5 Photoshop Essentials

1. Photoshop Essentials Intro: Photoshop in light room or really amazing programs that it's remarkable what we can do with these in terms of bringing in our images or even creating original art. But by the same token, these programs can be really overwhelming. There's a tremendous array of tools that are available with them. There are multiple ways of accomplishing similar tasks. So it can really be a bit much when looking at the program and many people will just say, I forget, I can't do this. So what I wanna do is show you just a few tools and techniques that will enable you to do almost 100% of what you want to do in Photoshop in terms of bringing in an image, making it look better or adjusting the contrast, the color, the color balance, and even your composition. And coming out of it with a great photo that you can show to others or even hang his art in your home. In this video series, I'm going to be using Photoshop, but the same tools are essentially available in Lightroom as well as most other image editing applications. So even though you may or may not have Photoshop, it's good to watch this and to try the methods out anyway with whatever is available to you. The first tool we're going to look at is the histogram, which is simply a graphical representation of your image showing dark and light values. So basically a distribution graph. And you'll be able to quickly identify your black points and white points and see what it takes to adjust them and to keep, to keep your image within a tonal range that could be easily printed or represented on a monitor. Next, we'll go onto the use of levels and curves to tools which essentially do the same thing. They can adjust contrast and color and you can even go in and adjust each color channel independently through the use of these tools. Then we'll move on to the Camera Raw Filter, which is a filter which contains a bunch of tools within it that will enable you to do just about anything you need to do with your image all under the umbrella of this one, to all the Camera Raw. And then after that, we'll move on to doing a little bit of retouching. Being able to take out and replace elements in your photo through the use of a Healing Brush, the cloning brush, or the Content Aware Fill. Working with and understanding these tools will enable you to bring in just about any image into Photoshop or Lightroom. And within a few minutes you'll come out of it with a great photograph that you'll be really proud of and happy way then you'll see a tremendous difference between the before and after. So I encourage you to try these tools out with any of your own photos, play with them. You can't break anything. And you'll quickly get an intuitive sense of what can be done. And it'll become real easy to adjust your images and really make some great art from them. 2. Photoshop Essentials Project: The best way to really learn anything is through hands-on application of knowledge. And it's the same thing with Photoshop and Lightroom and all the things that we'll be talking about in this course. The best way to really make this knowledge intuitive and for you to really gain a true understanding of how the program works is to work with it and try it out. Bring your own photos into Photoshop and try applying all the tools and techniques that we'll be talking about, your own photos. And when you see the results of your own work, you really gain incredible amount of knowledge and understanding that will really serve you well going forward. I will post the file that I'm working on in this video series so that you can follow along with me. And that's a great thing to do, but I can't stress enough how important it is for you to bring your own photos into Photoshop or Lightroom and work with those. And you really see tremendous results. And it would also be terrific for everyone to post their before and after photos on the website. The others can see what you've done and what's possible. Everyone learns a lot more that way. And also I can post whatever comments or suggestions or ideas that I have as well. So hopefully, everyone will really learn a tremendous amount together. 3. The Histogram: In making our conversion from color to black and white using Photoshop or Lightroom. There are few tools that are important to understand and to use. The first is the histogram, which gives us a graphical representation of the tonal values in the image. And the other tools that are useful in terms of color and contrast adjustments are the levels palette and the curves palette. So we're gonna go into those just to give you a brief explanation of how these work. You already know about this than just move on to the other videos and skip this. And making adjustments to our image to make a black and white, we want to be able to adjust our tonal values in an interesting way of looking at a representation of these values is to look at the histogram. And there are a couple of different ways of looking at the histogram. We can go into Window Histogram and it comes up here right now I have it set where it's showing my red, green, and blue channels as separate histograms. And this is the combined. You can also click on the hamburger menu here and go to a compact view which just shows the combined with nothing else or expanded, which gives you some other statistical numbers associated with that. Or like we had before, where it's showing all channels. So the histogram just shows you the distribution of light and dark values, the left side being dark, the right side being light. You can see this image is sort of a middle tone, maybe leaning a little bit towards the darker end of the total spectrum. So therefore you can see the bulk of our pixels are a little bit to the left, so a little bit darker. But mostly in the middle, very little really light area being represented by these very light areas of the clouds where the sun is coming through. And there's very little of total black too. As you can see here on the left-hand side, you have fewer and fewer pixels as you move to the left. Another way of looking at the histogram though, is through the camera raw filter which we will be using. So if I go under Filter, go to Camera Raw Filter and bring up that dialogue, you see we have a different histogram here up at the top, which provides a little bit more information. First of all, it's showing the red, green, and blue channels overlaying each other so you can see how they, how they adjust. And you can see as I mouse over different parts of the histogram, I get different highlighted areas. So if I start from the left, this is my black area, which is represented by the black slider here. And you can see if I move it to the left, increasing the amount of black in the image, the whole histogram moves to the left. You can see a big spike on the left-hand side and that's showing are really completely blocked up black area. We have a warning here showing our clipping for the shadow areas. I can turn it on and off by clicking on that. But it's really handy to have to show when you're adjusting the blacks too much, where they're just getting blocked up. Really not serving any value in terms of showing tone. So I can move that back. And if I move one section over, It's my shadow area. And again, we have a slider for that. And it's the same thing. I can move this slider left and