Hi folks.
Glyn here.
Back with another video for you, and this time I want to show you how you can increase
muscle using Photoshop.
All right.
I've just had a bit of a sort out recently since getting back from Photoshop World and
I came across this picture on my hard drive.
Now this is a picture of a guy.
It's a composite.
The guy was a rugby player, obviously.
This isn't really the kind of work that I do nowadays, but when I saw it it reminded
me of a technique that I used on him, which may be useful for you now.
We'll go through it.
It might be something that you never use, but it's a bit of fun.
It's experimenting and playing around, just seeing what we can do.
You might be able to find something else that you could use it on.
What I'm going to show you then, let's just dive over to Photoshop, is how this guy here,
Sam, we can actually make his back look just a little bit more muscular.
You can see here he's got one of those, it's kind of like a shrink wrap top on there.
Really compressing him down, and although he did have a muscular back, it wasn't really
showing through.
Here's what we can do to give him some muscle.
Now, it just so happens, over on my hard drive, I've got a picture of this guy here.
This is a friend of mine called Nigel St Lewis.
This is from a photo shoot quite sometime ago now.
Nowadays Nigel is considerably bigger, but this here, being the straightforward shot
of his back, will work out ideal for what we need.
Here's what we're going to do.
I'm going to get my lasso tool, and I'm just going to make a very, very rough selection
of his back.
Like so.
Just get the move tool and then we'll drag it over, hold it over the tab so we can bring
it into this picture of Sam.
You can see, obviously, it needs re-sizing.
Let's just zoom out a bit and we'll go Command or Control T to get the free transform.
We'll just re-size it quite a bit so far.
To help us position it where we need it, let's just lower the opacity down just a touch.
I'll zoom in now.
Hopefully you'll be able to see it.
You can just about see the outline of his white top, and we can see where Nigel's back
is now.
I'm just going to re-position it just a touch.
Around about there, the base of his neck.
This little bit down here.
This bit on this part is where Nigel's back is.
What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to right click within here now and go to warp.
Then I'm just going to manipulate it round just a little bit.
Doesn't need to be exact, but we just want to line it up to roughly where it would be.
You can see that Nigel's back was photographed square on, so his back was perfectly flat
toward the camera.
Sam's got a bit of an angle to him, so we can kind of mimic that just a little bit by,
when we're using warp, clicking in one of these right or left hand side squares and
just pushing it across.
You can see there, it gives it a little bit of a twist so that it does look like it's
not square on like it originally was.
You can see we've got the trapezius area here.
Let's just bring those up just a little bit.
Something like that.
That should be fine.
I'm going to go through it really, really quickly here.
That's kind of positioned quite nicely.
We'll press Enter or Return to commit that in.
Let Photoshop do it's thing.
Let's just bring up the opacity now to 100%, so we can see here what we have of Nigel.
Now, obviously, Nigel's back is up on it's own layer just here.
What I need to do, although Nigel here isn't really tensing and it does look like his muscles
have come up very defined there, we need to give them a little bit more oomph for them
to work and definitely stand out on the white top that Sam's wearing.
All I'm going to do is go to the filter menu, and we'll choose camera raw.
When we're in the camera raw filter, what we'll do is ... Let's just zoom in just a
touch by clicking down there.
All I'm going to do first of all is really whack up the old clarity.
We can see straightaway that's going to start to bring out the detail there for us.
We'll go something like that.
This lower portion of Nigel's back here is just a little bit too dark.
There wasn't that much light on it, so let's just get an adjustment brush, bring up the
exposure just a touch, bring up the shadows a bit.
Let's just bring the clarity down a little bit there as well.
We'll just kind paint that in, because all we need to see is just the shape of the muscle
area just there.
Let's just brighten this part up here and this part here.
We can see where we've got the upper part of the back is the main part we're after,
and this central bit here where the two sides, the two lats, of his back there are joining
in right down the middle.
That's good.
I think actually we could use a new brush here.
A new adjustment brush.
Just click on the new, and let's just double click on the exposure slider to bring that
to zero.
Double click on the shadows, and we'll just pump up the clarity just a little bit.
I'll paint over his trapezius here, because this is the main area that I want to stand
out on Sam's back, and maybe down that middle bit just there.
Okay, so that's looking good.
I think we'll also, let's just come out of there by clicking on the hand tool.
