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Audience Questions & Final Tips

Lesson 20 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Retouch and Restore

Ben Willmore

Audience Questions & Final Tips

Lesson 20 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Retouch and Restore

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

20. Audience Questions & Final Tips

Lesson Info

Audience Questions & Final Tips

All right then the only other thing I have to talk about it if people have questions or if you want to reconstruct some images just build you know, pieces that didn't exist to begin with so you guys let me know if you have questions as we go and I will reconstruct came up a few times in the chat room today I'm not sure if you have a sample that will illustrate this or not, but what night originally posted it got a bunch of votes but they want to know specifically about how to fix old the newspaper photograph who old newspaper photographs I don't believe I have an example of but that doesn't mean we can't talk about him. Um I make one okay when old newspaper photograph would look like take me just a moment tio you should ask the color black and white because there is a question I assume black and white yeah I'm gonna assume black and white I'm going to come in here and apply a filter that is called color half tone and I'm going to set all these numbers to forty five click ok? I'm not su...

re if the number eight will be higher low enough, but okay, let me get this just so my image is a little bit larger and I will simulate it sounds like we're having that question uh ok so images that are scanned out of printing printed material the thing is, when you print in a newspaper, if it's a black and white newspaper, you have white ish paper and then you have black ink, there are no shades of gray when it comes to the the inks that's used. So when you look at the paper from a good distance away, it looks like a normal photograph, but if you were to actually zoom up on that picture and look at it closely, you would see that it's actually made out of thoughts of varying sizes it's known as a half tone and to get something so it's light, it just uses small circles to get something to be dark. He uses large ones and that's. The problem is, when you scan something that's already been printed is it's already been turned into solid black and solid white, and you don't want it to look that way. So what are a few of the things you can do? Wolf? The first thing you can do is sometimes you'll end up getting what's notice amore a pattern it's, a weird looking pattern that kind of looks like, well, have you ever taken to screen doors and just moved them on each other? If you do, you get those weird pattern when you get that kind of a pattern and it has to do with the fact that your scanned images made out of a grid of squares called pixels, and this image has made out of a grid of circles in those two commuter fair with each other. So the first thing is, if you notice amore a pattern, when you scan it, don't scare up straight, scan it on a slight angle, and you'll find that certain angles will end up giving you a lot less of a more a pattern, then scanning it straight on, so you're going to scan it at an angle, scan it much higher resolution than you actually need, so that you might actually capture some of these dots. Then after you scan it, you're going to straighten it and scale it down in these little dots as you scale it down will start to blend together a little bit more after you're done there. Actually, I should say before you scale it down, blurred a tiny bit because what happens is these dots are usually solid black, and you might get a little bit around him that are shades of gray from your scanning, but they're going to be solid black, and if we stay blurred a little bit, we're not trying to make the image look blurry. We're just trying to soften the edges of those dots so that we have something more like this when we scale it down, they'll more easily combined together into a shade of gray compared to if they were solid really chris black dots if they're a little softer when you scale it down, you don't do that when you scale it down, since we only blurt it when it was much bigger than we needed, you won't notice the blurring so much so I scale this image up to what was it you remember three hundred percent I think I'll just bring it down to thirty three percent, then that should be its original size I'm not sure if that will be enough to notice here now we still have a good amount of him here, but if I had had it even further when I scale it down, they have more of a tendency of blending together. If they've been blurred a bit, I probably needed to do a bit more blurring to do that, then another thing you can do is there is a filter called median it's filter noise median, and if you apply it at a low setting like one, two or three on occasion it will get rid of the tiny specks that air in the image better will maintain a lot of the crisp details that air there s o those are some of the ideas this is a simulated image so it's not going to really be exactly the same as a true scan, but does that give you some ideas but doesn't really depend on the size I mean, if you're going to look at it as a five by seven or even an eight by ten, you're not going to see it, but if we blow it up like we did just now of course we're going to see it right billboard? Well, yeah, it depends on how big you got to reproduce it if you're going to reproduce it larger than it was in the newspaper that's your plan I'm going to make a big part of my wall. This little picture is going to be more difficult to get it to happen if, on the other hand it was a full page image from the paper and you're going to reproduce it half that size it's going to be much easier, so if that that does come into play quite a bit, the other approach we can use is if you're going toe print the image, we can try to just nicely capture the individual dots that made it up, and as long as we're going to reproduce it a similar size we can make it look similar to the newspaper and to do that, you usually want to scan it at a resolution of twelve hundred because when you have something that is solid black and solid white like text you can easily see the j g's that are on the edge of it if the resolution numbers too low it's photographs where you get away with having lower settings so if you want to actually reproduce the dots that it's made out of because you're not going to enlarge it all, then scan and a twelve hundred and scan it you can scan it a solid black and solid white if you want instead of shades of gray and tried to maintain those dots then but you need a high enough resolution to do so question in june I went on vacation and I just got my camera back from servicing yes and spent the first day taking photographs went tio downloading that night and they wouldn't get a larger I found out that they can't the