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Overview of Retouching Tools

Lesson 13 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Retouch and Restore

Ben Willmore

Overview of Retouching Tools

Lesson 13 from: Adobe Photoshop Mastery: Retouch and Restore

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

13. Overview of Retouching Tools

Lesson Info

Overview of Retouching Tools

So let's look briefly at how some of those retouching tools work just to make sure you understand it and I'll show you a few other examples of how we can repair images first just to show you that so you really understand anything with the word healing attached if I used the healing brush tool you might think oh I can copy from this area up above option click on it come down here to apply it in paint over this area on on this is layers in it for me flatten my image we were working on an adjustment layer an adjustment layer means we were working on the mask that was there now do it so I could option click up here and say I want to apply it down here and it could try to replace this like that but I could just as easily try to copy from this white box if I copy from the white box and apply it remember anything that has the word healing attached to it doesn't copy the brightness and color what copies this texture the color and the brightness come from where you're applying it. So when I app...

ly this even though I'm copying from a white box I could also use it but it is copying textures if I choose undo and I copied from down here it's not that I can copy from just anywhere because if I try to use that it still gets the color and the brightness from where I'm applying it, but if you look close at it, it's the wrong texture and then so any time you used something with the word healing attached, don't be concerned with what color is the area I'm copying from or how bright it is think about how does it vary in brightness? Because that's, what is going to be copying? And so if you think about what should be here, if that text wasn't, shouldn't it be a flats area of brightness that the on ly texture we have is the grain in the photograph? Well, that's, what I need to find from another area to copy from I don't care what color it is don't care, albright. It is a carrot that it should be if a the brightness shouldn't very cross other than the grain. So if I copied from down here where the event is that's not going to look right because it's going to get that variation in brightness, which means it gets dark it excuse me, dark and bright in those areas, but I can copy from something as simple as this it has the right texture. And notice before I've covered up all the letters you see the color of the letters kind of being pulled up into that that's because I'm telling it I wanted to very in brightness as much as the area I'm copying from, which is just a flat color and so it's attempting to blend from that area where I'm stopping my painting at the bottom edge all the way up to the top it is trying to make it just is even in brightness is what I'm copying from a need to make it all the way to the bottom cover up all those letters in order to get it to blend into the right information and needed to blend into what's just outside of the letters so have to paint cross all of the letters to get there your question or comment I am might be jumping the gun is there was a picture earlier with the girl holding the siamese cat but it had a lot of texture in it girls yeah, that one yeah so if you fix the color but you don't want that texture kaji is kind of the opposite feeling of that like find a blank well no the promise that it would take away the texture I guess you know I could add the technique I want to add the texture I it's somewhat do that but not with this particular tool because it would replace the the brightness there's currently in the image, it wouldn't quite do it right, but if I ended up wanting to apply this texture like have a new photograph and I wanted to look old, that kind of thing, I could try to find a photo that doesn't really contain much of any detail it's just this texture, I can put it on top of a photograph, and then I would use the blending mode menu, the ones the top of the layers panel to control. How does the texture apply to what's under it? But but there's not an easy way to take it out of it? No, there is something we could do here, I can just be part of it, and that is in this particular case, I think what I would do to get rid of this texture I don't know if I'll be able completely get rid of it. Is it's so ingrained into the photograph, but I can probably make it less noticeable. I'm going to duplicate the layer, you can do that many ways. I'll just type command j, though that's going to jump it to a new layer, and then I'm going to move this layer one pixel down so that it doesn't align with the version of it that's underneath instead, it's off by just one pixel it's just been moved down one and if you saw it even move when I did it I used the down arrow key to do it then there's a way to get photoshopped compare the layer I'm working on to what's under it and I can tell it toe on lee used the areas that are darker than what's under it think about that just for a second if what we have here are really bright little dash is there about one pixel tall if I copied it and I moved it one pixel down then this little dash of whiteness won't line up with what's under x it's been moved one pixel then I'm going to set this to darken mode do you see there all the little bright things just kind of went away we still have some of the dark stuff could I do the opposite? Well I could set this tow lighten mode but now we're kind of bringing all the bright things in I'm like I don't you think you say one had to have another duplicate moving a bit and said it to the other mode waken try that in some instances it can help you might see that on