From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Jump for joy: Finishing a beach photo in Lightroom and Photoshop

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Jump for joy: Finishing a beach photo in Lightroom and Photoshop

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- Hey gang, welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. Thanks so much for joining me. In this one, we'll explore how we can have some fun working with the photograph of a friend jumping on the beach. Here we'll do a workflow where we start in Lightroom, and then finish things off in Photoshop. We'll explore how we can clean up the image a little bit, and use some more advanced techniques as well. Alright, are you ready? Well let's jump in. Here we'll be working with this photograph of my friend Maude, she's jumping on the beach. In Lightroom we're gonna start by looking at how we can apply some basic adjustments. Then we'll send the image over to Photoshop in order to do a little bit more retouching, and also work with Puppet Warp, which is a tool which not many people use, but can sometimes help. Alright, well let's start off here by cropping the image, here I'll tap the R key inside of Lightroom to access the Crop tool. What you can do is if you have a horizon line, you can click and drag across that. That will level out that horizon line. Now the intent with this photograph is to make it look like Maude is jumping really high. I'm mean she is jumping high, but to even add to that I'll just bring this crop in even more. The closer the subject is near the top of the frame, the higher we feel like they actually are, so I'll tap the R key another time here and bring that down so now she's really up there in the top part of the frame, alright. Well now that we've done that, let's go through a typical Lightroom workflow. What does that look like? Well it begins in the Basic panel. In the Basic panel, we can fine-tune color. I'll drag my Temperature Slider to the left to cool the image off. I wanna have a really nice cool blue tones there. Exposure, we could brighten that up a little bit, add a touch of Contrast. Bring some Highlights down. Shadows really need a boost, so I'm gonna bring those, or drag those over to the right, so I get some more of the shadow detail in the photograph. Next we'll go down to Presence, and add a little bit of Clarity and some Vibrance. Alright well nothing really over the top here, but you can see we're fine-tuning the color, and the way that the image looks. Just gonna change my temperature there a little bit, I think I went a little bit too cool on the color palette. Okay, well the image is starting to come to life right, and that's what happens, it's each little step brings some new life to it. There also, there's some housekeeping we need to do, like with our Detail panel, we wanna work on some of the detail that we have here, and sometimes in the sky, we'll be able to see we have a little bit of noise, or maybe we need to sharpen it up so I'm just gonna go through and if we hold down the Option key while dragging Masking Slider, we can see which area will be affected. Whatever is white, will have sharpening applied, whatever is black will not. Next, down here with Noise I'm just gonna bring a little bit of Noise Reduction in as well. Okay, so far so good, basic work in the Detail panel. What about working with our Lens Corrections. We wanna Enable that profile correction. Often what that will do is remove a little distortion, or maybe some vignetting that we have around the edges. I think that's kinda nice. Now that we've done all of this, the last thing I wanna do here is just have some fun with the light, so I'll grab this adjustment, which allows us to bring in an adjustment into a specific area, it's called the Radio Filter. When we click on it, from the pull-down menu we can choose something like Exposure, I wanna brighten an area up. I'm gonna Click and Drag out over the subject. Now often, if you have the opposite happening of what you would like, in other words, it's brightening up everything but the subject? You just go down to the base of this dialogue, and click on Invert Mask, and now you can see how it's brightening our subject up there. Now with this kind of an affect, we wanna be careful right? Doesn't need to be too strong and over the top, but I do wanna bring a little more light onto the subject there maybe just a little touch of light like that. Alright, we've done our work in Lightroom, we are ready to go to Photoshop. How do we get there quickly? Well from Lightroom, go to the Photo pull-down menu, choose Edit In, and then select Photoshop right there, and we'll choose that option. What that will do is it will apply those adjustments and send it over to Photoshop. Alright, well now that we're here in Photoshop I'm gonna create a new layer and call this one R1 for Retouch One, and I'll grab our Spot Healing Brush. The reason why I'm doing this is, I wanna get rid of these rocks that we have down here on the beach, so I'll just go ahead and click over those. Often if you have little teeny objects like this, whatever they are, it will draw the eye towards them, so I'm just looking to reduce and simplify. Often if you can create more simple frames or simpler frames, they will become stronger. So again here, just hitting a lot of those little spots, just looking to reduce and simplify as much as I can in regards to that area. Okay great, so we have that. Now we have a little bit of cleanup work, we have the original image, what else can we do? Well, the subject here really was asking me is there any way you can make it look like I was doing like a level splits here as I was jumping. Sure, no problem. But we have two layers, so we have some retouching and we have our background. What we need to do is to merge everything to a new layer above everything else. To do that you need to learn a shortcut. And this shortcut is shift + opt + cmd + n + e on a Mac. So you press Shift, Option, Command, N, E, that's that shortcut for Mac. Windows shift + alt + ctrl + n + e. Once you've done that and merged everything to the top, I'm gonna go ahead and name this new one Puppet Warp, or just Puppet. Next we'll go to our Edit pull-down menu. And here we're going to select Puppet Warp. And what's interesting with Puppet Warp is what you can do is you can change an image by dragging around little points that you have set on the photograph. Also I should say, if you're seeing the mesh when you do it, just turn that off. What we need to do first is kind of pin or lock down different areas on the photograph. So that's what I'm doing here. And then we'll set a few other pins in areas that we might wanna make adjustments to, so you can see how I'm adding a few pins here, and also up top. Once we have all these pins, we can start to drag them around. So, as I drag this up, you can see how I can pull this up, or I could also push the leg up. So I can do this from two different areas, and I'm gonna do the same thing over here, do a little bit of a pull and a push, and what I'm looking to do is to try to bring all of this up. You can set other points too, if you feel like you need to fine-tune the angle on something, you can see how we can set one there. And so here again, all that I'm looking to do, is to try to give us a little bit more of level splits. I'm aware that it's affecting the ocean down below, but that's okay because we're on a separate layer right? And because we're on the separate layer, what we can do is we can then fine-tune that, or mask that away in just a minute. So once you have this where you want it by moving those pins around, the next thing that you wanna do is just click Okay or press Enter + Return. I'm just gonna fix that little shoe there. And we can do that by clicking on the Check Mark, or press Return on a Mac, or Enter on Windows. This will then apply that to the photograph. Now, at this point obviously we have some problems, so we need to do some masking. So let's do that. We'll click the Add Layer Mask icon. Now we have a mask. If we go to the Properties panel for our mask, we can click on the Invert button. That hides everything we just did. Perfect. Grab a Brush. We wanna paint with White. We wanna paint with a really big brush, here a brush without any hardness, really big, 100%. And what we're gonna do is just paint in the new version of this photograph, so we wanna have this version up here, so we're masking that in. And if we paint with white, what that does is it reveals this. And I just wanna make sure I have all of that in, so that this layer, essentially what it's doing is it's giving us this new posture, or this new look in the photograph. So you can do this with so many different situations. The trick of course is that working with the Puppet Warp tool is actually really hard, it's kind of awkward. So what I find is just practicing every once in awhile is helpful. And then when I need to use it, I have that skill. So that's part of the reason why I wanted to show you this, cuz some of us avoid that tool, but there are times where it can help you out. Alright, well after we've done all that, last but not least, we may wanna make, I don't know, a couple more color adjustments, or have some fun here. And perhaps a curves adjustment, just bringing the light up a little bit and adding a little bit more contrast to finish this off. And that wraps up our work on this photograph, here it is at least in Photoshop. The before and then now, the after. Alright, well as always, hey thanks so much for joining me in this episode of Photo Tools Weekly. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'll look forward to seeing you next time. By for now.

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