factory and re set my camera to as three, which is the lowest j peg level you can get and you know based on the data is like almost two by three by seventy two d p I so is there any way of fixing something like that? I'm not fixing and that it's not going to look like you shot in broad full size but if you go to the image size dialogue and you have the newest versions of photo shop not the older ones there is a choice in here that is relatively new ah and it's called preserve details and when you increase the size of the image, you could use that setting call preserve details where you khun try software made by other companies there's I can't think of the names of them right now uh general fractious, but they rename that it was called perfect resize perfect resize from on one and then there was about to others that I can't think of the name of right now, but alien skin I'm not sure about those guys they might, but there are some plugging vendors that have plug ins designed for scaling things up. You'll find they work amazingly on some images and on others it just doesn't seem to help yeah, unfortunately kill whoever that wascause I that that would that would be terrible, so let's, just think about we talked about a bunch of stuff today, but how do you think about what order to do it in? Is there any importance to that? And there is some is a general concept most the time when I'm adjusting images I work in the biggest problem first and then I re evaluate the image after fixing the first biggest problem. Now what is the biggest leftover problem? And I tackle that next and then I keep doing that until I run out of problems, patients time or budget but there are a few exceptions when it comes to restoring photographs in that is, I usually will work on color and tone before I started doing a lot of retouching to my image, because often times, if I haven't pulled out the detail where I want to, yet it's hard to tell what needs to be retouched if I haven't darkened certain areas, that might need to be dark and it's hard to tell is somebody really going to notice the problem that was in that area? Because it's going to end up being much darker in there? And when I'm adjusting color, if I'm not talking about doing color correction instead, I'm talking about making an image more colorful were less colorful. I usually only do that after I'm done doing tonal adjustments because you remember what total adjustments anytime we darkened an imminent, she got more colorful, and so if I adjust the saturation or vibrance of the image to determine how colorful should it be, and afterwards I make an adjustment to brightness, it almost likely change, so I usually do tonal adjustments before I adjust saturation are released, or at least before I finalize the saturation. Uh, then when I'm working, if you work with adjustment layers and that's, the main way that you make your changes, what I'll end up with in my layers panel is the bottom most images, usually the original untouched and I just never touched that layer that way if I ever screw up in anything that I do above it I can always throw away whatever layer contains the changes that I've made it might be an adjustment layer or a normal layer that has to be touching on it and get back to the original image and if I want a structure in my file in the most ideal way what I would do is have my original image of the bottom I might have some adjustment layers above that and then when I want to do every touching them I don't do my retouching on top of that what I'll do instead now open an image is I'm going to put my retouching just above the original layer so if you look in my layers pound here is my original picture here are my uh adjustments that I've made to the image and then I'm going to create a layer right above the background right there and that's usually where I'm going to apply my retouching if at all possible sometimes I can't put it there because I need to the retouching I'm doing is to fix things that I screwed up through my adjustments and if so it needs to be above them to affect them but if instead it's it's a little speck in the image and scratches and everything else if I put it here it will be the most versatile why? Because if I put my adjustment here my retouching here, all these adjustment layers air still applying to them and I could make changes in the future to any of these adjustment layers up here attn any time I'd like and what is down here is going to end up matching what's perfectly directly underneath it if on the other hand this is up here, then the moment I do any retouching the moment I come in here and I retouch out a spot which I'll do here in a moment I can get rid of those spots no problem but now that retouching has these adjustments built into it it's done after those adjustments so if I turn off these adjustment layers, the retouching no longer matches what's at the bottom if later on I decide oh no one of these adjustment layers I did here was too much and I double click on it and I go over here and I decided change it do you see my retouching doesn't match any more but if I were to have made that exact same change and not put it on top instead I put it down here right there then I could make changes all I want to go in here and use any tool I want I'll use this one I come in whatever change I want to make now it doesn't matter because of the where they're positioned as long as this image looks right and it blends in I can always turn off these adjustment layers everything still looks fine I can always double click on any one of them and make changes later and you see my retouching doesn't stand out like that but that's only going to be that way if the retouching is below the adjustment layers the only time I put retouching above is when what I'm attempting to retouch is something that was created due to these adjustments and that's usually the one we do have an example of that right here and that is this transition that's right here the existing transition is caused by me not being accurate with this mask if this mask was perfect then this transition wouldn't exist and so therefore to do the the retouching it would need to be on top because I caused it to bring with those adjustment players otherwise you want it down there and therefore you can make any changes you want later yeah layer up on top and made your adjustments and went moved it back down to where it is now well it's just that affect the adjustments or yeah because then the adjustment layers would have been applied twice they would have been incorporated into the adjustment itself I mean the retouching itself and then I dragged it down here and now they're applied twice okay yeah so, anyway, hopefully gone through today's class, he think about what we did. Total rescue, color, rescue, retouching, reconstruction in common problems. The combination of all those will allow you to solve a good number of the images you run into with just a little bit of practice.

