Lessons

Lesson Info

Adobe Camera Raw Effects

Just so you have some idea of what we're going to be covering today, we're going to start off with a session about what I'm just calling photo stylings, which is just waste techniques and photo shop to make your image of a different personality to it. After that, we're going to talk about adding textures and borders here image if you wanted to look a little bit more painterly or just have some sort of texture to it, then we're going to pop into showing you how to kind of convert a photograph into what looks like a painting, and we'll do that in a couple different ways will do it. Where if you really don't feel like painting, you know where you actually have to manually put in the paint strokes, you'll see how we get photoshopped, do it for us, and then I'll show you another technique where you can actually put in the paint strokes yourself. Even if you could only draw a stick figure you can still turn a picture into a painting, I'll prove that cause aiken, you know, not draw worth anyt...

hing. Um, but there were going to be coming some of the basics of doing that tomorrow we'll get into mohr of literal painting, where we grabbed the brushes and look at all the settings are involved. And what's cool about that is you might when you're using the brushes have to paint in each stroke, but that doesn't mean that we can't have a guide of a photograph that is just partially showing up and we can get the tools to grab colors right out of the photo that's underneath so that sure you might need to put down paint, strokes and things, but you don't need to unless unless you can't trace something you don't need to be able to be overly artistic, you know that kind of stuff and if you are artistic great, you can take it much further and I will because one of the reasons why I mainly use a camera to capture images instead of a paintbrush yes, I'm not very good at drawing, so you'll see that but anyway other than that, we're also going to cover type effects using this shape tool in photo shop using something called layer styles and tomorrow we'll cover a little bit about using filters and a little bit about three tias well, so the three d part, though, won't be like everything that's existing it's more or less for people that don't already incorporated in the workflow if you don't want to get deep into three d but you still would like some dimension to your image, you'll see how I go about doing that and so that's kind of what we're heading into so I just want to dive in and get started I'm going to start off with photo stylings and the first place we're goingto start would be in adobe camera raw because there's some features in there that I use one thing that's really nice about camera is you can actually just more than one picture at a time so that if I have a large group of images and I need to very quickly give them a certain visual look, I could simply select a folder of let's say forty images and in bridge if I go up to the file menu there's a choice called opening camera it would open all the images and if I want to change all the images at once there's a button on the upper left called select all as long as they click that before I make an adjustment, any change or make could affect all the images at the same time and so that's unique whereas otherwise and photoshopped you have to learn about actions in other automation related things to get things to very quickly apply to other images so let's take a look I'm going to start off in bridge and just say no any thing I ever do in bridge if you happen to own light room instead adobe light room uh, anything I do in bridge or in camera could instead be done in light room it's just this is photoshopped mastery I know everyone that's watching should have access to photoshopped in bridge comes with photoshopped light room is a separate purchase and it's something that could replace bridge and camera and it's what I use on a daily basis for my images and so I have it largely replaced bridge in cameron with light room so anything you see me do here you candace well do in light room and I'll try to if there's any big differences try to mention where those would happen so I'm just going to start with an image this is a raw file and with the raw file if you double click on it it's gonna automatically send you in the camera you can't apply camera onto a j peg file or a tiff file is well, but if you just double click on a j peg or a tiff, you're not gonna automatically going to came a raw so instead you'd have to go to the file menu and there's a choice called opening camera. The main limitation is camera doesn't like files that have layers so you have a tiff file with some layers you might find this command grayed out uh but if it's a raw file just double click on it, it'll send you straight into camera now in here if we're talking about creative effects that means I'm not going to do as much of the normal adjustment sure I could come in here maybe darken my highlights a little bit maybe bring up my shadows to brighten them up at a little contrast you know the normal adjustments but once I'm done with that kind of stuff and I want to get a little bit of a different look let's take a look at some features you might not used to be using if I want kind of an antique look to the image one of the things I occasionally do is first make it so the color within the image is not perfect because usually antique e photos the colors are starting to shift in them and so I might go over here to my white