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Advanced Adobe Camera Raw Part 1

Lesson 4 from: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers: Beyond the Basics

Ben Willmore

Advanced Adobe Camera Raw Part 1

Lesson 4 from: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers: Beyond the Basics

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

4. Advanced Adobe Camera Raw Part 1

Lesson Info

Advanced Adobe Camera Raw Part 1

Let's take a peek in camera. Wrong. Now remember, we have 23 day courses that are kind of marriage married together. The 1st 1 was essentials which covered some of the basic parts of camera. This one looks at the other parts that we didn't have time to get into last time. That could make a huge difference. So let me show you a couple images just before and after so you can see how it was transformed. Using one tool in photo shop, which is the dialog box called camera. I'm gonna show you what this image looked like before it was adjusted. Here it is with the default settings. And so that one I thought was pretty much a throwaway image pretty much at the time I took it. I took it specifically to Demo Kamerad because I was like, Who would take a picture of that? Because it was so bad. Um, and then I choose undo in Here's what camera was ableto to get out of that. Let's look at another one. Both of these, I believe, were taken in Hong Kong just, uh, matter of a week ago. I'm gonna go to ca...

mera defaults and you see how hazy that city can become. And then here's what I ended up doing with camera. I'm not saying it's the most ideal and result, but I think the before is unusable in the after is somewhat usable. And if I brought it into Photoshopped to do further enhancement outside of camera raw, I could probably make it look even better. But does that make sense? That weaken transform an image rather radically using camera? But the key is, we need to know enough about camera. We need to not just know the basics, and that's what this session is about. So let's take a look at some of the features and camera that can be overly useful. So first we're gonna look at a technical detail. So here's picture that I took in a place known as Myanmar, which is some people know of as Burma. In what's Funny is I was just there. But not this is not from the trip when I was just there. This is from like, four or five years ago, but what happens when you take photos depending on the lens that you get, you're going to get some artifacts around the edges of things. I'm just gonna make sure where it default settings. Here we are. I'm there. Zoom up and see if I can find some artifacts in this image. When I see him up close, oftentimes you'll find on high contrast edges where you have a dark object touching a bright object right where the to touch you will find a weird color halo. Do you see green here on the left when you see more of a magenta on the right, those are what's known as chromatic aberrations. That's the technical term for them, and they're very common. You mainly see them on high contrast edges, and it really depends on the lens that you use some lenses air much worse than others. This happens to be a 15 millimetre fish islands from Canon, and I find that it's notorious for having chromatic aberrations as you get closer and closer to the edges of your frame. So it has to do with the lens. If you're not familiar with why it happens, as far as I know, and I'm not an expert on this or anything, it's similar descending light through a prism. You know how When you send white light through a prism, it comes out. It's like a rainbow of colors on the other side. Well, sending light through the lens of your camera causes a similar thing. Toe happen just not to as great of an extent, so different colors of light end up falling in different parts of the sensor and you get this weird problem usually to fix it. All you need to do is in camera in, just in case you haven't used camera raw, Uh, let me go to bridge. If you have a raw file and you double click on it, it's gonna open it in camera automatically. If, on the other hand, it's a J peg file or a tiff file when your bridge you'd have to go up to the file menu and there's a choice called opening camera, and that would force the file that's not in raw file format to be opened in that dialog box anyway. But since this is a raw file from a canon camera, I will double click. It will send me there automatically. Then I'll zoom up just clicking with the zoom tool so you can see that issue in to fix it. I need to come over here and we have a bunch of tabs. One of those tabs is supposed to look like the glass elements that make up a lens. And that would be this tab right here. When I click there, I will see the Lens Corrections section and that has some sub areas. There are three tabs. I'm under the tab called Color, and that's where I find a check boxes just called Remove chromatic aberration. I'm just gonna turn on and let's see what it does. You noticed the green edge is pretty much fixed, but here's the problem. Even when you turn on that check box on most images, it will work perfectly fine and get rid of all the chromatic aberrations. Everything looks great, but look on this image. Do you notice up in here? Can you see some kind of a magenta purple? That's still there. Well, usually the chromatic aberration check