From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Ordinary to extraordinary: Photoshop details

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Ordinary to extraordinary: Photoshop details

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- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we will finish off the project that we started last week. Here we'll look at how we can use Photoshop in order to improve some details and then finalize color and tone, so if you are ready, well let's dive right in, here goes. Alright, let's begin the process of cleaning up the photograph. Now the first thing we need to do is to create a new layer, and I'm assuming if you're watching Photo Tools Weekly, you want to be a bit of an expert, so let's do that by way of an expert shortcut, it's shift command N on a Mac, or shift control N on Windows. We'll name the layer R1, and click okay. Alright, well now that we have new layer, we're going to do some retouching look up to this layer, so I'll go ahead and grab my clone stamp tool, or press the S key to select that, in the options bar, we want to choose a brush without any hardness, and I want a brush that's a little bit bigger than that, somewhere around there, you also want to make sure you're turning on sample all layers, and that way you can do all the retouching up to a new layer. Now where to begin with this photograph, what I'm going to do is zoom in, here I'll just press command plus a few times to zoom in, and I'm going to zoom in down to this area, if I want to get rid of the piling right here, I'll hold down the option on a Mac, alt on Windows, and I'll sample, or click to set my source area, and I'm just going to start to click and paint that new texture over there, because I have a nice soft brush, it's pretty easy to get rid of that, press the space bar key and I'll click and drag in order to pan around, and the next thing that I want to do is work on this little object right here, I want to get rid of this stick thing here, that's coming off of the piling. So, one way to do that, tap the left bracket key, makes the brush smaller, hold down the option key on Mac, alt on Windows, sample the edge of the piling, and just bring that up right, so we can then place that right on top, and can you see how we're creating a nice clean edge right there? You could also tap the left bracket key, make the brush a little bit smaller, and here what I'm going to do is go ahead and just paint along this, and sometimes when you're getting something like this out, what you want to do is just make multiple brush strokes, and what we may need to do is to approach is from either side, so right now I'm approaching it from the right, and then in a minute, I'll approach it from the left as well. Tap the left bracket key to make my brush really nice and small, just to create that little edge right there, when you need to do that, option alt click, create a new little source area, and then I'll go to this other side as I was mentioning, and the reason why you might want to do that, is you just want to hide your tracks, and when it comes to hiding tracks, sometimes it works well to, you know to do little areas, other times, you actually might want to do, is create a new layer, do you remember the shortcut? Shift command N on a Mac, shift control N on Windows, call this R2, sometimes if you make a really big brush, and you have like a texture like the ocean, you can option or alt click, to set your source area, and you want to do it a little bit away from where you are, but also the same kind of brightness value, and by doing that here I'm going to paint over the piling a little bit, but I'm okay with that, and you'll see why in a second, I'm just going to paint over this area, going back and forth from both sides, 'cause one side's a little bit brighter, the other side's a little bit darker, and basically what I'm looking to do is just add a big amount of texture over that because that way I'm not see all these little teeny mini patterns, and so sometimes, doing that can really help out. Now, I need to grab the eraser tool, so I'll just press the E key and I'm going to erase where I brought that over there. If you ever see any other areas that you might want to get rid of, you can use the eraser tool, it's really easy, just tap the E key, and then here I can go ahead and say, hey, I don't really need all of that there, maybe that down there, so ends up just being a nice cover up of the texture. Okay, well, we're doing good, got rid of that little object there, looks like, now that I'm seeing this, there are a couple of little areas I need to fix up or fine tune, I'm not going to spend a ton of time fine tuning everything, so I'm going to grab my clone stamp tool, I do just want to make sure that that piling area looks good, so I'm going to clean that up just a little bit more there as well. Okay, so far so good, now what else can we do? Let's zoom back out and see how the rest of the image looks. Well, we obviously need to deal with the boats, and so, I want to create a new layer, shift command N on a Mac, shift control N on Windows, R3, the reason I'm just naming these R1, 2 and 3, is it's just a real quick way to work, because when you have a lot of details to work on, like we do here, what we want to do is just work, you know, super fast, you don't necessarily need to name this, it'll be pretty easy to tell what all of these are. And what I'm doing here, is I'm holding in the option key on Mac, and clicking to set my source area, and I'm just clicking and kind of moving this away, you'll notice that I've zoomed way in, I am now really, really close, why is that? Well, when it comes to removing small details like this, we could try using a tool, say like a, content aware, or something like that, but with the ocean, I found, or a lake in this case, with water, it just doesn't work very well, and so here what I'm doing is, I'm coming in, paying real close attention to the lines that we have, and I'm looking to try to get those as good as I can. So again we'll work on this other area, I also want to point out that I'm going to work a little bit faster than I would if I were by myself, because I know, when you're watching these type of movies, it's not super exciting to see someone to just click on a lot of little small things, so here I'm going to go ahead and work pretty fast, and I'm clicking multiple times, hopefully you can hear that, I'm moving over a little bit at a time, chipping away at this stuff, and so far really, it's just about having that vision right, saying hey, I can do this, I can do this a little bit at a time, going back over areas where you worked, and going from each side, option or alt clicking, in order to select different source contents and just making sure you're getting everything out. Now what do you do in situations like this, where you have some defined lines, like we have here, well you just find that line, and you paint over everything in a sense, what we're doing is, we're bringing in a new line on top of this, so as long as those lines are all lining up, we're good. And so here, just going through that and make the brush a little bit bigger to work a little bit faster, getting rid of the sail there, and made a little mistake, so just need to retouch that out. Now when it gets to the area where we have something defined, like the mountain, left bracket key makes it small, sample and area of the top of the mountain, and just bring a new top of the mountain in right, so what you're doing is you're just using that line, it's the same concept as before. Okay, well so far so good, we have removed a few items here, let's review what we have so far, let me zoom out so you can see how we're doing. Here we have removed the little stick over there, then we added some more texture on top of that, that was important, then we also worked on a couple of the boats. Well we have more detail work to do, and we need to work on exposure and brightness and color, we'll do that in the next movie.

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