Mastering Photo Editing: Transform Your Photos into Great Art

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Stuart mine on photographer and artist based in New York. I went to school for design and had a commercial photo studio for many years. I've also exhibited by fine art work and numerous galleries. We all have cameras with us, pretty much 247. And whether you use that or a dedicated DSLR or other type of camera, you've probably have amassed a considerable collection of photos that are sitting somewhere on a hard drive on your computer or in the gallery of your cell phones, whether they're selfies or cat photos, dog photos, Kid Pix, landscapes, you name it. Most of them probably haven't seen the light of day and you really haven't realize the full potential of these images. I want to give you the ability to really make great art from the photos that you've already taken. I'm going to be using my own photos in these demonstration videos to realize the full impact of these methods, it would be great for you to grab some of your own images and try it out on those. I'll guide you through the process of creating beautiful, display worthy art using really simple and straightforward methods. We'll discuss the use of composition cropping and move on to contrast control and color correction. And then get into converting color to black and white and even simple retouching techniques to remove distracting elements from your images. The idea here is to gain an understanding of what makes a great photo and how you can use any tool or application to attain that. I'm going to be using Photoshop or Lightroom on the desktop, Photoshop Express and Snapseed on the cell phone thing. You can use any application you have available to you. No reason to go out and buy anything. We're talking about very foundational techniques and methods here that can pretty much be accomplished by any application or program. The goal here is to make great images, not to become Photoshop, expert or light room. We're not going to get into every little nuance and to walk in either of those programs in order to really learn the most from this, it would also be great for you to post before and after photos on the Skillshare website so that other people can see what you've done and really gaining an understanding for what's really possible through these methods. If you have a particular image that's difficult or you're not happy with or just present some problems. It would be great to post that too. And then other people including myself, can offer suggestions or ideas as to how to approach the image and how to work with. So grab a few of your favorite photos and let's make some great art. 2. Composition: Before we get into the processing of your photo, Let's talk a little bit about what makes a great or compelling image in the first place. In terms of composition and cropping, we'll look at things like point-of-view, worm's eye view versus a bird's-eye view. Point of view from way below or from up above. Like why is a drone shots so compelling many times, because it's a point of view we're not used to and it's from very high above. We'll look at symmetry versus asymmetry and why it's symmetrical. Asymmetrical compositions can be very compelling and strong. We'll look at balance and an image sort of like a Mondrian painting where you have blocks of red and blue and yellow and black. And how there's a harmonious tension to the whole image, even though it's really not symmetrical in, but it really works regardless. Then we'll look at cropping. How do you minimize or get rid of distracting elements in your composition while still maintaining the original intent of the image, will look at diagonals, how you can create diagonals. Diagonals that can be a strong element in leading the eye from 1 to the other. Near and far objects. We'll do the same thing. How like placing a large rock in the foreground can lead your eye to the background and a scenic or landscape shot. And then we'll look at the rule of thirds how placing a grid over your image can help in composing and creating a really compelling composition in your image. And finally, we'll look at natural framing. How using natural elements that are out in the field can help lead the eye and really help you create, again, a stronger image that leads the eye to where you want it to go. This is a shaft from Kodachrome Basin of some interesting rock formations against Deep Blue Sky. If a lot of color contrasts with the orange rid of the rack green of the shrubbery and the deep blue of the sky. This shot was taken about 5000 yards away, fairly straight on. It's kinda interesting, really interesting rock formation. But I thought What else can I do to make it a little bit better or more interesting? So I look to my left and there's another rock formation here, which is sort of diagonally across from the main point of interest over here. But still not great because there's a lot of dead area in the foreground here, which doesn't add to the image at all. So then I decided, well, I'm going to look to the right and there's another rock formation here with some trees gutting, jutting into the sky, which breaks up the sky a bit. And there's some more plants and trees here which add some more color and interests, but still not a great composition. Then I looked at adding a person and to give a sense of scale, adding a person or having the trees and shrubs here gives the viewer a reference point for how large or small something truly is. But then I decided I'm going to walk closer up to it and point the camera straight up. So first I got closer to it, kind of like zooming in on something and then I look straight up. And that creates a little bit of distortion and a little more drama. This is the rock that's supporting this archway. So it gets a little distorted because of the wide angle view, we've got this dark area around the main point of interests, which is right in the center, which helps frame it. And it leads to a fairly symmetrical layout where the whole here is right in the middle of the frame. And then in addition, we have this archway of the rock, this arc, which also adds another visual element. So when you take a photo, think about if you can get closer or further away, eliminate some distracting elements, and get a different point of view. If you look straight up or straight down your point of view, it can make a dramatic difference on what the, this is a shot from Iceland of some hikers going up a glacier. And the composition has some things going for it that are good to keep in mind. We've got some strong diagonals. We've got one here and you've got one here, which leads to the main point of interests, which is right here. So it's always good to keep in mind diagonals because they really can become very strong compositional elements. What we've also got going on here is you've got the main focus, which is the hikers and the background. And then in the foreground you've got this area of ice and snow here, which has some interesting shapes and colors, which can even be accentuated more with further processing. It's kind of nice to have the near and far elements. So the items in the foreground lead your eye to the items in the background or farther away. And again, the diagonal helps us do that in creating this visual movement. So all in all, it works pretty well. But we've got some issues here. Namely, we've got this hiker coming in on the left side, which doesn't add to the composition at all. So we want to get rid of that. Now, the other thing that we can start talking about is the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds you can see, but if we were in Photoshop right now, if we go into the View menu, menu. And go to show, and then go to Grid to brings up this grid of lines. And it's divides up the area into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. And what we get from the rule of thirds, one thing is that helps in in showing our points of interests audit be and they ought to be off-center on the 1 third lines or the 1 third quadrants, which we've got pretty much going on here, being that we've got the hikers here. It's right at the 1 third intersection. That works pretty well. Now, where you can also do is you can bring up this grid of lines in most cameras is usually an option in the viewfinder to show grid. And the grid will be this rule of thirds grid. So it helps you in, in composing your image. It also helps in keeping your horizon lines level and your verticals going vertical so that you're not creating tilted photographs. So all in all, it's a really good compositional tool to use. So let's take away the grid right now and we're going to go to our cropping tool. And once we move the cropping tool in Photoshop, it'll bring up the rule of thirds anyway. And you will have the same tool to use in Lightroom and other programs as well. So this is a pretty common thing. So you should be able to find it in whatever program you're using. So if we come in from the left, we've eliminated that hike on the left-hand side, but now we've also got a lot of sky. And this guy isn't particularly interesting being that it's a very overcast days, even raining. So there's not a lot that this adds to it, so we can bring that down. And that brings our hikers squarely into that upper left third quadrant, which is nice, which is what we want. And in the foreground here we have a lot of snow and ice and we could keep it if we want. I'm going to choose to get rid of a little bit of it because I just want the diagonals to work and that's what happens here. If we bring that up and accept that. We've got a pretty strong image going on here. And later on we can talk about other things we can do in terms of accentuating the color and the contrast and the texture of the ice, again, leading to what's going on here with the hikers in the upper left-hand corner. So all in all I think we've created a stronger image. Here's a shot from the great South Bay in New York taken during the summer. And it shows some things going on here. The first being that we've got a horizon line that's tilted going from the upper left to the lower right. We've also got a lot of area in the foreground here, which is not really adding much to the image. So those are the two main things to keep in mind as we go forward and cropping this. The other thing is that we've got going on, which is good, is that we've got a trees on the left-hand side here, and then trees on the right hand side, which helped frame the elements and frame the whole image. Our main points of interests or the boats and the foreground here, which adds color and some nice diagonals. And then we have the boats in the, farther out along the horizon line, which are also our secondary points of interests. So the foreground leads your eye into the, farther back into the background, which is usually what we want. So let's bring up the cropping tool. We're in Photoshop. So as we move at will see the rule of thirds. So let's first get rid of the foreground. So now we've eliminated much of the area in the foreground that we didn't want. But we still have a horizon line that it's tilted. In Photoshop, there's a straight AND function as part of the cropping tool. We can click on here a one part of the Ryzen just drag across straight across. And Photoshop will automatically then rotate the image to straighten it out. You can do this as a separate operation in any program, even in Photoshop as well. It doesn't have to be part of the cropping tool. It's just a little bit easier in Photoshop to do it all at once. Either way, we're ending up with a straight horizon line, which is what we want. We've gotten rid of the foreground. We've got a lot of area on the left here, which seems to be distracting little bit from the main elements. Let's bring the left hand side in a little bit. Now we've got the trees. We've eliminated that water on the left-hand side here, which created a little bit of distraction for the eye. It's bring up the bottom a little bit more. Let's accept that. And so you see now we've got really a stronger image. We've got pretty much two thirds sky 1 third water and land. We've got nice trees that are framing the main elements of the boats and the foreground, and then the boats in the background as a secondary element. All in all, we've created a stronger composition and definitely a more compelling and pleasing image. I hope these examples were helpful. So just to review, think about point of view, worm's eye view from below or bird's-eye view from above or even shooting straight on. Is your image symmetrical or asymmetrical? And try to be intentional in how you use either one. Is there a balance to your photo? Is, is there a harmonious balance or a harmonious tension to the entire image, to all the elements work together. Cropping, are there things you can leave out or minimize in your frame to help again, not distract from your main point of focus. Can you use diagonals are elements that are near and far. How do you direct the eye? Diagonals can be very strong in directing the eye to something as well as having something in the foreground that leads to something else and far away in the distance. And rule of thirds, can you activate the grid on your phone or on your, on your camera so that it'll help in composing an image to begin with. And then other natural elements in the field or natural frames that you can use that are really direct the viewer's eye to remain point of focus. 