The Retouching

In this digital photography tutorial we look at the techniqes used to retouch the image of a scarecrow.

So here’s our re-processed image for the filthy pumpkin head. What we do with this is just very simple get a selection tool and we can just select probably a little bit a bigger than we need and just do a copy of that. So I’m just doing command C on the Mac and then we can close that then just save it and then do a command V to a paste and that is it, there’s our new pumpkin head,. All you need to do is to line that up. Here’s one I did earlier, just move that out of the way like so. To line it up basically what I did is just to drop the opacity down slightly and then you can change the mode to a difference and that can help or just leave it in normal mode and then just gradually using the move tool. You can move it by grabbing it with the mouse or use the keyboard to nudge the arrows on the keyboard just to nudge it into position. Once you do that, just select perfect layers and the bottom here just select the link layers so that it don’t get out of alignment again. And what I did then was just basically—what we’ll do is basically live some masses off to get the pumpkin head nicely selected. I also said I want to take the neck of the scarecrow too across, so that’s what we need do next. We need to move in and select the areas we need. So, I'm on the layer with the new pumpkin head on, what I’ve done and to save time and to bore the hell out of you is I’ve already gone around and I’ve made a clipping path. You see there for the areas that I want, so all we need to do then is come down and to load that as a selection. I could then highlight my path, my sort of my layer. And with the selection active, just click on the add mask, new layer mask icon here. I come here and that will automatically give us a nice selection and masking off the stuff we don’t need. If I turn on my background layer now, you can see the new head in place. It still needs a little bit, let’s line all these up. The other thing that we’ll do is—at the moment, this is very, very sharp. The edges, so all I'm going to do is just go make sure my layer mask is highlighted and go to filter, blur, Gaussian blur and I'm just going be very gently just select the edges here and just blur those slightly. Maybe just by one pixel, I think the high-resolution image and that just softens the edges slightly and do a little bit nicely like so and that gives us a bit of a softer edge. You don’t really get pinched off edges in images, there is always a slight softness to them, and so you need to try to be aware of that. So all you do now really is to make this new head fit. I got to with this, I’m used to transform and try and nudge it on position or if I'm lucky I can perhaps just carry on masking with the layer mask and paint on that and blackout the bits that we don’t need. So where going to go ahead and look at that next Okay, so I have finished my mask off pretty much. I’ve decided after looking at the image we imported. I take that away, this neck area here, the reason is that we have the lighting matched quite well, the rim lighting here and by leaving the new neck and we also lost some of that, not a major problem but I decide to mask that back. So this is the mask layer that is mainly shown the new head but leaving the old head in place there. One thing I’m going to show you now quickly are a little technique by highlighting the mask. We got a little bit of an edge showing through here which is like been natural. I’m just going to contract the mask and we can do this by making sure your mask is highlighted go to layer and adjust one image, adjustment curbs. And what we’ll do is contrast a mask by darkening the mask; you keep an eye on the edges of the pumpkin head here and save it. We just taken away some of that white fringing by basically darkening by squeezing the mask in a bit. Contrasting the mask and I’m just going to show you the before and after that that’s before and that’s after we’ve contracted the mask so lock it there it’s choking a bliss. Here’s the right frame, phrases used and it’s a good lock tip to use. The next thing we’ve got to do is to, we can actually add this highlights back in the one that by painting the mask again. But for a second we’ve got to hold there and have a quick look over the image and show you the next step. We’re back here on the mask for the new work and a new head of the scarecrow and what we can do underneath here we got lots of highlights which we decided it’s a little bit too much. So we got the darker one on top and what we could do is we can paint back in with black and to reveal the image underneath, by the lighter parts. So pick up a brush, I’m using whack on precedence to paint tablets. If you haven’t got all those, you can change the pastel a bit but basically I’m leave my hands 100%, I’m just going to paint him very gently. Some of these highlights and just see what we get but it’s quite to get a little bit glow back in that and some of this areas. But not the extents we have them before, so just paint those in there like so. And just a take a look at that, we just painted it out and tie it a little bit just to give a bit of mesh to the scarecrow. Excuse me there a little nasty from under the pumpkin, so there you go that’s done and one