right, and that'll adjust pretty much that part of the histogram, primarily, although it will affect other parts because things move in concert. And then if we go to the middle or exposure, which is a slider right here, same thing. And you can even do it just by clicking into the histogram like I can go here, this is showing the highlights. If I click here and move left or right, it will automatically move that slider. So you can do it either way by going, hitting right and it found a histogram or going to the slider down below. And again, looking at the light area here, I have another clipping warning on this as well, showing me that these are completely blown out white areas that have lost all detail. And again, I can turn that on or off as well. So here I've turned it off. But you can see how the histogram is showing. There's a lot of values all the way on the right side here, because there's so much white that's just gotten completely blown out. Now, bring it back to where it was when we began zero-zero, more or less, this is what we're after and creating a working file for converting to black and white, where the bulk of the pixels lie somewhere in the middle area here. And that way we have a lot of room to move, to make adjustments, to make things brighter or darker or both, depending on the parts of the image that we're working with. So just keep that in mind moving forward. 4. Levels Adjustment Tool: One of the tools we can use for making contrast adjustments on our image is to use levels. And we can access that through the adjustments panel. It's the second icon from the left here. I can click on that or go to the black and white circle at the bottom of the Layers Palette. Click on that and you'll see the levels will come up on that also. So let's just click on it here. You see we get an adjustment layers as levels and we have a dialog box. It's showing a histogram, three eye droppers, and the left-hand side here, the weight of a gray scale at the bottom. The gray scale at the bottom is representing our output values basically. And we can make adjustments. So you can see how we can make adjustments to our light and dark values and everything in-between using this. So let's start with the widest white on our histogram, we have a little triangle here and you see a value of to 55. So if I grab that and move it to the left, what I'm doing is I'm moving my white point now where the lightest point in my image down, let's say if I go all the way to here down to my middle value. So now from this point where I have the white little triangle all the way to the right. All those values, values now has been made to 55. There are no longer showing values of something less than that of, let's say 240-23-0220 and so on. So now we've essentially of increase contrast in a sense by adding all this whiteness. But we've also lost a lot of tonal detail. I can do the same thing with the black end of the spectrum as well. So here we have zero-zero for our blackest black. And if I start moving that up, let's say all the way to the middle arm, right now, all the values from, let's say this point to the left have now become total black. Because I've moved that zero-zero point to my black, to the middle of my histogram. So I've lost all those darker values. All the values from, let's say zero up to 108, ECI, 108 here. I've now become a zero. Instead of something 0-108 are right now I just moved it to 50 or 66. So now I've got black values 0-66 or 69. And I've lost all those tonal gradation, gradations between those two points. And I can do the same thing with my middle of gray point here as well. I can move my middle of gray, let's say, all the way down to the dark end here. So that now from middle gray going up to white, It's a very long range. And all these sort of spread out the whole tonal range. Going from the whitest white to my middle gray, and from my middle grade go into black. I've shortened it up, and so there's very little left here. And I can go the other way too. If I move this middle gray all the way up to the white end, I've extended the gray and dark gray end of the spectrum all the way from here to zero-zero. From middle gray point up to white has been shortened, so there's very little left of the white values are lighter values to be shown. And you can see that on the histogram because it's showing very few pixels are left here in the white area. So that means the rest of this is gonna be all pretty dark. And again, I can go back here to reset everything, hit default, and go back to zero, or back to how we started. And I can do the same thing here on the bottom gray scale. If I take my black point here and start moving it up, I'm resetting the darkest dark in the image. So rather than having it at zero-zero, where you see output level of 0.2, 55 instead of zero. If I move it, let's say up to here. Now my darkest dark is 87 rather than zero. So I'm getting a somewhat lighter gray as my darkest point in my image. So if you're looking to make a high key image, this is one way of doing it and I can do the same thing for the white end of the spectrum as well. I can take my lightest white instead of being 255. Let's see here I can make it 153. So my light is white, is now almost a middle gray as opposed to being a white, white. And I can go here with my eye droppers and I can kind of set my light and dark points here. So here I'm going to use this to set my black point. And if I set it somewhere, I just put it somewhere in the clouds here. You can see it made some that point to my clouds are right here. That's gonna be my black is black and then it changes all the other values in the image accordingly. If I go back and I can do the same thing with my widest way to say if I want to make this yellow here, my whitest white, you can see what it does. It changes all the other images and change the colors as well. The interesting thing I can do also is to use the middle gray value. If I know I have a middle gray somewhere on my image that I want to use to calibrate the rest of the image. I can use this. I can let say if I want to make the grass gray, can click in the grass and so it made it a middle gray. And all the other color values around that have changed. Now, just like other things in Photoshop, there are a number of defaults we can use as well. I can go here or not default for Presets. And you can see, you can try these out so I can say increase contrast. You can see these points move in and creating more contrast. And you can try these out as well. That can be a good starting point. You can make further adjustments from there. If we go back in our default. And also, I can look at there we go. Individual color channels as well. I can look at, let's say the red channel, green channel, blue channel. And so you can see the histogram for each one will come up and I can make adjustments per channel rather than hitting all three at once. So again, another tool to use and another way to use the levels command or the levels adjustment palette. You can see it's a pretty powerful tool to use. And just like anything else, it's good to play around with it, see how it works and you'll get a feel for it. Just like everything else in Photoshop or Lightroom. 