balance setting and I'm going to shift temperature over towards the right and maybe tent over towards the right to give this a little bit of a yellowish ah kind of purplish look just so it doesn't look pristinely perfect color wise but if I really want to do a lot more with the color what I'm gonna do is up here at the top in camera cross here you going to find a bunch of tabs in one of those tabs he is known as camera calibration I'm gonna click on that and in here we can really shift the colors around in ways that are a little unique there's a slider at the top called shadows this isn't affect the darkest areas of your picture there are certain cameras on the market where they have a tendency of making the darkest part of your image slightly purplish and you could shift this towards green to prevent that from happening. Well, I don't have one of those cameras, but I can use this slider to push a color into my shadows because if I wanted to look like an old kind of antique e image that's maybe been faded over time, well the color is going to shift in this way I could force the color into the darkest portion of the image and I might try to push it over there towards purple. Behind the scenes, your picture is made out of three colors red, green and blue. Every picture you work on in photo shop in general is made out of red, green and blue and down here we can tell it what color of red, green and blue it's made out of and by shifting these sliders around, we can really change the visual look of the image quite a bit that colors. And so I'm just going to experiment with movies around trying to get them to give me a look that just feels like an old faded photo a lot more than the original did come here to start with I'm just using the huse slaughters, which is changing the basic colors that this image is made of behind the scenes there's also a saturation slaughter so if you want to emphasize the red in the image you could bring up the saturation in the red is going to be more prominent. You could do the same for green or bring it down, and so experimenting with this can give you a little different look and just remember that your image is a hole. If after playing with this it's too colorful or not colorful enough, you can go back to the general tab that tab on the very far left section known as the basic tab, and in here you'll have vibrance and saturation, both of which will make your image look more colorful if you move it towards the right, less colorful if you move it towards the left. So if when I'm done it's a little too colorful, I could bring that down. Other things that I do in came a raw is first off after I'm done doing something like camera calibration and messing with this to try to give it a little bit of a ve into field color wise instead of having to play with this every single time I want that kind of a look. What I'll end up doing is on those tabs there's a tab here just to the right of the calibration tab called presets, and I'll simply save a preset for this by clicking on the process tab and then at the bottom of the list they'll be a little icon looks like a sheet of paper where the corner turned up and if I click on that I can create a brand new preset and then it asked which settings where I like to save and I only want to save those settings that are really making this feel like it's kind of a vintage look and so I could go over here and manually turn off a lot of these check boxes to just get down to the calibration kind of stuff or I can click on this pop up menu here and there's a choice called camera calibration in all this pop up menu does a safe time it turns off a bunch of check boxes for you so if I choose that it just turned off everything except for camera calibration just little shortcut and so I could do that or if I wanted my white balance to be included as well which would shift the color towards that yellow ish kind of purplish shade in that way by saving on lee those studies the white balance and the camera calibration than any other settings that were already applied to the image or not thrown away so if I optimized the image to start with I'm not going to trash that optimization I'm only going to be changing white balance and camera calibration so click okay and now, at the bottom, actually, the top of my presets list, I should have my new preset sitting there, and if I do this to make about five or six different images, really playing around with those settings to get quite different looks in each time I save a preset, then in the future, whenever I want that kind of a look, I don't have to sit there and spend the time to play with sliders. I just go straight for presets, and I click in the name of the pre set let's look at a few other things I might do because I have a little bit of a vintage feel in the other towns that are under here. One of them is f x, and fx is where I have two things. One is grain, and the other is post crop vignette ing there's two places where you're going to find vignette ing that word, and one is underneath the tab that is right here, which is the lens corrections tab. I would not suggest that you use that one that one's designed for compensating for problems that your lens introduced and the problem with that setting forgiven it something a vintage feel is that it always darkens the edges of your picture based on the original framing the of the photo. If you ever crop your image, it ignores the cropping that you've applied and it darkens the edge of your picture from the original framing. This one is