another photograph that I have if we get to it if it has a bunch of scratches in it and I might use that to fix some of it will use both light and dark and vote but in general this was just moved one pixel down the duplicate and such a dark and motive and that ended up doing quite a bit. I could then come in here and do something else let's say I combine these two layers together by flattening the image and then I might be able to use maybe a filter let's say there's a filter called um but should we use maybe surface blur? What surface blur does is we have two settings, we have radius, and we have, uh, threshold radius simply means how much blurring it really should be called amount, you know, a lot of blur or a little bit of blur, and I could try to bring it up to see how much do I need before the that texture coming it's blended into the image and then threshold means how let's say we should apply this to things that are house similar to each other. Let's say we have a threshold if we bring it all the way down of two now it's only, you know, apply that blurring two things that are so similar that their two shades of gray away from each other. Well, I need to bring this up just enough to see if I can get it. It might not work on this image, but I'm trying to get it where if the texture is subtle enough, this can possibly blur the texture without blurring things like the eyeballs, but we're a little bit too much on this image to be ableto truly get it in there. Oh, sure, but we're gonna have specs on the eyes, so we'll have to manually such that, uh um so I would have need to have worked out a duplicate of the image I flattened mind, and then I could paint on a mask, but what just we know its surface blur does is this setting up here is just like the normal gazi and blur it's, just an amount setting, and then it adds a threshold setting, which means we're only going to apply this blur to things that are ten brightness levels away from each other if something is greater than that, if there's, the difference between two shades is greater than ten brightness levels is not going to blur them. And so hopefully we'll have a greater difference between the brightness of the middle of the eye and the things surrounding the eye than we do in the smooth part of the skin, and that can sometimes be useful, but on this particular image just right on the edge of where it's a little bit useful with not useful enough for me to be satisfied, yeah, well, here's what it looked like before it's one of those let's just make it real small so nobody could tell you but it's not exactly what I would like uh, we'll talk about other instances where we might be able tio get away with stuff like that as well when we're working on other images s o in here, other things we could have done remember we're working on this image before is sometimes I need to take texture from the surroundings and use it to fill in things, and sometimes that can be easy let's see if I come in here and use my clone stamp tool and just copy from over here option click I can obviously come over here and just fill this up if I go too far and you see it showing up again, I can set my tool to a choice called darken darkened means don't let it lightened anything up when I paint, so I get this to fill in and remember when I went over to the left before it brightens stuff up, it shouldn't be able to as much. Now the only time it will be able to brighten things up is if this layer here doesn't have anything and in it's already we run into an empty part of the layer because when I set the tool that's up here this menu this means how is the tool I'm working on going to interact with this layer if the layers ever empty there's nothing to compare it to is nothing to say make this only happened words darker than what's on this layer so it'll just apply is normal but if I do this and see that I have some content there look maybe I need to come down to this layer where the actual content was sometimes using darkened mode khun b rather useful but let's go to other retouching issues here's the one that has the scratches where I think we might be able to wipe some of them out using some duplicates notice the scratches there's a bunch of different varieties of them but a lot of them are vertical you see the very vertical ones let's tackle those first to tackle those I'm going to duplicate this layer with command jay and I'm going to move the layer one pixel left or right all I'm trying to do is make it so whatever is to the left or right of these vertical scratches moves over to kind of cover up that the scratch so just use the arrow keys on my keyboard I'll do one pixel to the left then I'm going to set the menu at the top of my layers palette to darken so it's going to compare that coffee that's on top to what's right underneath it and on lee the areas that are darker will end up being able to be used now, if I turn off this layer, do you see how that started deal with some of the verticals? But I don't like it everywhere. Look at the lines on his shirt. Do you see that? They're getting thicker, that kind of stuff. So what I'll end up doing is all at a man asked to this layer and then we'll painted and only where we see the scratches. And so all adam ask I want the master to be black so it doesn't apply anywhere to begin with. Remember command I command I means invert then I consume up here and wherever I see the vertical scratches, I'll come in here with my brush and paint over them. So little burkle scratch there by just paint little school scratch here, some of them that are more than one pixel thick he won't be able to handle. I can always move the layer. Two pixels over, then it khun handle once that are two pixels. Why? Maybe I'll do that. Make sure. Yeah, so I can come in here now and just paint on these vertical lines you know, either be ableto completely eliminate them or at least reduce them by using a