From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

880 Making an awful photograph awesome

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

880 Making an awful photograph awesome

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. I'm standing here a few hundred feet above the beautiful city of Ushuaia, which is the capital of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina. Also known as the end of the world. So called because this is the last major city before crossing the dreaded Drake Passage to Antarctica. Why? What am I doing here? Well, rather than traveling to tropical destinations my wife and I have spent the entirety of 2019 cold water diving. By which I mean throwing on dry suits and jumping into water that's barely above freezing. See this, this is an actual photograph of our dive boat right here with our dive gear covered in Canadian snow. This is my DSLR inside of its underwater housing covered in Canadian snow. The very next day, on January 15th of the year 2020 we jumped in the water in order to capture some Steller sea lions near Hornby Island in British Columbia. How did I do? Well, you be the judge. Not so great, frankly. But thanks to the fact that I have Photoshop and Camera Raw to work with I was able to take this admittedly awful photo and turn it into this undeniably awesome one right here. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, just so you have a chance to see it on screen, here is the original awful version of my underwater photograph of this cluster of Steller sea lions and here is the final awesome version of the photograph, thanks largely to the awesome power of Camera Raw. All right, so I'm going to start things off by going up to the File menu here inside Photoshop and choosing Browse in Bridge to switch away from Photoshop to Adobe Bridge. And notice this guy right here, Random animals.dng, so called because we're not just seeing sea lions, we're seeing this human diver over on the right-hand side of the photo. And by the way, this DNG extension tells us that I captured the image in my camera's raw file format and converted it to a digital negative, which gives us a lot of wiggle room where the editing is concerned. All right, so with this thumbnail selected I'll right-click and choose Open in Camera Raw or if you like you have a keyboard shortcut of Control + R on the PC or Command + R on the Mac and that's going to open Camera Raw hosted inside Bridge. Now a great first step is to switch over to the Lens Corrections panel right here and turn on Enable Profile Corrections. And that's going to account for the distortion caused by my wide angle fisheye, if you'd like, lens. And notice that I used the Tokina 10 to 17 millimeter lens, so it's quite wide. And might as well turn on Remove Chromatic Aberration as well. Now I want to crop the image, but you only want to crop after you correct for lens distortion, by the way. And so I need to crop and straighten. Notice that the horizon, as represented by the surface of the water, is quite crooked. And so I'll go ahead and grab my Crop Tool. Now if I click and hold you can see that I've constrained the aspect ratio to 13 by 19 to match my 13 by 19 inch paper. And you can dial in a custom aspect ratio by choosing Custom right here and then dialing in whatever values you like. All right, having done that in advance however I'll just go ahead and draw a preliminary crop boundary, as we're seeing here, and then notice if I position my cursor outside the boundary I can rotate that boundary in order to match the angle of the surface of the water. And I'm just going to go ahead and drag this guy down a little bit. Needs a little more rotation as well. Actually, quite a bit more rotation possible. And I can't drag it, notice this, I can't drag it any farther down, because I'm running into the bottom of the photograph and I don't want to go too far to the right, because I'll reveal that diver. I want to keep this seal right here, keep its nose inside the photograph, so I'm trying to crop very carefully where this image is concerned. I might go ahead and adjust the angle a little bit as well. And in the end I think something like this is going to work out quite nicely. So, again, I want to make sure the diver is totally out of the photograph. Notice that this person's elbow is up here in the top right corner, so we want it out as well. But we want to keep as many sea lions as possible, so I'm keeping this guy's nose that's pointing down, this guy over here. I don't know if they're girls or boys, by the way, so when I say guys I mean unisex. This person's nose right here is getting cut off. Not really anything I can do about that. And so in order to see what I've done I'll just go ahead and switch back to the Zoom Tool. All right, now that's already making a huge difference. We have a much better composition, but the colors are still pretty boring and we've got a murky image as well. So I'm going to switch back to the Basic panel. I didn't do anything with the White Balance, by the way. I just left it As Shot. But I did make some modifications to the other values and so I'm going to click in the Exposure value and take it down by pressing the down arrow key to negative 0.25. I'll pass by the Contrast value by pressing the Tab key a