box is good enough to get rid of most of these problems. But on occasion you're gonna find either Cem purple or some green left over. And so they added some more sophisticated controls in here. And let's take a look at what they dio First. If I bring up this slider, it's going to try to mellow out the purple fringes there in the image and let's see if that can handle it. I bring this up, I'm just watching the image. And yet, if I bring it up just a little bit compared to bring it back down, can you tell that it's minimizing that purplish halo? But then, if I look here, this determines what range of colors it changed. It searched out little fringes on the edges of things that were in this range of color. The problem is that this is too wide. Then there might be other things within the image. Let's say somebody has a tie on there wearing a suit and tie. And in the Thai, it's got some little tiny blue lines within the design of the tie. Those tiny little blue lines in the time might start to disappear because it thinks that there are those little fringes like what we had on the edge of these objects, and it's incorrectly trying to get rid of them not supposed to. We want to get this to be a narrow, as is practical to still get rid of that problems and let me show you a little trick on how to do it. You could pull this over and try to get. This is narrow as you can. Well, it's still fixes the problem, or you could use a little trick that's not very obvious. I'm just really needs to their default settings so that we haven't made a change yet. If I move my mouse on top of my picture and I hold down the command key and the Mac control in Windows, we get to a hidden feature. Right now I have the command key held down. I could move my mouse now on to the area where I see that purple fringing Just move my mouse right into it in click. When I click, watch what happens to the sliders over on the right side of the dialogue box. Click. Do you see how it just moved up the purple amount, the amount that it thought it needed, and it narrowed the range of colors to make it so It's concentrating on this specific color, and therefore it shouldn't mess up other colors within the image where it might falsely think that a little tiny line of color Ah, was something introduced by the lens when it could have been a design and somebody's tie or something else where it shouldn't be messed with. So what did I dio? I just went to this area here. That's Ah, the Lens Correction Town, the sub tab called Color. I had already turned on this check box to get rid of most chromatic aberrations. That works great most of time. But I inspected the image up close and I noticed we still had a kind of magenta purple problem. So I held on the command key. I moved my mouse on top of where I could see that purplish problem, and I clicked. And that's what caused it to figure out the right settings over here. So I didn't have to mess with them. All right, so that was a little tip. That's again, not very discoverable unless somebody tells you about it, because it's something where the programmers put in some extra work to make it so you can be more precise about what you're doing. All right, let's talk about a few other things. Uh, another one of those tabs that you'll often have to deal with is noise reduction. So in this particular image, let me see what it looks like with default settings. See how dark it WAAS. This is one of those instances where you pick up your camera, you take a picture and you keep walking. Meaning that I wasn't stopping specifically to take this picture necessarily. I just picked up my camera, shot it and I didn't think to review it and change the settings and take a 2nd 1 And so I ended up with this and I move the sliders within camera, mainly a move the exposure slider up to brighten. And I moved the shadows slider up to make it to the dark. Part of the image was brightened. And in case you can't tell here, I'll zoom up. Look at what we got in here. All right, so we got this bat, and if I try to pull out a lot of detail in it, do you remember what I said about how maney brightness levels were captured as you get into the dark and dark part of your picture so there's not gonna be all that much that many brightness levels in there, So the end result is not gonna look a smooth as it could. Had I shot at brighter, it would look better. The other thing is, as you get into the darker and darker areas of your picture, your camera captures more and more noise. So if I zoom up really close on this, can you tell what that bat is? Just covered in noise? I don't need assume that far, but right there, I can see noise on your screen. It's actually more pronounced the TV screen here than it is on my screen here. Not sure how it is in the video feed going out there, so let's talk a bit about noise reduction. You're gonna need to do this any time. You end up bringing the exposure where the shadows sliders up a considerable amount to brighten your picture because it's in the dark party or image where the noise is lurking. So, in order, fix it. We come over here and we have a bunch of tabs. One of them is this one. It's called the detail tab. When I click there, I'm gonna find choices related to noise reduction and two sharpening when I need to deal with noise. The first thing I think about is actually the sharpening, because