duplicate layer. That's just been moved over a pixel it on ly work for vertical lines, though it won't work for horizontal ones are ones that air diagonal because moving things one pixel to the left or right wouldn't perfectly cover up those things, but there will be an awful a lot of this image where it will be able to reduce or eliminate writethru is either a lot of that I'm not going to get rid of all of those vertical because I want to deal with some of the others let's, go back to the original layer again and let's work with the diagonal rips that aaron here, I mean to duplicate the layer with command j I'm going to use the move tool in my arrow keys of my keyboard, and I'll probably move this maybe to pixel still left and maybe one pixel down. I'm just trying to get enough for whatever it will b will fill in this diagonal line let's see if it does. When I said it to darken just using the arrow keys to figure out what's the minimum, I could move it to really kind of fill that in. I don't like the way it looks on the majority of the image, but it did fill in that little crack, so I'm going to add a mask and painted in on lee where I need it. There's a trick when you add a mask usually at a mask and get a white one by clicking here if you hold on the option key which is alton windows you get a black one to start with just for those either love keyboard shortcuts and every little trick hold down the option key when you add a mask and you get a black mask if you won't remember that because some people just hate keyboard shortcuts just don't use it enough I would more be apt to try to remember the keyboard shortcut of command I for invert because I'd use it more often for all sorts of things because you could inverted after you make it so now I'm just painting over that diagonal scratch and its handling a good portion of it doesn't look absolutely perfect but it's a lot more usable then uh what we had in there before so sometimes you can get away with something as simple as duplicating a layer, moving it a little bit and setting it to um darkened mode and if you don't like it on the whole image then mask it all right now let's see what other stuff we can come up with on this image now when I got these images people don't tell me what they want to be done some people would never want to add the eye back because that's what you remember about your dog is it only having one or something or maybe in this case the dog has another eye and it's just got some infection and or something and it's closed up temporarily I don't know but what I see in this particular images first some color problems I noticed that it feels very yellow green and then secondarily the eye so let's look at a few of the issues we could do first thing is this look it's me to be a modern photograph, not one from like a hundred years ago and when that's the case the first thing I would think about doing is using a camera, so I'll actually close this image and go back to bridge here if you ever see me switch to bridge automatically, it just seems to appear just so you know, the keyboard shortcut I'm using when I've been photoshopped is the same is going here to the file menu it is called browse and bridge if you look at it this this says option command uh oh, so if you're used to doing command over open, just add the option king to that or if your windows that means you're used to doing control over open just add the all turkey and windows so if you ever see me just instantly be over there that's the keyboard truck kind amusing so I go to the file menu also say opening kameron and if it's a color issue the first area unusually going to go to would be white balance and remember we have the white balance eyedropper near the upper left. I look in this image for anything that looks like it should be a shade of gray when I say shade of gray, I mean something that shouldn't have color, and I only see two things that would be the caller that the dogs wearing in the whites of the ice does that make sense as far as your only options? So I'm going to move this down into the collar in click and see if it helps it did pull out some of the yellow and there if I choose undo this was before it looks more yellow green after, and I'll just experiment with different areas to see. Does it help more over here? No two felt more over here. Yes, does that help in the whites of the eyes? The whites? The ice problem is there is usually veins and things. If you click on a vein, it will shift your way, and that didn't seem to help, but just so you know you can click a cz many times as you want it's only the final click that's actually used because when you're clicking, all it's doing is moving these two sliders, and so it only remembers the last but you made a ce faras where these go it's not like it's adding them up for anything that I could try to find soon. This by moving the temperature in ten sliders see what it looks like if I move this further away from green, see if I think that helps at all or move it further away from yellow because those are the two colors that seem to dominate in here. There we go. But if I moved too far away from you know, I got a lot of blue. So it's like it's a delicate balance there in this case, I'm looking at the dog's ears. Do you see the inside of the year? And that's where I first noticed it go too far where I see blue showing up so make sure you don't get too much blue in the years. Then the other place I go to find soon color h s l and in here if I look near the snout, uh, in here from the this area I see greenish yellow. So I'm going to go to saturation. You see what happens if I bring greens to become less saturated, less colorful or yellows that seems to help the yellows. I don't know that I'll be able to get it looked perfect it could be that this dog is being photographed underneath big green canopy and all the light hitting it is that color and we get more in some