From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Quick fix of a background

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Quick fix of a background

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- [Chris] Hello friends, this is Chris Orwig and welcome, to this week's episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this one, we are in Photoshop and here I want to share with you a technique that you can use when you need to quickly retouch a large area in a photograph. And this is a technique that retouchers use all the time. We'll be working with this photograph here, you can see I captured it in New York, 'cause there is the Statue of Liberty in the background. And with this particular photograph, what I want to do is actually remove the Statue of Liberty and all of this. I want to have a more minimalist image, because I feel like the combination isn't really working here. So how the heck are we going to get rid of all of this content? Well one of the ways that we can do that is by first making a selection of some good content. So I'm just going to go ahead and make a quick selection of this area over here. And then I'll copy this to a new layer. To do that, we press Command + J on a Mac, Control + J on Windows. So step one is to select an area with good content, and copy it up to a new layer. Step two is to do some retouching on this. What I mean by that is here I have the clone stamp tool and I will Option or Alt click. And I'm just going to go ahead and paint away anything here that I find distracting. So I'm just sort of cleaning up what I have, making what I have just a little bit better. Tap the left bracket key to make the brush smaller. Now this isn't essential, and you don't have to do this every time. But it can kind of speed up your workflow a little bit. Sometimes if you feel like it's going to be a problem to have other things in the image, just clean it up, make it really nice. Next step. We need to change this, so it's on the other side of the image. How do we do that? Well if you press Command + T on a Mac, Control + T on Windows. That gives you access to free transform. Which you can see now. Then right click or control click inside of the free transform area and choose Flip Horizontal. Next step, go ahead and apply that. Enter or Return. Here with the move tool we can move this to the other side of the image, something maybe right around there. And obviously it's covering up too much of our subject for this photograph, but we can start to see, yeah, this might work. And those initial observations are really important when you're copying and pasting stuff from one area to another. Now of course, there's going to be some areas we need to fix up and some of the lights we'll want to change, but let's take a look at how we can progress through this project. So we have content above our background. Let's go ahead and name this one Skyline. Next step. We'll go to our background layer. Use a tool like the quick selection tool and make a selection of the subject, because we need to make sure that nothing happens to our subject there and that it just sort of comes into this area of the image. Now, we need the opposite of that, so we'll go to Select and Inverse. Next, we'll click on the eye icon for our Skyline layer. Click into that layer and add a layer mask. And basically what that does for us is it limits this new skyline to that area, so it's not affecting the subject. If there are any little problem areas, which sometimes happen, right? With selections. And I'm going to go in and just fix this up just a little bit. And just correct that right there, there's a little edge that needed fixing up, and that looks good like that. Okay, well now that we have that skyline in and we have retouched away that problem. Create a new layer, and with a clone stamp tool or with a healing brush any of those kind of tools, what we can do is just start to work on the edges, so if you notice there's a little edge issue, in some way we can clean that up, or if you feel like the lights are repeating themselves too specifically, what you want to do is just kind of change them. Sort of create the light pattern that you have here. Or modify in this case our skyline. So I'm just sort of changing it around a little bit. And the reason I'm doing that is I don't want it to be completely noticeable that each side is identical. So I'm going to go ahead and just modify that in a couple ways and add some other lights in a couple different ways, and that way it kind of blends in nicely. Alright, well there you have it. There is our quick tip in retouching away a pretty complicated situation, right? Or complicated content, without a ton of effort. And that is why retouchers use this type of a technique all the time, because they know, that if ever you can use something from the photograph and repurpose it in a new way, it often can lead to really strong results. Alright, well I hope that you found this one to be helpful. Thanks for joining me in this week's episode. I hope to see you in another one, have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.

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