Natural Light Portrait Retouching in Photoshop - Start to Finish

1. Introduction to the Class: Hey there, my name is Martin and welcome to my natural light portrait retouching course here on Skillshare. I am professional recapture, working in this industry for close to 20 years now. I've been working with top fashion magazines, brands, photographers. So I do feel I have some really valuable things to give you. And my ideal retouching workflow, the one that doesn't complicate things too much. So I tried to use really basic tools and basic techniques because you need to know when it comes to retouching. What's professional is basic. Retouching is very simple, as long as you do not. Complicated to manage. And today we are going to focus on pretty simple portrait that can be done really by everyone. So the portrait that is done outdoor in the natural light. So when we look at this image, it's now the finished retouching that we are going to do step-by-step in this course. And I need to tell you, you will get this image so you can practice at your own piece or follow me when I do everything step-by-step in this course. So simply I can show you this is the before, after the row processing already. And as you can see, a few things is simply not perfect. The skin, maybe the colors are not ideal. The eyebrows are a little bit messy. So I'm going to show you how to use the basic techniques to clean this up and make it look natural and simply beautiful. So you are getting this image, you will get some extra resources that will speed up your workflow. And once the best discourse is, not too long, so you can do it anytime. If you want to know more about me before we start, if I'm the right person to teach you and feel free to visit the Instagram marching reattach to make sure I'm the right person to teach you. You can also visit my website much in mucus.com and see the other classes here on Skillshare. Because I've been here for awhile and so far, 7.510100 people seems to have trusted me and enjoy learning from me. So let's go to the first lesson. 2. Before we Start: Welcome to the course. Few essential things. Before we start. As you can see, I have my images opened or displayed in this window, which is called Adobe Bridge. And Adobe Bridge is the plug-in that is together with Photoshop. So if you have Photoshop, you have it. You can move it to your dog. If you don't see it, you can simply go to Creative Cloud and make sure it is installed. So wildlife to have it this way. Because when you start in Photoshop and you want to work with few images or open your image. And you want to make sure that you choose the right image, you'd have File Open and then, well, it's not perfect. But when he worked with Adobe Bridge, you have everything displayed here. So you can easily navigate, especially when you work with the set of the images. So I navigate through the folders on my computer. And as you can see, I have this small set of images here. So I know what I want to work with ICD images. I see all the information. The second thing is the format of the images. As you can see, format of these images is and E, F, which is raw format for Nikon cameras. And if you are a photographer and you have two choices, you can shoot in RAW. So if you acne conduct will be NEF, or you can choose JPEG. But when it comes to JPEG images, they are already processed, slightly process. So the contrasts are already a little bit adjusted. The shadows highlights, and you have way less information. And also size of the file is much smaller. So if you want to preserve the wide range of information for the editing, the best is to work with raw files. So once it's done, I'm going to open all of that in the camera, which is another software. Together with Photoshop. Once again, you should have it. If not, you can install this in your Creative Cloud because this is all together. So when you get Photoshop, you have altogether including Adobe Bridge, including Camera Raw and Lightroom as well. So as I want to work with three images together, I'm going to hit right. And I have option open with. So even if I choose Adobe Photoshop, it will move me to camera. But I'm going to choose Open in Camera. And this is how it looks like. So as you can see, these sliders over here and camera overall is pretty much the same thing that developed panel in Lightroom. If you're familiar with Lightroom, that's what it is. So by moving the sliders working, I will adjust the contrast shadows, highlights for the string images. As you can see, we have pretty strong exposure here. This is pretty solid and this image is underexposed. So a little bit different work. And I will start from this image. And if I wanted to have better view, I don't need to work with these two other images. I can hit this arrow here or just drag it down here to close it. So this is the image I will start with. So let's go to the next lesson and let's start working on this image. 3. Camera Raw Editing: Starting with the camera, as you can see, on the right-hand side, which is dislocation, we have all of the panels. And these panels is basically the same thing as Develop panel in Lightroom. So all that the adjustments we're going to do is here. And mostly we will be used in this basic panel because it allows us to do everything. It allows us to adjust temperature, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and some others. Of course, if needed, we can use other panels to adjust more color. And things related to this. Above that we have the profiles. So this is the thing that I like to start with because profiles do matter when it comes to general look. But before we get to this above that you have the histogram. And the histogram helps you to read the image. It simply shows you how the certain pixels are distributed through the image. So on the right-hand side, you have the bright pixels. Let's call them white. And on the left-hand side have pixels, pixels that are dark. So you can see this line over here means basically this part is overexposed. Looking at the midterms and the shadows we can see it's rather flat so we can read from this well, except this part. We don't really have many contrasts. So you can use this to spot the mistakes on the image. I talked about profile. If you hit this, you have only few of the profiles, but I would recommend you to hit this square or browse over here. So you can see all of the profiles that you have available in the camera. So these are the basic ones and this is different outlook. I don't think the like going crazy with this is good idea. But I would recommend you comparing this Adobe color to some profiles in camera matching. But also don't go crazy because this camera matching are more natural. But I like to compare two cameras standard. As you can see, the depth is a little bit better. And you can see on the histogram, look how the histogram changes. I think we are able to get more depth and contrast. So that's why I'm actually going to choose a standard to start with that I'm going to basic. And what I want to do, I want to adjust temperature. This in many cases could be your own choice. I like images that are not warm. For this image, I don't want it to be warmed. But of course, you can choose temperature. If you want colors to be rather colder, more natural, you can go down for making them warmer this way. But I don't think going with the warm image actually match here. We also have this eyedropper here. So we could adjust the white balance automatically. Or we can choose auto. When h is 0 to I, I can see the automate the image a little bit colder because what auto does, it makes this highlight simply white. So it's too much for me. But maybe for temperature 6,900, it seems too much. Maybe I want this and I don't maybe just slightly down with distinctive at this moment. So that's the first steps I do. Profile and temperature. Then I would go to shadows, bring a little bit of shadows. And when it comes to highlights, I also want to lower this, but well, I don't want to bring actually that many details from this area because it will not look nice, but I want to recover some areas on the face here. So this image is actually very flat at this moment. I'm also going to add just a touch of exposure because it gets