5. Curves Adjustment Tool: Another powerful way to deal with contrast control and even colored correction is to use your curves adjustment layer. And this can be accessed either through clicking on black and white circle at the bottom of your Layers palette, or going into the adjustment panel and clicking on the icon that says curves. When you click on that, you see we get a layer and we get the dialogue box. And just like any other adjustment layer, I can double-click on the name and give it any name I want. In this case, we'll say new curves. In our dialog box here you'll see we have a diagonal line going from the lower left to the upper right. Lower left signifying our blackest black with his value of zero, the upper right being 255 or complete white. And you see the histogram behind it. If I just simply take the black and white points, Let's say I'll take the black point and I move that up. What I'm doing is I'm changing my ultimate black point to the image. So here I'm getting total black of a zero. Once I start moving it up. You can see my input and output numbers change. Input was zero, that's where we began. The output is now 33. So my deepest black now has a value of 33 rather than zeros. So I'm not getting a complete black. I'm getting a darker grays somewhere north of zero. In the same way, I can adjust my white point and the same way I can take my white point, drag it down. Rather. Here I started with a 255, right now it's set at 179. So my lightest right now has a value of 179, so it's a gray or white because I'm no longer going all the way up to 255. Now, I can also drag a point anywhere along this line to make a change. I can take a point, let's say here in the middle. Move it to the left. And you'll see my input was 107. That's where I began with, but now it's 166. So I'm taking all the values that were 107 and now they're making them lighter at 166. But it moves the whole line. So all the other values along this line are also changing. The greatest change being closer to the 109 here, or the point where I am and having decreasing effect as it moves out towards either the black point or the white point. So it's an interesting effect. And what I can do is I can let say here I want to, let's say make my lighter values a little bit lighter. And I can make my darker values of when I grab a point down here a little bit darker. And this adds a lot of contrast to the image. It's a very typical way of using the curves to add a little bit, a little bit of contrast in the image while still maintaining our black and white points. And I can change this either by going back to default. Or if I had a point here, I can just grab it and just pull it off and I'm just back to where I began. So it's a very powerful tool to use. I can also go to this little finger icon here. If I click on that, I can identify areas of my image to see what value they're at and make an adjustment. So let's say I go here, I want to make this my darkest part of the sky. So I can click on that and go down or go up. And it automatically will identify that value on the curve line. And I can make an adjustment in real time seeing what happens. So let's say I want to make it a little bit darker. And let's say I wanted to make, Let's say this area a little bit lighter. I can make my contrast adjustment just like that. So it's again, it's another really interesting way of finding where the values are in your image and making an adjustment. Another way of going about this, I can actually even freehand curve line if I want to. I can take this tool and let's say make curve like that, which looks pretty lousy. And then I can smooth it out by clicking on here the point that I can bring it back to a straight line, but still maintaining the white and black points that I set. So we can go back to default here. So you can see there's a lot of powerful things you can do with this and it's definitely worth playing around with again, to see the effects that you can get with this. Another interesting thing that you can do, just like we saw on the, on the levels palette, is we can set our black and white points here too. So I have a dark eyedropper here. And if I go somewhere in my image where I want to, let's say set my black point. Let's say these little islands in the image, I can click on that. And that'll set my black point. And if I want to set my white point, I can go, let's say into the light area, the clouds here, that this doesn't look so great, but again, it's something to play around with and adjust to your liking. The interesting thing to use is actually the middle one that gray, which will identify a middle gray. And just like we saw before with the levels palette, I can use this to make a middle gray value anywhere on my image that I think it can be used as a reference point. So like we did before, if I go into the thread Cloud and click on that, which isn't working. There we go. Let's go here. I click on that. You can see that a lot of get automatically set that point as a middle gray. So again, a powerful tool to use and something to try out and use on your images and you'll see how great it can work. The other thing that we can do to also do is we can adjust the blending mode. We can do that with a levels as well. So let's say if I made a contrast adjustment here, but I don't really want to intensify the colors. You can see the colors get a little bit more saturated. If I go to my blending mode and go down to Luminosity, it'll just affect the values of it without affecting the color. So that's another powerful way of adjusting your, adjusting your tonal range without affecting the colors. Again, we can default out of that. Or I could also do since it's on a layer, I can go here to opacity and lessen the effect of it by just bring the opacity down, the adjustment. And so it's another way of getting a really nuanced adjustments to your image. Just as we saw with the Levels Adjustment Layer, we can do the same thing in the curves in terms of adjusting where our white points fall on the histogram. If I grab my white point here at the upper right, and I drag it horizontally across the grid here to the left. Let's say I bring it down to the middle, which is now at 01:28. Now all my values, 1-255, have all become 255 because I've moved that white point over across the histogram. So I've lost all these values here you see on the histogram where normally the I value is, let's say of one-third, one-fourth, one-fifth, one-sixth, see all the way up to 255. I've lost all those, all those have now become 255. And that's why we see so much white in the image. Now, on the other hand, if I do the same thing with the black point and I move that to the right. It's the same thing. If I move, let's say all the way up to the middle. Now all the values I went from 127 down to zero, all those darker grays, I've lost all of them. They've all become black. And now the gray values from 127 up to 255, all the lighter grays. Those are the only ones that are left. You can see on the histogram is just what's represented here, but there's not a lot of them and that's why there's so much black in the image. Now. Again, another powerful way of dealing with the tonal values and your image. Very similar to what we saw in the Levels command. 