Hey guys welcome and welcome back thanks so much for joining me today and I'm here Jessica McGovern
International multi-award winning portrait photographer and I'm here today to talk to you
about something that I see far too often a huge mistake that so many photographers make and it's
so easy to avoid so without further Ado let's get five minutes on the clock and get stuck in
if you haven't already please do make sure you've hit the Subscribe button because it helps me out
and all that kind of good stuff we release video every single week on a Friday at 12 noon so on my
screen right now you'll see a little picture of baby Beanie this is baby Bryt she was about six
months old at this point and this is literally one of the only images I can find where you can
see the area of the image clearly that I need to discuss that's because usually my camera is
lower to the floor with other foreground in the way but that's not explaining what we're doing
here so let me set the scene you've entered an image that you've retouched and edited into an
awards or you're submitting for a certification panel maybe you're just putting it on Instagram
one of the biggest mistakes that you maybe are going to make but definitely most photographers
at some point or another you're going to be a little bit sloppy with your retouching and
the main issues that you're going to have are to do with cleaning stuff up if you take stuff
out of an image and one of our five ways to remove things in Photoshop video which I'll link above or
you're doing content aware feel to make the image bigger expand this in itself chances are you're
going to be utilising other areas of the image or photoshop will be to fill in those gaps and
that is the start of this problem so I'm sat there looking at these pictures coming through and every
single one of them bar a handful has this problem in it and this just means that you're not being
careful enough so what do I mean by that you can see Bryt on the screen and you can see that we can
see you can see that we can see what and you can see the floor line okay so you can see the floor
you can see some dead leaves and stuff and let's say that I as the photographer was like I want to
remove this leaf it could be anything don't get stuck on the fact that this is the example so we
go back and we go ahead and take that out we'll whip it out we've taken the leaf out that leaf
is no longer there as you can see the Leaf's not here now a lot of photographers are leaving their
pictures like that because the leaf's gone and therefore it's not distracting anymore they're
exporting their pictures finishing the retouching and off they go and they think no one's going to
know that nobody's going to know you're wrong okay you're wrong this is probably the main
issue that I see and basically what you've done is you've broken the focal plane you've heard
me talk about it before monthly challenges but it seems to be something that I repeat nearly every
single month so it is something that I need to go through in its own video so in this instance what
we have in the image is an area of In-focus bit and then the foreground and the background okay
so we have the foreground blurring getting sharper getting sharper now it's sharp and then it starts
to fall off again just because of my depth of field so if I shoot this from higher up I'll
have more of the in-focus bit because I can see more of it if I get lower down I get a lot less
of it because that shrinks just visually in how we look at an image now your depth of field is
governed by lots of other things we've talked about that before so I'll put a video to depth
of field above but in this instance what you've done is you've just broken straight through the
middle of that and slapped a big old blur on it now that's bad that's really really bad because
mentally I'm looking at this image and going what the heck happened here because this area should
be sharp my eye has found a problem and I can spot this from zoomed out you probably can as well I'm
going what what's going on here why is this blurry because it shouldn't be okay so unless you've got
foreground covering that area of in-focus there is literally no excuse for breaking the focal plane
so that's number one error number one is really really common but error number two is probably on
par with it hence why I've sandwiched them both together inside this video so error number two
is on the screen right now can you spot it so you can focus still on that leaf area because this is
where we took the leaf out okay so the leaves come out of here we have a relatively consistent focal
plane coming all the way across so that can't be it so what is it well in this instance we've got
cloning repetition which again is a huge usually hugely frequent error in photographer's work and
it just is caused by either content aware fill filling something and to fill it it uses something
from elsewhere right so you always want to go and check it can also be caused by flipping one side
of your background so you've got a symmetrical scene that will obviously create duplication or
it can also happen when you're just doing your cloning because you've not gone through and
made them uneven they're essentially clones quite literally of a detailed object that's recognisable
so in this instance this section here is exactly the same as this section here so you've done a
really good job in this instance to keep your focal plane you've kept the focus bit the sharp
bit but what you've accidentally then gone ahead and done is you've created a duplication right
you've got cloning repetition happening in the scene both of these things are not good you want
to avoid them at all costs do everything you can to rebalance this in a way that does not include
broken focal planes or bad repetition which is one of the main reasons why you would shoot an
empty shot in a scene or at least another shot so that you've got space to use if you need it but
if you were in this situation and you did want to take this leaf out your best bet is actually
to focus on the areas that are in focus right so you're still on your focal plane but what
you're looking for is a clone source or a similar kind of area is you're looking for something that
doesn't really have any recognisable colours in it any recognisable patterns or any recognisable
shapes so you kind of want it to be as boring as possible because then when you put it there nobody
is going to know so if I was to use my lasso tool and just go ahead and do one of our five ways to
remove things methods and select that do a shift backspace and then enter to content aware fill
you can see how it fills that area with blurriness okay so it's broken the focal plane because this
area is sharper than this area so you may well get away with using the healing brush tool which
as you guys well know is one of my favourite things but you're going to end up with cloning
repetition we've got it here we've got two little knobbly bits there two little knobbly bits there
cloning repetition not good so what else can you do you're looking for a boring area and you're
going to borrow that your alternative option is to actually work on mirroring so you can still
use your healing brush tool maybe select this area use a smaller sample harden it up just a
little bit grab your clone source tool go ahead and flip it on the horizontal axis
okay and then when you're lining this up you want to go side to side and what you will end up
with is if we zoom out it's not recognisable as a duplication because there's a mirror involved you
can also change the size flip it vertically and so on and so forth but you want to make
sure you retain your focal plane and you do not cause repetition if you when you do your
retouching make sure that you don't do those two things then you can rest assured that your
images are cleaner and better as a result I'm really hoping that you've got everything you
need from that utilise your cleanup tools and techniques but also remember this in the back
of your mind and you shouldn't go too far wrong if this video is helpful for you I know it was
short and sweet but you know we like it like that sometimes go ahead and put why it was
helpful in the comments below and I'll see you next week for another Five Minute Friday