thing that I notice I spotted this image and got rid of the dust and there’s a bit of red like a gentle patch ogrish from nearby lighting orange. It’s so peculiar thing going on. I don’t know what always so I done just a little bit distracting, so what I did I made a selection, rather than selecting the whole layer I selected most of the area like so. I did make sure the layers selected to the Command C coffee, Command D the paste. We select this little layer here and then we got the patch tool and went around the cationic area. And then basically drag this across to basically trying to peel it that’s what’s before, so it’s basically just cloned over there, you have to move it carefully. You get bit too close edge sometimes with these selections. By the patch tool you can get a funny bleeding effect when we contrast and blend the edge so you have to watch that. Sometimes you need to any elements that‘s very close to an edge like that, you have to go with the stamp tool just o repair that or make a selection to protect that area and so that was that and that’s really at this stage. All the re-touching now and the next thing we need to do is to go back to scarecrow and get rid of this radio trigger. Now I could have been hidden this with a bit of more care hinders in the back of the pumpkin, m I get a ton of flashing there. But to be honest with you time is running on a little bit plus it was a little bit precarious to the scarecrow. I think I stop messing around it too much, so I guess it will be a lot quicker but a better option to re-touch that, so that’s what we got to do next. We’re going to try to get rid of this radio slave out of the image, so what will I do know. I’m going to merge all this four layers including the background into one layer, so that we can work on this image a lot bit easier. I add a new layer by then holding down the ALT key choose merge visible. By holding the ALT key means instead of finally release down together it’s going to flat all this line lay here. It’s called a stamp as so as we call that stamp so what it means and then we’ll go in and take a closer look at this. And I think the first thing we got to do obviously select this area and we got selection work with and we can obviously use that to try drag rather than clone in all this in bits, so maybe drag a whole section of sky over. Might work, might not but it gives something better chance of getting a good research, so you can see here many selection. I’ve zoomed in right 300%. I always do my selections at 300 or 400% its bit overkill but at least I feel that I get it right that close. In. we view it a 100% is going to look better, so we got that selected and now I going to just see a lot better and I’m going to select, modify and feather. So I’m just going to feather the edge by a pixel, so you just going to soften the transition and now we got to try and find. Keeping the selection tool active, find a good area to clone to take a down from. So I just going to look at this side first and try to keep it as close to the scarecrow as possible, so obviously if you go too far out and the lights full off. You’ll not get a good copy. So that’s seems a fairly very good area to try, so I’m going to go now Command C for copy and Command D to paste and there’s our new layer here. Grab the move tool, I’m just going to try move that across like so. Now it’s not like to be perfect to begin with but as down, it goes. I think that’s not a bad choice and we can certainly work with that and try and blend this area in the line now. What we have to begin with we’ll start to finish being moved if a layer and a layer mask and see if we can paint in a bit more subtle allowance that blend, so there we go so we click. Press the Command key and click on the layer. That allows the layer to selection and we go down to the layer mask tool and click there and that gives us a nice layer mask and we can work with that and it’s weird doing such instruction like this. Try and select and you kind, to love it more than you’ll need and by that I mean obviously I could and quite close here add a bit of more bleed. And the reason for that is now that I can paint on the mask and try to bond this a bit better. If I was to close, I’ll leave us no room to do that, so with my brush tool, with black selected. I’m going to gently paint in around here like so very lightly. And at this stage we just try to get a nice blend to go and to snot hash especially around there. Now if it’s a little bit difficult to get it perfect, sometimes you can sometimes you can’t it’s not really possible on this one I think. ,so what I can do now is obviously take a step further and we can start using the patch ,tool all the spot healing brush. And just try to blend this a bit better but so far that’s not too bad. It’s close enough for what we need for the moment. Here’s our mask as we have for the moment. I’m going to apply the layer mask to the layer. So that we just left with the layer itself, we can now zoom in a little bit and just hit the clone and stamp tool. Got a bit of smaller brush I got the current and blow selected from the sample options. That means it will layer below as well and but it will actually clone on to our add layer is what is there, so we’re just go in and just clear some of this lot bits up like so. We’re working at