couple of times. And I'll take my Highlights down by pressing Shift + down arrow until I arrive at a value of negative 50. Then I'll Tab to the Shadows value and press Shift + up arrow to take it up to plus 20. I'm going to scroll down here, because I've got a short screen, and I'll Tab to the Whites value and I'll go ahead and Alt or Option + drag this slider triangle right here, so that you can see we have some blown highlights in the top right corner of the image. I want to get rid of those and so I'll go ahead and drag this value down to negative 50 at which point the entire image turns black and that's because I have the Alt or the Option key down, notice that. And that shows me that I no longer have a clipped highlight. All right, now I'm going to click inside the Vibrance value and take it way up, no reason to make a subtle modification here, to plus 80. And then I'll Tab to the Saturation value and take it up to plus 10. All right, now I want to work on the detail in the image. And I'm going to start things off by cranking the Clarity value up to plus 100. So again, subtly is out the window here. And then I'll Tab to the Dehaze value and just take it up to plus 10, like so. All right, now if I zoom in here you can see that we've got a lot of noise. I need to take care of that noise by switching to the Detail panel and then I'll just select the Luminance Noise Reduction value here and I'll take it up to 33. And that does a pretty good job at smoothing things out. We still have some color noise however, so I'm going to Color value up to 50. All right, now I want some more sharply focused detail and so I'm going to crank the Sharpening Amount value up to its maximum of 150. I'll leave the Radius value set to zero. Notice that we are sharpening the noise and that's a function of this Detail value, which I think I've mentioned many times I do not like. I don't know why you would want this effect right here, for example. By default it's set to 25. I would really love it if by default it was set to zero, because that way we're not sharpening the noise. All right, but I do want to sharpen not only this high frequency detail, which is a function of the Sharpening value here, but the medium frequency detail as well. So I'll switch back to the Basic panel, I'll zoom out just a little bit here. I want to see the fur on these animals and to bring that out you want to switch to the Texture value and then crank that guy up and I'm going to take it up to plus 40. All right, now I'm going to zoom out by pressing Control + zero or Command + zero on the Mac. Now anybody who was on this dive with me can tell you that these colors are pretty accurate. This was very cold water, what's known as green water. However, I don't like green water, I don't like the way it looks. And so I'm going to change it to blue water by switching to the HSL Adjustments panel right here, make sure that the Hue sub-panel is active, and then I want you to grab the Targeted Adjustment Tool, which you can get by pressing the T key, and I'm going to go ahead and drag inside this green water to the right in order to crank up that Aquas value. Notice that value over there on the right-hand side of the screen. And I ultimately wanted to take it up to its maximum of plus 100. Notice that I've set the Blues value as a result of dragging inside the water to plus 50. All right, now I want to warm up my animals, specifically this guy in the foreground, by dragging inside of its fur. But this time I'm going to drag to the left. And notice that I'm taking the Oranges value down to negative 22 is what I'm shooting for. And I also want to take the Yellows value down to negative 50. And that really makes this foreground seal pop. Now the other seals are a little bit too green, so I'm going to switch over to the Saturation tab and I'm going to drag inside one of these green areas right here in order to take that Greens value down to negative 66 and I'm going to take that Aquas value down to negative 40, even though that makes for a pretty subtle distinction. All right, now that takes care of it, so at this point I'll just go ahead and click on the Open Image button in order to open the photograph inside Photoshop, as we're seeing here. And I'll go ahead and zoom in as well. Might take this zoom value in the bottom left corner of the image down to 48%, just so the image fits a little better on screen. And just so we can see what an amazing difference we've made, this is the original version of the photograph, which makes it look a lot like I can't shoot a photo worth darn underwater. Not sure that's untrue either. But thankfully I know how to develop the photograph in order to create this much improved effect. Now if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a very special follow-up movie in which I show you how to warm up that image and give it a little bit of old fashioned (speaks foreign language), so that it looks like it was painted underwater and in the cold by 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt. If you're looking forward to next week things get colder still as I show you how to recolor free-form gradients in Illustrator 2020, this time from Antarctica. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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