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Scenic Retouching Session

Lesson 49 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

Scenic Retouching Session

Lesson 49 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

49. Scenic Retouching Session

In this section, we walk through all the steps of basic scenic photography retouching. We'll correct exposure and tonal issues, apply filters, and color.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

Scenic Retouching Session

let's take our tools and apply what we've learned to a scenic photograph. And so what we're gonna do is go into Photoshop and once again we're gonna go through our similar workflow. So we're gonna open a new file and so I'm gonna go to my desktop here and then we're gonna go to um this last thing here called Nepal dot DMG. So make sure you open Nepal dot DMG and I'm gonna open that file. Okay, right off the bat we have an image that looks like it's something you would throw in the trash. But this is the joy of adobe camera raw and shooting with raw files. I mentioned before that if you have an image resolution, that's how large the images, how the distribution of pixels are. But the other thing that's really important is the bit depth, how much color information is in an image. And then also there's something depending on your camera, you have more dynamic range, you can store more information if you shoot raw, all of that information is saved. And so this image right here is an image ...

that I shot in Nepal and you're gonna be shocked at all of the information we can extract right now the sky looks sort of OK, we need to bring out the foreground because you can't even see it. It's so underexposed and then we need to be making some changes here to make this look like something you would want to show people. So the very first thing we need to do is we need to fix the exposures, we need to fix the tonal values to this so we're gonna do a global change to get it as close as we can and then we're gonna do local changes to get everything exactly the way we want them to. So watch what happens. What we're going to do here is we're gonna take our exposure value and we don't want to overexpose anything. So I'm gonna click this little right um a little triangle up here, we already know that right here where the sun is setting. There is no image data. We're never going to get image data, no matter what we do because it was just over exposed in the camera. So there's no data there. So we're not even gonna worry about that. But we are going to do is we're going to take this exposure as far to the right as we can. There we go, something about like that. Okay, so we're gonna go up about two and a quarter stops. Okay, I'm gonna turn off this little thing now, our sky is way too bright in our foreground. We're starting to see stuff there, there are houses and green stuff. So let's go in here. These are now in the shadows, let's increase our shadows. Holy smokes look at that, we actually have an image there. This is something that most likely you would absolutely not be able to do in a jpeg image, but in a raw file, you've got all that data and you can pull that out. Okay, what we need to do is we need to start fixing some of these things so the highlights there too bright. So let's try to bring those down a little bit. Now the sky is coming back that looks cool, The shadows are coming out, we want more contrast. So let's take our blacks and let's move those down just a little bit and then we'll take our whites and go to the right, just a little bit. Okay, our color temperature. Let's warm this up just a little bit. We want gold in the sky, something like that. We also want to take our clarity slider and increase the clarity just a bit. So we can see some more of the details of this foreground here. And then we also need to sharpen up this image. So I'm gonna go at 100 and it goes down here and we can see that this looks pretty good, but we can go in here to detail And then we have our sharpening is at 36, let's take that way up something about 80. So we're looking at this and now that's really popping. So if I turn that off and turn it on, you can see those details really coming out and let's go back. So we see the entire image. So this we've just done some basic corrections here right off the bat. So we can click this down here to see the before image and the after image, they look like two different pictures but it's the same thing. So what we need to do now is we start we need to start making local adjustments. We have the entire image sort of at a good starting point but we need to sort of fix some things. We need that sunset to be a little bit more dramatic. We need the clouds to be a little bit clearer. You need to bring the balance from the foreground to the background back into balance because right now it's too bright in the sun and not bright enough down here in the foreground. Okay so we've done all we need to do in our basic edit. Let's go in and fix up some things here, we can see that. We have some sensor dust on the clouds, we don't want to see that. So let's go down here to our healing Area. So we're gonna use our healing brush. I'm going to get a little bit larger brush by hitting the right bracket and bringing that size up to about 10 and I'm just gonna start clicking in here using my hand to pan around. There's another little dust spot here, There's one right here. I'm just finding these as