the moment at 600% so we’re very high resolution on this. We’re not going to see this close in ever better, I figure if it looks good at this resolution at 100% it’s going to be look even better. So we got to add a couple of pixels, so it’s just a little bit clean up there. Now what I’m going to now, I really need to use the probably the patch tool that is the quickest way around the rest of this. And so I think we’re done here so I just go to zoom in and just again the clone tool. Just clean this a little bit up down the bottom here, so as we again, just to make the transition a bit better a lot of something like that. We don’t want showing through again I’m working at extremely close in. a little bit silly but I always done that and again we can get wide in there and see what’s going on, so that’s it so what we’ll go now. We’ll basically get another layer up and I think we’ll create a blank layer there, do a little stamp so merge visible while holding down the ALT key like so. And you could mostly layers a lot of people do I prefer to what lead them intact to begin with. But now let’s go back and flat them a bit later but just a way to as a reference. Now I just simply for, when your using this healing brushes and patch tool you’d be very careful. If you go too close like too close to the edges here I’ll show you what’s going to happen. You’re going to do that try and move the selection across and it’s going to create this very nasty a little bit of blur in which trying to blend the edges. We’re quite obviously we don’t want that so you got be very careful not o get too close to the edges but if you’re getting close to the edges you’ve got a little bit of think about it before you commit yourself. May be going and use the close tool or certainly select this area to protect this, we don’t go over there, so that’s working out not too bad and we got in line there so again we just come to this side now. So if we could get and smooth that out in this is just a better of quicker way rather than clone in everything. It’s a bit quicker way of doing a retouching, let’s get rid of the blur on that. It’s still in the fad but there to work on and not to close the edge there and once we have problems. And it’s always a problem when you get these transitions highlights so to get the blend right and we just takes a bit of work. Let’s try over this side with better idea and that’s better and we go in here get a bit of right and then brush and find it easy to do. So get in there so it just takes a little bit of practice and little getting to know your tools and making sure that you don’t cover the wrong area. Let’s have another quick going on that before we get to that part. This is a bit more working on but I think we have to go with the clone tool here and just clone that in but you get the idea and you can see what would we could change with those tools. So our first a bit further with the clone tool and the patch tool and here’s the before, and here’s the after. So I think we all agree that so that’s has been pretty good, pretty pleased with that. Lot things like that on the out set and even myself who have been retouching that for over ten-years. And you can go that and it will be too hard to take a hands on sometimes you can catch to that. And this was a little bit more difficult than I 1st thought it would be. I think it would’ve been a plain sky we would’ve been a lot easy but getting in this transition here right, was a tricky a little bit. And I’m a better perfectionist and there are things that can annoy me to take ages to do because I’m a less pretty fussy. And so I think the most stories is obviously things like this and indeed if you can hype things like this and do extra bit with in cameras it is always better to do that. Than to result to retouching and so it stand for a moment I think it was the right decision. I have a tight deadline getting a shot done and the last thing I want to do is to fit a round with this and have the whole lot fall over. I would’ve been happy, so that’s where we are at the moment, and I’m just going to zoom out. And you will see what we are getting on its coming together. And I think most have been retouched now is probably complete and now is the more the fun bit. And while we can actually draw up the image and just add color and add a little bit of contrast and we have a bit of to play around. And do some of the fun stuff so that’s the next thing while we move on to that. Just finished off the image and we’re going to make some of adjustment layer like these I’ve done here. This is turned off at the moment and I’m about to show you how quickly we produce those. Best are you get in to the make new adjustment layer go to our curves; see if I can put my cursor on that, there we go. And basically, you can actually click on to the image and it will show up if watch the box here; it will show up the different parts of the image. Now back where we used to I’ll show you why that is for the minute and so what we’re going to do is just basically make your adjustment there and then click OK. We’re about to do then is to fill that adjustment there with black and the reason for that is that’s going to take away the adjustment like so. So here’s what I did earlier and this one it’s called fill contrast so basically what I’ve done here is I clicked on