with default settings, photo shop is sharpening the entire picture, and that means any little detail. It finds its exaggerating it, and that means it's actually exaggerating the noise. It doesn't know it's not useful detail within the picture. So, first, with sharpening, I want to make sure that whatever Scharping's being applied is on Lee being applied where it's useful, and that's where we have usable detail. So if you look at this image when I look at this branch that's here, I see a whole bunch of noise and only a little bit of usable detail. Do you see this little detail going across it or this branch? But otherwise the main portion of the branch itself looks mainly like noise to me. And if I come over here, same with the middle of the leaves. I primarily see noise, and then we have the bat where I see a lot of noise and there's a little bit of detail on the edges where I can actually see something that's part of the bat and not part of just the noise. So here's what I'm gonna dio isn't the sharpening area. Do you see the slider cold masking as they bring it? It's gonna sharpen less and less of the image. But I want to see where exactly it would be sharpening how much of the image it would dio. And here's how you do that. I'm gonna move my mouse on top of the masking slider. I'm gonna hold down the option key, which is all time windows, and I'm gonna click. When I do, it shows me a different view of my picture. Any area that showing up his white will be sharpened. So in this case, absolutely everything in the entire picture would be sharpened. Now, if I move the masking slaughter towards the right, you're going to start seeing other areas show up in here. And if anything starts showing up is black, it would not be sharpened It all if it shows up is a shade of gray. It would be partially sharpened, and if it's white, it will be fully sharpened. So what I want to do is move this slider up until any areas that did not have usable detail or, I should say useful detail turned black. So if I look at this area right here, can you actually see any detail from the bat at all? Any vain ing in his wings or texture to his wings? All I could see his noise. So I want this entire surface right in here to turn black. Now the edge that's right here. I don't want to have black cause that's real detail. Aiken. It's part of the bat. I want that to be sharp in this area here. I can see real detail where that edges, so I want it to be sharpened. Same with around his eyes and his nose and stuff. Those things I want to have sharpened its these big flat surface is where all I can see is noise that I want to have turned black. So let's try it. Hold on the option key, click on the masking slider, and I'll continue to bring it up and tell those areas that were just big, flat areas where I couldn't see any useful detail. They turned black right about there. But if you look at where his nose is, if that's what you call it on a bat. His eyes are the edges of his wings. They're still white, which means it's very going to get sharpening. So I want to bring that up and see if I can get it. So the middle of the branch where I couldn't see any really useful detail turns black. And therefore we won't be exaggerating the noise because that's the first thing. The sharpening is gonna make the noise look worse than it really was in the picture. Now, if you want to see the difference you might be able to see in this image, I'm not sure it's not always gonna be dramatic. But if you double click on any slider in camera raw, it always resets it to it's default settings. So if I double click on the slider, it will bring masking back down to zero. So it applies everywhere and let's see if that exaggerates our noise. It's very subtle, but if I do that back and forth, I see a slight difference mainly in the branch. But that's the first thing I want to do. Even if it's going to be a subtle change is make sure we're not exaggerating the noise with sharpening. It's especially a problem if you have skies, because the sky is so smooth and blue that if you see the noise in there and it gets exaggerated just a little bit, it will be an issue. So now that we made sure the sharpening is not exactly under noise now let's go down to the area called noise reduction. In there, we have a bunch of sliders, but there are two primary ones, and that is the one called luminous in the one called Color. There's two different kinds of noise. The one called Color gives you noise that is multi colored specks. I calm Christmas tree lights because Christmas tree lights are usually more than one color tree, and it automatically as the default setting turned up to 25. If I bring it down, you might be able to see what it actually looked like in the image. I can see it a little bit, I presume up quite a bit here, But do you notice that in this area, which would be a tree branch, I can see red and green and blue with little random specs? That's what I call Christmas Tree lights and bringing up the color slider even to the default setting even sat out. So if the issue that you notice is multi multi color specs where the color doesn't seem to belong, then it's the color slider you want to go to and just push it higher than the default. But I'm most images I find. The default setting is sufficient if you have really fine detail in your picture, really tiny little