Lessons

Lesson Info

Clone Between Documents

Now, let's talk about working between documents because you can copy from the contents of one document and apply it within another. So here I'm gonna open two images. We have a blue sky. I wish we had a blue sky with a cloud in it. Well, we can potentially get that. If we start over here, there's our cloud. If you look at the brightness and color of this sky, it doesn't match this sky. So therefore, if I were to use my Clone Stamp tool, it would do a lousy job. But it would still be able to work. If you wanna see it, I'm just gonna Option + click within this cloud. I'm gonna switch to the other document. And I don't know if that other document is larger or smaller, but I'll click, and here I can apply my cloud. But you see it did nothing to attempt to make it match the surroundings. That's because there was no healing involved. Let's go back to the other tab. This time I'm going to choose the Healing Brush. I'm gonna go to the same cloud. And remember, with Healing Brushes, I use hard-...

edge brushes. I'll switch to the other file and now let's attempt to apply it. It doesn't look right right now because I haven't completely made it all the way around the cloud. But once I made it all the way around the cloud, that's when it notices that, hey, it actually ends up with blue over on the edges, and it's able to apply it. Now, it did end up making the cloud more blue and that's just because if you compare this sky to this one, this sky is more vividly blue. And so it just made it so the transition ended up transitioning into just as bright of a difference as there was between this blue and the white. Well, just imagine you took this and adjusted it to make the blue sky just as dark and as colorful as the other image, and you allow that adjustment to apply across the entire image. This area here would also get darker and more blue, and it did. We can always adjust that, but that's not what I'm trying to show you right now. I'm just trying to show you that you can copy between documents. You should also know that you can copy between documents and in the process, it can copy colors. Let's say I wanna put a hot air balloon in here. I think that's gonna look ridiculous 'cause we're gonna end up looking up at the balloon. But in order to make this fit into that other document, I think I'm gonna have to have it smaller. So I'm gonna go to Image Size under the Image menu, and I might make this image about 30% of what it is right now. Not 3,000, (laughs) but about 30%. C'mon. I hope it doesn't stay with a height of 3,100. These two have a link symbol between them, which means it should use the same setting for both, but the fact that I'm getting a little twirly and a really long progress bar tells me I should click Cancel and make sure that they're the same. I want percent, three, zero. For some reason, this link symbol was ignored and it didn't have a 30% typed into the other field. There we go. Okay, now it's small enough that I think I can get it into the other document without it bumping into other objects. I'm gonna use my Healing Brush. I'm gonna click right in the middle of the balloon, switch to the other document, and let's just see if we can apply it. I'm just gonna click, and it doesn't look right. That's because I haven't made it out to the edge of the balloon yet. The moment I get all the way around to the edge of that balloon, I can get it to being this other document. Doesn't quite look right in the lower portion and that's because this balloon went to a dark shade. It looks similar to the sky and so it's doing the same thing over here. But the main thing is you can go between documents. That's great, that means that you can find, let's say, skin that has the right texture in someone else's face and use that to remove blemishes on somebody's face that has blemishes everywhere where you can't find a clean area to copy from. You can clone between the documents. And later on, when we get into advanced retouching, you'll learn how you can also scale and rotate when doing that. And therefore it'll become much more versatile, so you wouldn't have to do what I did, which was scale down that balloon first. All right, let's look at a complex document. This is an image that I performed a bunch of retouching on and I mainly wanna let you know how to think about retouching along with adjustments because if you use adjustment layers and you do retouching, you gotta be careful 'cause it's easy to mess up and kinda get in your way when you attempt to continue working on a picture. So I'm gonna turn off all the layers that are in here at the moment. And when I do, you'll see how much stuff had been retouched. I have a layer just above the background of the image or the original image, and I call it Weeds-B-Gone. That's just what I like to call my retouching layers. I'm gonna turn on the eyeball for that layer and you'll see how much stuff was retouched out in there. Then on a separate layer, I decided to declutter the right side of the picture to get rid of a few extra elements. I wasn't certain that I was going to want them to be gone, though, so that I put it on a different layer. Therefore, I could toggle that layer on and off to decide if I wanted to do that or not. Then I have another layer that removes this electronic sign that's in here. And maybe it was then I wanted to sell this picture to the town of Cowan, I think this is Cowan, Tennessee, I think, where the station exists, and I would put it on a separate layer so I could easily turn it on or off to decide if it should show up or not. I should mention that this bus, by the way, is my own bus, so that's the bus we lived in full time for over a year. It's not painted like that anymore. But if you would like to find out about our little adventure in that bus, look up Creative Cruiser on either Instagram or on Facebook, and you can find out more. But anyway, I have three layers there that are doing the retouching work. But then here's what we need to