shape. I'm gonna choose undo and all that means is instead of going through all of this, I'm gonna do it in sections. I'm gonna do just this section right here where I don't start making an enclosed shape. I'm gonna then do this part right here and that should work. It's when you end up curving around that sometimes it will try to complete and encircle the area that you are working on and uh it can be an issue. They're trying to make it. So it's being helpful in those cases. I just wish it was something I could disable. Uh Here, we got another line. Let's just clean up some parts of this. I'm gonna go relatively quick here. Notice I went over those and it noticed that the lines were here, the lines were there so they should be continuous up here. We got something that looks kind of like a ladder. So if I get rid of this, yes, it should be smart enough to recognize all those straight lines and that those should remain continuous. And so when I do that, you see that it did a pretty darn good job. I bet you I can get it to mess up though. Let's try to get rid of this. Line here and hopefully in doing so it's going to mess up so I can show you how to fix it. But the main fix is simply painting over the area again. And when you paint over it a second time it knows that, uh, it should retry just like it did on the person's arm. Yep. They're, it messed up. So I just paint like this paint like that and maybe get rid of that. This looks like it's got a little droop to it. So I'll just try it and you can see how it's very good at recognizing straight lines and angled lines and even some curved lines and, uh, trying to fix those. And so it, this makes retouching so much easier than in the past that it's almost absurd. I mean, the number of hours that this saves me and the number of projects I'm able to tackle, uh, because I can now have a sophisticated tool that does not take a lot of time is kind of crazy. Now, I can guarantee you it will mess up on certain areas. Now, you might think it would mess up here if I try to get rid of that yellow sack that's inside of this basket. But I noticed that the basket is a pattern of a bunch of straight lines and it's pretty darn good maintaining straight lines. So I'm just gonna make sure I don't paint too far beyond that yellow bag that's inside of there and I'm just gonna make sure I cover the entirety of the middle and it's not perfect. So I'm gonna try a second time like that and see if it can kind of fix some of those straight lines. If it ever doesn't, then just type command Z to undo and possibly try a different or a smaller area. But considering what it is, we've retouched out, it's almost acceptable in there, even though it's not quite, I might need a slightly smaller brush and go across here to see if it can create a line there and it did so still not perfect. It all depends on your quality standards in that particular area. Uh Here, we're going across natural elements. So let's give that a try. Now, when I've been using this so far, I've had a check box turned on up here at the top called remove. After each stroke, you can turn that off. And if you do, then you can click and paint a little ways like this, let go and then paint somewhere else, let go. And the other thing you can do is click in one spot like that. And if you have a straight line, hold down, shift and click to create a straight line. And that's the same thing as when you're using normal painting tools, but it only works when you have that check box turned off. Then when you have the entirety of what you want to remove uh highlighted, press the return or enter key or you can hit the little check box that was up here and it actually performs the retouching. Now with this, I've been doing this directly on the image itself and I wouldn't usually do it that way. I would usually instead I create a brand new empty layer. So down here at the bottom of the layers panel, usually I could click on the new layer icon and I'm not sure why I couldn't a moment ago, but I clicked on this layer now it is available. Um Then if you're gonna work on an empty layer, you need to go to each and every one of your retouching tools and look up here in the options bar, some of them will have a pop up menu. It'll always be labeled sample. And if it's set to current layer, you need to set it to currents and below in order to be able to work on an empty layer and have it still know what the image underneath looks like. So I'm gonna do that here with my clone stamp tool. I'm also gonna come up here to that tool we were just using and turn on sample all lay. You're either gonna find it as a pop up menu or a check box like that. I'm gonna switch to the other retouching tools like the spot healing brush, turn on sample all layers. I'm gonna go down here to the healing brush you gonna turn on right here. Current and below. It's either a check box or a pop up menu depending on the tool. And the patch tool is a retouching tool, but it doesn't offer that choice. And that's why I actually rarely use the patch tool. But now I could get any of my retouching tools to work on that empty layer. Now, you might think that this tool is so amazing. It can just do anything. Well, not necessarily, if I attempt to get rid of this plant, it might not be able to figure out all these angles of the bicycle spokes. I doubt it can. Uh