specks of color. You might even want to bring the color slider down and find the lowest setting that gets rid of the color noise so it doesn't mess with real detail in your picture. But that's only if you work with, like fabrics that have tiny little specks of color or other things where the color would be very tiny in size. Otherwise, we have the slider cold, luminous in luminous deals with specs that just varying colors are not color and brightness from the subject. And that's what we have left over in here. So I'm gonna bring up Luminant slider in. That should lessen the amount of noise. It's a matter of finding a high enough setting that's hopefully going to eliminate it or a least get it. So it's reduced enough that it's not distracting, but a couple things related to this. There's a slider down here called Luminant detail in its limiting how much the slider above can affect your picture. What you could do is move that all the way down to say, Don't try to bring back any detail. Yet just do your noise reduction without anything extra, and I could bring up luminous then and just watch the image and see if I can figure out what is the lowest setting that makes the noise. So it's not objectionable because the higher I go, the softer the image becomes. It's got a blur stuff, and so I want to find the lowest setting that tackles the job. Once I found that, then I could go to this slaughter called luminous detail, and this is somewhat similar to the masking choice that was with sharpening in that The higher I bring it, the less it's going to be able to do noise reduction, the less of the image it's going to effect. So what I would do next is take the Slaughter Co aluminum's detail and actually turned all the way up, and that's gonna bring back some of the noise. What I want to do is find the highest setting that still gets rid of noise, so I'm slowly bring this down somewhere in there. I think I'm getting rid of enough noise because what happens is with Luminess details turned all the way down. It's just reducing noise, and it's not trying to do anything special to limit where that noise is being reduced. When you start bringing up luminous detail, it's taking the noise out of less and less and less of the image. And so I'm trying to find the highest setting that really still tackles are noise, and that's gonna give me the most detail in the image. Then there's a setting code. Luminous contrast. And that means let's add some contrast back into the image to make it feel as if we have a little more detail and I find that on a lot of images, you will not notice this. Do anything. You'll turn it up and say, I can't see a thing, but on occasion they'll be a image where you really see a difference with it. But I'm doubting we're going to see much here. I'll bring it up halfway and see bringing up all the way and see. And then I'll bring it back down and on it about you. I'm not seeing much. Yeah, so in most images you'll find it don't matter. But on occasion you'll find the exceptional image where it makes it said the detail pops out a little bit more. All right, so now we've tackled some of this noise. So you want to see what it looked like before? I'll go back over here and I'm gonna bring our masking down, and I'll bring our luminess noise back down to what it was watched. The bat. You see how much noise there waas I am choose undo, and I get my masking back up so that it doesn't sharpen that stuff, and I think it's much more usable image once I'm able to minimize the noise. So with that, I remember the first make it so we're not sharpening the noise by adjusting masking. Then, when you end up doing your noise reduction, the luminous detail I usually start at the bottom just to say, Don't use that feature yet. Figure out how much noise reduction you need to tackle the problem. Then take luminous detail, crank it up and try to find the highest setting that still is effective, and that's gonna bring back as much detail as you can. Below that, you have a luminous contrast on most images. You're not gonna notice the difference with it. And then below that you have the choice called color. And that's if you notice what I call Christmas tree lights. You notice specks of varying color most of the time, the default settings fine that will get rid of him, but on occasion you'll have to bring it up a little higher depends on your camera, and then you have a similar choice of color detail. If you had any really small, tiny specks of true detail in your picture, like it's a painting and it's a pointless pain, there's tiny little specks of color. You could try to find the highest setting of that that still gets rid of your Christmas tree lights in. Therefore you can look better, but those are the main settings for well done. So any time you end up taking a picture that was dark and brighten it up. Be sure to inspect the dark part of your picture if it's a part where they used to not be able to see much detail. But now suddenly you really can see the detail. There's probably gonna be some noise in there, and you'll probably need to go in and do a little bit of noise reduction to make the image look better. That so we looked at to kind of technical issues chromatic aberrations, which were those little halos in, then noise reduction. Now let's look at issues that can come in because of how you shot picture. Let's