called post crop than getting so that means it's going to darken the edges of your picture, but it's going to do it after it's been cropped. And if you go in and crop the image some or the darkening of the edges will move so it's still aligns with your new cropping and so that's much better for a vintage feel. So in here I'm going to just bring the amount down and that's gonna darken the edges of my picture goes far as you want. Then midpoint is going to control how far that goes in towards the middle of the picture should it be limited so that it's on ly at the very, very edge is or should have poet and go really towards the middle of the photo what I would usually dio is create presets again I would create a preset just for vignette ng and I might make about five different versions one that would be a partial vin yet which means the only comes in part way one that would be a full vignette, which means it comes all the way to the middle, and then I would have probably three versions of each one would be light, medium and heavy you know, for a partial been yet in for full vignette, so you actually six presets in that way, you can very quickly click on a pre set to get a starting point and then if you need to find to in the end result, you can always click over to the fx tab and you'll see the settings that were applied. You, khun tweak him just for that image. So other things that are in here, we do have around in a setting, which will control the shape of what's in there. If you really want to get a sense for what a lot of these settings do, just take the setting called feather in, turn it all the way down that makes it much easier to see what you're doing, so if you grab midpoint now and move it, you can more easily see that it's encroaching further in towards the middle of your picture versus being limited out to the edges. And you can see with roundness how it really changes the shape of what's being applied and so it's a little easier to figure out what settings you might want to use for those. And then only after doing that might you want to bring up feather, which is going to soften the edge, and then you could find tune here. Now there are a few different ways of applying this we have a little pop up menu highlight priority color priority in paint overlay highlight priority could be useful if there's any really bright things near the edge of your picture because if they're really bright things near the edge of your picture, this darkening effect will feel like it's just plopped on top and won't feel like it really belongs there if you do have those bright objects setting this toe highlight priority will allow you to bring up a slider that's called highlights and what that will do is allow any really bright things on the edge of your picture to breakthrough that vignette ing that darkening effect. So if I had important bright things on the edge of my photo I could bring that up on this image I do notice it on the right side where there's some like motorhomes and things over there in one of them is white right near the edge of the frame if I bring it down, I see that that is being darkened and if I bring it way up, I see it's dark in the law at les but if you're going for a vintage look it's not going to matter that much because you want it to look ah a little less interesting in those areas if you choose color priority than instead it's going to try to make sure that the fidelity of the color is better in that area because usually when you darkened things they become more saturated and the colors can shift a little bit but by setting it to color priority it's going to try to maintain the integrity of the colors on the edge on that will be more important than maintaining highlights so I might set it to that then of course I will go over to my presets create a brand new pre sat it was given a name and here I'm just going to tell it to go to buy effects got to find it in here post crop than getting in that way I'll have everything else turned off click okay and then all I got to do is switch right back to the letters fx and just make it more aggressive and then pop right back to my presets and save another one and tell it again to do post crap than getting and then just once more to mellow out the amount so it's very little in safe one more pre set I don't want to call it I don't know and that's the amount of time it takes to make three presets I might then make a full one that would go all the way into the middle and therefore any time I would like to apply these, all I need to do is go to my presets and can do do it very quickly other things at work find out who the fx tab is grain and so if I want this look like an old granny photograph, I could come in here and bring my grain amount up, you'll start seeing the grain appearing in the picture, but the grain is usually going to be relatively fine in there if I want to look like an older photograph. Usually the grain on old photos was much larger then it is on modern films, so I could bring the size up to make it more pronounced and the roughness to make it so it's a little more randomized just gonna not make quite a strong but kind of get a grainy old look then of course I gotta presets save it is a pre pre sat and of course, and here tell it just to save the grain in just by doing that. Now, anytime we open a photograph, if you want someone vintage look, all we're going to do is open our image head straight for pre sets were going to come in and choose one of our antique effects and then afterwards come in and