I'm zipping around looking for them in the gray. I think we got them. Let's see if we can visualize the spots. Ah there's one right there. Did I get that one yet, nope, Let's get that visualize spots again, just so we can see this a little bit more clearly looks like there's something over here, yep. There it is this visualize spots thing. It's really useful to just see things that are sort of invisible until it shows you they're there. They're like, oh yeah, how did I miss that? So use visualized spots? I think that's pretty good. I'm gonna go back and fit this whole image in and then I'm going to go back to my basic edit. Okay, we've cleaned that up. Now, we need to take this sky and we need to make the sky a little bit more dramatic, a little bit more orange and change the exposure of that. So what should we use? Well, it's a big area of the image. You can almost take a straight line and cut that in half. So that is a good candidate for this guy, The graduated filter. So I'm gonna reset all of the edits and then just so I can see what I'm doing. I'm gonna take this exposure down by two stops and I'm going to click and drag drag that around something like that, move that up, just a hair. Okay, now what we can do is we can start working on this sky. So the sky, I'm going to make the exposure down to about Yeah, negative for ish something like that. I'm going to take the whites up to make that much more dramatic, Take the blacks down. So that's really making that a lot more dramatic. I'm gonna keep going there, look at that that we've got jesus beams coming out. Take the temperature a little bit more. Something like that. Oh, it's a little bit too orange. Okay, so we've got some highlights. I'm gonna bring us down just a hair. Okay. And then I can play with this huge. I think it's a good right where it is, but that's two oranges to yellow. Take that back to zero. We don't want to do something that's so nasty. We can take our saturation down just a bit if that is just a little bit too much or up, depending on how you want this sunset to show up. So I like that. So it's pretty good. Okay, I'm gonna move this down maybe just a little bit. And one of the things that we have here is we have these trees in this house that are being affected by this graduated filter. We can turn on our mask to see where that is. So let's paint out some of these edits using the eraser tool. I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna erase these from this tree. I don't want that. And again, see why the tablet is so good to be able to paint things. We want to paint this off this little house here, take that away. You don't want that and then maybe we can just sort of follow the ridge line here. So we are determining exactly where this is happening. I'm just gonna paint these edits off these mountains right here. Okay, so it's sort of like, we have created a and edit using a big brush, but using the graduated filter, we were able to do all of that all at once, just when one fail swoop. Okay, turning that off to turn off the overlay. That looks pretty darn good. Okay, let's go back to our basic edits and see if there's anything that we need to do here. Let's take our texture up. Just a hair that looks pretty good and I like that. And so you can play with this and see where your, you know what works best for you. But let's just take a look at where we started that and then where we ended up, which is that and we can play with all kinds of things here. Maybe we can make the temperature a little bit more blue. I sort of like that or a little bit more amber orange, whatever. It's a scenic photo. You can interpret it any way you want once that's done. We can open that in Photoshop now for this. We don't need to do any skin retouching. We don't need to do any of those types of things. Maybe if I wanted to, I could come in here and paint on some details. But for me, I like this scenic photo and it has turned out the way that I want. I think it is done Okay. Well I've included in the class materials, all of these files that you can go in and do some retouching. There's a beach. I'm seeing that you can do some portrait or some scenic retouching and practice your skills and do that. You can practice on all of the different portraits that we've included there. We've got the advanced compositing that you can do to try to put those models together in those chairs that we included. The point is now that you know, all of these different tools and all the different principles and ways that you can use Photoshop. The way you use Photoshop is up to you. What you need to do now is take the things that you've learned. Take these class materials and practice practice practice, explore the interface, make the workflow your own. And in the end of the day you will be proficient in Photoshop and your lower your weight around. Thank you so much for joining me for Photoshop for beginners. I've had a blast teaching this. I've hope you've had a blast following along putting up with my wackiness and seeing all the things that we've been doing. But I hope that you've been learning as you've been laughing. It's been highly rewarding for me and I hope it's been highly rewarding for you. Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you in my next creative live class.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workbook
Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

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