6. Camera Raw Pt 1: One of the more useful tools in Photoshop is the Camera Raw Filter. It can be used to bring in raw files from a digital camera, but you can also use it to work on other files that can open up in Photoshop such as jpegs, tips, or just regular Photoshop files. The nice thing about the Camera Raw Filter is that there are a lot of tools that are contained within this one filter. So in this first part, we're going to look at the editing tools which encompass tools to adjust, tone, contrast, color, geometry, and things like that. And there are a lot of tools within here, which can also be done outside of the filter. But it's interesting and useful to see how they can be done within this one filter. This is a JPEG from a cell phone. It's just, it comes in as normal as a background file here. But what I'm going to do is if I right-click on this and I say Convert to Smart Object, and you see there's a little icon that, that goes on top of the thumbnail. Then now this is identified as the smart object. And what this means is that any of the filters that I apply to this now are completely editable in the future, I can do whatever I want to. This pretty much. Nothing is really permanent. It's non-destructive and it's not going to affect the original image at all. So I have it set as a smart objects. So now I'm gonna go here up under Filter, go to Camera Raw Filter, which can also be accessed by hitting Shift Command a. You can see the image opens up in the camera raw filter, which has a whole bunch of different controls and adjustments that are available. So all this is available within the Camera Raw Filter and it replaces some of the other ways of doing this within Photoshop where you would have to create layers. This way you can do a lot of it all in one place and it can be a little bit easier for adjusting your images to do it all in one place like this. So I'm just going to run through this rather quickly. This is not a real in-depth look at the Camera Raw Filter, but just to introduce you to it and hopefully get you to try it out and use it because there's a lot here. On the right side you see I have a histogram as we've talked about before, but it could just go over this very quickly as well. The left side of the histogram or my blacks, the right side is white, so goes from black to white on a gray dated scale. And you can see there are highlights as I move my mouse over it. And the black relates to the black slider here, the white relates to the white slider, the shadows. And you can see because it all comes up underneath the histogram here. Shadows Exposure is up on top here. So I can click in any area of this, Let's say the blacks here. And I can move my mouse to the right. And you can see it moves the black slider up. Or if I move it to the left and moves the black slider down showing that blue areas where the clipping occurs, where it shows I've so much black that there's no detail there anymore. And you can see the left side of the histogram. The values all go way up on the left side showing that I've got all this completely blacked out area. So I'm going to move it back pretty much to the middle because I don't want it blacked out. You can see the same thing on the white. I can click in there, move it to the left, moves my white stone. You can see I get start getting a little more detail in the sky. Or if I move it to the right, it becomes completely blown out with those red areas that are signifying white areas that no longer show any sort of detail or gradation of tone. So I'm going to bring my whites scan and you can do the same with the shadows. If I click in the shadow of the histogram and move right, it's going to move all those values, values to the right, which is lighter. By moving to the left, it's going to make them darker. So I can just move it a little bit just to open up my shadows a little bit. The highlights, same thing. If I move it down, you can see I start gaining a lot more detail in the sky, which is important. So let's bring that down. And exposure or my mid values, I can move them left or right to adjust the density of it. Maybe a little bit to the left just to bring more tonal area in there to work with the texture clarity and dehaze filters or adjustments or contrast adjustments texture affects my change from dark to light and very small areas where there are abrupt changes from dark to light. Clarity effects over longer periods like in the clouds here we have a gentle change from dark to light. And dehaze is pretty much what it says. It is that it'll affect the haze in the area and essentially darken the sky a bit. So if I move the texture up, you can see I'm getting more definition in the water and the ripples of the waves here. But it also brings up more grain in that image or brings up more of the visual noise. You can see more of those random colors coming up. So we really don't want a whole lot of that. You can see the clarity as I bring that up. It brings a lot more definition into the sky. But you do start to see a little bit more grain in that area as well. It needs to be careful, especially with an image from a cell phone. Where it's not going to be of the highest fidelity to begin with. The dehaze also, if you bring it up, you can see it darkens the sky, makes things more intense. And I can always go back and adjust my blacks to bring that up to eliminate the blocked up areas. And then you have Vibrance and Saturation, which are both saturation sliders. The vibrant slider affects mostly the mid-tone values. The little, little more gentle and how it works. As opposed to saturation, which will just saturate all colors you can see. As I bring them up, the colors get fairly unrealistic, so we're going to leave that at zero. Then we have a curve adjustments here, which we've talked about before as well. And I can make more nuanced adjustments for this as well if I want to, let's say bring down my shadows, raise the light areas a little bit. We can get a little bit of an S curve which adds contrast to an image for this, so this is a handy way to add contrast to an image. Suppose to just working with the contrast slider. You can see we've increased that quite a bit already. The next one down is the detail. Sharpening increases the contrast basically between pixels between light and dark areas. It'll make apparent sharpness in the photo look more acute, but it will also bring up more noise. So you have to be careful with how you use that. Wouldn't overdo it at this point. And noise reduction, that's our visual noise. The best way to look at that is to bring an image up in size. So if we bring it up and look where the noise is going to be in the shadow areas for the most part you can see we have some random color. You see the purples and the greens and the blues in here. A lot of that is color noise in the image. And if we bring up the noise reduction, it'll soften the image because it will smudge over it. So you have to be careful with how you use that will get rid of the noise. But the cost of doing so is going to make the image a bit softer. You're going to lose sharpness to the image. Color noise will affect the color noise and they can reduce some of that random colorization that goes on in here. So again, you have to play with it and see what works best for your image. It's best not to overdo these things because they can just make your image rather mushy and take away from the overall sharpness. Here we add a little bit of noise reduction that does seem to help here in the waters in the foreground of the picture. But you can see it definitely did make it a little bit softer, but I think