slightly darker you have before-after. So we can see this image is darker, is probably a little bit more sad, and it's more flat for sure. But that's the outcome I'm, I'm looking for maybe give touch of more temperature here. Then I would change the saturation of the image. So we have two sliders. One is the vibrance and the other is saturation. There is small difference between them. Let's see what happened when I move the vibrance. As you can see, I get a lot of details on the background. I have this blue strong colors, green, so it increase the saturation on the cold colors. But when it comes to this kin, it doesn't really increase this orange tones. But if we do saturation, the opposite happens. You see really strong increase of this orange tones. So if I want to bring more dynamic to this image. I would go with the vibrance because it will allow me to bring more color in this cold tons and it will preserve the color of the skin. So that's something I'm looking for here. When it comes to texture and clarity, I don't like to use it right now. Simply clarity similar as contrast. I don't want to bring contrast now because it might be difficult to reattach the image later. And clarity increases the contrast on the midtones and it makes it too gritty, I would say. And also texture, this image, if we zoom in, has a lot of texture already. Let me, let me show you. Can see this. The face of the model does have texture. So I don't think increasing the texture would do any good. The Christian, sometimes if you have maybe some deep pores, you can try experiment with this, but that's not something I do in this stage. So I would be careful here. After Basic Panel, I like to go a few steps down to the optics. And we have two things here. So we have something that is called profile. And Manuel MANOVA allows you to fix the vignetting on the image and fix the distortion and that was caused by the lens. But I don't think that doing this manually is actually a good way. So the best way of doing this is checking the profile corrections. So if you use profile collect corrections, it fixes the Vicodin and it fixes the distortion. But when it comes to the outer images, I actually think the vignetting works in the favor because it brings that tension to the center point of the image, which is quite nice. You can also remove chromatic aberration or the fringe. So sometimes if you zoom on the image, you will be able to, to actually see some, some weird parts on the edges. But it usually would happen when the light got wrong to the lens. We don't really have this problem over here. I could probably remove some green hues because I see some of that here. But be careful because when you have some similar makeup colors, you can actually affect this area. So this is not something that you would use a lot. So let me feed, feed in view. Right now. After optics, I might play a little bit with color. So we have few things here, like color mixer, where you can adjust hue, saturation, luminance. And also we have something called calibration. And this is one of my favorite part when it comes to the other images like this. First of all, we can manipulate with the shadows. We can add magenta or green color, so we can do some tinting or we can manipulate with the different channels. So when it comes to the red primary, green primary, and blue primary, you need to know that this is not about the colors, but it's about the lights. So these three lines you see if I'm changing this, you will be changing the relation of the certain pixels on this image. So as you can see, if I manipulate with the, with the red primary and I change the color of this use is actually changing the relation between different lights over here. So I wouldn't play it with the play with disuse over here match. I don't really need that and it's easy to do mistake if we need to increase maybe saturation on the skin tone or sorry, like this, we can do it a little bit here. When it comes to the blues, we can see there are still on the skin because we also have the blue pixels on the skin. So it's not about the color. If you actually need to work on the color, I would recommend going to the color mixer because this is the color. But here you have the channels. So these pixels exist everywhere. But what I like to hear, I would like to add a little bit of magenta to the, to the shadows. I think it will give some really amazing color. And now I think maybe I don't need this saturation over here. So for many images, other images, it will give this really a nice pop. And for this image, this is everything. Of course we can go with curve and maybe tried to do something with the lights, tried to do more. But I want you to keep in mind that we don't want to overdo it in camera. We want to do simple processing. We want to adjust the lights, maybe do a little bit. I work on the color and then we want to start working with Photoshop. So once it's done, I want to adjust this. So I'm going to do, as he can say, I have three images. I have the major image selected. I will hold Shift and select rest of this. And I can hit these three dots. And I can choose Sync Settings, which means synchronize settings. So I can see everything is selected. I don't think I want to preserve anything here. But the images are different. For example, they have different level of exposure. So when it comes to this image, this image in the middle, of course, exporter has to be different because it just looks different. So now these two images match, but this one does it. The reason for that? It's also too dark. And what I see on this image, it's actually completely, it has completely different color. So would actually have to probably go with even different white balance. And also we need to check the calibration over here because that potentially change a lot. So I wasn't, I wasn't wrong. Let's see what else we can do here. We took down the saturation and let's see if we can actually adjust the temperature better. So the white balance was completely different here. And I need to make sure that these images look similar. Not easy task to be honest. Because when people should them in different condition, it will actually, despite having similar white balance, the image will look very different. Now. We'll be around. Okay? So I think the colors are pretty similar now. Maybe even less of, less of the temperature. So once it's done, I'm ready to export the images. So how I export this? I'm going to export three of them, but I'm checking if I need to maybe adjusted federally to be this third image. But I will think about this because I might even I'm just more of the temperature. So I will select these all. And I can hit this small icon to save here, or I can hit this one here. And here I have all of the, all of the options. So I can save these images as the TIF, for example. So destination, same location, file extension. I like to save this as TIF or PSD to preserve all of the, all of the information resolution 300 pixels. And I can select folder where I want to save it. So for this, I would actually create new folder here, which I would call processed for example. And I will save this three images here. Let me save this. So now it's been saved, that had been saved as eight bit images. So some people prefer to go with 16 bit because they're much larger. We have more information on 16 bit images. To be honest, I'm doing these images for myself. And I don't think when you have good quality images, that's a big overstatement that there is huge difference between 8-bit and 16 bit. If you have bad quality images, you want to actually squeeze the most of that. Save it as 16 bit. I actually don't need that. So this is what I do it some people like to actually open them in Photoshop or open as the smart object. But this will allow you to open only this one image. So for example, if I open as the object, it will direct me to Photoshop straight away. But this is not the way I like to work. So I like to save my images first when they are ready because I don't want to do anything more on them in camera. So I don't need smart object. I need the ready images to do work in Photoshop. 