3. Tone Adjustments: We're going to begin by looking at our image and setting our dark and light values. Generally we want to achieve the deepest blacks and the widest whites, while at the same time retaining detail in those areas. I'm going to use Photoshop in the Camera Raw Filter within it. Lightroom in Lightroom classic have pretty much the identical menu system. If you're using a cell phone, you can use Snapseed, Photoshop Express, or any other program that will allow the adjustment of exposure in dark and light values. We'll begin by analyzing our image. We're going to set our blacks and whites, adjust the overall exposure. And then we'll also look at making more nuance targeted adjustments within the image as well. We'll begin with this photo of a baby which has some obvious issues. But our plan of attack here is first that we're going to analyze the issue and see what needs to be done. Then we'll set our deepest black values and shadow areas, and then we'll set our highlights and white areas. So that'll give us our two extremes for tonal value. And then we'll look at our middle values, which is referred to as the exposure of the image to lighten or darken that. And then we'll get into a more targeted adjustments as we see me. I'm going to open this photo up in the camera raw filter, which is under the filter menu in Photoshop. And this will bring up a bunch of sliders on the right-hand side. And this graph at the top, which is our histogram. The similar thing will be found in light room or Lightroom Classic as well. So looking at the histogram at the top, we see at the left-hand side, if we put our cursor over it, it shows that our area of blacks. The next areas we move to the right is our shadow area. Then the middle is our exposure. The right of that are, are our highlights. And then to the right of that are white areas. And this relates to the sliders that we have down below here. I'm going to start with the black, so I don't want to sit my maximum black. And if I move the slider to the left to get it black or in black, or you can see two things that happen. We start getting these blue areas and I get a spike right on the left-hand edge of the histogram. Both of which are showing areas that are getting completely blocked up in losing all detail. I don't want that. So I'm going to slide this slider back towards the right until we lose the blue area. And I lose the spike on the left-hand side of the histogram. Moving on to the white area, which is gonna be the extreme right-hand side of the histogram. I want to lighten the whites as much as possible by the same token. And you can see as I move it to the right, a circuit in these red areas and the red areas correspond to the spike I see on the right-hand side of the histogram again showing loss detail. These are whites that are getting completely blown out. And I'm losing all, all sense of detail whatsoever that was there. So I'm going to slide it back until I lose those red areas. Now we've increased the whites a little bit. And I'm going to move on to our shadows are, shadows are going to be the next area of dark from the blacks. And especially in terms of portraits and shots of people. I'd like to keep the shadows a little bit lighter because especially with skin tones and facial features, extreme shadows generally don't make people look better. If I move the shadow area to the right, I can go all the way to the right and you can see we completely eliminate it, but that doesn't look natural or even any better. But keeping it up a little bit, we can just lighten the shadows a little bit and alleviate some of the heaviness in the photo. Moving on to the highlight area, those are gonna be our lighter areas. And we can do the same thing. I can bring the highlights down or I can slide them to the right and you can see we're going to get those red areas of blown out detail. So if I just move it back to where I regained the detail, we've gained some lighter areas and we've essentially I've increased the contrast of the photo by deepening the blacks and lightening the whites. Therefore, we don't really need this contrast filter right now. Later on at the end of the process are further down the line. We can adjust contrast if we need to, but doing it at this point probably only result in losing detail or valuable information in the photo. Going onto the Exposure Slider, That's our middle values in the photo. So sliding to the right to try to lighten it up. You can say lightened everything up. And now we're starting to get some blown out areas in the highlights. Again. If I go back to the white slider and slide that back to the left, you can see I've regained that detail. I've also have lightened the shadows. So overall at this point. That's what we started with. That's what we've got right now. You can see we've made a really big improvement, but we can do more. I can go in now and do a more targeted approach. We still have fairly dark areas here around the eyes. So in Photoshop, I can go to this mask icon here. And I can select a brush, and the brush I can change in size. You can see how big it is here. I want to make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to bring it down to about an eight here. And I can adjust the feathering of the brush to how abruptly it ends at the edges. I want it soft. So I'm just going to paint in a little bit over the eyes here, just in the shadow areas on both eyes. What this signifies is that's going to be where our area of adjustment is and everything else around this is not going to be affected. So I've created my mask, that's what the red area is showing. Then if I go down to the slider and begin to adjust it, I can bring up the shadows, which will start to lighten it a little bit. And I can bring up the exposure to just generally bring up generally lighten the whole area. I don't want to do it too much. You can see what happens there becomes very unnatural. But just doing it a little bit, we can start seeing that we were regaining detail in the eyes. And we're getting some life back into that. We still want to retain blacks. I mean, I could open up the black area too, but then we kind of lose the deep part of the color, the black. We lose a lot of contrast. And I really don't wanna do that. So I'm going to leave the blacks alone and set that back to 0. So now we've got the eyes a little bit better, but I still have some shadow areas around the mouth and the cheeks here. So I'm going to create another mask. So I'm going to hit on Create Mask again. Use another brush and just paint in a little bit around the cheeks here and under the nose. Again, this will this mask signifies that I'm just going to affect that area here around the mouth and everything else is going to be untouched. So again, I'm going to raise the exposure a little bit, and I'm going to raise the shadows a little bit again to lighten it up. And you can see we've gained a lot of detail, a lot of life back into the face and the baby. And finally, I'm going to make one more mask, a third mask, because I see the shadows on his forehead and above his nose. So I'm going to paint them a little bit there again. So that's gonna be the only area affected. And go back to my exposure again. Bring that up a little bit and you can see we've lightened it up, but we've eliminated a lot of the shadow. So we've certainly have gained a lot of enhancements here at this point. Now the background is pretty light, which can be nice, but we can also darken the background a little bit if we wanted to direct the eye more towards the face to keep the face is the lightest part of the image. If I go to Create Mask and go to linear gradient, then I can go starting at the left side here I can drag across and the gradient will show that it has maximum effect. We're begins at this red dot here on the left-hand side. And on the right-hand side of it, it goes to 0. And again, I can adjust my exposure. If I bring it down instead of up, like what we did before, it'll darken the background a little bit. And I can do the same thing on the right-hand side. So I'll do it again. I'll say Create Mask linear gradient. And this time I'll start on the right-hand side, drag across. I've got the mask on and the lower the exposure a little bit. And you can see the same thing. So now we've got, we've did 1234, we did five mask targeting each individual area. And we darken the background a little bit. And the eye now is directed more towards the face. And you can see the before, the **** that deep shadows in the face. And now the after where we've regained a lot of detail back into the baby. So just to recap, we analyze the photo, we made a plan of what we needed to do. We set our deepest blacks in our shadow areas. Then we set our lightest whites in our highlights. And then we adjust the mid tones. And after doing all the global adjustments that we went in and did some targeted adjusting as well. 4. Tonal Adjustments - People on Mobile: So we're going to do the same thing that we just did in Photoshop and Lightroom work. We're going to use the same photo in Snapseed on a cell phone to make the same adjustments at saint, to make the same modifications in terms of total value and and exposure that we did before. So I have an Android phone here and I'm going to open up Snapseed, which is a Google app that's freely available. You can use it on iOS, I believe, as well. So we're going to open that and we're going to bring in the same photo that we had before, showing the same issues of the shadow being on the front of the face and the body and the exposure essentially being a little problematic. The right side of the app you can see it's got that says portrait, smooth pop, accentuate all these kind of recipe approaches to adjusting a photo with a one one-stop shopping here, you can just sit on one of these and it'll make an adjustment. But we're not going to do that. We're going to go the hard route and do it ourselves. So I'm going to hit on the pencil icon here, and that brings up all the tools. And the first one we're going to do is the first one that top-left corner here that says tune image. It shows the icon is a series of sliders at the middle, on the bottom here. So I'm going to hit on that and it brings up brightness, contrast, saturation, ambience, highlights, shadows, etc. So just like we did before, I'm going to start with the shadows. And we can see it says shadows up at the top. And by swiping left or right anywhere on the image, doesn't matter. You'll see a blue progress line at the top. That'll show how much just give an indication of the intensity of what we're doing. So if I go all the way to the left, it's darkening the shadows. The maximum amount if I go all the way to the right, it's lightening the shadows, the maximum amount, neither of which really want. We're not going to have the same thing that we had in Photoshop where it showed gave you a warning of when the blacks were getting completely blocked up. We're going to have to do with just visually. So I'm gonna do a little bit at a time here. Remember, you can always go back in and do more if you want. So it's always best to go a little bit at a time. And then if it's not enough, just go back in and make further adjustments. So I'm going to open up the shadows a little bit. I don't know. It looks like about a plus 1516. That seems to be okay. Maybe we could go even a little bit more. Let's go plus 22. So that's our shadows. So I'm gonna go back to the slider icon at the bottom and hit on highlights. And I can do the same thing. Swiping all the way to the right, raises the highlights are lightens them as much as possible. Sliding to the left darkens the highlights, neither of which I really want. So I want to highlight, I want to brighten the highlights a little bit, but obviously just like before, I don't want to lose detail. So I'm going to bring it up a little bit, trying to judge it on the phone here by looking at it when I'm losing some detail. It looks like around a plus ten or so. So we'll leave it at that. So we still have a shadow over the face. Not much has really happened with that, but let's hit our slider and the slider icon at the bottom. And let's go up to brightness. Again. We can slide left to right on this. And I'm going to slide right a little bit to brighten up the whole image. And I'm most concerned about the face. I'm, I'm really willing to let other parts of the image go if I can get the face right, because that's the most important part of the image here. But I don't want blown out highlights on the baby's forehead or the checker or the nodes either for that matter. So let's just bring it up. I don't know about a 15 or so. And we've gotten a little bit of improvement here. So we can hit the checkbox to accept this. And then we can go back to the tool menu, hitting the pencil. And even in this application, I can go in and create masks somewhat the same way as we did in Photoshop. They're not quite as fine tuned and I can't really adjust the size of them as easily, but it still gives us a lot of capability to do targeted adjustments on the image. So if you look at the tools here and go to the third row down, the first one on that row is selective. I'm going to hit on that. And you see it's got an icon at the bottom of a blue plus sign with a circle around it. I'm going to go with my finger and just put it over the eye and just locate it comes up with a magnifying glass that gives you the ability to fine tune where the mass goes. So I'm gonna put it right over the eye. And you see it says brightness at the top so I can swipe left or right. And it's gonna be sort of similar to what we had before, although it does affect somewhat wider area. So you've got to be a little more careful with this. But I'm going to increase the brightness by, I don't know. Let's go by about 20 or so. And then hit the plus icon again at the bottom to get a blue. And I'm going to go over the other eye and target that one. And do the same thing. I'm going to brighten that I that one probably go a little bit less because there's some white, lighter areas right around that and I don't want those to get blown out. And then we'll do again, hit the plus sign, get a blue and put it over the mouth. And do the same thing. Brighten that up a little bit. And you can see we've definitely brightens it and it spills over onto the shirt, which is okay. Because that can use a little brightening anyway. So we've done a similar thing to what we did before and Photoshop where we did some targeted adjustments that for the most part leave the rest of the image untouched. So we can accept this. I can hit the check mark. You can see we've definitely have improved the image, but we can always go back in and make further adjustments if we want. But this certainly shows the capability of what's possible with an app like this. And it's really pretty remarkable that you can just do this on your cell phone. 