And so I can attempt to do it and I don't have remove after each stroke turned on. So I have to hit return and I'll turn that back on so I can do it after each stroke. It seems to me like it just removed a lot of spokes and that means also trying to get rid of this black bag that is over here. You can probably do it right over there. But doing it in between those folks, I don't think is going to be a possibility because that's just a lot of uh lines that need to be absolutely the right angle and continuous. Let's see if it can do that. Uh It didn't do a great job because I think it should look more like this coming over. Uh You can always like I do give it three strikes until it's out, meaning give it three tries and only after it fails on all three tries, might I come in and say we need to use something else? So I choose undo here and what I might do in that case is clone. Sometimes you do need to use the more basic tools. So here I'm gonna use clone. I'm gonna copy from what's right over here by option clicking on it. And I'm gonna come over here to use it. I'm gonna think about where would that be if it were to continuously come over to here. And oftentimes what I do is use a large brush just so I can see where it would be and I get it positioned where I think it needs to be, let's say right about there I click and then I choose undo. So I'll type command Z because I didn't want that big of a brush. I wanted to have a small one so I can get into the nooks and crannies that are there and I'll get a smaller brush then and I can now apply it in here and I'm gonna click maybe about here and I'm gonna get a straight line by holding shift and maybe click up. Let's get a slightly smaller brush. Now, the straight lines have to be the same size of a brush. So I have to uh go back up and do that over again. And I'll see about painting right up against there to try to get it. I also, I could come up like this and I'm gonna overlap the tire and then I can just grab the eraser tool that's over here on the left and then erase the overlap. And that's one reason why I wanted to have that on its own layer so that if I erase, there's something underneath to show up, so I'll just erase that and I'll go back to my clone stamp and I'll just continue and see if I might be able to retouch some of that out. But in this case, I'm not gonna be able to really tackle the uh area in between the spokes. So I don't know that this is worth it. And what I would do is a minimal area here and then I would switch right back to the remove tool and say, hey, you fix this part, that's like a difficult part. So you do it, you figure out how that's supposed to blend in and I might come in here and right here, I can see a repeat of this. I can see it over there. Oops, I didn't mean to click there and I would just use another tool to go right over it so that it uh changes the contents like right there and maybe even right there because I could see that over here. But I'm thinking that's looking pretty good now, when it comes to this. We would have to use something much more sophisticated to fix it. Let's take a look. Do you remember when we were in camera? There was a check box we could turn on that would use generative A I. Well, we have something similar here in Photoshop that actually can do even a better job sometimes than what uh Adobe camera raw could do. All you need to do is grab a selection tool. I got my lasso tool active here and cycle around selecting all of what you want to remove. Make sure you do not include uh or do not exclude any part of it, including its shadow. And I'm just gonna come in about like this and then I'll hold shift to add some more and I have to add this little part of the bag on the other side of the uh what would you call that? The kickstand? And just to ensure that there's no little hint I might add just a tiny bit more. I'm just holding down the shift key as I make additional uh selections. And I'm just glancing around right there. I'm not sure if I got it all. So I hold shift, make sure I got that. Then once I have a selection I'm gonna go to the edit menu and I'll find generative fill and when I choose generative fill, it'll ask me a question, which is what do you want in there? And I'm gonna leave it empty. We'll talk about what you could type in there later on when we're not doing retouching. So I'll hit generate and let's see if it can tackle this. If you look at the bike spokes, they're not perfect, but they're close. Any time you use generative fill, you get three variations, you'll find the three on the right side of your screen in this area called properties. Let's click between them. Here's the second one and here's the third one. And I'm thinking that second one, a lot of those spokes are remaining pretty nice and straight. And so what I might do there is say that that's good enough to start with that got me started. Then I would create a new layer on top of it and then I might switch back to the remove tool and it's very good at making lines continuous. So I could say, well, let's come in here and see if it can figure out that there were supposed to be some straight lines in there. Maybe give it a second chance there. Mm Come on. I'm surprised it's actually not con connect maybe four chances until it connects. My guess is it's because those angles don't truly match up. And