the layer, so where the fill with the grass here lies on the curve and then work out where we need to increase the contrast on that. Its nose there that’s not going to do very much because most of the adjustment needs to be where the if you can watch the curb again when I click on the image here. It’s more on mid tones so most adjustment is going to happen in the area. And so why I need, to do is to 1st of all get my brush tool and what it will do basically is painting white on the adjustment there. To bring that adjustment through, on to the fields, and like so, just that no picking up, I’m not going through all of the fields I’m just going to pick up parts that want. Now I need to go back in to curves here just to adjust this a bit more and because I’m getting as much light in certain areas, so there we go if I just increase the mid tone there. This is from the cicerone and if you where this is going on it’s more on the mid tone from the highlights so we need to increase as deep as the curve in that area to get the extra contrast we require. So that will do me, so again using white we just painted the bits we where we want. And that’s for the off back to the on, so it’s settled but it brings out the drawn to the area. So again want do we want for the sky as well and this is a sky curve. And in this one I wanted to increase the contrast here and more on the highlights we should again work on the mid tones rather than the highlights. So that’s where we concentrate on the curve on, so that’s what we’ll do we just going to paint now the adjustment and again with the white so much for the layer mask is adjusted. And there’s a lot of white there we’ll have so here we go. So now I can just literally go in here and just paint in the areas I want just o lighten the sky. It’s subtle but its works and just turns off and turns on so there you go. Like I said, it’s not a great big adjustment it’s quite settled. And we can go back in there and what we wanted to do now adjust to filter, blur and do Gaussian blur. If we can just soften this lines a little bit like so. Press the ALT key and just back off the mask, mask on mask off and it just soften this transition, so again just helping bring your eye in to the areas what we want. One more that I’m going to do actually is just to highlight the highlighting on here. So again go in to curves and I’m just going to find the area that I want and this is a quite low down the curve co I can probably lock down the layer here and adjust. Literally, increase the areas there where I want around here. And that’s increasing these curves contrast just in this areas where I just want. And just do that and that actually adjusted the whole image and you don’t want that so we going to fill that with black. Get the paint bucket tool and that’s it and takes the adjustment away and make sure what’s foreground, paintbrush. I’m going to zoom in for this one and we can now paint it again selectively the area of the coat we want just to add a little bit more contrast there. Be careful not to go much over in the sky and there we go. So that will do this while I might to do with this one is to change the better to normal to leave the lot of the, just take that extra bit of saturation of the image. By leaving it normal mode where you make adjustment like that you can’t pick up extra color which I haven’t probably a little adjustment on here it does. So we’re just going to do that so we just zoom out a little bit let’s off, on. So we just picking up the clip lighted on the edge license sorry on the scarecrow there. So I think we’re just about there I think the only one thing mi might do now before we finish this. Is just to add one more adjustment there and that will be my, just to draw darken the edges and so again level of adjustment there, curves. And we just naturally drag it down like so does with the edges so far and we can make a selection if you like on this and just loosely to bring out keeper the selection there.; and that we can do is fill that area with black that takes away the adjustment and opt also leaves our jagged lint there. But we can get rid of that, we go to filter, blur and Gaussian blur and just rack up the radius as far as it goes it doesn’t really matter. And now it’s quite a big step in the graduation, so you want to drop the effect down by dropping your passage down a bit a little bit there and then also we going to do with black as our foreground color. And our paintbrush tool we will just gradually where not happy where it goes back to the edges we can just paint it back a bit. And quite after and we’ll go back here and just do another filter Gaussian blur just like so, so I think just click the ALT key on the mask so that’s back to the where’s no adjustment the white is where the adjustments we’re going on. And so that again just darken the edges slightly that’s we need. And I think that’s about it. I’m really pleased with that and it’s quite confirmed and quite a bit retouching that one. And if you’re watching this one of the photo websites, you’ve probably watching the juice versions this is a long tutorial and if you want to see the full-unedited version just go to prophotoinside.net and I think this is going to be our fifth video on the series and so watch out for that one. And I hope I catch you next time, have fun cheers.