5. Color: Now that we've got our basic exposure on contrast covered, let's move into color. And first we'll look at the color temperature of the image, whether it's cool or warm, and how we can adjust that. Then we'll get into ways of restoring lost color. In contrast, maybe you have a really hazy photo or something very muted. And through the use of texture, clarity and dehaze adjustments, we can really bring back a lot of loss color in contrast to the photo. Then we'll conclude with the adjustments of saturation and vibrance and how we can make overall adjustments to the color intensity of the image as well. It's targeting specific color channels are specific colors. And all of these adjustments that we're talking about can also be combined with the use of masks, like we did previously in our tonal adjustments so that we can make very targeted or nuanced adjustments to the photo. Here's a landscape photo shot and the Catskills of New York. And you can see it's kind of a hazy, misty shop is a lot of water, water in the air which is diffusing the image. So it's got a pretty soft feel to it. There's no crisp focus here because of all the water that's present in the air and the clouds. So what I'd like to do is probably try to bring back a little bit of the color that's in this photo are trying to enhance the color and add a little contrast. Right now it's kinda flat and it's all hazy and it's not really doing much it as an image. The first thing we can look at is going to the color temperature. And this is available. I'm working here in Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. It's available on Lightroom and most other programs as well. As the shot comes into the program, it's at 5750 degrees. You can see if we move to the left, the image gets cooler, move it to the right, the image gets warmer. Warmer is red or orange and the cooler is more bluish. So what we can do is we can do it automatically by setting this eyedropper and picking out a neutral area. You want a gray tone or neutral color area and the photo to sample. And then Photoshop will make the adjustments based on that, we don't really have much of a neutral area in this photo, maybe a little bit in the water, but it's kinda tough. So let's go and just do it manually. And just by bringing the slide are a little bit to the right, adds a little bit of warmth back into the clouds and give some needed contrast against all the blue that's in the sky. So we brought it up to 6200 degrees here. The tint as well, adjust the green to the left and magenta to the right. We don't really want a lot of either one of those, so we can move it a little bit to the right. We don't want a magenta feel to this, so I'm going to leave it at about plus eight here, and that seems to be fine. Now for the Exposure Slider is we're going to do what we did in the previous video. So I'm going to put the blacks down until they start to block up. That's around, let's say about a negative 50. We're going to try to add some contrast in here by increasing the whites up to the point where they get blown out. And you can see that's about a 22 here. The shadows, I wanted to bring some detail into these trees in the middle ground here so that they aren't just blocked up. So if I open up the shadows a little bit of a game, a little bit of detail in there. By bringing the shadow slider to the right. And the highlights slider, if I bring that down and it adds a little contrast to the sky, which again is something I'm after the exposure, we can just bring it up a hair just to open it up a little bit again to gain some detail into the medium and dark areas of the image. Next we come to the texture, clarity and dehaze filters, and these affect the edges of light to dark in the image. So in the sky are edges of light to dark or very soft and kinda spread out. It goes from light to dark over a long transition and it's very gradual. Whereas if you look at the ripples in the water here, it goes light to dark very rapidly and it's a very sharply defined transition from light to dark texture. The texture slider, which could be called structure and other programs, effects more of what's going on in the water. It's going to affect the sharp transitions from light to dark or dark to light. And so by adjusting that Texture slider, let's say all the way to the right, we gained a little bit more contrast and definition to the water. Bring it all the way to the left. It gets kinda soft and almost painterly or watercolor. In this case, it doesn't affect the sky so much either. So I want to bring it up a little bit gain, a little bit of contrast into the water. And It'll enhance it a little bit and add a little more definition. Next we have the clarity which affects more of the mid tones and definitely works more in the software areas again. So I bring up the clarity. You can see it affects the mountains a bit. We're gaining a little bit of contrast in there and it cuts through the haze a little bit. So we'll bring that up a little bit. And then the Dehaze filter is pretty much what it says. It cuts out the haze a bit. It'll restore color and contrast of the image that's lost due to the atmospheric k's. So if we bring that up, you can see it really does cut through and add some contrast. If you go all the way, it gets really dramatic and pretty artificial. You could also go the other way. And if you want to create something that's kind of painterly, that's an interesting effect as well. In this case, we're just going to cut through a little bit of the haze. We don't want to lose all our Hayes because that's part of the beauty of the shot. You can see it's increased the blacks a little bit so we can go back to our black slider and bring it up just so that our blacks aren't getting blocked up here. So that's definitely an improvement. You can see our before and after. That's our before the way the shot was brought in and that's where we're at right now. But at the beginning we talked about the way we want to increase contrast and drama in the sky and maybe darken it. So let's go to our masking and let's go to a linear gradient. I'm going to go from the top down to about the mid mountains here. So the maximum effect is gonna be at the top of the image. It's going to go down to 0 at the bottom of the mask here. So what I want to do is I'm going to lower the exposure a little bit so I can bring a little drama back into the clouds here. I can bring the blacks down as well to increase the contrast, I don't want to go too much. Then I can also hit the Dehaze filter on this to cut through more of the piece that's in the sky here. You can see it starts to bring the blue sky back in and you get the different colors in the clouds and really adds a lot of definition back into the clouds that was lost. We can likewise go with the clarity as well. Let's see what that does. And that does a little bit. We can bring that up as well. Then next, what I want to do, since we've got this color going on in the sky now, I want to look at maybe doing the same thing for the water. I'd also like to darken it a little bit to give a little balance to the darkness that we have up in the sky. So I'm going to, I'm going to create another linear gradient. This one I'm gonna go from the bottom up to about the treeline. And given that this is the water area, I know the Texture slider is going to have a lot of effects. So I can bring that up to add a little bit more definition into the water. I can try to add a little more lower the blacks and this to add some contrast and maybe add a little more saturation to bring some of the color up as well because I'm looking to get that yellow or orange color going in the bottom of the water to reflect the sky. Even the bringing that up. A lot doesn't really have a dramatic effect, but it definitely does something. Let's look at color saturation and color intensity. We have two sliders that affect this, vibrance and saturation. Vibrance targets primarily your midtone values. Saturation will attack all colors across the board. So for example, if we bring saturation all the way down, we lose all our color and it turns into a black and white image. If we bring it all the way up to the right, we get very neon colors and it becomes very unreal. Back to 0. If we look at our vibrance, it's not going to affect quite as many colors we bring it down. It looks almost black and white old, although there's still a hint of color in there. And we bring it all the way up to the right. It's pretty similar. We just get very unrealistic colors. So working with vibrance first, we bring it back down and look for an image that's sort of balances what we're after. We're getting a little more orange and red in the clouds. And we still have the blue in the mountains and stuff. But it's not to a point that it's unrealistic saturation. We want to be a little more nuanced with not quite as heavy handed. So we could bring that up to maybe seven or eight here, where we're getting a little more intensity of color. But again, it's not to the point that it's unrealistic. But if we want to target the warm values even more, because I really want to bring out these orange and red. Because I really want the contrast against the blue. We can go into our color mixer. Now we can target individual color channels, so I can bring up the red. And it's not a whole lot of red in this photo, you picks up a little bit when you bring it all the way up. So let's bring it up to about 25 and orange. Let's see if we bring it all the way up. You can see there's a lot more orange in there and we've got more in the water, which is what I'm after, but we don't want to go too much. So let's bring that up to about I don't know. We've got 22. Let's see what happens with the yellow. If you bring all that up, it blows out some of our highlights. So we want to be a little careful with that. So the yellow go a little bit less. So we can go probably about a plus three or so. Now, if we go before and after, after all our colors saturation work, That's what we started with. And now we've got some nice contrast in the clouds. We've got a little more drama in there. We still have the blue haze in the mountains, but there's more definition of the different mountains. And plus we have gained more definition in the water. The ripples are more pronounced and definitely it's a stronger image overall. From this example, you can see how we can take a dreary and flat kind of image and really bring some life back into it. We began by looking at the color temperature, whether the photo was cool or warm, and whether or not we want to make an adjustment for that. Then we looked at the areas of transition from light to dark, whether they are abrupt or sharp, like in the case of the water, where were we had the ripples or whether they take place over a larger area like we saw in the clouds, in the sky. And through the use of dehaze clarity and texture sliders, we could make those adjustments and target those specific areas. We can make further targeting through the use of masks in conjunction with those sliders, as we did with the tonal adjustments previously. Finally, we looked at color saturation or color intensity and how we could bring that back as well. And again, we could do more targeted approaches with that too, through the use of targeting specific colors. So overall, you can see through the use of, of all these things, we could take a kind of innocuous kinda blots or to image and really bring some life back into it and really make it into something that was almost completely unexpected. 