We've now got the basic tab here.
I'm going to bring down the saturation, but I'm also going to go to the details tab here.
We've got noise reduction.
I'm going to bring that up quite a bit just to smooth out, because as we've pumped up
the clarity, it brought out a lot of detail and texture within his skin which we don't
really want.
Let's just pump that up just a little bit.
We'll just play around with the luminance detail here, see what else we can get.
Luminance contrast.
In fact, let's go back to the basic tab there and just increase the contrast just a bit.
We can see there, really starting to make those muscles stand out.
Something like that, and we'll click okay to send it back over into Photoshop.
It's a 16 bit file so it's going to take a little bit of processing, but then we come
to that there, which is kind of cool.
Then, what I'm going to do is just going to get a blend mode.
I'm going to change the blend mode now actually.
We're going to go from normal and we'll probably try overlay.
That's going to really darken it down ... Sorry, it's not going to darken it down.
It's going to get rid of the grey, predominantly get rid of that grey.
Already we can start to see the actual shape here of the muscles showing up on the back.
There's a little bit of tidying up we need to do, but we can see also we've got these
areas going around outside of Sam.
That's when we actually did the lasso around Nigel's back.
All I'm going to do, hold down my Alt or option key, click on the layer mask icon to hide
it, then get a normal soft edged round brush.
Let's just make sure there's no crazy settings in here that are going to make it behave differently
than I want.
We're going to paint in a white foreground color.
All I'm going to do is just come in and start to paint on Sam's back to bring the muscles
in where I want them to be.
Certainly down that middle bit just there.
Little bit on his traps.
Nice bit of shadowing actually there.
Quite liking that.
Something like that.
Now, this lower part of his back here maybe just a little bit too obvious, so what I'm
going to do, I'm going to reduce that down.
I'm going to change to a black foreground color and we'll paint it around about 50%.
Nice big brush so we get the feathered edge of it and just brush it gently over that bit
so it kind of blends it away, so it's a bit more natural fade into his back there.
All right.
Looking quite good.
These areas either side of his lats, we don't really need those too much, so I'm going to
get my brush, again with black.
I'm just going to put a few strokes, just to reduce that and reduce that bit there,
because it's mainly the middle and the upper part of his traps that we want to work on.
Let's just bring it down.
Just paint gently in there, just to take it away just a touch.
What I think I'll also do is go to the filter menu.
While I'm actually clicking over in the layers panel there, if we zoom in, I'm actually on
the actual back here.
I'm not working on the layer mask now, I'm clicking on the back thumbnail itself.
Let's just go back out.
You go filter, blur and gaussian blur.
Just to smooth it out just a touch.
Doesn't need to be contrasting too hard, because bearing in mind the muscles are actually underneath
this rugby top that he's wearing, so they wouldn't be that defined, but we do want them
to show out a little bit.
It's almost like we're using a picture of Nigel here, playing around with it by making
it black and white, and then using the high pass.
It's almost like a bit of dodging and burning on it.
Let's just bring that up.
Round about 5's pretty good, and we can click okay.
Let's just zoom out just a touch.
We could come in, maybe just reduce that, because we've got the back on its own layer.
Let's take that down to maybe, I don't know, 70% something like that.
Again, it's just a bit of experimentation here.
We can turn that on and off.
We can see now how we can start to bring out muscles that were actually there on Sam, but
we can use somebody else's to really start to bring them through on the t-shirt there.
I don't know where you're going to use that.
It's certainly good if you're doing physique stuff.
You can see from the original picture, if you dive back over into Lightroom, shift and
tab to hide everything else.
We can see here that I did that on Sam myself.
It worked for that picture, but I'd be interested to see, or hear rather, where you use it.
You might be a physique photographer that you might want to enhance somebody's muscles.
You may find some completely different way to use it.
Just let me know.
It's a bit of fun.
Playing around.
That's pretty much it.
There you go.
There's the video.
Just to let you know, if you want to get the files that I've used in this, the one of Nigel
and the one of Sam, all you need to do is just subscribe to the newsletter over on my
website glyndewis.com.
Then, every week when the newsletter comes out, it should be every Monday, there will
be a link in there so that you can go to the website and download the tutorial video's
files so that you can actually follow along as well, as opposed to just sitting there
and watching.
So, that's the newsletter.
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and people are liking the content.
For now, I'll see you next time.