maybe even yet it maybe had some grain. We're done, maybe go to the fx having just fine tune it, maybe the grains a little too heavy, so we're going to bring it down to mellow it out kind of thing I'm gonna hit the done button when I hit done it'll attach those settings to my image to the next time I open it, it will remember them and let's look at a few other things we could d'oh I just double click on a different raw file which sent me right back in the camera and this if I remember correctly is an old italian restaurant I don't think it's running anymore and I'm just going to get it to the highlights aren't quite as right as they are in the original maybe bring the whole image down a little get a little shattered detail it's getting somewhere to start now another thing that I do quite often just to get a different look in my image is I will creatively use the hsb sliders to get to the hsb slaughters you go these tabs that air here in the fourth one from the left this one here is the hsb and what I like to do with some images is make certain colors where they're almost black and white and let other colors be more prominent in this particular image. I might want to keep my blue sky but make everything else kind of mellow out so I could come under saturation and bring down my greens if I bring it all the way down, anything that used to be purely green will go black and white but oftentimes you'll find things that you think are green a really dark yellow and so if you're finding that you're not getting exactly what you want you might need to bring down the yellow slider you can also go to loo eminence in luminous well couldn't control the brightness and so if I make the greens and the yellows a little bit darker might look a little more interesting and then I would go to process then I would save this and we just gotta figure out in here what to choose and it would be a chess l adjustments look on ok and now have a preset I'll do the same thing for getting rid of blues if I want a black and white sky I would have one that would just make blues go back black and white and why not do that for each color would only take you about five minutes to go through and move all the sliders and savior presets then at any time you can come in here to your precepts click between them very quickly and add various effects so here I can come in and, uh door vignette strong or partial I can come in and do our antique and after I do antique I could come in and uh uh wherever that no greens went like sure that that's being applied and get quite a different look other things that I do to give a different look is in cameron there's, a special way of applying camera I'll show you in a moment uh, if I want to make the colors look quite different ah here's something I'll end up doing first let me get this image to the way it used to look, I just went to a side menu and chose camera defaults to show you what it would look like with default settings. This picture was taken in the pollution, the place I've been exploring the last short period of time, and usually you have two sliders for controlling how colorful your images you have vibrance and saturation if you bring them towards the right, the image becomes more colorful, bring them towards the left and it becomes less colorful and I find that usually someone will choose one or the other toa work with, but I often work with them in concert you know both of them together. Vibrance controls the mellower colors in your image, the things that are not overly prominent to begin with. And if I bring this up, it's going to make your blue sky usually go darker and more blue in just the areas that don't contain all that much color are going to become much more colorful if, on the other hand, I just saturation it, adjust all colors equally the problem with that is some colors might already be close to their peak the you know, the more colorful they should be and so it's easy to overdo certain colors with that well oftentimes what I'll do when I want a different look is I'll take vibrant and move it all the way in one direction in this case I'm going to max it out then I'm going to take saturation and moving in the opposite direction until the image starts looking okay and that will often give me quite a different look in my picture if you want to see the difference here I'll go to camera defaults here's before here's after so what's happening is some of the prominent colors with the emmett and within the image are billion mellowed out but we're maintaining color in other areas I could do the exact opposite of that I could take vibrance and turn it all the way down and then move saturate asian in the opposite direction and I'm going to get a different look in the image now you'll notice the color in the barn is becoming more prominent things like the sky and that are being secondary they're being reduced but in this particular image I liked it the other way or vibrance was all the way up then you can always go to the hs l sliders look like we have before it just fine tune the individual colors and there's little tip about using the hs l sliders is you notice that before when I was trying to change green things it was actually in the end dark yellow things that I needed to change because when I adjusted the greens I still had a lot left in the image well, there's a tool up here at the top left that we can work on this little guy right here is known as the targeted adjustment tool if I click on that well, I'm in the hse l area of light room where I have