6. Color - People Pt 1: For most of us, the most common photograph we're dealing with it are usually pictures of people, whether it's friends or family or kids. We tend to accumulate a lot of these photos. And in working with these photos, we approach them a little bit differently, differently than we do with landscapes or scenic images. Whereas with the landscapes and the cnx we're looking for contrast, color, saturation, and a little bit of punch to the image. In the case of people were primarily concerned with skin tone. Does their skin look like a natural color? Are we minimizing blemishes or other artifacts on the skin? We look at the eyes. Are the eyes open or the clear or the light enough to still hold some detail. You want to be careful. Sometimes you get something called red-eye when you use a flash and a dark environment. So all these things are important in terms of creating a pleasing portrait or people photo. This is a pretty typical vacation photo of three women sitting under a tree. You can see a couple of issues. We've got a lot of contrast going on. We have very bright area on the ground here and in the background. And then where the women are seated, it's in the shade and their faces are dark, they Harris blocked up, but we're not seeing a whole lot of detail. This is a pretty common problem, a camera. We'll look at this and it'll automatically meter the scene and it tries to average out all the lights and darks. And so when you have a lot of contrast, it's, it's difficult to make either one really read well. So we'll start looking at our blacks, the deepest tones in the image. And you can see already we have a little blue highlight here and down over here that the, showing us that the blacks are already starting to get blocked up. And you can see it on the histogram all the way on the left-hand side where you have this spike going up along the left border there. So the blacks, we can open up a little bit, we can bring it up to the right. I'm going as much as let's say plus 20. It's still reads as black. So I'm not worried about making it too washed out. And the whites, that's gonna be our extreme right-side, our brightest lights in the, in the photo. I can bring that up a little bit, but you can see it starts to blow out the background. Now I'm not all that concerned about the background, but it's still don't want blown out bright white areas. Let's just leave it at about a plus ten. That's really enough. And we'll deal with the other contrast issues as we get more into this. Now the shadow slider is going to be the next set of dark tones, not quite as dark as the blacks that we dealt with. This is the prime area of interests of where the women are seated and most of their value. You can see in the histogram, most of the values that are in the area of shadows. We need to open those up a little bit. So if we move the shadow slider to the right, you can see it really begins to open up the tones and the women and their clothing and their skin. And they really look a whole lot better and we can see much more detail what's going on. You can see the hair. We've got details, not just black anymore. So we can go even with a pretty extreme value of here. I'm, I've got about a 70 or 71. That really looks a lot better and our skin tones are still okay. They haven't gotten any strange color cast or anything like that. They're little reddish, which we want that looks healthy. So I think we're okay. The next slider we can work on is the highlights. The highlights are the light areas not quite as bright as the whites that we worked with before. And maybe bringing those down. And you can see what happens to the ground with the gravel around their feet. It starts to become more in line with the shadow area. It's not so extreme from light to dark. It's a much closer relationship now when we bring these highlights down and it just makes the whole image a lot more pleasing. Then the contrast like we did before, we're not going to adjust that because by doing all these other things, we are adjusting the contrast. So there's no point in doing it twice. And exposure is going to be our middle values. That's on the histogram. You can see it's right in the center area. And so we can open those up a little bit and add some little brightness. And it really helps to just lighten the feel of the image and bring, again, bringing detail to the faces and just making them look better. Next, we can look at the color temperature of the photo. And as shot you can see it's 5250 degrees and the tint is a minus one. Since the person in the center here is wearing a gray blouse or a gray shirt. We can use that as a sample point for a medium gray or for a middle gray value to set the rest of the images, rest of the tones in the image. So if I put the eyedropper over the gray part of her sweater here and click it. We can see that the tones now moved to 5750. The color temperature moved to 5750, which means it added a little bit of yellow to the image. And you can see that a little bit. It's pretty subtle. And then move to minus three. You can see if we move the temperature to the left, it gets really blue. If I move it to the right, it gets really yellow. So going back to the 5750 that we did from sampling, you can see it looks pretty natural. You have to be careful looking at images like this for a long time because your eye gets used to seeing it and you don't perceive the changes. Especially something very subtle in terms of the blue versus the yellow and the color temperature. So it may take a little bit of extra experimenting and going back and forth to see what works. We can stay with this, the sample, I think maybe it's got a little too much yellow. I can go a little bit back towards the blue. Just a hair seems to look pretty good. And again, we can always go back and adjust these things later if we need to. Looking at the dehaze clarity and texture filters. First the texture. We don't want to do too much with that because that's going to add a lot of contrast to our areas of transition from light to dark. And we don't want to make that too extreme. You can see I brought it all the way to the right. And the whole feel of the photo is just very harsh and very contrasty. And it just doesn't work. There's a reason why people use saw filters on cameras sometimes for portraits, because people will generally look better when you soften the features and soften the defects or blemishes on people's skin. The texture. We can move it up. Just a hair, just maybe three just to get a little more definition in the water behind them. The clarity is going to be less harsh in terms of these areas of transition, because the clarity is going to work more on the areas of transition of tone from, from dark to light that are larger, your where the transition is much more gradual. So bringing that all the way up, it's still adds a lot of contrast. Quite as severe as we saw with the Texture slider, but certainly too much. So bringing it back down. You can look at what happens when you go all the way to the left, it gets really soft and kind of weird looking. So if we bring it up just a little bit, it can add a little bit of punch to the image. But again, we don't want too much. We're just looking for pretty subtle approach here in terms of how we're going to deal with the color and contrast. So I left that a plus eight. Now, looking at the Dehaze filter, we do probably has some haze in the background, although I don't really care too much about it because it's the background and the main interests in the photo here are the three people in the middle. So the dehaze we can leave as is, you can see what it does if I bring it all the way to the right, it adds a lot of crazy contrasts which doesn't work at it. Bring it all the way to the left, brings a lot of haze, which equally doesn't really work well. For some portraits, if you're doing a port, just a close-up of a person's face or something like that. Sometimes. Adding a negative Dehaze filter could make the skin look nicer and smoother. So it's something to definitely experiment with. But in this case, we're going to leave it at 0. Next we have vibrance and saturation, which is the color saturation or intensity of the colors here. So vibrance is going to affect more of the middle tones and leave the extremes, darks and lights alone. If I bring it all the way to the right, you can see we get some really bizarre color going on that looks very unnatural. So we can bring it up a little bit just to add a little color punch being that the girls are wearing red and blue. There is some color that takes place. But again, we want to be careful of skin tones. We don't want to introduce weird color cast into the skin. We don't want it to be too red or too yellow to blue or, or anything. We just want the skin to look natural. We're going to leave the vibrance at about a plus four plus five. That seems to work. Okay? Saturation again, you can see the same thing. The colors get really strange and if we bring it all the way down, it turns it into a black and white. I'm going to leave the saturation, it's 0. We don't really need it. Again. We're concerned about skin tone and how the people look. And they look pretty nice here. I don't want to make them have real saturated colors in their skin. 7. Color - People Pt: You can see with the figure right here in the center and the front of the tree, there's a bright highlight on her, on her leg and on her shoe, which can be a little distracting. And also the ground around the shadow, around the shade area here is very bright and relation to the three figures here. So let's create a mask. I'm going to create a linear gradient that goes from the bottom up, Partially up their legs. And I'm going to lower the exposure a little bit. Lower the whites, you extreme bright, the extreme white in this area. And you can see our red warning area has disappeared. And we're bringing some tone back into the gravel and it's not what it does. It it equalizes the contrast between the sunlit area in the shade area. So it's certainly a lot more pleasing. So we brought the whites down to a negative 39. And we could do something similar on the top of the image where we could create a little more dark area to guide the eye of the viewer to the people in the center of the image. So we can let this go a little bit dark, not too much. And you can see that that does help. It brings a little more deep color into the overall image and guides your eye more to the faces into the three people looking at before and after. That's what we started with, where we had very deep shadows in the shade of the tree and very bright and the sunlit. And now if we look at what we've got, we've opened up all the color and detail and the figures, and it's certainly a lot more pleasing. The last thing to look at is our composition. We've got this large red thing here, which is a little distracting. And the rocks and the water over here. Now, in a vacation photo, it can be important to give a sense of place. You want to remember where the photo was taken and anything that can give us a clue to that could be important. In this case. My intention is to, I want to eliminate some of these things. So if we go to our composition, you see our rule of thirds is being brought up. And I'm going to go to an aspect ratio of four by five or eight by ten. And I'm going to make it into a vertical. Even though this shot was shot, the image was shot as a horizontal. There's no reason why we have to stay with that. So looking at our rule of thirds, you can see if I bring it down, you can see the center of the faces are going right through the 1 third line, which is pretty much exactly where we would want our main point of interests. Or even maybe a little bit above that. Because it makes them, that makes the face as the point. It's, makes it somewhat asymmetrical and not boring the way it is right now. The tree also acts as a nice element in line with the woman on the right side here. Again, along that 1 third line, we've eliminated the red thing on the right side here we've eliminated the rocks on the left. So if we accept that, you can see we've ended up with a much more pleasing image. And the attention is where it deserves to be, which is on the three people. As you can see, our our approach with dealing with photos of people, it's a little bit different than dealing with photos of landscapes or scenic images. In the case of photo that we've worked on, hero of the three women, we were concerned with being able to see the details in their faces. Make sure the eyes are light enough to see, to see them that they're not blocked up and totally dark. We want the skin tones to read as natural as possible. And the other elements in the photo are really secondary, the background stuff or elements that are in the background, like in this case, we've got rid of that big red thing, which was just a distracting elements in the photo. So minimize things in the background. Let him go out of focus or just let them fall away and keep your attention on the people and especially their faces. 