4. Important - Why you need graphic tablet: Before we start retouching our image, there is one thing I need to tell you about if you think about retouching in the serious manner. So what do we want to be professional researcher? Or if you read, touch your own images and you want to retouch fast and effective. You need one thing. And this thing is graphic tablet. This is how it looks and the brand is why com? So welcome is probably most popular brands for creating the graphic tablets, for drawing, retouching, for anything really graphic related. And they're pretty good at this. I never used another brand, so this is the natural choice. So why you need graphic tablet? We also have the pen. Because whether you draw, whether you reattach, you want to do it fast. So if you will be retouching with the mouse, it will be really slow process and will not be as precise. So you can take the mouse and you can take the sample and cover the area. But as you can see, it's very slow. And in fact, it might seem like it will be effective. It doesn't, It's not effective because the mouse is not really precise. And you don't have the pressure control when you work with the mouse. But when you work with the Wacom tablet, you can do it fast because simply you can hit many times and every time you hit on this, you can cover the spot. Also when you use it. You can actually have the pressure control in the same way as you would be drawing. So it takes time to actually get used to the tablet, but don't get discouraged. You need to spend few weeks forcing yourself to actually work with the tablet once you get used to, your work will be much better. And also it's really important you will start retouching much faster. So it will be able to reattach fast. You will be able to retouch precise. Of course, you will be able to use techniques like the Dodge and Burn, which is impossible to do. We found this. So if someone tells you differently that does not true, you cannot do this technique. We found the tablet and most important finally, you will be able to reattach non-destructively. So fast, precise pressure control. I'm painting light experience. I want to tell you one more thing. Don't go crazy with it. I always used the basic tablets, the cheapest ones, because for retouching is absolutely naff. You don't have to have all of this option. But just Peyton is important and you can see, I do use it a lot. You can see it's quite new. It only has like two months, maybe humans. You can see I do retouch a lot. So remember, you need that to have nice control over your workflow. 5. Basic Retouch: So we export it images in camera and we are ready for retouching in Photoshop. Here's my export images in the tif format. So I'm going to start with the first image as the example. I'm going to hit right and choose Open with Adobe Photoshop. But if you double heat and if Adobe Photoshop is your software chosen by default, of course, the image will be opened in Photoshop. And I'm going to teach you how to use basic retouching tools, but please do not get discouraged by the word basic because actually retouching with the basic tools is the professional way of retouching. And we will focus on healing brush tool as the first one and also Spot Healing Brush Tool. And the other tool will be clone stamp. So for most of the skin retouching, we will be able to reattach all image. We found that the Dodge and Burn yet with this two tools. So the next step, you want to know how we reattach. We don't want to touch this original layer here. And because we would work destructively, so we always want to create a new layer by hitting this small icon on the bottom here. And I can rename it to clean or skin retouching or whatever for you to remember. It's your choice. So what I'm going to perform, retouching, I'm going to do this on this empty layer. And the original layer will be untouched. So it will not be distractive because if I do the mistake, it's easy to remove it. So let's make sure their visibility is on. And I'm going to start with this small spot over here. So I'm starting with healing brush tool. And the mechanics behind Healing Brush Tool is pretty simple. We need to press outer option next to the spot so we want to find a clean spot with the texture of the skin that it's relevant in the area. So if I take the sample, I took that sample of the texture and I applied. Now here, the texture is applied and the color is adjusted automatically. So you need to remember, Karen below need to be said here. If something doesn't work, That's the, that's the thing. And as you can see, I can speed up now and it works really well because as I said, adjusting the texture and the color. Automatically adjusted. Very similar is Spot Healing Brush tool, but it's even more simplified process, which it's not always perfect. It and just not only texture, but the color as well. So I can use it to correct this part. And for such a simple retouching, we could actually easily use, as you can see, Spot Healing Brush Tool. Because even here, but in some complicated areas it might be not easy because as you can see, the texture of the skin hair is not perfect. It's complicated. So that's why I usually preferred healing brush tool over the Spot Healing Brush Tool. If you have simple areas, spot healing brush tool will be perfect even for removing the hair. Like here. You don't need to think much. Perfect job is done, right? So that's pretty simple. The other tool that is similar with some major differences is clone stamp. And clone stamp firsts. Mechanics, by taking the sample of the texture is the same, but it also copy the color. So I can use either option the same, and of course, hello needs to be the same. And then if I'm going to apply it, as you can see, I've copied the texture, but also the color. So by this, we can note that clone stamp is not really perfect for such skin retention. But it could have amazing uses in the areas where we have a lot of edges like this hair over here. So if want to just slightly blend this in, as you can see, I'm using soft edge brush and you will get the same brush as me. It's my brush. I'm going to add this in this course. Can easily blended or even retouched the areas that have a lot of edges. So as you can see, two different tasks, similar tools, but functionality could be used in very different ways. So I'm going to go back to hidden brush when I'm using the Healing Brush tool, I always used hard edge brush because it's much easier to read and you don't want to affect the texture in the bandwidth. And I'm going to start with, so I'm doing everything I can to remove the spot. Some may be oversized pores, but remember to not reattach the skin pores because You can actually overdo it and remove the texture and then, trust me, the image will not look right? So it's not about the course, is about the unnatural spots. Oversized pores may be, yes. But first, let's pay attention to these spots. Maybe the hair, maybe some wrinkle that doesn't need to be there because of course, not all the wrinkles are battering calls you. When you read Tange them, mature woman or man, you don't want to remove the wrinkles. They will just not look like themselves. So be careful about this. And this is how I remove all of the spots. So pretty simple process. You can see I'm doing it fast, but I have some experience. So if you just started, if you start in with the retouching tablet, of course with the graphic tablet, it will not go that fast, but you need to know that our starting as well and well, I got better. So you will get better if you really want to do it. If you want to better and if you are willing to practice, of course you will get better and you have chance to practice on the same images as me. So another thing that I just switched automatically, so for what else I like to use the clone stamp is usually when I have heavy heavy pores, would like to soften this part of the skin texture with the soft edge brush. I could simply take the sample and try to paint really softly on that. So you can see, I'm kind of trying to blend in this course to be more unified, to be not as big as strong. For this, I must tell you when you use the tablet, the graphic tablet, you need to have sensitive hands so you don't press strong because the effect will be to Strunk series. You just touch it likely. And you can see the effect is really