Class Materials

Bonus with Purchase

Handbook
Clone Source Shortcuts
Lens Flare Working Photo
Retouch Working Photo

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Wow! That is pretty much what I thought about the course. It was my first live studio experience and it was fantastic! Ben is a great instructor because he presents the information in a straight forward manner that is understandable, detailed, and concise all at the same time. I have a couple of his other classes and the handbooks his wife creates are exemplary and make going back and reviewing the rebroadcast so much easier. Also, I want to give a shout off to the Creative Live team...Kudos! They are an excellent host...they are professional and fun at the same time! The content they produce has helped me tremendously to expand my knowledge and skills and mostly importantly they are affordable!

Wilson Blackwell
 

Super class! Ben is the best at explaining Photoshop and how to make full use of it. This class included techniques I've never seen or heard explained in other photo restoration classes I've taken. And the accompanying book, while I've only glimpsed through it so far, is expansive, well laid out, attractive, and looks to cover everything Ben went over in the class - it's a valuable resource as well (thank you, Karen Willmore, for all the effort you put in to produce a worthy complement to what Ben teaches.)

Old_Redeye
 

Ben is one of my favorite instructors on CreativeLive. (That's saying a LOT because they are all so good!). Besides being very thorough and understandable, Ben sets himself apart with two things. 1. He thoroughly demonstrates a process, then does a recap of all the steps he just took. That makes it much easier to remember. 2. His wife takes notes during the broadcast and creates a handbook which is available to download when you purchase the course. Some people find it easier to learn by reading than by re-watching the video. I like it because I can find information by using a word search. I feel so fortunate that I was able to sit in the audience for this class. It was great to be able to talk directly to the instructor and interact with the other students.

Student Work

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