8. Tone Adjustment on Mobile - Landscape: Now that we've made these color edits on Photoshop and Lightroom using Adobe Camera Raw. We're going to duplicate the same thing using cell phone applications. So we're going to use Snapseed and Photoshop Express. These are both free applications that are available on your cell phone where you can edit the photos and largely do what we've already done on the desktop. First, take a look and see how close we can get to what we've done before. So here we've got, we've got the same photo that we worked on before on the desktop we're working on in Snapseed on the cell phone. And you can see, I have the picture open and on the right-hand side there are three icons, some middle one being a pen, which is the icon for the tools to manually make adjustments, which is what we're going to do. If you press on that, it brings up a bunch of other tools. And you can see the first on the upper left is tune image. And that's where we're going to start. You press on that. And you can see there's an icon for sliders at the bottom, which brings up a bunch of other tools. So if we press on that, we can bring it up and we have brightness. Contrast, saturation, ambience highlights shadows, warmth. So let's start with shadows. We want to probably deepen them. And so by sliding to the left, you can deepen the shadows and sliding your finger to the right, you can see a lightened them. So let's slide to the left and deepen them a little bit. We don't want to get them blocked up. And then we'll hit the slider icon again and go for the highlights. The highlights, the same thing. If I slide to the right, that gets very light. We lose a lot of detail. If I slide to the left, you can see it actually brings up a lot of, brings back a lot of detail in the clouds and we get a lot more drama going on. So in this case, let's lower the highlights. If I press a slider icon again, we can go to ambience, which is a peculiar adjustment that's only in Snapseed. We don't see this in other programs. But it seems to have the ability to add contrast without affecting the deep dark through lightest lights. So if we increase the ambiance, you see we get a lot of contrast and a lot of drama, but really not losing detail and then deep darks. So this is sort of a magical filter which seems to be good to use. So I'm going to increase that. Let's hit the slider icon again. And let's go to contrast. And if we increase contrast, you see we can get a little too much. But if you bring it down by sliding to the right and to the left, you can make an adjustment that seems to help the image. Then let's go to brightness. Just to open up the image a little bit to make sure we don't have a lot of deep tones in there. So that's what we've got. So let's hit the check mark to accept all these adjustments. And then we'll hit the tool icon again in the middle on the right hand side. And let's bring up details and details. If you press the slider icon in the middle at the bottom, we can have structure sharpening. And the structure is pretty much the same as the texture adjustment we saw in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. If I slide to the right, you can see the water ripples get much more pronounced and the clouds get a lot more pronounced as well. We're building up a lot of contrast where there's a transition from light to dark. So if we slide to the left, you see just gets very soft and we lose all detail. So sliding to the right quite a bit seems to really help the image a bit and brings up a lot more drama and a lot more interests in the clouds and the water. Here we have a plus 56, so we'll accept that. Then finally, we can go to white balance, where again, pressing the slider icon at the bottom brings up temperature and tint just like we had before. So the temperature affects the blue and orange spectrum. So if we slide to the left, the image gets cooler and blue or slide to the right, it gets more orange or yellow. So we just want maybe a little bit of that just to, of the oranges to capture more of the orange color in the clouds is contrast against all the blue haze. We could go to the tint and you can see it's going to have the same red and green variants. So if you slide to the right, we get a magenta or reddish color. Slide too light to the left, we get green. We don't really want any of that. They could go to the right a little bit, very little. I don't want to go too far. And so you can see we've added quite a bit. So I can hit the checkmark on that, accept it. If I want to do further refinements, I can go back and just make more adjustments. I can go back to tune image. Hit the center and maybe go to, let's say shadows. If we want to bring it down just to try to get a little more contrast going. And it seems to be a pretty dramatic shot. This one you can really keep on trying to find more things to do. I can go back to ambiance, bring that up, and really seems to make a difference. And so you can see there's quite a bit that can be done with this, with this application. So again, we're working with the same image that we did in the other applications, the same we did on the computer with Lightroom and Photoshop and and what we did in Snapseed on the cell phone. So here it's Photoshop Express and it's fairly similar to what we've done in the other programs. You can see at the bottom there's some recipe adjustments that you can do automatically. So you see vibrant spring, etc. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna go to the manual route. So if we go over to the slider icon at the bottom, right there you can see it brings up a bunch of adjustments sliders that we can do that are fairly similar to what we've seen before. So just starting from the left, we'll start with clarity and hit on that. And you can see we slide it to the right. We'd get some contrasts in the sky. If we slide it to the left, we get some very soft and painterly, just like we saw before on the computer. So I'm going to bring it to the right and bring up some contrast. And it doesn't have a huge effect, but certainly helpful. Then we're going to work on over to the right and go to our dehaze filter just like we did before. I'm the computer. In this one. You can see if I bring it to the right, it's a pretty dramatic difference in the image. Bringing it to the left. Again, it gets lighter and very soft. So we're going to slide it to the right. And we don't want to overdo it because we're not looking for an artificial look to this, but you can see bringing it up substantially to about a value of 50 or so brings a lot of contrast and definition into the clouds and the water. And we're getting a little bit of color back also. So it works pretty nicely. We can go to exposure than just two because we don't want to get it overly deep and dark to just increase the exposure a little bit. That's going to be more of our mid-tone values. And then we can go onto contrast. If you want to bring that up just a little bit. And then go to our highlights. We can bring it up a little bit because again, we want to maintain some contrast and shadows. We can open them up a little bit to get some detail into the mountains. And then if we go to whites, this is just like we saw on the computer where the whites and blacks are the extreme ends of the spectrum. So if I bring up the whites, you can see it's getting much, much brighter. But I don't want to blow out detail. And the same with the blacks. I can bring that down to get some more contrast. But again, I don't want to block up the values. So we'll bring it down a little bit. And then we've got temperature. These are color temperature just like we saw before on the computer. If I slide it to the right, it gets very warm and orange or yellow. If I slide it to the left, it gets very blue. So we want to be little more careful with this. I don't want to go too much. So we slide it to the right a little bit. We're picking up some of the orange and warmer colors and the clouds and the water in a really seems to help. And then we can go to our vibrance and saturation sliders which affect the color intensity. Again, just like we saw online on the computer. And if I bring up the vibrance, you can see we're getting some real color back in the clouds and the blue or the bluish green, It's getting a little more intense in the mountains two, so we don't want to overdo it. Let's go value of about 13. And if I go saturation, same thing. If I go all the way to the right, it gets a little artificial looking. If I go all the way to the left, we get a black and white image so we can bring it up a little bit. I'm just gonna go with a three or five here. So you can see just by using these simple tools and within a couple of minutes, we've dramatically improve the image. And you can see there's a lot of potential and using this cell phone apps, if you don't have a computer and something like Photoshop or Lightroom available to you. So you see how we were able to get pretty close to the same thing that we did with the computer, with the cell phone applications. Again, we're we're not getting the same level of nuance and detail that we could get on the computer, but we can get pretty close. And it's kinda nice to see with a, with a simple app and a couple of minutes at a time, we can get at least a much better photo than what we began with. So try them out, experiment and see what you can come up with. 9. Tone Adjustment on Mobile - People: So we're going to do the same thing that we just did in Photoshop and Lightroom work. We're going to use the same photo in Snapseed on a cell phone to make the same adjustments at saint, to make the same modifications in terms of total value and and exposure that we did before. So I have an Android phone here and I'm going to open up Snapseed, which is a Google app that's freely available. You can use it on iOS, I believe, as well. So we're going to open that and we're going to bring in the same photo that we had before, showing the same issues of the shadow being on the front of the face and the body and the exposure essentially being a little problematic. The right side of the app you can see it's got that says portrait, smooth pop, accentuate all these kind of recipe approaches to adjusting a photo with a one one-stop shopping here, you can just sit on one of these and it'll make an adjustment. But we're not going to do that. We're going to go the hard route and do it ourselves. So I'm going to hit on the pencil icon here, and that brings up all the tools. And the first one we're going to do is the first one that top-left corner here that says tune image. It shows the icon is a series of sliders at the middle, on the bottom here. So I'm going to hit on that and it brings up brightness, contrast, saturation, ambience, highlights, shadows, etc. So just like we did before, I'm going to start with the shadows. And we can see it says shadows up at the top. And by swiping left or right anywhere on the image, doesn't matter. You'll see a blue progress line at the top. That'll show how much just give an indication of the intensity of what we're doing. So if I go all the way to the left, it's darkening the shadows. The maximum amount if I go all the way to the right, it's lightening the shadows, the maximum amount, neither of which really want. We're not going to have the same thing that we had in Photoshop where it showed gave you a warning of when the blacks were getting completely blocked up. We're going to have to do with just visually. So I'm gonna do a little bit at a time here. Remember, you can always go back in and do more if you want. So it's always best to go a little bit at a time. And then if it's not enough, just go back in and make further adjustments. So I'm going to open up the shadows a little bit. I don't know. It looks like about a plus 1516. That seems to be okay. Maybe we could go even a little bit more. Let's go plus 22. So that's our shadows. So I'm gonna go back to the slider icon at the bottom and hit on highlights. And I can do the same thing. Swiping all the way to the right, raises the highlights are lightens them as much as possible. Sliding to the left darkens the highlights, neither of which I really want. So I want to highlight, I want to brighten the highlights a little bit, but obviously just like before, I don't want to lose detail. So I'm going to bring it up a little bit, trying to judge it on the phone here by looking at it when I'm losing some detail. It looks like around a plus ten or so. So we'll leave it at that. So we still have a shadow over the face. Not much has really happened with that, but let's hit our slider and the slider icon at the bottom. And let's go up to brightness. Again. We can slide left to right on this. And I'm going to slide right a little bit to brighten up the whole image. And I'm most concerned about the face. I'm, I'm really willing to let other parts of the image go if I can get the face right, because that's the most important part of the image here. But I don't want blown out highlights on the baby's forehead or the checker or the nodes either for that matter. So let's just bring it up. I don't know about a 15 or so. And we've gotten a little bit of improvement here. So we can hit the checkbox to accept this. And then we can go back to the tool menu, hitting the pencil. And even in this application, I can go in and create masks somewhat the same way as we did in Photoshop. They're not quite as fine tuned and I can't really adjust the size of them as easily, but it still gives us a lot of capability to do targeted adjustments on the image. So if you look at the tools here and go to the third row down, the first one on that row is selective. I'm going to hit on that. And you see it's got an icon at the bottom of a blue plus sign with a circle around it. I'm going to go with my finger and just put it over the eye and just locate it comes up with a magnifying glass that gives you the ability to fine tune where the mass goes. So I'm gonna put it right over the eye. And you see it says brightness at the top so I can swipe left or right. And it's gonna be sort of similar to what we had before, although it does affect somewhat wider area. So you've got to be a little more careful with this. But I'm going to increase the brightness by, I don't know. Let's go by about 20 or so. And then hit the plus icon again at the bottom to get a blue. And I'm going to go over the other eye and target that one. And do the same thing. I'm going to brighten that I that one probably go a little bit less because there's some white, lighter areas right around that and I don't want those to get blown out. And then we'll do again, hit the plus sign, get a blue and put it over the mouth. And do the same thing. Brighten that up a little bit. And you can see we've definitely brightens it and it spills over onto the shirt, which is okay. Because that can use a little brightening anyway. So we've done a similar thing to what we did before and Photoshop where we did some targeted adjustments that for the most part leave the rest of the image untouched. So we can accept this. I can hit the check mark. You can see we've definitely have improved the image, but we can always go back in and make further adjustments if we want. But this certainly shows the capability of what's possible with an app like this. And it's really pretty remarkable that you can just do this on your cell phone. 