areas than others but aiken shifted a bit uh if you want to see before and after you see the difference there so now let's open that image and let's see if we wanted to have two eyes how might I do it? Well, I don't always use the retouching tools if it's a large area working on often work with layers instead and so what I'm going to do in this case is I'm going to make a selection around the good eye that extends out a good distance like that and I'm going to copy that do it on layer to remember the keyboard short cut for jumping something to a new layer good man j control jane from windows I just type that and so if you look at my layers panel you see a new later it's only of the area had selected so it only got that one part then I could use the move tool and now I can't move that around, but if I move it over here it needs to be flipped right? So to do that you go to the edit menu you choose transform and there's a choice called flip horizontal then I'm going to get it in here approximately where I think it should be, and it just doesn't look right angle wise and all that, so let's, figure out what we can use to kind of change that around a bit. Well, first off, there are some changes I might make that I don't want to be permanent. I might need to go back and find tune them later on in one way of making things not permanent is when it comes to scaling and rotating and distorting your image is you can first go to the filter menu there's, a choice called convert for smart filters. What that does is it turns the layer you're working on into what's known is a smart object, and if you watch in my layers panel, just look at the little thumbnail image for that layer and notice that to start with it looks like a normal little thumbnail image of this, but after I choose convert to smart filters, if I look on the layers panel, I'll see this little icon plopped on top of a layer that's your indication that this layer is not normal, it's what's called a smart object now anything that I do, too, that layer is something that won't be a permanent change, it'll be a change that I could easily undo later, I can easily change the settings on later if you're not used to him I just give you an example let's say I blurred this later and I brought it up really high so is very blurry that's little too blurry if this is a normal image where I did not turn that into a smart object and I went back to the blur filter a second time it would simply apply a second blur and it could only make this image blurrier especially if I were to save the image close it and open it next week that would be permanently blurred but because it is a smart object any changes I make to it are just attached to the layer as temporary things things where I could turn off the eyeball if that's what it offers me in disabled the blur I could turn the eyeball back on to have it apply the blur again it should eventually update camera well one day it will update its supposed to right now but I could also double click here on the word gazi and blur and that will bring me back into the blur dialog box and I could lower it because it's not permanent instead it's a setting attached to the layer and that's not just with filters where I can blur things and later on come back and change the settings it's also with transformations that means scaling rotating that type of thing so I didn't want to blur the slayer. I was just doing that to show you a bit about how a smart object works. I'm going to click on the word gazi and blur here in my layers panel and drag it to the trash, so I don't have any of those effects applied, and instead we're goingto make changes over here under the edit menu, under transform. When I come in here and choose transform, I can choose something like rotate, and I can rotate this, get it in the right angle press return her answer and it's not permanent because this is a smart object. If I go back and choose rotate again, it will remember the angle that I had rotated it too, and I could go appear to the top of my screen where it tells me that rotation and I could just set it to zero and would move it back to its original angle. Anything that I do to this will not be permanent that so let's see how this could be useful for getting the eye to possibly look like it belongs there. I'm going to mask this so that we don't see this crisp edge around the edge instead of only using it in the area I think it would be useful for so I'll add a layer mask the bottom my layers panel, I'll grab my brush and I'll paint with black and I'm just going to hide the areas of the eye that I don't think I need to use use it up into maybe about there and hide everything else just paying with black to do it now I might use my move tool in reposition this they try to get it into the right area, but then since that portion of the face might be at a different angle, I'm going to go to the edit menu and let's see what we can use there's a choice in here called distort and if I use distort, we have the four corners here that I can pull independently of each other, therefore I can get it to be kind of at a different, slightly different angle coming out this way something like that and it might be the other thing that I need to do is a little bit of a color adjustment maybe push a little bit of yellow or green into it to get it to look a little bit more like the light that's hitting this side of the face many different ways of doing that I personally like curves a lot of other people don't because you're just not comfortable with it if you're not comfortable with it, you might choose to use something like there's one called color balance uh that's everything but I'm going to use curves because it's my favorite with curves I want this toe on lee effect one layer the layer that's directly underneath and to accomplish that I click here from that icon that means only affect that. Then I can use this and here I have