overall it looks better. And then we can go to the Color Mixer where we can adjust these individual colors in the image in terms of hue saturation and luminance. Hue is the color saturation is the intensity of the color and luminance is the color value, is the lightness or darkness value of it. So you can see in the foreground we have this red bone which is rather strong and color. So if I take the red here and I bring that down, you can see reduces the red and the saturation of it. I could go to the luminance as well if I wanted to darken it so you can see what that did or if I just want to change the color of it overall and make it a little bit more orangey. I could do that too. So there's a lot of adjustments that we can do color wise within Adobe Camera Raw. And I can do that for any of the colors here. If I want, let's say my blues, I want the sky to be a little bit more intense blue color. I can bring up the saturation. If I want to darken it, I can bring the luminance down and things like that. So you have a lot of control over individual colors. It's a good thing just to play around with that and you can see how it works. Color Grading will sort of work in the same way, but over a broader range, it's split up into mid tones, shadows and highlights. And this is sort of like a color balance adjustment if I wanted to make. So in other words, if I found that the overall feel of this was a little bit too blue, especially let's say in the shadows here. And I want to warm it up a little bit. I can move this into the warmer spectrum here, like in my reds or oranges. Just to take away some of that blue. I could do the same, let's say with the mid tones, then it gets a little bit too warm. So maybe I want to keep it more blue so you can see how you can sort of play around with this to get the color effect you want. For highlights. If I want to keep those kinda warm, I can move that into the reddish orange area, maybe move the shadows back into the blue to get a little contrast between my shadows and highlights. Shadows will normally be cooler and the highlights will be warmer from the sun. So you can see how that works. And also I can work with the blending of this here, the balance of my various tones, you can see here going all the way to the ground and getting more almost all the worms and moving the bounce over to the left, it pretty much is all cool. So again, you can play around with these sliders to affect the overall color balance. Bring it back to where you start by just zeroing out these parameters. So if I just bring this back and then we go to optics and we can effect a story for you. If this was taken with a wide angle lens and there was a lot of barrel distortion. I can adjust that like so. Or if I want to create vignetting your light or dark around the edges, you can use this. You can also do it manually. So either way, in geometry, if, let's say if my horizon line, It's tilted, this one looks a little bit tilted. I can adjust it like that to straighten it out. That looks a little bit better. And these are other adjustments. I want to if you're want to straighten out a building shot or something like that. This is one way you can do it. Then we have effects here. Grain if you want to add grain to your photo or vignetting, just like we saw before. We can do it here as well. We can go to calibration, which affects the red, green, and blue channels, which are the primary color channels in any image you see on your screen. And so I can affect the rate if I want to make the whole red channel, let's say a little more towards the yellow, a little more orangey. And if I want the green to be maybe more towards the yellow. So you can see the yellow gets more intense here. And you can see what happened to the red. It became orange. So it's a very effective way of making global color changes to your images as well. 7. Camera Raw Pt 2: We're going to look at some of the other tools that are available within the Camera Raw Filter in these includes some some light retouching tools like Content-Aware Fill, healing, and cloning brushes. And although these brushes are available in the main part of Photoshop, they are operating a slightly, slightly different way within the Camera Raw Filter. So you might find this easier to work with are just better for your manner of working. Then we'll get into looking at the masking options that are available within the filter as well. And these enable very targeted adjustments of color tone in contrast within your image. And again, these adjustments can be done outside of the filter and in the main part of Photoshop. But this is just another alternative that's all under the same umbrella of the Camera Raw Filter. Within the Camera Raw Filter, we're also able to do some retouching and some masking and things like that, things that we normally do in the main part of Photoshop. The cloning brushes operate a little bit differently than they do in the main part. Probably not as much flexibility or ability to really retouch, but you can do some of it here, so we'll take a look at it. So if I click on this second icon down from the top, it says healing and we have three brushes here. We have Content Aware, healing and a cloning. So let's say we start with the cloning brushing. We can adjust the size of the brush here and the feathering and the opacity of the brush, whether we want it to be 100% or something less. So just for our purposes here, we're just going to make it 100% so we can see easily what's going on. And we'll include a little bit of feathering. Let's get the size down. Let's try to, I'm going to try to just take out the flag here. We're using the cloning brush. Then as soon as I paint in there you see there's a circle and a line with an arrow showing where it's sampling from. Photoshop automatically just determined that it's going to sample here. But if I don't like that, I can click on it with my mouse and just drag it. And I can change the sampling where it's coming from. And if I wanted to see what it looks like without the icon and the circle on your argument. Click off of Show Overlay. And it will show what it looks like. I can click on the Show Overlay to get rid of this so I can see what it looks like. Then if I'm happy with it, I can just move on. If not, put the overlay back on, I could try a different brush and I can try a different brush with the one I already just did. Instead of cloning, I'm going to say, well, let me try the healing and see if that works any better. Now I tried the healing and you see we get a different result. It's still showing the sampling area. And I can again move that around at will to see if I get an effect that I like. And again, I can shut off the overlay to see what it looks like this, if I'm happy with it are found not. Then finally we can move on to the Content Aware, which sort of like how it works in the main part of Photoshop where we're Adobe Camera Raw or Photoshop will determine some other areas of the photo to use as a source material to replace what I, the area that I defined with the brush. And we can work with this a number of different ways. I can hold down the command key and click and drag. And this will be a sample area that it's going to use. And you can see it changes slightly. It's trying to blend it into the background. It doesn't really look so great. Or we can just hit the refresh