10. B&W Conversion Pt 1: We're going to be converting color images into black and white. And there are a lot of reasons to do this. It could be that the color in your photo just isn't working. It could be kinda dull or drop. In the case of photographs of people, it could be that the white balance is off in that skin tones or weird, or maybe I mixed lighting sources which gave really unusual color. In the end, creating a black and white image can be more powerful in yield a much stronger image. But black and white or converting to black white also gives us another advantage. When we make the conversion. We can target specific colors and we can lighten or darken those colors in the conversion. So we can really go for a very dramatic photo on black and white that might be unattainable in color. In the old days, one would have to use a filter to accomplish this, like a yellow or red filter in order to darken the skies of the photograph. In our case, we can do everything digitally and we have much more precise and stronger control over the conversion process and making a black and white image. So I'm gonna be using Photoshop and the controls are essentially the same thing. If you're using Lightroom or Lightroom classic, you can really do the same thing in Snapseed or Photoshop Express. And I can explain how that would work just as well. It's a pretty simple process and it's a lot of fun to see how you can create a dramatic photo pretty easily. Going to start with this photo that we use before in the previous video of the Ashokan Reservoir in New York, if you remember, has a lot of blue haze. The overall fueled the photo is very bluish or very cool with a little bit of warmth in the clouds or the Sun breaking through. So the first thing we need to do is to open up our black and white tool. And there are two ways we can do it. We can go to the bottom of the layer palette and hit on this icon for our adjustment layers and go to black and white. And that'll open it. Or we can go up to the top, hit on Layer, new Adjustment Layer, then down to black and white and less because the name, okay, we could change it if we want, but I'm not going to say OK, so now we have two black and white layers. I'm going to use both of them only so that we can show the differences between different settings on the black and white palette. Other than, other than that, you really, you only need one black and white layer. And it would be the same for Lightroom or Lightroom Classic if you're using that instead, the tools are going to be pretty much the same. If you're on Snapseed or Photoshop Express will explain that later as to how you can accomplish the same things using those programs. So anyway, so let's go to our first black and white layer. And we'll click on this little black and white symbol here to bring up the tool in the Properties menu. If you don't have the properties window open, go under Windows. Go to Properties and make sure that's open so you can see what's going on here. When we open up the black and white properties or the black and white tool to begin to weigh that comes in as a default setting. And you can see we have six different colors here, red, yellow, green, cyan blue, and the magenta. And slotting to the left will darken that color. Sliding to the right will lighten that color. And we have that ability for every, for each color. So going back to the default setting and see the, mostly you're pretty much around the middle values for darkness or lightness for each color. If you think about when photographers shot black and white images in the film where they would use black and white film. And then to make adjustments to that. They would use yellow or red or different colored filters over the lens. And like in this case, we have a very bluish image. And if we use a yellow or red filter, it would darken the opposite color. So in the case of yellow would darken the blues and it would lighten the yellows. Or in the case of red, it would darken the greens and blues and lightened the reds. So in this photo, it would be good to use because it would darken the clouds and the blue sky behind the clouds To add a little more drama in contrast to the image. So going back to the default setting, we see we basically have pretty much like middle values, but if we wanted to go to another, start adjusting that setting, I'm just going to use the other tool that we brought in, but the same thing. So right now it comes in a default setting, but we have presets for typical kind of filters that one could use. So like in this case, we're talking about using a yellow or red filter. I can go to the yellow filter now. You can see what that does. It darkens the blues and science and the lightened The red and yellow. We have a value of, let's say 120 on the red. And if we go back to our original. We had a value of 40 for the default setting. So going back to our adjustment now, using a yellow filter, you can see we're getting a little more dramatic change in the tonal values of the conversion. And I can go even further. I can take the blue and cyan and make it even darker. If I slide it to the right, you can see the mountains are getting darker and even parts of the clouds are getting darker also in the sky behind the class. And the same with the cyan filter. If I bring that to the right, you can see a pretty dramatic difference in the blue sky and areas of the clouds and the mountains because there's so much blue haze in the photo. And likewise lightening the reds are yellows will lighten those warmer areas in the clouds. You can see if I bring it all the way to the right, pretty much get blown out, which we don't want. So you want to bring it back to the point that we still have detail. Same with the yellow. So you can see how we can really customize the conversion to whatever contrast in the image that we're really looking for. So here's the photo of the three girls that we worked on previously. And it's got a lot of nice color to it. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when we try to convert it to black and white. So I've got the black and white adjustment layer already in place. And the properties are shown in the property window with all the six different color sliders. So if I click on this to make it visible, and you can see this is the default setting. It'll looks reasonably well. It looks like maybe the skin tone on the girls, It's a little dark. So let's see what we can do. Now. If we go back and look the original image, we've got deep reds and blues, and there's green in the background. And we can begin by looking at what if we just work with the presets? So if I go, let's say to a blue filter. If you go to a blue filter, it's going to lighten the blues in dark and the yellows are red. So in this case you can see what happens. All the skin tones have gotten very dark because you have a lot of yellow or red in the skin tone and it made it darker. And the blue, which is their pants and a shirt on this girl here gets very light. So that doesn't really work for this. If we go to the green filter, it's a little bit better. It opened up skin a little bit. Doesn't look a whole lot different from the default. That's our default, and that's the grain, slight difference. But then let's look at if we go, let's say to a red filter, so that will lighten the reds and deepen the greens and blues. So you can see that the leaves at the top got darker, the skin tone got much lighter. And the shirts as well got lighter because this girl's shirt was red. So that's a bit of lightness and it's sort of a nice contrast with the dark areas around it. So it's really not so bad. And if we go to yellow, It's pretty similar. There's not even a whole lot of difference. So you can see just by using this simple presets, we get a lot of variation in how the image is converted from color to black and white. We just looked at a couple of examples of how we create dramatic black and white images from color photographs. In part two, we'll look at a few more to get a better understanding of what the possibilities are in creating these images. 11. B&W Conversion Pt 2: This is another people photo, although in this case it's little people, kids playing on a beach and so nicely saturated photo with strong colors, a cloudless sky. Probably something we wouldn't think of converting to black and white normally. But let's give it a try and it'll be interesting to see what happens when you've got strong colors like this in an image. The black and white adjustment layer is in place. Let's turn it on and click on the icon to bring up the values in the property window. And you can see that it comes in pretty nicely. The sky is clear and we have a little bit of a darker skin against the lighter sky, especially so with the child in the background, it's much darker against the sky and it looks nice. But let's see if we can do some more to it. So we'll begin just by looking at the pre-set filters. We can go to the blue filter, which lightens the blue and darkens the red and yellows. And you can see that the skin tones get darker and this guy got lighter just as we would expect. Probably not something we really want switching when you look at the leg here and the child in the background, the definitely appear a little bit too dark. If we go to the green filter, it seems to improve things a bit. The sky gets darker, skin tone gets slider. So it's definitely a step in the right direction. But let's keep going and look at a red filter. So if we go to a red filter, the red and yellow sliders move to the right or get lighter while the green cyan and blue slider is moved to the left and get darker. So this guy gets darker in the skin tone gets lighter. And that's a nice contrast and it will be almost begins to look like the child in frontier is being illuminated from below or from in front, which is nice, and especially the blonde hair on top against the dark skies. A nice contrast. If we go to the yellow filter, it's pretty much identical things at the sky isn't quite as dark. Now we can use this as a starting point and then adjust the sliders as we see fit. So if we want, we can try to make the sky a little bit darker. I can move the blue to the left to make it darker and does make it more intense and more dramatic. Although what it does in this case is that the tones in the sky we see are fairly uneven. They get much darker at the edges than they are at the center of probably a result of being photographed with a wide angle lens. So we have to be careful of that. So you probably have to back off of that a little bit. Or ultimately we could make some other adjustments to lighten the edges of the photo, but that's a little bit beyond our scope of adjustments for right now. So we can move the blue backoff on the blue little bit black backoff on the cyan. And it really looks pretty nice. The skin is light and the hair is really bright against the sky. And it really seems to look like a nice image. We can just look at the default again, if I bring up another black and white adjustment layer, turn off the one we did. And this is the default. We can see the difference between the default and what we've got now. So it's pretty dramatic difference and maybe it's not to everyone's liking, but it's certainly an interesting way to make a black and white image of such a saturated photo. This next image will give you a good idea of the drama that's possible in the conversion to black and white. So here's a pretty contrast, the saturated color shadow, some desert mountains and Argentina. So again, if we just go to the black and white adjustment layer, if this is our default setting, looks pretty interesting, but we've got a cloudless sky that was deep blue. And we've got these orange, orangey red mountain forms with the same color in the foreground with a little bit of green thrown in there. So if we just run through our color filters here we go to the blue filter. So the blue filter will lighten the blue color. So you can see that the sky got very light and the mountain forms in the land in front got dark. Which is an interesting take on the image. If we go to green. So the green colors will get light. So you can see there was a little bit of green in the foreground here and that got light. And then the red is sort of a middle here, the yellow getting a little bit light. So that's why the mountains here appear quite a bit lighter against a darker sky. The blues and science at roughly around the middle. So they're getting darker, not tremendously so, but if we move on to a red filter, you can see how dramatic it really gets. Now. Now