red, green and blue were right there's green I want to add or take away green I could click on the image and then I can drag up her down if I drag up, I accidentally clipped a few times so let me get rid of these dots. Ok? If I click and I dragged up, I'm going to add green to the image I dragged down I'll take away green the opposite of green is magenta they're a little bit problem is when I pull up to add green to the image it also brightens it. Remember this little menu how we can say only affect the color, not the brightness. So now if you look at this a mainly looking below the eye you see how it's looking less magenta, a little bit more green I think it's looking to green at the top, though well, that's, when you grab your paintbrush, remember what a mask does if you paint with black, you take away the adjustment and that's where if I choose undue I might not want to take it all the way out the way I'll bring my opacity to fifty percent to say bring half of it out of there I also might not need the middle of the eye this part in here to shift so I can paint on it but it's looking a little bit more like it belongs there I could spend more time to manipulate it mohr ahs well, but I find that to be a rather useful let me show you one other tool you might need to use this image doesn't need it, but I could just use it in this an example I'm going to grab the ear here and let's just say we needed it to be in a different shape. Well, I could type command j to copy it to its own layer, just like we did before I could then convert it to a smart filter so I could make changes later and they're not permanent. And then if I go to the edit menu there's a choice called puppet war I just want to describe it because it could be useful for some things that could have been useful on the eyes well puppet warp but to mesh over that the mesh itself isn't very useful look at if you want to hide the mess you can type command age control agent windows if you're on a macintosh the very first time you type that it will ask you this question and that's because the macintosh operating system likes to use command age to hide programs and it says hey do you want t do that or would you rather have it do what it's done in photo shop for twenty years which is hide things like selections and meshes and things I choose this choice now what happens is when you have this thing called a puppet work I can click on various areas of the image like this in this case I'm trying to lock in these areas so they don't change and then I can click on other areas that should change I remember how far out this layer goes but and now watch what happens when I grabbed these pins and pull on them. So this is where sometimes I have to copy like a member of the other image where we had a hand in the hand had a big scratch going across it sometimes they need a copy from one finger copy to its own layer and then I need to re bend the hand a bit to get it to look appropriate in this is the kind of feature I could use to do that with you think of this as these pins is being like your body where your elbow is or your wrist is it's the areas where you could rotate things and we had the spins into say these air where the image has like a flexible spot where it could be bent then you can grab them to reposition those pieces to bend it around in different areas if you noticed something moving that shouldn't like here where the ear attach is to the body over here that means just before you move that had a pin there and just don't move the pin it locked it in so now that area doesn't move and so sometimes you need to do that and I could have possibly used this and I needed to close the eye a little bit or needed to move the corner of the eye up a little bit or this side over a little bit that kind of stuff like you put pins on it it's called puppet warping and it's found under the edit menu um puppet warp the advantage of turning something into a smart object before you do that is that if you ever need to make changes later and you go to the edit menu and choose puppet warp it will remember where those little pins are so you could reposition them later if you didn't have a smart object every single time you choose puppet warp it never remembers that you've done it in the past so you'd have to manually add those pins over again teo tell it where exactly it should be held in place in where you would like to bend it again but when you have a smart object it remembers those things and it makes it so it's easy to go back and make additional changes later yeah three ps defile but what is there a difference between that or d n g or to file? They're in general photoshopped file format and tiff file format are pretty darn similar you're not going to notice any quality difference you might notice a slight file science difference between the two but not dramatic so you can kind of pick between those two almost like flipping up a coin in some ways to choose dmg format is a bit different you need to make sure that you would only open it in programs that can support the engine because it's a more limited set of them and I primarily used the n g when I start off with a raw file and I want to keep it as a raw file on just get it in a different format I wouldn't usually used the n g er for something that's not a straightforward rafael is just not as useful and for my particular work flow but tiff and photoshopped file format are uh pretty consistent as far as their quality and everything. Would you say that using the psd extension also gives you a clue that you have manipulated that file whereas the dandy would not be well, obviously I used to use photoshopped file format on lee when I had layers and I would never use photoshopped file format when I didn't have layers and therefore just looking at any folder of images I could say hey, that files got layers and exits photoshopped file that file doesn't cause I never