button and it'll change also just seemingly in a random fashion. You can see each time I press the refresh, I'm getting a different result. So you can see, you can use this and I can use multiple spots within the image if I want, I can, I can go hit the clone and just create another one right here. Let's say if I want, do the same thing so you can add as many as you want. But like we saw before, it doesn't quite have the flexibility of working with these tools and the main part of Photoshop. So just keep that in mind. So, and also, if I hit this little icon here with the arrow, I can just reset everything and remove everything I've done. I could also I could have also clicked on it. Like let's say if I put this back and let's say I'm not happy with it with just, with only this brush. I can click on it and hit Delete and removes it and nothing, no harm done. The next icon we come to after the healing is the masking. So if I click on that and you see we get subject sky and background. And in this case, in this photo, we probably want to deal with the sky first. So in this case. Photoshop will automatically select the sky for me, which is real handy. If I just said sky, you see I would get this red area which is signifying the active area of the mask. As opposed to the main part of Photoshop where the red will signify the masked off areas, the areas that are not affected. So in this case, it's showing the sky and then I can go in and make whatever adjustments I want. I can lower the exposure, increase contrast. Let's say bring up the shadows, lower the blacks. I want to change the color temperature a little bit. I can make a totally different colored sky by eliminating the blue here. Want to bring up saturation, can do that as well. And so you have a full menu of the adjustments that you can work. You can apply a curve to this area as well. So there's a lot that can be done. Even with these contrasts, adjustments of texture, clarity and dehaze. If you want to bring up the dehaze being that sky, it will cut through it a little bit and darken the sky. Clarity will add a little bit more contrast as well, as well as texture. Although it may bring up a little more grain into the sky as well. Then we have further adjustments of sharpness, noise reduction, etc, that we can deal with. If I want to add a new mask to cover another area of image, I can just hit the plus sign and it gives me the whole choice of types of mask I can create. So let's try a brush mask. Let's say I wanted to darken this area of the image so I can paint in with the brush. And the brushes is I can change the size of it, the feathering, the flow, the density so you have full control over how the brush x. And so once my mask is in there, I can go and change it just like anything else. So I can lower the exposure. Bring up the contrast if I want. So again, you have full control over the mass to make any kind of adjustments or enhancements that you want to do and you can keep on adding more mass. I can go do another one. Let's say do a linear gradient. If I want to darken the bottom of the photo a bit to lead the eye into the center. I can do a linear mask like that, which is a gradient, lower the exposure and you can see I've darkened it considerably and I can keep on going. You can add even another one. Let's say, let's do just one more. I'll do it from the side here and the mask. And even one can overlay over the other. And I can do the same thing. So you can see you can make pretty dramatic changes into the image all through the use of the masks and Adobe Camera Raw. So after that, we come to red-eye reduction, which in this case obviously we don't have a need for. But if you have a portrait photo, you can use that. And then we have presets. And there are many, many presets available in Camera Raw. You can see all these changes and we have black and white color. There's all different. You can try them all out to see what will work for you. And some can be interesting. And you can use this really as a basis for moving forward and you can adjust the intensity of the preset also appear on a slider. So you hear right now it's set to 100. I could bring it down or I can bring it up to make it really intense. So just another way of working with your photo and you can get some pretty interesting effects here and just try them out and see what works. And then once all your settings are done here, I can go back to my original edit menu. I can click on the three dots here and I can save my settings. I could save it here. And asked me, what do I want to save? And I can either check all or just uncheck whatever you don't want. And then I can hit save. And you just give it a name. It'll save it in the settings setting on your computer. I'm going to cancel out of this because I have no reason to. So there's a lot you can do here. It's a very powerful tool to use in Photoshop. I can do really massive changes to your image, and it will require probably a bit of playing around with it to see what you're comfortable with and what you feel really works for your images. 8. Cloning, Healing & Content Aware: Many times when we take a photograph, there's something that intrudes on our image to make it something less than perfect. And the tools of content aware fill the Healing Brush and the cloning brush easily enable us to take those elements out and replace them with what would normally be in the background to make our image cleaner and more powerful. So try out any of these tools and see what works best for you. One of the great things about Photoshop and imaging editing applications in general is our ability to remove and replace elements in our photos. In this case, in the photo you see here we have three areas where things are impinging into the sky area, where if they were removed and replace the whole image would really look a whole lot better. So we're gonna look at three different ways of doing it. There are lots of ways to do this, but we're just going to look at three quick ways. Hopefully what you'll do is you'll try it all out and see what works for you and what's easiest to use in various situations. The first thing we're going to do is add a layer to our image because it's always much better to do whatever changes were doing on a separate layer. That way, we can always remove it and replace it, or even just roll back the opacity of the layer, make it work better. So the first item we're going to look at is the clone tool, which looks like this rubber stamp. And that's essentially what it does. It's going to sample from a source area or a sample area and replace the sample, the area into the new, into the area that we're trying to get rid of. So the way we do that, I just clicked on the tool and you see we have some parameters up at the top here, opacity flow, which is just like we have with any other painting type tool. Then you see aligned and sample means where we sample from and where we're going to end up painting that that relationship remains constant as we move the cursor over the image. And if, if it's not aligned than the sample area will always stay in that same spot where we originally set it in the sample shows what layers we're going to sampling firm right now I have it set to all layers. If you have multiple layers involved where you don't want to sample from various parts. You might want to click that off and put it