so it's not doing it, but there might be an area here that I don't want. So I'm gonna paint over it and this doesn't look like it's straight and it should be choose undo if I don't like it that should give it one more try. This line should be a little more solid coming through here. Let's see if it can figure that out and going any further than this. We would start having to use advanced techniques. We're gonna have this whole separate section on advanced retouching and I could, for instance, copy from this spoke that's here, have it rotated in order to apply it in here and that kind of stuff you'll learn in the advanced session. Let's head to a different picture that's got some telephone lines and figure out what we can do there. Well, if we're using our remove tool, then we probably want to turn off the remove after each stroke check box because only when it's turned off, can I come in here and end up clicking in one spot, holding down, shift and clicking on another to make straight lines and that's gonna make it. So it's much faster to come in here and hover and, and cover up these areas. I'm gonna then come up here and work on the power lines, holding shift, clicking. When I get to the building itself, I'm gonna skip it for now because I want to use a smaller brush because I don't want it to be able to work on such a large area where I don't need it to. But here for the telephone lines themselves, I can use a bigger brush and cover those up and then we'll just come back with a smaller one to cover the areas where it needs to be more precise. So I might fast forward to the point where I have all these covered up. And at this stage, I'm gonna zoom up and where these lines cross fine detail that needs absolutely precise retouching. I'm gonna get the smallest size brush possible and get into those areas and only cover up where it truly needs work. Like right there, it doesn't need to change anything, maybe do there into there. Same thing down here. And I think there were a few lines here that were just really close to the building and I didn't want to get overspray onto the building. Although if you get some over spray, it's fine because this can do straight lines and keep them continuous. I wanna get rid of that whole pole that's there. But I do want to make sure that I get all the way across those like here and here. I'm gonna call it good enough for now. And now let's apply our retouching this time. I'll hit the check box at the top which is the same as pressing return and that used to take a lot more time. Uh In this case, I did decide to retouch out a good portion of the pole that's here in the end. I would retouch out the entire pole, but now let's go in and you have to be critical of the areas that we ended up painting with really small brushes on. So I'm gonna zoom up and just look at this to see if it did. OK? I might choose undo and then redo, redo is up here. It's shift command. The uh so that I can remember where the retouch was. OK. I can see right there the letters o is broken and I'm gonna see if there's any other. Yeah, down here the O gets distorted. So with this, I'll just try that again, I'll just see, can it figure out that there's a curve there? Although I wanna turn on that remove after each stroke in this case because otherwise I have to press return every time and I'm just gonna try to give it little spots to correct to see if it can figure out what those shapes are supposed to be. And if it's not perfect, I would use one of the other tools such as the clone stamp tool and to fix this letter O, I might copy from this letter O down below. And therefore I could option click here to say that's where I want to copy from. And I could come up here and make it sure it lines up and retouch that out. I can do more on here. Uh All those tlee lines, they cast shadows onto the building. And so I could use the same tool that might turn off the remove after each stroke option and then I could come up here and see if I can get it to remove these. And I've done this in the past before this tool was available and it was not fun to come in and remove all of these shadows. But since there are a lot of straight lines, I would guess that this might do, ok. I just want to make sure that I don't use too large of a brush where it's not necessary and I'll just do those areas for now in press return to see if you can deal with them. I'll turn off the remove or turn on the remove after each stroke after that and touch up anything that did not quite look, right? Just by giving it a second chance. I think those are some of the lines that were there previously that I just didn't paint far enough across. Let's see if we can figure out that the top of these should be curved. Yeah. And I can attempt the same thing over here where we have a shadow going across all this tile work. Although I'm assuming it might mess up on those because it just needs to be so exact. But it, it's crazy how much this can do things that before it would take me hours. I think that's enough on this image. I'm not trying to finish it. This image was taken back in 2009. I always liked that. I'm sitting here standing next to this huge bell, but I never liked that. There were always these tourists in there and I had tried to retouch them before and simply failed because getting it so the grout lines would be perfect