amazing. And why I'm doing this, you'd say, hey, that's kind of distracting. But, well, we don't have whole day. No one have the whole lamb. Trust me. Don't listen to the people who, who said to you, it's okay to spend 10 hours on the image. It's not okay. You're getting paid for your work. Yeah. Of course. It has to be done with the taste. It has to be done with sensitivity, right? So as you can see, I'm not doing this as much. I'm just trying to do this slightly to make sure it looks natural. So little bit more here, a little bit more on the other side with the, with the clone stamp to blend it in a little bit more here. And it does look better, maybe some shadows also, the same thing. There is no reason to experiment with techniques, Hey, how I remove the shadows. If you can use, do it all at once, right? So a little bit more here I did some retention. I can blend this in. Pay attention to the arms or the hands. Whether you want to remove some moles, some spots, you can do it. Or could they emit more natural? It's worth to look for this redness. Often on the arms you can see some red spots, maybe some hair that stand out too much. So that's worth to take care of. And also on the arms. You can do the same, soften up with the larger size of the of the brush, just like this. So before, before we go further, of course, you could probably see I make the size of the brush smaller and bigger very fast. It might be confusing as well, but I always use a shortcut and I would recommend learning the shortage is trying to use them. You have the Mondavi page basically to make the size of the brush smaller or bigger, I'm using the square brackets. So I'm using the left square bracket to make it smaller and the right square bracket to make it bigger. That simple. When I zoom in and out, I hold Z on the keyboard and I drag it on my Wacom tablet. So that's, that's pretty simple. Let's move to the hair. Here we can meet the technique. We can use both. We can use Healing Brush tool where we can, and we can also mix it with the clone stamp. But we always need to be careful because we don't want to change the light that is here. So for example here, I could potentially change some light if I would do it on the weekday clone stamp. So at first, I'm going to use the healing brush, of course. And get as close as possible. Then a little bit of work with the, with the constant just like this to blend it. And that looks natural, the same here. Bend it a little bit. Just like this. This one over here. Look strange. I want to I want to just just blended softly. And we have this hair over here. We can probably leave it. But if you really wanted to, we can we can remove it. So I'll take the sample and make sure I'm going on the straight line just like this. So might be annoying at first when you, when you try many times, I can actually see the color is not perfect. I change it a little bit so I will try to blend it even more. So just like this. Let's see if I can paint it over nicely so it will not look too much like it was retouched. I know. And I can see the difference in the color as well. So I'm trying to blend it better. And later I can use private dodge and burn to make it even better. It's not too bad. We'll blend in this part. Make sure you actually don't try to remove all of the hair, it will not look natural. So this side, I'll just kind of blended softly. I straighten them, but some of them can stand out. It's fine. Just just some of them I'm going to remove this way. So this is how I touch the skin. This is how I read times the hair. Of course. I mentioned how I would return to the Heritage site as well. Let me let me remove some more here. Say don't want to remove them. I would actually blend them softly with the clone stamp. Don't waste your time on the fields that are not really needed. So something like this and here I have one more hair that I want to blend in. And it looks already much better. So that's it. That's how I do the basic skin retouching. One thing I need to mention, when I look at the eyebrows over here, tenant the same and I don't know why it happened. I don't know why this one is app this one is nicely tighten up. I will have to show you how to do it as we have this image. And also make sure our photographer that you remove the lenses or ask the model, you don't do it yourself. You ask the model to remove the lenses because it can be seen as you can see. So we need to reattach this lightly as well. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to make sure the eyebrows look the same. And that will eat when it comes to the basic retouching. 6. Fix Eyebrows: This lesson might be a little bit more difficult because this time we have to fix the eyebrow, the uneven. So it's best to take care of this. Of course, some people could cleave it, but it bothers me so I want to change it. The difficult is the fight that the perspective might be a little bit different, but we'll see what we can do. So to start, I'm going to cut out the left side of the eyebrow and I'm pretty sure we will be able to adjust it. We don't need hall of the eyebrow. Just this part I believe will be enough. So I need to redo it because that was not enough. We need to cut out with the part of the skin just for the safety. And I'm going to hit right. And I'm going to choose Layer via Copy. We don't want to cut this because we don't want to affect this background layer. So when you copy it, the background layer still stay the same. I'm going to rename this to the eyebrow. Eyebrow. I hope I typed it right. And then I'm going to move it. So I'm going to turn off this clean layer just for now so I can see everything clearly. What we need to do, we need to use the free transform. And with this, I'm going to press Shift because I'm going to flip it to the other side and it's best to make sure was the size of it. So that's around 545. I think for 50 was maybe under Start. Probably somewhere here. Doesn't have to be perfect, to be honest, but it could be a little bit bigger, maybe because of the perspective. So touch here. And I guess, I guess we could make it before and after. So that's pretty good. Once it's done, we are going to create a mask. So let me explain quickly. What is the masker? To create a mask on any layer, we have to hit the small icon. So the mask help you to cover the certain area or uncovered a certain area, or make it invisible. If the mask is white, everything that's on the layer is visible. The white layer means visibility. But if we reverse it, for example, by using shortcuts, Command or Control and I, it makes everything what's on this layer invisible. So let me reverse the bag. What I'm going to do here to make sure it's adjusted well. I'm going to use the brush and I'm going to use this soft edge brush that I created for myself. And on the layer mask, not on the layer. On the layer mask is very important. I'm going to paint with black colored brush. Why blank? Because I want to make sure that the edges of this eyebrow here are not visible. Sign I know. I know that's might be a little bit difficult. We can see now that the original eyebrow is wider. So I'm going to see if if I can actually extend it a little bit more. Maybe not necessarily in the thickness, but in the length and just touch in the thickness. Could be okay. So it's normal to to to fix as we go. And now I can adjust it better. It's very important. You can't adjust it. Maybe like perfectly on the edges. The edges will have to be retouched a little bit more, right? I think the thickness of this is, it's quite on point. And the length of it is also k. This is not getting too far. I don't think we should go as far as the previous one, but if it's needed, we can always extend it. So I just I'm just trying to see how it looks on the eyes. So then I'm going to turn on this clean layer. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to clean the edge here. Because you see we have the previous eyebrow, the messy one, coming out from the bottom. And color wise, it's a little bit different. So the good way of doing this is maybe using some clone stamp to darken this here. But overall, I think we did good job and I would not be worried if there will be some small disproportions regarding color, right? So here is a little bit brighter. We can easily fix it here, but that's no issue. But also, so to do it, I'm actually going to remove this hair. But also as we're going to work with the Dodge and Burn later. And this sort of light disproportions can be easily fixed. So this is not something we should viewer it right now. And I think that's the basic thing is done. You can tidy up a little bit more here. But I, I think it looks just so much better right now. You can see it. Well, not like this. It looks tidy, it looks clean and well, doesn't it doesn't make it look weird. We don't have two different eyebrows. So this is a, this is how I do these sorts of things in I have the problem like this. 7. Dodge & Burn Retouch: In this lesson, I'm going to show you on the one fully non-destructive retouching techniques that this dodge and burn, possibly you heard about it. And keeping it simple, Dodge and Burn is nothing more or nothing less than painting with light. So you see the skin is not the flat texture. And you can clearly see this here, that despite these basic retouching, it still doesn't look fully clean. It looks a little bit patchy. And the reason for that is because the skin is not flat, so the light is not evenly distributed over her face and rest of the body. So to fix this, we are able to brighten the thing, the areas that are too dark or dark and the areas that are too bright. And make sure that the skin look healthy, natural, and have smooth transition. So to make it maybe even more clear, I'm going to show you what I mean. We can do the experiment and choose the hue saturation adjustment layer. Take down the saturation, change the Blending Mode to Color to make sure that you do not affect the proper luminosity values. So we own affect the colors. And then let's increase the contrast with this curve adjustment layer. And as we do it, you can see the beak patches on the skin. So simply we had an even skin here and it resulted in an uneven line distribution. So we need to fix it and we will be painting with the lighter. The idea for doing this is very simple because for that, I will be using the curve adjustment layers. So to make the areas brighter. Grabbing this in the center, right? And this will be done. You would ask Kate, but how to paint on it? I mentioned before the masks, we simply invert the mask, right? So Command or Control and I to invert this. And then we have the brush, white color of the brush. We can paint on this back layer mask and we will be able to fix the areas as long as we work in the right way and as long as we are being careful. So the opposite will be burned. We've burned out would be more careful because the effect is usually stronger. And that would be Byrne. And that's how we invert this and then we can paint it, right? So the idea is simple and it's completely fine if you work with these two basic layers like this. To make it simple, I'm actually going to give you the actions. So I always use this actions, my action for Dodge and Burn it so you don't have to do it manually every time. And yes, they look a little bit different, but the idea is the same. So how I created this, I simply created curve. Then I add a hue saturation layer, selected this bulb, press Command or Control N G, and then created the mask on it and inverted. So that was fast process. But let me explain why I did it like this. So you can, this is the adjustment layer inside and I added this saturation here. Because if you are going to paint, some people complain that they shift the saturation when doing this. So then I added this extra layer over here, so you will be able to fix the saturation in incase, it actually happens. Some people say that brighten things might actually push the saturation too much. So you might want to lower this. To be honest, never really happened to me on regular images. I don't think that's necessary, but that's in case it's it's there. If you need that. And then to make it even easier, I'm going to use this black entwined help layer. And I also have the action for it so that the black and white help layer, I'm going to layers because that's the group. And this is for the darkening and here is for the contrast we can play with them. We can, of course, and the contrast too dark and it doesn't have to be the same, but you can use them for the help. So remember, the black entwined help layer is just for help. We will turn it off later. We not 10 in it into the black and white image. Once we have this, I'm ready to fix everything that is wrong here and we can start step-by-step. So for example, if I want to start from the areas that are highlighted out, start like this, right? We need more. We can keep darkening this. We can make it brighter. Let's start from these areas. So I will start with the notch. Of course we don't have to keep the flow at 100%, I think 5%, even 3% in most of the cases is just fine. And we've left side. Square bracket. I'm going to make it smaller. And I'm using my soft brush, always Myself brush. And then I'm painting on these areas. So you see, it will be pretty much impossible to do if we don't use the tablet, the graphic tablet. So that's why I always urge you to actually use the tablet. That's super-important. It takes time to get used to the tablet. But after you get used to, and if you develop your skill in retouching or something that becomes like fully natural, then for example, I can't see it and work with the mouse on the images because it does feel unnatural. So you need to tweak your brain. As we learn everything. In the past, you learned using the mouse and you get used to the mouse. So now than ever use mouse when you reduce your images and you will get used to this new process. And then this process will become fully natural for you. So I did a little bit of work, maybe a little bit more here you can see the retention is not heavy at all because that's the outdoor image. So we don't really do some crazy experimentation here. So also I'm going to brighten this part here. I'm going to adjust this help player. Okay, So now I see the problem here is very visible. So I'm going to brighten this area. And often when we are between. So we had the dark and here, dark here. And we have the bright spot over here. So we always need to pay attention to this. So a little bit more here. And I think we are doing just fine. Of course, this area here is very visible. So maybe we do this area now. So you will be able to actually see the nice progress I need this and it will be darker. The more contrast you will add, the stronger effect will be. And it might look like you never hit it perfect. But to check, always turn off this layer because otherwise you might overdo it. So be careful with this. Don't, don't overdo it. Paint softly. Touch on your tablet lightly. Like navy, you wouldn't put the effort. So don't be angry with your tablet. Don't press it too strong. I'm pretty sure that people who have the background in the design, working with the tablet will be so much easier. Even the people who actually are the artist and paint, they would understand the idea behind, because this is the natural mode for them. I don't have any artistic background. And recapture, of course, but before that, I don't have artistic background and in fact, I can't paint. I have no talent at all. So I'm the proof that even if you have no artistic talent at all, you still can do reattach and you still can't be pretty good at this. Because you will train your eye despite the fact your brain not being very talented in the artistic form, the work make you master of your craft. So let's see Now, before and after can see it's amazing difference, very settled and amazing difference. And that's what you want to do all the time on the image. Just continue doing it. And to be honest, when it comes to outdoor images natural, the timeframe that you want to do, it shouldn't be too long. For studio images. It might be more because studio images have stronger artificial light. And the artificial light make the details pop up stronger. So then you will have to do more retouching. But for such outdoor image, I don't actually want to do the dodge and burn more than 20 minutes. Soften like 15. Of course, if you start, it will take more than that. Get discouraged by this. If