onto current layer or current and below something along those lines. In this case, we don't have any other layers up, so it doesn't really make much difference. So I'm going to set the sampled area and I do that by pressing the Option key. And you can see the cursor changes to a target. And because I'm dealing with this area on the left here where this roof comes in. I'm going to sample in this area of this cloud because I wanted to essentially make that cloud extend all the way across to the edge of the frame. So I sampled over here, it's aligned. So I'm going to just start painting with it. And you can see what it does. It just replaces it with the area that it's sampling from in the cross hairs are showing my area of sampling where I'm drawing the pixels from. And you can see that actually looks pretty good. It's not completely smoothed out from the transition from the old to the new, but it's actually pretty good. We can go and do the same thing up here at the upper left because I have it set on aligned. If I just start painting, my sample area comes up with me, that doesn't look too bad either. So that's one way of doing it. And this is all done on the layer. And we can always reduce the opacity, or I could just add to it or put a mask on it to paint back certain areas. So there's a lot of flexibility. So let's label this as our cloning layer. I'm going to turn it off. And now we're going to work with the healing brush. Healing brush is pretty similar. It's pretty similar to the cloning brush, except that it will, it will try to work in the new sample pixels into the old area that we're covering up to make it all blend together a little bit better. So I'm going to create another layer will put this on top here. And we'll label this healing for the healing brush. And I have it selected and we have the same attributes up on top here are aligned and sampling from which layer I'm going to keep it all the same just as we did before. We'll do it the same way down the Option key. And so that's where I'm sampling from and we can adjust the brush size by either right-clicking on the brush. It'll bring up the size, hardness, and spacing. I can change it any way I want. Or if we want to, I can hit the Control and Option keys and move my cursor with the left mouse button pressed down left and right to affect the size or up and down to adjust the feathering or hardness of the brush. So I've got this size. Won't go on re-sample again right from here. And you can see what happens. It's trying to work in the area that we're replacing with the new sampled pixels. And it merges the two. And you can see that's why the colors get a little bit different. You find a few, go over it multiple times. It can sometimes improve it a little bit. But you can see that the color difference changed if we compare this to our healing, I mean to the cloning, you can see the difference. That's the cloning. And this is the healing. And I can do the same thing up on the top here, sampled from below. And in this case, that actually probate works a little bit better than the cloning did. So these are two quick ways and you can experiment with it to see and you can even use a combination of the two and use the opacity slide or on the layers to adjust between them. In this case here I have in both live and if I reduce the opacity down a little bit. You can see that that can work also and you can go back in and touch up various spots as you want to. So another way of doing this, I'm going to turn these off now. The other really efficient and fast way of replacing elements and your photo is to use the Content Aware Fill. Select the items that you want to replace. So in this case, I'm going to select this area, this roof area that we were working with before. And we're going to hold down the Shift key and select this area here. And do the same thing on the right side. So I've made my selections and I'm selecting the background because, because that's the area that I want to sample from what I'm working on. I'm going to go under Edit, Content Aware Fill. And it brings up this new dialog box and I can adjust the size of these windows. So the left side is showing my original image with my selections and the right side is showing the resulting image using the Content Aware Fill. The green is showing the area that I'm sampling from. So given that these are all sky areas that on sampling, I only want a sample or that I want to replace. I only want to sample from others sky areas. I don't want to use the buildings or the boats or anything like that. So I have a brush that it comes in as a default and it's got a little negative sign and it's kinda large. So that means with a negative sign, it's going to take away the area that's selected. So here I have this green area on the boats. I don't want that. So if I just paint with the brush as is, they'll take it away and saying here, so that is what I want because I don't want to sample from these areas because I only want to replace the, my selections with others. Sky area now, not with trees or boats or flags in this case. So you can be pretty rough with this. It doesn't have to be terribly inexact. And if you wanted to add to it, just go up here. It's the plus sign and I can adjust the size of the brushes. Well, interesting here. And so if you, if you do want to go a little bit more meticulous with your selection, you can do it this way. I've got that. That seems all pretty set, pretty well. My image over here on the right side looks pretty good. But I can examine it better by bringing it up and size. And I can even go into parts of the image. Very large. You see I have the hand so I can move my image over to really examine parts of the image if I want in greater detail to see how it's working. So given that this all looks pretty good. I'm going to hit Okay, it opens up with my selections and you can see it automatically created a new layer with all these filled-in areas on it. So if I hit Control D, command D rather, and I get rid of that, it all looks pretty good. I can see my before and after. If I turn this off, That's my original image. And here's the layer with the new content aware fill on top of it. It's pretty convincing. If you want to, I can add the cloning layer to what we've already done. I can bring the opacity down on that. If you want to just feather that in slightly. So here it is about 59%. So you can see there's a lot that can be done very quick and easy and can certainly improve your image by removing unwanted elements. 