use photoshopped file format for images that don't have layers, and it was a nice way of managing my files so that any time I look at any folder, I could say these four images have layers these don't because of the file format used and if you're consistent like that, you could do that and if that's the case, I would use photoshopped file format because tiff file format is relatively common in the publishing industry to use for images that don't contain layers, they just want the highest quality image and they don't want to be created it all and they'll use tiff with a flat image but it's rare for people to use photoshopped file format for that purpose and so therefore it can be useful from a file management standpoint uh so if you find that part of it to be useful, go for it but it's not technically essential you can use tiffin file for men are tiffin photoshopped interchangeably yeah, your philosophy and on how to think about and let's see what other kinds of retouching weaken d'oh this image is one where first I skipped camera because they wanted to retained the problem in house. I mean, we could try to it in camera raw because this was a raw file, and what I don't like about the file is their skin is almost blown out toe white, and I could attempt to come in here with the highlights slider and bring some of that detail, possibly in there's, only so much I can get, because it depends on the exposure used when the photo was taken that there just might not be enough data captured in their skin. So if you can't get it here in camera, you choose open image and let's see if there's something we could do about it can photoshopped that will be unique way of doing retouching or, in this case, total repair look down here in his skin, right by the base of his shirt, and noticed that there's pretty much next to nothing in there, up in here, we also have similar problems. What I want to do is be able to separate the detail that's in the image from everything else, which means the brightness of the color so that the detail can stay there and we can mess with the brightness and color with abandoned you could say in ways that we usually couldn't get away with. For instance, right now, if I create a brand new empty layer, I come in here with my paintbrush and I just say, well, his skin looks like it's got good detail and brightness in this area right here saul option click to grab that color to paint with and then I was come over here and painted yeah, there we go if this is satisfactory to you, I want you as a client because that's just not wanting to and even if I lower the opacity of it it's like I don't think I'm going to be able get away, I want to do something where the detail the photo becomes separate from the color and brightness so I can do things that's blatant is what I just did, but the detail will stay there when I do it some interesting things we have to do in order to accomplish that. Um the first thing is detail wise, I might want to do noise reduction on this you see a lot of noise in the background, but I'm not going to for now because it's it's not essential to the technique where you were going to try to do I'm going to duplicate this layer twice remember the keyboard shortcut for duplicating command j type of twice, so we have a total of three of these and I'm going to change the name of them just get a double click on the top one I'm gonna call it detail and I'm going to double click on the middle one and call it color then I'm going to look at that middle layer that's the layer that's active and I'm going to go on blur it, aiken blur it with many different things oftentimes it's gazi blur but also another one I can use is one that's called median either one would work both of them will blur median will leave some of the more distinct detail left over, but for now let's use gazi a blur because more people are comfortable with it. What I'm going to do is try to figure out what setting would get rid of the fine details in the image that means the pores in the skin, the noise it's in the image possibly but mainly in the skin no, I'm not looking at the main image I'm looking over here this little preview and I'm looking to see how high the setting dough I need where the skin completely smooths out so that all I really seeing here is what I would call the color in brightness of the image, not the fine detail and I think I've pretty much found that setting somewhere around here where I don't see much of any of the fine detail in there I'm gonna click ok then I'm going to make the top layer active and I'm going to cause photoshopped to do some special math to compare the top layer which is a normal version of the picture to that version we blurred which is on the layer directly below it in order to do that I'll go to the image menu and I'm going to choose apply image apply image means we want to apply one of the other layers to this kind of comparing the things in here need to set this up right first it wants to know what layer should I compare to this and write out says merged which means the whole image I don't want to compare the merged version I wanted toe compare that layer called color then down here it says how do you want to compare them? I wanted to subtract the detail that's on this layer all right I wanted to actually subtract what's in the blurry layer from this so I'm going to choose the choice called subtract and then there's some numbers in here I'm going to set the scale that too and the offset toe one twenty eight one twenty eight is going to determine the overall brightness of what I haven't here s o this most areas in here will be fifty percent grey one twenty eight this halfway between zero and two fifty five it means it's fifty percent growth so that's actually the detail that we blurred away from the other layer it just compared the blurry layer to a normal version of the picture, and it said that's, the amount of detail