it takes you more time. Of course, the thing that we talked about before, maybe not this way. So look, look, look here. As you can see, we have just above the eyebrow. It's bright here because of course I was retouching this area. So you need to pay attention closer attention to the areas that were actually reattached. Because these areas will need your attention, especially, especially more attention of yours. And on the bottom, probably same case. You see it doesn't match here. So you need to make sure it looks like it's connected to the skin. Just like this. Knows, not perfect. Often important to make sure. But don't overdo it. Because actually, when the nose you see, here's the natural shadow. If you try to overthink, if you try to overdo it. You will change the shape of the shadow. And there is nothing worse than changing shape of the shadow because then it just look unnatural. So you really have to be aware of this and better to make less than more. Let's go to the other side. I think it's really look nice. So I'm going to do the face. I'm not going to speed up the video even if if I could, because I don't actually believe this will take me. And so much time, maybe five minutes more. So I hope you will be able to handle my voice and do the process together. So maybe it's even better this way, because if there is any mistake, you can always look closely to what I do. As you can see, I switch back to the healing brush because sometimes when we increase the contrast and especially if we do the black and white, we see that we could do more. And as I'm working with current below and not all layers, I'm not going to affect these layers above that. So sometimes I see more. It's fine to do stem bags. We don't have to be like organized to match. We shouldn't be organized. And I think my workflow is pretty organized, but it's fine to, to step back. A little wrinkle here. I'm going to leave it. This to be very visible when we turn off this layer. A little bit more here. And here should work slightly more in this area, including a little bit more we touch here. So more Battenberg. I must say it's, the process seems to be a very, I would say simple word, boring. But honestly, you get used to retouching. It's going very fast. Sometimes you might stick for hours and you will feel like you worked for 15 minutes. And you will have a lot of work that is already done. So here on the forehead, I didn't see it much because it's not so visible and sweet if we don't turn on the contrast. So just a equal b, three touch. I don't think it will be visible after now too far. And it will be more a few times here. And of course, one of the common mistakes, maybe especially in the studio images, is defined that we would reattach the face and we forget about the arms, we forget about the neck, chest, and men other part so shouldn't be match to retire. But just don't forget about this to check this out. So there's always some touch ups that we should done. The amount of free time more likely will be less on the body. But, but sometimes It's even up to the conditions on the set. The skin can have different different patches because for example, it was too cold, so the blood flow will be different. So we need to reattach this. When it comes to the shadows, I don't think as much to do, but you will see the patches. So same process as I said, we're not so much, we can actually make the brush size a little bit bigger. It will not be strongly visible. In the shadow area there is not so much do if you see some areas that could even retention, you know, it's okay to do a step back here as well. Go into make sure looks better, right? It will be more here. And this one here for sure need more attention. And after the arms, I think we will be done for now. So a little bit more here. And I'm going to darken this a lot. Because what's really important is what we see in the highlight. The highlight areas are more visible. So let's read touch, especially this arm, the other arm, like we will not see much. The light is just, just to stronger. Probably would not happen on the studio image. But sometimes we get some areas that are overexposed and they're just not visible when it comes to the outdoor images. So yeah. I don't think it needs much more. I might do a few more touch ups after I finish recording videos. Let your eyes rest a little bit and come back and look at the image after. So let's see. And I think it looks absolutely beautiful, you know, very settled three times, but now her skin look just absolutely healthy. And it looks very natural because we didn't use any weird technique. But from what I see, more work here in this area of the arm. I'm sure you would agree with me. So I'm going to hold you for two minutes more because I think it can be better. And actually arms can be more difficult than face. Sometimes easier, but the patches might be not as visible. The work is sometimes more troublesome because we need to come back few times to see them better. More here. And I think it's right now. Maybe more from the distance. I think it does look well now, we could make this shadow on the bottom slide. You can see this transition here in the shadows not smooth enough. So let's also add a little bit of dodge and burn here. I zoomed in too much. That would be. So this is the Dodge and Burn process. Simple. Maybe I will darken her neck, so I keep stopping you. But as I said, like when we when we zoom out and have a look, we see that we can do touch up here. Touch Up here. Yeah, that, that's it. This is the Dodge and Burn process. Huge difference, beautiful result. We can do a little bit more on the eyebrows, brighten the eyes. Of course, there is always some extra elements that we can do, but we'll talk about this in the next lesson. 8. Eyebrows, Eyes, Teeth: Using dodge and burn and masks, you can do much more than just skin retouching. For example. You can also make sure that the eyebrows are uniform. You can make sure that the eyes are shiny and many others. So this is what I'm going to show you in this lesson. So this time I'm going to increase the flow maybe to 20 percent because I want to make sure that the eyebrows look a little bit better than not perfect right now. You still can see we have some of the discoloration over here. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to darken this. So with this, I'll make sure that they're darker. They're more unified. As I said, it doesn't have to be perfect as before, because this is not the beauty image, this is the other image. And also on the other side, you see I'm basically fill in the holes that I have here because they do have some bright host. And with this simple think I'm doing, you can look from a distance. They, they actually do look much better. And it took us seconds to do. Also. We can make sure that the eyes are nice and shiny. We could use the same dodge layer or we can create a new one using curve adjustment layer. Again, I'm going to rename this into ice and reverse it. And the same flow 20 percent will work fine. And to do it, we cannot do just the circle around here because it will not look natural. So we need to go in the direction of the light. So I would paint as I see, the light goes into certain areas. So as they do it here, you see it does look more natural and also you have this part brighter here. So I'm going to paint a little bit over here. Maybe darker here, doesn't. It needs to go into the center. And I think this way of brightening, so very uneven, gives more dynamic to the eyes. And I think it looks absolutely beautiful. The other usage of the mask not necessarily Dodge and Burn. But for example, if one to whiten teeth or do anything else with the color, we can use it. For example, using hue saturation, I can decrease the saturation to negative 30 or maybe even 14 this case. I'm going to name it teeth whitening and reverse it again. And this time with the flow at 100%, I'm going to paint over the teeth. So just like this. And we have to be careful because if we go over the edge, we can make the gums desaturated which we don't want, and the leaps, the saturated, which we also don't want. So be mindful of this that you don't want to go over the edge. And I think it, it does look a little bit better. Doesn't require much of your attention. And as you can see with the masks, we can simply fix many things to make sure that our image look better. 