9. Bonus! Get Smart & B&W: And as an added bonus, I'm going to include just a small, small part on the use of smart objects and the black and white adjustment layer. These also are really great to use and you'll find that once you integrate them into your workflow, it really makes your job much easier and you'll come out with better images. One of the great things in Adobe Photoshop is the use of smart objects, which enable us to apply effects and filters too. Images without having them be permanent where we can go back in and readjust them at will numerous times or as many times as you'd like. So here we have the file that we've been working on before. And you see it's in Photoshop as a regular file, as a regular layer here it says layer zero. If I right-click on that, I can say Convert to Smart Object. Or I can go to the hamburger menu on the layers palette, do the same thing. Or I can go under Filter and do Convert for Smart Filters. All of these do the same thing. So let's just right-click. We hit Convert to Smart Object. So now it's got a little icon over the thumbnail, which signifies that this layer now is the smart object. So now I can go and apply a filter. Let's say I'm going to apply a Gaussian blur and we'll make a pretty hefty blur just so we can see it well, I hit Okay. And you see under the layer it's a smart filters as sort of a thumbnail of a masking layer. Then underneath it says Gausian blur. And if I double-click on the Gaussian Blur, it brings up my original menu for the Guassian blur and I can adjust it, I can increase it or decrease it at will and just say, okay, and it looks fine. Or I can double-click on this icon on the right-hand side. And that gives me blending options. Here, I can change the mode of blending with the layers below or how this, or as the blurs applied to this layer. And I can adjust the opacity of a two. I can bring it way down so that it just has a slight effect. So it's really handy. So you can always go back in and change things as much as you want. And then I can also go into the smart filter with the icon here, or rather the thumbnail of the mask layer. And if I grab a pink brush and paint with black, you can't see it too well here, but I can paint a mask where I can mask out areas that I don't want affected. So if I go back, double-click on the Gaussian blur, increase the blur a lot. You can see everything is blurred around this, but not the boats which I just masked out. And you can see a picture in the mask right here on the smart filters. I can also click on the smart filter mask here, and then I can go edit the mask even further. I can reduce the density of it to let some of that blurring come through. Or I can adjust the feathering of the mask as well to make it harder or softer as well. So there's a lot you can do here and it's really handy. I can also add another filter to this. I'm still clicked on my layer here, on the layer zero, my only layer visible, I can go add another filter. So if, let's say if I add noise will just keep it really heavy so you can see it. Now you can see I've Gaussian blur and now add noise. And the noise is the same thing. I can double-click on that, adjust the intensity of it, or double-click on the blending mode. And I can change the blending modes if I want. And I can reduce or enhance the opacity of it as well. So there's really a lot you can do and it's really interesting, fun to play with. And it's all non-destructive. You can take all this stuff away. I can click on the noise. Whoops. I can right-click on the noise and I can say either disable it or delete it. Here, I deleted it. And that could do it the same with the Guassian blur. I can delete that one as well if I want to, if I just want to return this whole layer back to what it was, I can right-click on it and say convert to layers. And it's back to the way it was. So it's really handy way to work. It's not disruptive. And you can gives you the ability to try out all sorts of things without doing any permanent effects to your image. The last thing we'll talk about is the conversion to black and white, which I have another whole video series on, but we'll just touch on it real briefly right now. So if I go down to the bottom of the Layers palette and click on the black and white icon for adjustment layers and hit black and white. You'll see that it brings up a black and white layer, so it's a separate layer. I can turn it on and off at will. And you can see I have all these color adjustments and also some presets. So it can hit a preset if you want that as like a filter like we used to use in the film days. Like a red or yellow filter which would accentuate the sky and minimize other parts of an image. Or I can just do a manual. I can adjust the color sliders here at will to create the black and white image that I really want to go after or what, or what I'm trying to attain. And then I can easily go into the black and white layer and adjust the opacity of it as well. If I don't want the full effect, particularly on a slight color effect to it. You can do all that as well. So there's really quite a bit you can do here. And I encourage you to check out the other videos on black and white conversion because there's much more that can be done with this and it's really a lot of fun to work with. And you can really come out with some great images. 10. Thank You!: Thanks so much for taking this class. I really hope you enjoyed it and that you have gotten something out of it. I think you see that with programs like Photoshop and Lightroom, that they are really very sophisticated, deep programs that have tremendous capabilities. In fact, these capabilities grow over the years. With each additional update, which come fairly frequently. You see that new tools are added, things get improved, the whole process is continually changing, so it's good to try to keep up with it. But it can also be challenging. I think, with the few tools that we talked about in this class being, first being the histogram, gaining an understanding of the color range that's present in your image. And then going on to youth the use of curves so the levels to make adjustments of contrast and color and blacks and whites. Then moving on to the use of the camera raw filter, which has a whole array of tools contained within and to make your images even better in terms of adjusting color and contrast and geometry of the photo and even doing retouching within it. Then finally, to the use of cloning and the Healing Brush and the Content Aware Fill to give you a really ultimate control over what's contained in your image in terms of composition. And to really make it as strong as possible. You see that there's a tremendous amount that you can do. Very few tools, but it's good to have a really good solid understanding of these tools. So I encourage you to work more with this and you'll find that the more you work with Photoshop or Lightroom, the better you get at it and you become more comfortable with it. You'll learn kind of the quirks of it or the nuances of various methods within the programs. And you'll see that there are multiple ways to accomplish similar tests. So you'll find what works for you. You'll, you'll figure out what you're most comfortable with and the kind of work you want to produce. And you'll see how the whole process will sort of gel together. And you'll become much more satisfied with how it works. And you'll become much more satisfied with the work that you produce. It will continually get better. So just keep at it. And finally, I hope that you'll post your before and after photos on the Skillshare site so that we all can see what you've done and how much you've accomplished. It's great to see. And even if you have an image that presents problems or challenges, then I can offer suggestions as well as anyone else. And so it can be a great way to learn if things really hadn't thought of it. Finally, I'd encourage you to leave a review of the class in the Skillshare site as well. It's a great way for me to know what's working and what everyone is really hoping to get out of this. So I thank you for any review. You can leave. And so again, I hope you enjoyed the class and I look forward to seeing everyone's work.