that you blurred away sitting here in this layer doesn't look very useful, though when it's sitting here as a gray blob, so I'm going to come in here and change my blending mode menu to a mode that's going to combine these two together and let's see if we have the exact that same look as the original picture, the original pictures sitting here at the bottom, we actually don't need that layer, but it is the original I'm gonna hide the top two layers just to see if the combination of those two layers looks identical to the original here's. The original picture here is the two layers that are above it. I can't see a difference, can you? I see no difference. Ok, so let's just throw away that bottom layer just I was using it so you can see that we truly have the same look is the original picture, but look at how it's made made out of two layers and if I only show you one of these layers at a time, watch the bottom layer that contains the brightness and the color in the image but not the fine detail if I show you the top layer that contains just the detail and we can work on them separately so I can either work on the layer that is down here at the bottom, or I can create a new layer in between the two if I would like I'll create a new layer in between the two and let's, grab a paintbrush tool and just see what kind of blatant changes we could get away with. Now I'm gonna choose from the skin that's in an area that doesn't look like it's almost blown out, and I'm going to come in here and just paint that in let's say appear on his forehead even I'll have my capacity down, so I don't make it radical change will bring it maybe at forty percent, but when I painted in, do you notice that when I paint over the hair where I paint over other areas that the detail remains, I'm not covering up the detail even if I have my opacity one hundred where with the normal paintbrush two ofyou pain over a picture without passing one hundred you completely cover what used to be their well, if I do that now you can still see the hair and the other stuff right that's because that detail is contained in a layer up here it's separate from the layer on working on and therefore I can get away with interesting changes I just grabbed the paintbrush tool, I grab a colorful the surroundings and I can come over here now and it might be a little too much there are one hundred percent usually painted twenty or thirty nine just build it up pete this end and you see the pores on the skin and everything are remaining we're not covering those up at all and I'm just going to copy from different areas whatever looks appropriate for the air about toe paint on I can try to fix some of the middle of the nose may I grab a good tone from over in here? That's more of what I wanted to look like and I might not get it completely down because I wanted to still look like it has a highlight but you'll notice some bring it down quite a bit if I hide the layer I've been painting on before after you see how much more I'm toning down that skin, we could try the same thing down here by his neck. I don't think we're going to get much detail in there because there wasn't much detail in the original picture, but I can come in here now and just kind of paint when the colors from the other areas in there remember my own path is at twenty percent so I might need to build it up here and I didn't mean to get that over spring a shirt so if you ever have skin tones where somebody has a sunburn but another part of their skin is not some bird we'll weaken, grabbed from the color of where there's no sunburn, and paint on top of the area that does have sunburn, and, unlike using a normal ah layer, if I would usually just have a normal layer on painting on, it would completely cover up all the detail it's there, but in this case, we have the detail in a separate layer, sitting up on top, they can't really be disturbed, is that layer was never active, and so the detail of the pores in the skin of the just the general skin texture and everything is going to remain, even though we're doing blatant painting like that in that how you can separate the texture and the detail from the color in tone ality so you can come in here in paint, in fine tune now here, if we have no texture in her nose, so I'd have to grab texture and ground from somewhere else. I could go into this layer called detail, possibly grab the clone stamp tool to say I want a copy from somewhere copy, I don't know if texture from her neck will be appropriate, but no it's, not the right brightness in there. What I would need to do is isolate these s o that this is not set to this is my problem right here it's copying from the entire picture I would needed toe on ly copy from the layer that has details so that means you'd wanted on current later I want to do any blemish removal before you do that you can do some of your bill omits removal on this layer called detail if it's a blatant blatant uh thing you might as well done it ahead of time but it can be done on this layer called detail a cz well, you could do some of the retouching so if you want to see how that was done let me do it over again. He opened our image duplicated twice top one is called detail middle one is called color blur the middle one intel the fine detail goes away that really small stuff. Then you click on the top layer it's just the normal picture shoes apply image in maine thing is here you have to tell it which later did you blur which is the one cut color and in here you use thes setting subtract two in one twenty eight and that gets you your detail. Once you've done that you changed this menu to the choice called linear life in the images back together again it looks the same but now we can do our re touching on that separate layer restore skin tone I'm sorry we're nearly there

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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