9. Editing with Adjustment Layers: In this lesson, I will show you how to use adjustment layers to achieve really desirable effects on your image. So use adjustment layers many for two things. When we need to work with the lights, whether it's adjusting contrast, fixing, highlights, shadows, cetera. And also we can use adjustment layers when we need to color grade our image. So I will start with color grading. For me. The best adjustment layer for color grading would be something like color balance, because it's very easy to read. What are we doing on the image in this certain one moment. We can also use curves et cetra. Important to remember when we're using this sort of adjustment layers. We always manipulate with the lights so we don't really add the colors, but we change the values of these three lights that make our image, such as red, green, and blue. So it doesn't really matter if we use curves, color bands, even the Channel Mixer. But I will go with color balance because this is really simple to read. As I said, we have three different tons which had shadows, mid tones, and highlights. And this is very easy to understand what we will be doing here. If I will work on tone shadow, I will be changing the light value, the color light value of this certain lights in the shadow area. If I would go to highlights, I will be adjusting the color lights values on the highlights areas. And then when we go to midterms, I will be doing this on the mid-tone area. So I usually go with simple like shadows and highlights because these two things are kind of contrasty to each other. And it's also important to understand how the color works. So you could use it seed in the movies and that often to make something stand out, we use two opposite colors, and this is called complimentary colors. Of course you will not do it if you have sunset image because that's a completely different atmosphere. But often you will use orange color on the blue background because it will stands out. You would use red and the green because it will stand out. Purple on cyan, etc. So I'm going to start with the shadows. And we can simply see for ourself what works best here. For example, I could think, Oh, I'm going to see with the color tone for the shadows and add some of this color tones here. And you can see we can always hit Preserve Luminosity to make sure that when we change this, the luminosity is preserved. But if you don't want to do it and make sure you're not affecting any contrast. You can unhidden this. So I would recommend maybe not doing this because you will be affecting contrast in this case. But let's go with this at first and then I can undo it. So if I will go with this direction, I actually believe it doesn't look good, right? So making cold shadows this way, it doesn't seem like we're matching the colors that we have here. So I'm going to press Command and Z to do instead banks because it's just not it. So let's go back to the, to the beginning values that we have here. Okay, I'm going to hit 0 or just risked here. The other thing I would try, I can go to shadows, and this time I will try and a warm tone. So let's see, are the better, is it any better? So maybe not with magenta and this moment. And then highlights, core shadows for the highlights. And I do think that it looks way better than when we were trying with cold shadows. The warm shadows make her bonds, the cheekbones stand out nicely. So this is way better grading that we did this time. And I'm going to reset this once again. And maybe I actually see that we have some nice magenta in the shadows that we added in the RAW conversion. So I think nothing wrong happen if we add a little bit of magenta here. We'll try to be settled. And for the highlights, just touch of green. And now I do like this look. I like where are we going with this? So also may be a little bit red for the shadows and yellow. And go back to highlights. And at this colder tones here. So I didn't quite match because I wanted to be sure that this gradient that we did here is visible. So as you can see now, I tried to see what's the atmosphere on the image. I tried to read the colors that we already half of the half on the image. And then I tried to adjust what match to the atmosphere of this image. And it's still quite settled. So I didn't go really too heavy with this. And if I want to do contrast by myself, I can just undo preserve luminosity. As you can see, it's rather settled, but I can undo it. And I could do contrasts by myself. For the contrasts, there is of course, a few ways of doing this. We can go with some simple adjustment layer. But I didn't add that actually when it comes to preserve luminosity, you can also change the blending mode and you will do the same thing. So it doesn't really matter. So for the contrast, we can go with brightness contrast, we can go with levels, curves. This is my favorite tools to use it. If you'd actually some simple contrast going with brightness and contrast is absolutely fine. I don't think that the basic things are necessary. Band summing more complicated levels and curves will give you the most of the control. So many people, when they do contrast dye, they like to cut out the very dark spot. To do it, you basically need to grab this this stop here. And as you can see, this is the shadows. If I go down with this, I make the shadows darker. If I go up, I make them brighter. So I kind of make it washed out. And if I go up here, I make the highlights darker, going down an app, make them brighter. Simple contrast would be this way, right? I increase the contrast. The image stands out more. Taking down contrast would be this way. Increasing the brightness. Maybe in the center on the midtones would be this way, darken in this way. So the idea is very simple. If we need to take down the stuff and just grabbing here and taken it down. So let's say I would like to brighten up some shadows because I don't like the strong effect. Let's say hypothetically. And another little bit contrasted. So I will create a stops here. And that would be the contrast for me. That actually might be a little too much. So let's see if I change the blending mode to luminosity, like to do it to not affect the lights. And let's maybe look a little bit better. But this is still too strong For sure would be taken down opacity. And that's some very settled contrast as you can see I added here. So this is very basic work that we can do here. This contrast is not something I would be in favor of. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to work months, more specifically with masks. And also I'm going to show you the way I like to do to add contrast at the end when the retouching is finished. So going to get rid of this layer, and let's move to the next lesson to discuss some more things. 10. Working with Luminosity Masks: Before we go to the final adjustments, I wanted to show you one last trick that allows you to get even more control over your adjustment layers. So for example, if you want to work on the contrasts and be very precise, go into Open, let's say curve adjustment layer. And let's name it as the highlights. So of course on the one layer we can do the contrast. But if we decided to work on one specific area, we can, we can do it. And there's few ways of doing this. So for example, I chosen highlights. We can create the luminosity mask on this mask over here. Then we will be able to control only the highlights without affecting the shadows. The easiest way of doing this LUMO luminosity mask is coming via image. Apply image. And you want to have the layer merged. So all of these layers will be merged and blending by default is multiply, so we can keep it this way if you go with normal, it's also the same. But don't go with others because as you can see, you will lose this mask over here, so you can keep it as the default. And as we go over the highlights, we will keep as it is. But if I would hit invert, that could be the shadows them. So let's see how it looks like. I'm going to press Alt or Option and hit on this mask to see how we define that. And then if I'm going to work with