say that you shot at crooked. You weren't level with your camera or you shot architecture and you tilted your camera up when you tilt your camera up to include the top of the building. What happens? The top of the building starts looking smaller than the bottom. Or maybe you shot at a slight angle, and you ended up with vertical lines that don't look vertically more. There are some things in camera where it can deal with that. So first here I was in Miramar, and this image I happen to capture, but I did it by holding my camera down near the water where it wasn't up to my eye. So I couldn't tell if it was level or not, and, uh, ended up getting this. You can see the horizon. Is that a big angle? Ah, a couple ways. I can change that. And there's a new feature that they've added to make it easier. In the newest versions. Photo Shop CC, you actually have to have the newest update two cc, though for one of these things, let's take a look up in my tools. In the upper left, one of the tools up there is supposed to look like a bubble level. If I click on that, then I can move my mouse onto the image. And if I can find the horizon line, I can click on the horizon in drag to make this line lineup be parallel to my horizon. And if I do when I let go, it's going to create a cropping rectangle that's at that same angle, which means it's gonna straighten this horizon, and I could adjust the cropping to get exactly what I want here. And then I just changed to the hand tool to finish it, and you see my horizon is not straight. I'm going to clear that cropping. If you go to the crop tool, it's actually both a tool in a menu. If you click and hold down, it's a menu. In one of the choices is clear crop. That means get me back to the original framing I had on this. So it's as if I haven't done anything. Now, if you have the absolute newest version of Photoshopped CC, you've done your updates. Then you can do this much faster because all you need to do is go to that little straighten tool that looks like a bubble level and double click on it. And if you double click on it, it will look for a hint of a horizon, and if it can find it, it should straighten it for you, where you don't have to click and drag with on your within your picture. It'll do it for you. It sends you into the crop tool so you can simply crop because right here I don't like the edge of this building being cut off, just bringing in just tiny amount there. What use a little less sky and then switch out of the crop tool to something else. A little fennel. Finalize it. But you have to have one of the newest versions to be able to simply double click on that little thing that looks like a bubble level. It's this tool right here. But then there are other issues we can have. Not just your camera being a little bit crooked. This image I took in Abu Dhabi, this is the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. And it didn't look like this when I shot. This is where this opening is humongous. If I were to stand in here, uh, I might be, asshole. I is, I don't know, just a tiny amount in here. This is huge. And in order to get that entire opening in my shot, I used to fish islands. And so let me show you what this image looked like with default settings. And actually, that's still not default. So I have to get rid of the cropping. Okay, there's the original picture. And then, by adjusting the image to make it more colorful, pulling out some contrast in such, I was able to make the image look a bit better, but, uh, you can really see that there was a lot of distortion in there when it came to the lens. So let's see if I can correct for that distortion First is gonna make the image a little bit more interesting by making it more colorful. But then let's start working on it. First off, I bet you this has the same issue we had with the other fish I shot you remember? With the other fish, I we had chromatic aberrations. I can see a hint of green right here. I can see a hint of magenta right there. You know, if you could see him easily or not, so I might go over to the lens corrections tab where we were before we have that removed chromatic aberrations check box I turned on in. That is fixed, which is nice. Then I'm going to try to reduce the amount of distortion that's in there. Do the lens that I chose. So I'm still in the Lens corrections area and there are three tabs in there. There's profile, color and manual. I'm gonna go over to profile. That's where there's just a check box here called enable lens profile corrections. What a lens profile is is the dhobi actually tested various lenses If they tested this specific lens, which is a popular lens, it's a used to canned fish islands. A lot people have it. What they did is they ended up taking on a sheet of paper that looks like a checkerboard, just a bunch of squares of varying brightness. And they pointed the camera and it took a shot of that. And then they analyzed how that checkerboard had been distorted. Where did it bend? And by how much, and they can create a profile or a description of how much it meant. So if I turn on this check box, it's gonna look at the metadata for this image, which means it's gonna know what camera shot it with what lens it was shot with and all that. And if it's a lens that Dobie has already tested and it has a profile for it, it will try to correct for it. So