the sliders for h s l then I could move my mouse on top of my picture and I can click and if I drag now it's going to figure out which sliders are necessary for targeting the particular color I'm working on and if you look at what photo shop is doing with those sliders it thinks that that area is mohr green then it is yellow but it knows that contains both and so it moves the green slaughter the most and moves the yellow slider a little bit as well to try to really target that particular color so that we can come in here and find tune each area and here you notice it's moving blues as well asac was in order to get to the sky now there's a different way of applying the camera aw uh adjustment he only share what it is if I go and open any image here's a jpeg file just double click on it and adobes come up with some new features and photo shop there's a version the photo shop called photoshopped creative cloud it's really photoshopped cc and that's where now instead of just buying photoshopped outright in buying an upgrade each time they've changed it so that now you subscribe to fetter shop uh by paying a monthly fee and that's how you get the new features these days and with that they've made it so they can introduce new features more frequently instead of having to wait full eighteen months before they come out with a new version they can out upload new features whenever they feel uh it's ready and there's a new feature that's only available in photo shop cc so only if you have a subscription to flutter shop creative cloud can you get to this particular one but I wanted to mention it so usually you get two kamerad by going into bridge choosing whatever image you want if it's a raw file you just double click on it. If it's a j peg or a tiff, you go to the file menu and choose opening camera but now is a new feature in photo shop you can access camera from the filter menu if you go to the filter menu there's a choice called camera filter and that's new so if I choose camera filter pops me right into came a raw. There are certain features that will be disabled in here because there are certain features that on ly work with riel raw files, and so once you have the image open all the way into photo shop it's no longer raphael, even if it started out as a raw file, and so you'll find just a few features that aren't in there. But the vast majority of them are here, including our presets. So if I want to come in here and apply a little antique, look to the image to a partial than yet, uh, and maybe do some grain in here, I can do it with just a couple clicks now, and that could be kind of nice, then I'll come and find tune my effects exciting while was much grain in there and click ok, although it would be a little more ideal to do this a slightly different way, I'm going to choose undue. I'm just going to type command z that'd be controls and windows to undo that what it would be best if I go to the filter menu in first choose convert for smart filters if I do that, then it's going to protect my original image and when I go up here and apply the camera filter in fact, if I choose just the very top filter that's, the last one of applied, uh, I can come in here again and do my antique vignette ing little grain click okay in what's nice is if you converted your image to a smart object, which is what I did when I went to the filter menu, and I chose the choice called convert for smart filters is if you look in your layers panel now instead of it, permanently changing that layer in a way where if I save and closed the image, I can't undo it. Now my camera filter is just kind of attached to that layer in a way where I could turn off its eyeball icon to remove it and see the original picture, I can turn the eyeball icon back on to apply it, and if I want to modify the settings related to it, I just go over here to my layers panel and I double click on the the words camera filter, and it'll send me right back into camera with those settings, and I could modify him in that way. I don't have to, you know, feel too bad about committing to things I could always come in here and say, well, I think my vignette ing needs to be a little stronger in this image and fine tune that and so that's a little bit more ideal way of applying it if you have a j peg or a tiff, you could convert to a smart object then apply as a filtered and it's just on the filter menu case you didn't notice that's only in the c c version of photo shop in on ly if you've updated to the latest version so if you subscribe to adobe creative cloud, a lot of people get confused about how it works these days just because it's called creative cloud doesn't mean you have to be on the internet to use it. It is just like any other version of photo shop you've ever used it gets installed on your hard drive, but now you can go to the help menu and there's a choice of checking for updates or you can go and see if there's any new features available have them installed and if you've done that for your version of photo shop so you have the absolute latest, then you should be able to find the camera filter under the filter menu. If you don't have photoshopped cc, then you won't be able to do it that way you'll have to do it from bridge instead, all right, any questions before we move on? Then when you were choosing multiple presets from camera, were you holding down command to choose multiple already just when I click on one uh, it just applies it, period, and then it, when I click on another, applies that one in is long as one the second