do, is we need to make sure that those retouching layers end up being below any adjustments that we do. If we end up doing any adjustment layers and then we put retouching above it, it's gonna be very difficult to make changes later. I wanna see if I can show you what I'm talking about. In this case, I'm gonna act like I'm starting over. I'll just turn off these eyeballs and I'm gonna make an adjustment. Let's say the adjustment I made was one called Black and White. That will make it pretty obvious 'cause the image becomes black and white. Then above that, I end up making a new layer and in that new layer, I do some sort of retouching. Maybe I use the Spot Healing Brush and I come in here and attempt to get rid of a tower. I'm not gonna attempt to do good work, but that did pretty amazing to get rid of that tower. Get rid of the top of the telephone pole or more. But now, what if I decide I no longer want the image to be black and white? Well, the problem is the retouching is looking at the current layer and what's underneath it to choose what to copy from. And when it looks at what's underneath it, it sees that black and white adjustment layer and it affects what we're copying. So if I later on turn off that black and white adjustment layer, then usually we're gonna end up with some issues. In this case, it's kinda funny because the sky, where I happened to do that retouching, is really close to being gray, so it doesn't show up all that much, but it's still there. Do you see that the sky is black and white right here? And over here, it is black and white, but it just might have been that the clouds are pretty close to black and white, so you don't notice it as much. But I can see a little column right here where there's a lack of color in that sky. I should have done it in a more blatant area when we had color. So, to prevent that kind of a problem, I always put my retouching on layers that are found directly above the original image. And that means even if I've already applied adjustment layers to this picture to refine it, I'm still gonna work below those adjustment layers. And if I put my retouching on layers below the adjustment layers, then those adjustments will not be incorporated into my retouching and therefore it's not gonna matter if I ever turn them off with this little eyeball or not in the future. The retouching will always blend in because retouching is always looking at where you're working and the layers below it. And so when I construct my documents, that was what I have. It's the original image on the bottom of this layer, then retouching layers, and above that, any adjustment layers I need to apply. In this case, they happen to be stored in a folder 'cause there's a bunch of them. Now, there are other retouching tools available. There is one that is, let me see if I can open another image to show you. You're gonna find, if I come in here to my retouching tools, that I've ignored one called the Patch tool. And that's because the Patch tool doesn't like working on an empty layer. And I always put a retouching on an empty layer so it's separate from the main image. Also, you'll find that it's rare for me to use, if I create a new layer, an option that is called Content-Aware Fill. I do use it on occasion, but it's not an everyday use, and I'll try to show you why. Content-Aware Fill is available in two areas. One is to go to the Edit menu and choose Fill, and that's in a little popup menu. And the second one is you can go to the Edit menu and there's a choice called Content-Aware Fill, and that allows you to get more control where if it ended up copying from an area you didn't want to, you can force it to be able to copy from only specific areas within your picture. But right here, you'll see one of the reasons why it's not good working on an empty layer. Anytime you have an empty layer active, these tools will end up giving you messages, like, for instance, here, if I say Fill, Content-Aware, I wanted to just get rid of that lamp, click OK, could not complete because there's not enough information there. It does not like working on an empty layer. Now, I'll give you a workaround just in case you need to use that tool and you also want to work on empty layers. Here's what I would do. I'm gonna throw away the empty layer that I was about to work on and what I need to do is make a duplicate of my image so that it is on a separate layer. If it's only made up of one layer, you can simply duplicate that layer by dragging it down with the new layer icon. Otherwise, what I would do is select all, go to the Edit menu, and there is a choice in there called Copy Merged, and then right after that, go to the Edit menu and choose Paste. What that's going to do is if you have more than one layer in your image, it's going to take the result of all those layers, whatever that image looks like, regardless of how many layers it's made out of, and it's gonna put a copy of it on a layer. We don't have a complex document here so I don't need that. But anyway, I'm gonna duplicate this layer, then I'm gonna use that feature, the feature that didn't like working on an empty layer. I'll Fill, Content-Aware. It'll work just fine most of the time. And I just wanted that on its own layer where we didn't have the rest of the picture there. So immediately after using it, I go to the Select menu and choose Inverse to get the opposite, and then just hit Delete. So now I have what I wanted, which is the retouching on its own layer. If I hide the layer that's underneath, you'll see there's some retouching. And I don't see why Adobe can't make it work on an empty layer because I can easily trick it. Just get the entire content to the document, a copy of it on its own layer, use the tool, and when I'm done, invert my selection to get the opposite of it, and hit Delete. So it's a little workaround, I wish I didn't have to do, but I just wanted to mention it. It's the reason why I don't use couple of the other tools that just don't like working on empty layers.