let's see. All I do is turn on this check box. Here's what happens so it corrected for the fisheye effect, meaning the bending of the picture. But it didn't correct for the fact that I tilted the camera up because it doesn't know if I wanted to tilt the camera up and do that or not. But if I turn that back off, you can see the curve nature versus this. So that's kind of nice. It also corrects for vignette ing vignette ing is where the corners of your image can be a bit darker than the center because the lens just doesn't deliver as much light to the corners. And so also, when they shoot that checkerboard they could measure. How bright are the corners versus the center? And how quickly does that fall off as it gets towards the center? So that also fixed it. Now there are some sliders here and some settings. First off, it's gonna tell you right here what it read from the metadata it saw. It was a cannon. It saw it was the 15 millimetre in assault was shot on a five d mark two. That's the camera, and they've tested that combination. And so it could correct for down here we have two sliders, and this is how much of that correction do I want to apply for both the distortion and the men yet ing so if I wanted to not straight now to fish, I I could bring this all the way down to zero, and it would leave the fisheye effect, but it would correct for vignette ing where the corners would brighten up. So there it's an even brightness across the image. Or if I want Teoh and I find that my lens was different than the one Adobe tested, and it didn't quite straighten things out all the way, I could push the distortion even further. In this case, it's not needed. But if I pushed it even further, it would start bending it the opposite direction because my lens might have been different in the sample that Adobe tested. But that's not enough to really fix what I want. I find this to be too obvious that I tilted my camera up. I want to reduce some of that. I don't expect to get these sides perfectly vertical. I could have a really needed to, but I just wanted to be lesson. So now what I'm gonna do is go over here to the manual tab in here, there are some sliders one of them is the vertical slider, and if I adjust that look at what it does, you can either exaggerate it, so it looks like it was tilted more or it can try to reduce it. And so I'm going to do that. And if I go to the extreme isas far as it goes, that's about as far as I can go. The only problem is it's cutting off the top of picture. So there's another setting in here called Scale. And if I scale it down, Aiken Seymour of the results, you see the weird shape of it. Now I notice at this point that the top of the image is not straight. Can you see this dark area? And you can tell that there's Mawr dark area on the left than there is on the right. If you guys can see that or not, but I can tell it's not quite straight. Or if you look across here, I'm gonna grab that little straighten tool. I'll click right here where the base of this Ah wall is, and I'll drag over here, too, where the base is on the opposite side. So this line should be parallel, and that should rotate me a little bit. Get out of the crop tool. Actually, let's stay in the crop tool. Let's get rid of that bottom portion that's got this weird checkerboard checkerboard indicates any area that's empty. I have to bring it like that. You bring it down, decide how much of the sides do I want to have visible Get out of the crop tool. All right, so to me, that's much more dramatically different than what we started with because we don't have the fish. I look anymore and so know that if you do have the fish, I look. Or if you tilt it up slightly on a building, you can partially compensate for that. I'm gonna click done. Let's try a few other examples because there are some other features that can make this a little easier if you have the new versions. A photo shop like Photo Shop CC. There are some new features that, uh, could make things easier when it comes to straightening things. So in this case, he noticed I tilted my camera a little bit because this would usually be a vertical line, isn't straight. It's not perfectly vertical. It feels like these buildings air kind of tilted backwards a bit, so I'm gonna go to that lens corrections tab. But this time, instead of working with these sliders, where I manually adjust things like rotating in doing my vertical correction at the top, there's something new. It's called upright, and it's pretty cool. The letter A stands for automatic, so it's gonna analyze the picture and see if there's any vertical lines that are a little bit off from being vertical. If they're tilted, it's going to try to make them straight and perfectly vertical. Let's see what happens. I hit letter A. Do you see how it distorted the picture? Such the Now this vertical line is perfectly vertical. So is this one. So is that So is the church. If I go to the icon of the left, that means disabled that you can see the difference. All I need to do is grab the crop tool in with the crop tool. I need to draw cropping rectangle to choose what I'd like. I don't want to get too tight on these sides, something like that, and then I get out of the crop tool justly know the crop tool with default settings won't usually allow you to do what I'm doing in the lower right. Do you see this