priest said, I clicked on did not override the first meaning that remember, when I created it, there's a long list of check boxes of what to include in that pre set. Well, as long as the second preset didn't have the exact same features was the first where override it it it just kind of added him together. It's a ziff I manually move those sliders in camera, and then I just manually move different sliders and camera when I applied the second preset, so no need to hold shift or anything else. And it doesn't in general remember which ones I applied after I click ok on this image, it's not going to remember I applied any one of those pre sets it's on ly going to remember where the sliders were in the end result is if I manually moved them so it sze just a shortcut for manually moving the sliders. It's nothing special, it's not as if there's like a tag on the image that says these this preset is being applied it, so just go ahead and click on which everyone's you want, if you find that it completely removes whatever you applied previously what that means is when that particular preset was created whoever clicked on the icon that creates a preset they left all these check boxes on and that means it applied every single setting to the image and wiped out whatever used to be applied and that's why we we we went in here I isolated it down to just saving things like grain we're just saving camera calibration on ly saving what's essential to that particular effect in that way it doesn't wipe out all the other settings when I applied then would you just click it again if you wanted to d select that preset no uh I would just choose undo type command z controls in windows and to get rid of it it's once you've clicked on it it forgot that you ever clicked on it so there's not like a toggle where you click on it a second time to turn it off s o just choose undo and if you were just playing around you found you really didn't like your end result at all you can go to this little side menu that's right over here on the right side if you click there one of the choices is camera defaults and that means just get me back to the beginning is if I've never adjusted the picture in my lifetime and then you could start over cool thanks ben so from the internet yeah lyle from lacey washington asks I assume you have used camera raw to create a vintage image than later. You want to use that image for a different look and you don't have the creative cloud and he's saying, so you open in camera raw again? Can you save the original adjustments before you change to the new effect? Sure, let me show you a couple options there I'll go over here and let's say we needed this toe have it for a vintage look and we needed it normal or black and white or something different, so I'll double click on this we have a couple options. One option is when you look at the tabs up here across the top, the far right one is known as snapshots in a snapshot is literally a snapshot of the settings that are currently attached to your image where this is the same a cz a pre set but it's specific to this picture it's only going to show up when this particular image is open. So if I click on this and give us a name it's going to save every setting that's been applied to this picture in that little snapshot in that's going to show up on lee on this picture the next time I open it or any time open it in the future so I could do that, then I can go to the side menu and say camera defaults see the that snapshot still sitting there and I could optimize this in a different way maybe I come up here and fine tune this a little bit and I decide that I'm going to convert to gray scale because that's what somebody else needed, I could go back over to snapshots and save another one, and then if you want to get this image between those two separate looks, I could just go to snapshots and click between them and it'll automatically apply all the settings that replied to that image back and forth so I can have two versions of the image in that way. The advantage of doing that is the file size has only gone up by about five k, meaning it's only the amount of information that it needs to remember where the sliders are so that's one method the other method would be back and bridge I could simply duplicate the picture sense it's a raw file on you suggest typing command d I'm sure there's a menu command for it if I type command d l c which menu lights up the moment I do it it's under the edit menu I never do do it other than a keyboard circuit, so we couldn't tell you so any way you could go to the edit menu and choose duplicate or type command de controlled the and windows to create a duplicate and then just double click on the duplicate. If it's raw file and you could, uh, go to camera offic defaults and then do whatever you want to that duplicate click done. And now, if I go back to bridge, all have two versions of the file, but I just doubled the amount of space it takes up on my hard drive, so it's up to you as faras what you need it for. If you just want to be able to show a client more than one version, have them choose between them. I would probably use snapshots, because then I could just click between them and whichever one they like is the one I'll stick with when I click the done button. So that that's what I end up with. But if it needs to be used in two separate projects, one for a brochure in one for a magazine in the brochures black and white needs to have that look, uh, then I might duplicate the image instead, it's up to you.