here and everything else, uh, just took too much time. But now that type of thing is easy. I'm just trying to get it to mess up somewhere so I can show you other fixes. But sometimes it's difficult here. I might have finally found an area where it's gonna mess up because it's just really hard to figure out what should be here. If you're a human, you know exactly what this shape should look like just from looking at it. But for the computer that's gonna be difficult. So let me try this and this is where I assume it's gonna mess up and not be able to reproduce the shape of the column that's there. And if so I will show you how to influence the way it analyzes that image so that it might be able to do a lot more of the work. But first we just need to try it. Yeah, that looks terrible. So let's choose undo. And finally we have a version where I need to do some work. And when I need to do some work, oftentimes it has to do with using the most basic of tools which would be the clone stamp in this particular case. And here I can see where this colored area of the wall should end. Do you see this little line down here at the bottom? And I just need to extend that over here and then define what the shape of that column should look like. So here's what I'm gonna do. Uh I'm going to copy from up here using the clone stamp tool. So that means I'm gonna hold down the option key and click right here. Then I'm gonna put a gap between the column that's there and what I'm attempting to retouch out so that it knows what should go in there. And so I'm gonna run out of space here when this comes down and gets a little too low, that's part of her elbow that's being copied in. But I'm gonna try to put as much of that as I can in there. Uh Then right here, I need to define that shape and I just need to find some appropriate material to put in there. Well, if this wall extends down this far, then just think about it would extend over to about here. So I need to put in something similar in color all the way down to here. So I'm just gonna copy up here again, option click. Uh And I'm gonna draw in there by hand, the edge of that column like that. Uh And I just, these two little spots I messed up. I'm gonna fix that was where I came down here and I touched her elbow from where I was copying from and right there. So now it sees what color should be all the way down. I might put just a slightly larger gap in there. Uh Right here, it sees the shape that that column is supposed to be. And now I need to define the shape down here and use some appropriate info. I'm just gonna copy from over here. I'll option click right about here and then I'm going to put in the shape of the bottom of that column, at least how I interpret it about like that. So now we have that wall ending, we have the right color of stuff down here. And then let's see if that's enough to get it to start acting correctly. I'll go back to the move tool and I might uh just come in here and try to remove this upper portion and I'm gonna just paint into that gap without actually touching the column. And therefore it's forced to use the information that I put in there uh in there. And I'm just gonna get minimal overlap onto the belt itself, do something like that. Uh I should get down into this bottom part. So it thinks of it as one continuous image and try to do something about like that similar to what I had before the main uh issue. There is gonna be the shadows that they're casting, but I'm only coming in here and I'm stopping just short of that information that I put in. I'm gonna do something like that and now let's see if it does any better. Yeah. Do you see how it kept that shape? Except for right here. Well, I can attempt to either do that part myself by drawing that shape again or just give it a second chance and just say, hey, go in there and it's not doing a good job, see if I can get it to break apart and I can't. So again, I go back to my clone stamp, I copy from up here and I define that shape and I can come up to the edge of that bell. And if it doesn't precisely match, I just go back to the remove tool and now have it touch those areas up. If this isn't continuous, I can try to go right over like this and see if it can figure it out. And I'm gonna call that good enough. I mainly wanted to find an area where it would mess up. So I had to show you how you could influence it. And the way you influence it is by putting a gap between the object it's messing up on and what you want to remove and just making sure what you have in that gap is the proper brightness, the pro color and hopefully the proper texture in there so that when you end up cloning up against that or using the remove tool up against it that uh it doesn't actually touch the column. Now, here I might touch up the edge of that column transition as well. Well, now you should have a pretty good sense for how powerful the retouching capabilities are within Photoshop. But we will have a second lesson that will be on advanced retouching. Because what if you have, let's say a shirt like the shirt I'm wearing and there's a stain on my shirt and I need to keep the pattern of my shirt intact, but I need to retouch out the stain. Well, to do that, we're gonna have to do something pretty fancy. And so that's why we're gonna be having a second session that's for advanced retouching.