where I'm including nothingness within the frame. It usually limits use, so you have to have a picture within the cropping rectangle and you can't have an empty part. I changed the setting on my camera that allowed me to include those empty areas. And if I remember correctly, what I needed to do is go to the crop tool, click and hold on it. And there's a setting called Constrained to Image, and if that's turned on it, it would not allow me to include that checkerboard area. It's not truly part of the picture, but I needed to turn that off so that I could do this, because if I crop it all the way in to get the image looking out close, we are to the church pretty tight. Now I'm going to open this image. In the previous three day photo shop for photographer session, I showed you had a stitch of panorama. Once we were done stitching the panorama, there were some empty areas because the end result was not a perfect rectangle, and I showed you how to fill those empty areas. Were Photoshopped figured out what to put in it? I'm gonna do the exact same technique right now, but in case you hadn't seen that seminar, I'll tell you exactly how it's done. There's a way to get a selection out of your picture and photo shop, a selection that just shows you everything that's in this particular layer. We're the only thing that wouldn't be selected is an area that's empty in photo shop. Empty areas look like a checkerboard, so that's what we have in the lower right corner. The way I could get a selection that selects everything except for the empty parts is I go to my layers panel. I move my mouse on top of the little thumbnail image for this layer, and I hold on the command key that's controlling windows, and I click. So I'm gonna command click whenever my mouse is sitting within this little thumb. Now command click, and by doing so, it just created a selection, a selection of everything that's in that layer. It just didn't select the empty parts, so that's nice. Actually need the exact opposite of that. To get the opposite, I'll go to the select menu where I'll find a choice called inverse Inverse means giving the opposite select inverse. So now what I have is just the empty part selected to do the technique that I want to use. That selection, though, needs toe overlap the picture itself because it needs to know what the picture itself looks like. And right now, it's not touching the picture itself. It's not overlapping, so I want to make this selection larger so that it overlaps the image. To do that, I can go to the select menu, choose modify, and there's a choice called Expand. Expand will act as if the selection was a balloon, and it'll blow a little extra air into it, which would make it larger to keep its same shape. So when I choose expand, all I need to do is one pixel, one pixels enough to make the selection larger, where it overlaps the picture, but just the tiniest amount. Now to fill that area, I go to the edit menu and choose Phil in the default setting is content aware, which is what we need. I'll click OK and watch what happens. Photoshopped analyzes that area, compares it to the rest of the image and tries to figure out what would naturally go in there if it actually contained a part of the picture. And I go up to the select menu and choose de select to get rid of the selection, you can see what we have. So that was pretty cool in that if we end up doing a lens correction and then cropping the image, but we don't have enough image to fill, are cropping rectangle on some images photo shop, a bill to fill it in for us if we can get a selection of that empty area, make it just the tiniest bit bigger, so it actually overlaps the picture. Then I went to the edit menu and I chose Phil default. Setting in there was called Content Aware, and it did all the work. So I think that's pretty cool. So let's just try it on a different image. Any time I have architecture in my photographs, I usually go to lens correction because I'm gonna turn on that check box called Removed chromatic aberration. Anyway, I'm gonna have that turn on for almost every image I opened. So since I'm gonna be there anyway, I might as well come over here to the choice called Manual and just see what happens if I hit that auto. But the auto button will usually not only level my picture but also straightening architecture. So in this case, it's going to see these lines that are very close to being vertical lines on the edge of the doorway. And it's gonna say, Hey, there's lines. They're really close to being verticals. Let's try to line him up. So I just hit the letter A. Let's see what happens. Where's my go back? You see the difference. So try it out with architecture. Now, you do have a couple choices every here, where instead of using auto, you could click on these icons. What those icons do is this icon here will try to only level things. So if you find your camera was just not quite level and that's the only thing you're concerned with, you could tap there, and it's gonna try to just level that that looks for horizontal lines that are not quite perfectly horizontal, or you have this one which is for vertical lines. And that would be if you tilt it up and the things air Keystone E you could tap there or you could do the one on the right, which means do both. And sometimes that's way too extreme, depending on the photo that you