the sky is almost pitch black because it was a deep blue color. And the mountain forums get almost blown out white. Because they were orange and red. And to a somewhat lesser effect, the yellow filter will do the same thing. It's not a whole lot of difference there. So you could start with something like this and then adjust it from there. So in this case, we're thinking, well the yellows and reds are really a bit too light flips, bring them back a little bit. So if I slide the red filter to the left, we start getting some detail coming back into the mountain forms. And the same with the Yellow Emperor and the yellow to the left. And the same thing, I've got a lot of detail and now it looks like something from shot on the moon or from outer space or something very dramatic shot. And then we could go and say, Well, I think maybe the sky is a little bit too dark so we could bring the cyan to the right a little bit to start lightening it up a little bit and the same with the blue. So you can see there's a lot that can be done to create a very dramatic shot of something that's really pretty simple just through the use of different colors, sliders and the black and white tool. Here's a photo from a wedding of two people, women and a man. Obviously it's a woman as smoother skin than the man, maybe a little bit lighter. So we want to keep those things in mind when we make the conversion, we have the ability to lessen some of the blemishes on the skin and to smooth it out a little bit when we make the conversion. So turning on the black and white adjustment layer, this is the default setting. And you can see it looks okay, everything is around the middle value, but we can improve it. Remember, the skin is composed of mostly warmer colors. The red and yellows are going to affect mostly the skin, a little bit of the background as far as the yellow goes because we have green in the background and there's quite a bit of yellow and the green. So be aware of that when we make an adjustment. But starting at the top with the red, if we move it to the right to lighten it, we can lighten it quite a bit to the point that we lose all detail which we don't want to do, but we'd go a little bit. And it seems to improve the skin of the two people. And so we move it to the right. I have a value of about 87. We can do the same with the yellow. Look, if we move it all the way to the right, you can see it really does blow out the background quite a bit to, but we can deal with that later. But we can lighten the yellow a little bit. You gotta be careful with it. And then we get to the green. And with the green, we can go the other way. Since it's mostly the background is not a lot of green, either one of their skins. We can move it to the left and darken it and we get a little more separation between the background and the two figures that we're focusing on. So that works nicely. We've built up some nice contrast. And the same with the science and blues. They're going to affect more of the clothing of the suit jacket and the dress on the woman. So moving it to the left, you can see it darkens it. The same with the blue. If I move it to the left, we get a little more contrast built up between what they're wearing and their skin tones. So all in all, if you look at what the default setting was, that's what we started with when we first turned it on. And then this is what we've got. Now, as you can see in these examples, the possibilities are really endless when converting a color photograph to black and white by targeting specific colors in your image, whether they'd be the warm tones in the skin or cooler colors in the sky or the trees, what have you, it doesn't really matter, but by adjusting those colors lighter or darker, or making them more saturated or less saturated, you can really alter the kind of black and white image that you'll get out of it. So the best thing to do is to bring your photos into Photoshop or Lightroom and try it. Try just using the black and white adjustment layer. If you don't have that, try adjusting the color through hue and saturation and make the adjustments there and then make your conversion into black and white. And you'll see how you can make a really dramatic and intense image. 12. BW Conversion on Mobile: Now that we've done a couple of black and white conversions in Photoshop, which is the same thing as using Lightroom on the computer. We're going to try doing the same thing using Snapseed on the cell phone. And you'll see how really incredibly powerful these simple apps are and how much you can accomplish without even going to the computer. You'll see that what we're going to do is we're going to exaggerate the colors in the image first and the color image and then converted to black and white. And this will give us more headroom for, for creating really great and dramatic black and white image. So let's go take a look. This is the same photo we worked on in Photoshop of the Ashokan Reservoir, New York. So we're going to do a black and white conversion of this just like we did before using snap, this time using Snapseed on the cell phone. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to hit on the tool icon and bring up tune image. What I wanna do is I want to saturate the image. I want to bring up the colors as much as possible because this will give us the most, the most work with when we make the black and white conversion. So it brought up the saturation to 100. You can see the blue and the, the yellow and red in the sky. So definitely a little bit over saturated. Hit the checkbox to accept that, I'm going to hit on the tool icon again, and I'm going to go to the black and white filter. You can see we have three icons at the bottom. We have these recipes here of neutral contrast, bright, dark film, and darkened sky. If you do any of these, let's say the dark one we can slide left or slide right to increase the intensity of this particular selection. Bring it back to 0. Then the middle slide are just does brightness contrast in grain? Let's bring the contrast. I want bring everything back to neutral. So contrast is 0, grain is 0 and brightness is 0. Then let's go over here to the colored filters. We have neutral red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. Blue is going to lighten the sky and darken the reds and yellows. So that isn't going to work for us. Green a little bit less. So if we hit on yellow, we start getting some more drama in the sky, which is what we're after, the same with orange or red. And orange seems to actually do them through the most here. But so now I selected the orange, but now I can vary the intensity of it or the contrast by sliding left and right. So I can bring up the contrast, you know, a little bit to the right here, then go to brightness. If I want to bring that up, I don't really need it. And grain, I don't want to add any grain. So there's quite a bit of modification that's possible with the way this is setup in Snapseed and it's worth experimenting with. But we can even go a step further. So let's accept this pit on the tool icon again. And let's go to the drama filter, which is exactly what it says. Here. Let's go to Drama one, it comes up with recipes just like the other. Filters dead. And we can click on the slider, you can see the filter strength and saturation. So if I go to filter strength, I can lower the strength down or bring it up. And you can see it has a really dramatic effect on the photo. So bring it up to about, let's say a 70. That's pretty amazing. And it's really a remarkable filter. And you can see we've created a very dramatic black and white. And we can go back and hit drama too, an experiment with that and do the same thing. I can bring up the strength even more. So you can see by experimenting with this, we can really come up with a pretty intense black and white conversion from a pretty dull color image. Here's the same image we converted in Photoshop or Lightroom of the kids playing on the beach. I'm going to go through the same thing that we just did with the landscape photo. I'm going to hit on the tool icon, bring up tune image, hit on the slider, go to saturation. And let's bring up the saturation again. So we have a lot to work with when we go into the black and white conversion. We'll accept the ink. So I slipped to the right to increase the saturation, hit the check mark to accept that. Go to the tool icon again and go to black and white. You can see we have the three icons at the bottom. We have the colored filters, the sliders, and the recipes for neutral contrast, bright, etc. So let's grow the slider is first and let's just set everything to 0. Set the brightness to 0. I'm going to set the contrast to 0 by sliding into the middle. So now I have just a regular black and white conversion. Nothing too exciting. We go to the colored filters, so we know that blue is going to lighten the sky and darken the skin tones are red and yellows that we don't want. So I know I'm going to need a yellow, orange or red filter. If we go to yellow, you can see, well that looks pretty nice. We've lightened up the scan and we've darken the sky. Some nice contrast that seems to work. We can go to orange. Sky gets even a little bit darker, a little more contrasty. And if we go to read pretty much the same thing and it's affecting a little bit of the red graphics on the child's bathing suit, but that's okay. So maybe we can go with orange. Then. We can go to the sliders in the middle. And I can bring up the contrast if I want. And we can bring it up a little bit, just add a little drama to it. And then we can also go to brightness. And we could brighten that up. Just a hair also. So you can see just with a few quick things, we can make a pretty dramatic black and white conversion of a color photo. And it's pretty easy to do on a cell phone using Snapseed. So you can see by these two images how incredibly easy it was to create black and white photos on your cell phone. It's incredible how powerful these apps are in how much you really can be done. And so you see that by exaggerating the color before we go into creating the black and white, it gives us more leeway and creating a really dramatic black and white image. And you see how you can play around with this and really adjust the colors and then go into black and white and see what the real possibilities are. So just like with everything else, experiment with it and see what you can come up with. 13. Desktop Retouching: We're going to look at doing some simple retouching on your photos using two tools within Photoshop. One is the Content Aware Fill tool and the other one is the Healing Brush. They're both very simple, a lot of fun to use. And you'll see some real dramatic changes in your images. We're going to begin with this beach photo and we're going to clean up the beach. And then we'll look at a photo of the photo we used before of the kids when we'll clean up some blemishes on the skin of the kids. This is a drone shot of a beach in Mexico. And although it's a nice scene, you can see that we've got a lot of seaweed on the beach. I want to clean up the beach and get rid of the seaweed. So we're going to use something called the Content Aware Fill tool in Photoshop. The way we work with this, we first select the area we want to work on and then we go into the tool. So I'm going to first select the Lasso tool in my tool palette here. And I'm going to click on that and I'm going to select the area that I want to work on. And we can zoom into the image a little bit so we can be a little tighter in how we do this. Let's go like this. And I'm just gonna go free-hand Lasso tool and just select just the seaweed. So we're gonna go around like this. And you can adjust the selection after you do that using either the Shift key, I can add two if I hold the Shift key. While I'm drawing with the lasso tool, you can see I can add area to it. If I hit the option key, the Option Alt key you see next to, next to the Lasso little icon there you get a negative sign. That means we're going to take away. So I can go like that and take away area that I that I don't want. So I wouldn't worry too much about this at this point because when we get into the Content Aware Tool, we can with the ability to adjust the area that we're working on anyway. So now that we got that, let's zoom out a little bit. And I'm going to go under Edit and go to Content Aware Fill. And now you can see we've got a window on our left and another window on the right. So the window on the left, it shows the image right now. It shows my area that I selected, which is shown it's clear then shows a lot of green area around it. The green area is the sampling area. So I want to adjust the green area because I don't want to sample everything. I don't want the trees and the houses and stuff like that. I just want sand. So I want to be sure that I'm only getting the sand as the sampled area. And the image on the right is showing, my result is showing what the image is going to look like. So even as we bring it in, as is, it really looks pretty good. You can see all the seaweed is pretty much gone. But I want to be sure that I'm not getting any of this other stuff in here. So it comes in with a brush tool and I can adjust the size of the brush tool up here. There's a slider. So I can make it pretty much any size. And right now it's set with a negative sign, which means I'm gonna be taking away from the green area. I can also add to it by hitting the plus side. So I'm going to stay with