this, as you can see, I can increase this and I can increase jazz the highlights. And if i will decrease, I will decrease just the highlights so the image will be flat. And also we'll get this weird heavy saturation on the skin tones because I took down the light from the skin tone. So now we can see more colors. So that could work if you have slightly over rocks exposed image, but if it's too overexposed, It's not going to work. Let me show you few other way of creating this mask. So we can also do it via the channels, via the RGB channel, I can press command or control heat on this RGB. And then I can press Command or Control, and I am inverting this here. So as I'm inverting this, you see we have shadows now, of course, every time I would press Command or Control and I can just keep invert index. So it doesn't really matter what we have here. And for the shadows, if I want to darken this, also, I can do this selectively, just the shadows. There would be more possibilities if we want to narrow that. There are some other tricks. We can go to curves. And we can go, for example, to select and go with the color range. So we can work with any specific color, or we even can take the sample by this eyedropper. You can see the colors here, or we can choose highlights. And then we're friends. We want to go to the maximum range. And we can try to pick just a little bit of the highlights if we want to increase, maybe just like a very narrow range of this highlights. And the one problem is sometimes this mask over here doesn't necessarily represent what's really mask and I can quite see that. So if it comes to this part, we're going to make it stronger. Hit, Okay? And this is the mask that was created here. So for example, if I would like to just increase the highlights in certain areas, maybe around the face and on this arm. Look, I can hit X to reverse the colors and black color on this mask. I can paint it over. I'm going to paint over this arm because let's say I don't want to affect this as match the hair. And you can see then on certain parts of the image is visible here. So let's say I want to affect part of arm here and face. So then you see I can, I can do it more on this side, but I do not necessarily think is like super nice. But this is few tricks. How you can get more control to work on the specific area. If you want settled results, I would recommend going through the image and apply image and then working on the contrast, or simply working on the colors. Because of course the same thing we did here with the color. And we can separate this for shadows and highlights and apply color separately. So you can see I didn't do anything to the contrast. And the reason is that there is a certain way I like to do it. So in the next lesson, we are moving to the final lesson where I'm going to show you how I do the final adjustments. And this is regarding contrast, hand, shadows, highlights, and maybe touch of color. 11. Final Steps: As the final step where I like to do is to create the layer on the top that will summarize all of our efforts. So that will be actual image on the top. To do this, we need to make sure that the top layer is checked. And this moment, and as I'm working on the Mac GPU device, the keywords will be Command, Option, Shift, and IEP. And if you work on the Windows device, that will be Control Alt, Shift and E. So once it's done, I'm going to rename this into final dance, the final step we're going to do. And then I'm going to hit right, or simply Control and hit on my tablet and convert to smart object. That's very important because as we convert things to the smart object, later, we're able to add the filter and it will be added separately under this layer. So it will not be included within the layer, but added on top of that. And we can edit this or remove it anytime. So the filter I'm going to go with is Camera Raw Filter because it gives me everything. I need to make sure that this image look absolutely perfect. As you can see, I have contrast exposure highlights, shadows can work with the colors. So everything in one place. For small corrections. I'm going to go with the contrast. I didn't add much contrast. So for sure this is time now, I don't want this image to be two contrasting. So being careful with this, what I'm also going to dumb going to increase some of the shadows because, well, contrast make image maybe a little bit dark. So let's bring it up and just clench. And I do think it looks absolutely amazing. There's not so many things to do. I wonder if I could make it maybe a little bit brighter just for a better effect. But I think it's absolutely enough. If I need to work with the color, I can use temperature, I can use tin because we saw before that this image look amazing in the magenta tons. So, and in this maybe, but not this time for me, because I want to keep this looking really natural. So I'm not doing this. Then we can go below and we can work on the vibrance or saturation if needed as well. So you see perfect because everything is this in this one place. I'm going to zoom in now. So let me zoom in maybe around the face. And because what we can do here now is use the sliders hours mentioned before. I'm not a fan of the clarity because as you can see, I added some and maybe some would say, hey, that's not bad. But we need to be careful with this because this increases the contrast in the mid tones. And by this it can make the image look actually too rough. If we go too far with this. And texture will be much settled because simply that's a texture. So if you want to have nice visible texture, you can actually add a little bit of this. Let's see if I could do a little bit of clarity. A little bit afraid of adding too much, but let's go with this. So I'm using simple values. They are okay and easy to remember for now, but of course, do not suggest yourself by these values. Just make sure it looks perfect for you. We cannot use calibration now, really because we can only use it on the raw file. But we always can work with the color. If we need to do more, of course, with the color mixer or a curve adjustment layer. So for example, if we need to add more saturation, some colors, maybe to the greens, we can do it. Maybe to the cyan blue. We can do it if we want this background colors to be a little bit more punchy, which is not bad idea. And also in the newer versions we have something that's called color grading and that will be very similar to color balance. So also, if you want to add some more color, maybe to bet the background like more of this purple actually that we were using before. I think it's really cool effect to do. Maybe even, well, it's not perfect to slide, maybe something colder to not make it too warm. And in a little bit, it's not such a bad idea. But as I said, I'm not going to play with this, although you can, I just want you know, that there is the option like this, as you can see, and you can actually increase the blending on the bottom or decrease the blending so it will affect and the smaller areas. But for me, keeping the blending pretty much in the center. Blending and balance, of course in the center, will be the best choice for you. Because it will look more natural. So you for sure don't want to increase the blending, but you can actually balance it out. So you can see, so this effect doesn't seem to be as dominated. But of course, I'm not doing this. I'm going to keep it as natural as it is. I like this natural look. But here it is. Every week you can do in the camera of software. So once it's done for me, going to hit Okay. As you can see, the settings are saved down here. And then if I need to save it, I can go to File. I can choose Export to export as a JPEG image. If I want, I can choose Save as, if I would like to save this as a TIF file on my computer, you can see I can choose the format TIF. So this is how I work. This is my workflow for the natural light outdoors, images like this. I like to preserve this natural look. So this is how I work and I hope my workflow will use was useful for you. I invite you to use the same images to practice your work. If you don't have images, I think that perfect for practice. The texture of the skin, some mistakes to remove. So good luck with this. Thank you.