have. But that's gonna try to make it so many rectangles or perfect rectangles. If this was a picture hanging on a wall and the picture frame was there, but I couldn't shoot it straight on because there's a column or something else behind me that just prevented me from filling the frame with that picture and I had to shoot it at an angle, it was distorted. Then that last setting would be great. But most of time I end up using auto. And if it doesn't do what I want, then I switched to one of the other three choices. Remember, the choice to the right of auto means just level things. The choice to the right of that means look for level and vertical lines, and then this means really straighten absolutely everything and that I would probably use for a picture hanging on the wall that kind of thing. Any questions about those features? We've gone through either chromatic aberrations, noise reduction or what's called upright, which is fixing distortion. Dio How you pointed your camera? One question from up here. Do you have a certain workflow where you feel like you are always removing noise and then doing chromatic aberrations and then sharpening and someone for so far that you tend to like to work within. In general, I usually fix the biggest problem first, and then after fixing that problem now, what is the biggest problem? And I keep working because you have a limited amount of time to work on your images, and I usually work on them until I run out of other problems patients or time. You know one of those things are going to run out of in. But I would say that I usually do noise reduction near the end, because if I'm gonna brighten up the image further, it doesn't make sense to do that after noise reduction because it's in the shadows. The dark part of your image, where all the noises lurking and I want to make sure have brightened up the image. However far I think I need to, uh, so I can really see how much noise and my revealing by doing that. It's not that frightening. The image introduces noise. That noise was there. It was just so dark you couldn't see it. And so I wouldn't do noise reduction afterwards. But otherwise I work on the biggest problem first and work my way down Cool. And one of our regulars, Sam Cox, says, Can you selectively apply noise reduction? Not with. Well, yes, you can. Ah, let me show you how, uh, go back to the bat. Let's say that when I apply that to the bat, Uh, and actually, let me see if it'll allow me to. I know you can with sharpening. Let me see if I can with noise. Yes, I can. All right, here's what I would do. Let's say when I needed to do noise reduction, it really needed to happen on the bat in less so on the trees. Let's say the trees had some really fine detail, and when I did the noise reduction, they looked a bit soft. Here's what I could do if I go to the detail tab and I just note what the setting is for noise reduction. Do you see the setting to 51 is what ended up using and I just remember that number. Then at the top of my screen, there's a brush. It's up here. This thing, that's the adjustment brush. And with the adjustment brush, I can dial in a setting that I want over here in painted into my picture. Now it remembers whatever setting out last used in. So if any of these numbers are not zero, I can double click on their sliders to reset them to zero. Because right now I'm only thinking about noise Direction. In here is a choice called noise reduction. If I bring it up, we're going to reduce Moyes Mawr wherever it is that I paint. If I bring this down, we're not going to do as much noise reduction. What it's going, dio is it's going to be undoing the noise reduction that's applying to the entire picture. So if I bring this to negative 51 is not what it was set to that was applying to the entire picture. Now, whenever a paint, I'm gonna bring it all the way back to what it looked like before we did noise reduction. Or maybe I just want to do a little bit less than what we had. So anyway, if I do negative 51 now, I could move my mouse on top of the image in If I paint, I'm removing the noise reduction from wherever I pain because I'm applying the exact opposite of what's being applied to the entire picture. Plus 51 is on the entire picture. I'm painting a negative 51 which counteracts it. Hopefully, that makes some sense.

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Ratings and Reviews

Olga
 

The best investment I've made to improve my PS skills. Mr. Willmore is a skillful lecturer. English is my second language and I appreciate the clarity of his voice and the fact that he repeats several times what he's doing or what he did. It is great for note taking as well as for practicing. Just an Excellent workshop! Thanks Mr. Willmore!

a Creativelive Student
 

I absolutely love Ben Willmore's teaching style. He is clear and thorough. This class has a wealth of good info so I had to purchase this course. Thanks Ben and Creative Live!!! PS, Don't forget to forward the PDF. I am waiting patiently.

a Creativelive Student
 

AB FAB- Ben is an excellent teacher. He is very through and "down to earth" in his explanations. All his courses are worth the time and the money to view and purchase them!!! Please keep on teaching on CreativeLive. Thanks, Thanks, and more Thanks. Janet Bozgan 4-24-14

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