the negative because I've got too much here. And I'm just going to paint around this because I don't want I don't want any of the trees or buildings and stuff like that. So again, the program, again uses artificial intelligence to figure out what it is you really want. And somehow it really does know. I don't want to get water on the beach. So I'm going to eliminate sampling from the surf area here because I really just want sand. So you can be pretty rough with this because as you can see, I can see in this other window what my effect is. So if I look on the right-hand side here and I can zoom in a little bit. It's again, pretty remarkable what's going on here. If I zoom in a lot, you can see we've really gotten rid of a lot of almost all the seaweed and we've got a nice clean beach here. So I can accept that. Just say, Okay. I sold my selection. I can hit Command D to get rid of the selection. And you can see we've got a nice clean beach. And what's really nice also is that Photoshop will automatically put this on another layer. So if I click off of it, you can see there's all my seaweed back again. And if I click on it, it's all gone. And we could even go further. We could do this again because I see there's more seaweed in the background here. If I really wanted to get rid of all of that, I can go in and do the same thing again. Using the Content Aware Fill tool is a pretty remarkable way to do some simple retouching. It's quick, it's easy. And it It's hard to do it wrong. This is the same photo we worked on before. If the two kids playing on the beach, the child in front, if we zoom into his face, we can see that he's got some suntan lotion on the bridge of his nose and some sand under his lips. So I wanted to get rid of that. We're going to retouch that out and we're going to use something called the healing brush. So if I go to my toolbar on the left-hand side here, I don't see it. We're in Photoshop right now. If I go into the Edit menu, go down to toolbar. It brings up a customized toolbar window here. And on the left-hand side it shows the tools that are presently on my toolbar. And on the right-hand side it shows extra tools. So that's where I'm going to look for the healing brush. So if I scroll down a little bit, I can see the healing brushes right here. And if I click on it and drag it over to the left-hand side, I'm going to put it right above my brush tool. Now it's gonna be added to my toolbar. So I'll hit Done, go over to my toolbar. And there it is, just like we did. Now, the healing brush is very similar to another brush called the Clone Stamp Tool, which is this one right here. The clone stamp will exactly mimic another area. So if I sample, I select an area that I want to sample from, let's say right adjacent to the suntan lotion here. The clone tool will exactly sample that exact area. The healing brush will attempt to merge the sampled area into the area where I'm retouching. And so it'll hopefully blend the area a little bit better, uses a little bit of artificial intelligence. So what we're going to do is I'm going to add a layer in our layer pallets so that we can see a before and after. I created a layer here. And I'm going to click on my Healing Brush. And I get a round circle for the cursor that shows the size of my brush. If I right-click that, I can vary the size of that brush. You can see it shows in pixels, will use roughly 30 pixel brush here. To create my or to specify my sample area. I select the option Alt key. And you can see my cursor changes to this target cursor. So I can select the area that I want to sample from. So I'm going to select an area right adjacent to the suntan lotion area. So I'm going to click there. And when I let go of the Option Alt key, I get my painting cursor backwards, the round brush cursor. So now I can start painting right over the suntan lotion. And you can see the crosshairs show the area where I'm sampling from. And you can go and do this even a little bit like I noticed that it created a little bit of a dark area here. So maybe I want to get, trying to get rid of that. So I'm going to sample from a lighter area and just go over that dark area. And you can see, I pretty much got rid of all of it and it looks very natural. And if we go to before and after, if I turn off that layer, That's what we had. And now I got rid of it. We've got the same photo open in light room to show the differences in how the healing brush works in light room versus what we just saw in Photoshop. I'm going to zoom into the photo, go into the Develop panel. And the second icon from the left is our brushes. And we have a cloning brush in the Healing Brush. The healing brushes like the cloning and accept that adds the artificial intelligence or the algorithm for better blending in the retouched area into the original area of what we're working on. So I can adjust the size of this here. Goes really big to really small, and the feathering of how sharp the edge of the brushes will keep the feathering at about 28 or so. And the size that's a little smaller. We can go a little bit bigger. Let's go about 26. And we can just click on the mouse and just paint over the area that we want to work on. And as soon as we let go of the mouse, you see another area comes up and that shows our sampling area where Lightroom is sampling front. And we can move that around to see what works best. And as we click on it and move it, we lose the the white outline of the retouched areas so you can really see how it blends or doesn't blend. That looks pretty good, just like that. This is fully editable, It's non-destructive. We can right-click it. I can delete it if I want, or I can go back later and adjusted if I feel like it needs adjusting, I can also add another area like right here underneath the lip and do the same exact thing. So there's a lot of flexibility with it. It's non-destructive. And it's really a lot of fun. As you can see from using these two tools, the Content Aware Fill tool and the Healing brush, you can really do a tremendous amount in terms of eliminating blemishes on skin or removing small items, adding a photo and really cleaning it up so that you don't have distracting elements. So bring some other photos into Photoshop or Lightroom and try it out and see where you can do. It's really a lot of fun and very satisfying to make a real clean photo. 14. Retouching on Mobile: As we saw, were able to do a tremendous amount of retouching or cleaning up of our images through the use of some really simple tools. And now I'm going to show you how you can do the same thing using Snapseed on your cell phone. It's really pretty remarkable how much you can do on your cell phone. And through the use of this app, you can almost do the same things that you see that we've done on Photoshop. Maybe not quite to the same degree or with the same level of sophistication. It's really pretty remarkable what can be done. So we're going to do the same to images that we did on the computer. We're going to do them with the cell phone app as well. This is a drone photograph of a Mexican beach with a rainbow in the background. It's pretty amazing. But the problem with this image is that there's a lot of seaweed on the beach and it really takes away from the image. You can see that dark stuff near where the surface hitting the beach. And it really takes away from the image. And so we're going to clean up the beach. So I'm going to hit on the tool icon. And I'm going to go to the healing tool. And the Healing tools is sort of like what we have in Photoshop where you can do the Content Aware. Retouching in this sort of does the same thing. So what I'm going to do is I want to bring up the size of the photo so we can be a little bit more precise. So you do just like on your cell phone and when you want to expand an image to look at it, you go to Zoom in, you use two fingers and in slide them apart. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to slide the image to where I want to work on it. So you can see That's the seaweed that I want to get rid of. And you can see I have this little navigation window on the bottom left-hand side that shows you what part of the image you're working on. So if I just slide with my finger and you can see I get a red area. And I can just highlight this red area with my finger. Let's try to capture as much of the seaweed is possible. See what happens. And look at that. It's like magic, it's gone. And then I can do two fingers and slide the image down and work on more of it so I can do the same thing here. I'll bring it up. It's really pretty amazing and you can go back in and just keep on doing it if you like it. You have to watch out for areas that look like they're cloned or it's duplicate areas of other areas of the photo. But really, again, for a cell phone app, It's really quite amazing. And you can go, you can undo with these two arrows at the bottom or redo. So there's a lot that can really be done with this with using your fingers and swiping. And It's, it's just remarkable. So here we have the photo with a clean beach. So one more time we're going to work on this photo with the kids on the beach. If we look closely at the child and front, he's got some sand or I don't know what on is on the bridge of his nose and there are some sand underneath his lips here. So what we're going to try to get rid of that. So you can see just like we did before with the beach photo, we can swipe with two fingers to expand or contract the image and really get in tight to work on the area that we want to work on. So we can be pretty specific in how we attack this. So I'm going to hit on the tool icon and get again, go to the healing tool. You see if I just swipe down over the bridge of the nose, I got rid of it. It's really pretty amazing. We could go back and do a little bit more. You can see a little bit of a border area where it was. And if you do it again, you can eliminate that. And it's just, again, it's amazing. And again, I can go underneath the lips here and get rid of some of the sand that he hit up. That's no good. I'm going to hit Undo. Let's try it again. And that'll work a little bit better. You have to try it a few times, the C because the phone or the application is pretty intelligent, but it doesn't know everything. So we can even go into other areas. If I want to get rid of some freckles, I can just swipe on that there and do the same thing. Or I don't want to do that. Again, use two fingers to slide the image over to get to other areas you can see it's a little bit of white area underneath the eye here. I can try doing that, but that doesn't really work. So anyway, you can see how just with a couple of quick finger swipes, you can get rid of blemishes and retouch an image pretty nicely on this. So it's worth experimenting with. You can't mess it up too much because there's always the undoes and the Redo. So it's definitely worth checking out and trying. As you can see, we're able to accomplish almost, almost the same level of ability or retouching ability that we had on the computer with the cell phone. It's pretty incredible. And with more practice, you can even get a lot better at it. There's a lot more to this of course, but experiment with it brings some more photos into your cell phone or just grabbed some out of the gallery on your on your cell phone and try doing some minor we touching or maybe major retouching, whatever. It's a lot of fun and it's very satisfying to really create clean images without distracting elements in there. 15. Thank You: Thanks for being a part of this class and I hope you enjoyed it and really found it valuable. I also hope that you'll come away with from it with great enthusiasm to take more photos and to create great art. This is only the beginning is there are more tools, techniques, and methods available. So when you have a general understanding or basic understanding of the foundations of creating a great image, you can use any method to accomplish this. We talked about composition, contrast controls, setting darks and lights, color correction, converting from color to black and white. All these things are important in terms of creating great images and you can use a variety of techniques to accomplish these goals. So go out and shoot a ton of photos. Try out everything that we discussed here, see what works for you and what really goes along with the kind of images you hope to create, the kind of art that you want to make. Think about what ends the Latins would say he's a tree. Visualize your image when you take your photo. In other words, think about how you want the result or the image to really look like when you first take the photo, think through the whole process of what you'll do in terms of contrast adjustments and color correction and all that stuff. At the very beginning, when you take the photo, you'll find you'll make better decisions in terms of, in terms of composition and exposure and other parameters. And you'll generally find that you'll be happier with the results that the yen because you've already thought it through. Also feel free to reach out to me if you have questions or suggestions for the class, I can be reached through Instagram. Also, please leave a review for the class. I want this to be the best experience possible for everyone who takes it. And I really hope that you get the maximum amount out of everything that we've talked about. So thank you again for being a part of this and go out and take some great photos and make some terrific art.