In this video I'll walk you through how
I retouch my photos from start to finish
using Alien Skin Exposure x2. Welcome
back everybody to The Breakdown, I'm
Miguel Quiles and I'm going to walk you
through a simple way to retouch your
Sony raw files using Alien Skin Exposure
x2 software. For those of you who aren't
familiar with the program it's a
non-destructive, raw editing software,
that allows you to organize and edit
your image's completely within the
program, or as a plug-in that's
compatible with photoshop and lightroom.
If you want to follow along and retouch
your own images, you can download a free
trial of the software, over on their
website at Alienskin.com. Before we get
started let me give you a brief rundown
on the various panels found within the
program. To begin, you'll want to find
your images on your computer within the
folders tab. Since I often shoot tethered
using capture one, all of the images are
directly saved onto my computer, where I
can quickly find them with an exposure.
In the middle column of the program
you'll see all of the images within that
folder. You can also use the slider at
the top of the panel to make your
thumbnails bigger or smaller. As you
scroll through the images you can hover
over them to see a dialog window that
displays all of the metadata for each
image. As you browse through.. each image
you can click on the stars that appear
below each shot to give it a rating, this
will narrow things down so that you can
filter out and see only the images that
you created, and are considering for
retouching. Now that I've rated a few
images I can click on the filter bar
below, to see my favourites! Now, looking at
these I see the image I want to retouch,
so I double click to expand it and begin
working. I often begin my workflow by
selecting a preset in the left side
panel. There are over 500 presets
available in both black and white or
colour, that can be fine tuned to give you
the look you want for your images. By
clicking on the arrow to expand each of
the categories, you can hover over the
thumbnails to see a preview of what each
of the presets will do to your image.
Once you've found the preset you like -
simply click to select it. You can also
click on the star in the top corner of
the thumbnail to save it to your
favorites tab
which can be seen at the top of the
presets panel for quick access in the
future. For this image, I've chosen the
Kodak Portra 400 VC preset. It keeps my
skin tones looking good, and adds a
beautiful richness to the overall color
of the image. With the preset applied, I
can now customize it to get the exact
look that I want by adjusting the image
via the panel on the right. Before I do
that I'm going to click on these
triangles to minimize the other panels
so I can maximize the size of the image
on the screen. Now you'll notice that you
have a histogram panel up top where you
can view your overall exposure. Clicking
on the triangles in either corner will
show you if you're clipping your
highlights or shadows. Any areas that you
see that are highlighted, mean that you have
lost detail at the pixel level by either
over, or under exposing your shot. You can
see by the blue highlighted area that
we've lost some detail in the shadow
area of her hair, but that's ok since
there's nothing back there that I really
wanted you to look at anyway!
Moving right along, the first tab we're
going to work on is the basic tab. Here
we can make overall adjustments to our
white balance, as well as our exposure,
clarity, and saturation. I'm going to
tweak the white balance, to warm it up a
bit, and give her skin tone and hair a
richer colour. I'm happy with the exposure
so I won't adjust that, but I will add
some contrast to the image, right around
five looks good to me.
The last thing I typically do in this
tab, is to adjust the clarity. For
portraits I tend to go somewhere between
1 and 5, since going much higher
than that will usually give the image of
really highly processed look. For this
image I'll leave it at 1, and close out
the panel. The detail tab will allow you
to apply sharpening, as well as noise
reduction to your image. You can manually
adjust all of the parameters here, but we'll
leave this one for now since I don't
need these settings for this particular
image. The color tab allows you to make
additional adjustments to your image by
either applying a preset, or by manually
adjusting the sliders. You can even
target specific colors in the color
saturation section. But again I won't
need to adjust these, as I'm more than
happy with the colors the preset
automatically applied. The same can be
said of the tone curves tab for this
image, where you can tweak the tones in contrast
of your image even further. We'll skip
that, and go to the vignette tab here.
I can customize my vignette to look
exactly the way I want it to look. I'm
going to click on the preset drop-down
menu, and select subtle black for this
image. I'll increase the size of this
vignette manually by moving the slider
over to 21. Now that we've applied this
vignette, we'll go ahead, and we'll move
over to the overlays tab. The overlays
tab allows you to apply borders, light
effects, and textures to your images.
They are a lot of fun to play around
with, and add a creative touch to your images.
I won't be applying any to this image,
but you definitely want to explore this
tab to see if some of the effects might
make your images more interesting.
The next area we will adjust is the
focus tab. For my portraits, I use the
preset Sharpen Low Radius 25. You'll
notice that this preset adds a lot of
sharpness to the image, more than what I
would actually want, but as you can do
with every other preset, you can adjust
the sliders to get the exact look you
want. I'm going to bring down the amount
to around 5.36 and have the radius match
that number as well. You'll want to tweak
the settings for each and every one of
your portraits, as some may need more or
less sharpening. The final tab I will
make adjustments to, is the green tab. Now
I apply grain to almost every single one
of my images, to give it a more pleasing
final look. I typically choose the preset
regular grain 25% and manually
adjust it to taste. You can customize the
look of the grain within your shadows
mid-tones and highlights to give your
image a more film like look. I'm going to
reduce the shadows and mid-tones to
25% - and the highlights
down to 8% percent. I'm also going to
adjust the roughness of the grain down
to 15. This gives a slight amount of
green, and it won't take away from the
overall sharpness of the image. Now that
I have my preset looking the way I want it,
I can begin my retouching. Right below
the histogram tab you'll see two icons
one is a band-aid, and the other a brush.
We're going to eventually use both here,
but we'll begin by clicking the band-aid
icon. Within this window, I can use the
healing brush or clone stamp tool to
remove blemishes, and reduce other
distractions throughout the image. You
can adjust the size, the feather,
the opacity for
these two tools, so that the adjustments
blend nicely with your image.
All I do is simply brush over the area
that I want to heal, then a selection is
made, and I'm able to move it around to
sample other parts of the image, to heal
the selected area. You want to make sure
you move the selection to an area that
is close to the area you're trying to
heal, and that way you can retain the
same texture and end up with a higher
quality result.
Finally it's time to apply some effects
via the brush tool. The first thing I do
with my portrait, is to begin by dodging
and burning. I'll select the Dodge Tool
and brush over the areas of the image
that I want to lighten. I tend to dodge
over the forehead, nose line, chin, as well
as the natural highlights on the lips.
I also lighten the shadows underneath
the eye, to give a fresher appearance as
well as the space between the eye and
the eyebrows.
Another thing - I often Dodge are the
highlights within the hair. Noel has
awesome hair, with a lot of natural
highlights. So I simply brush over the
areas to give them a bit more shine.
After I'm done dodging the image, I go
over to the burn tool - this will
basically darken selected parts of your
image by brushing over it, just like it
does with a Dodge tool. For portraits, I
typically use the tool to darken the
eyebrows, as well as around the iris, and
in the dark areas of the hair, to add
more texture and dimensionality. The last
thing I'll do is to use the Enhanced
Iris preset; with that selected, I simply
brush within the iris to bring out the detail
Don't go too far with this, you want to
add just a hint of detail and keep
things looking realistic. I've completed
all of my adjustments, and now I'm ready
to export this file and share it with
the world. Simply right-click on the file
and choose export. A new window will open
up and allow you to select where you
want to save your image how you want to
name it,
what format and size to save it in, as
well as choosing to include your
metadata. Once you finish here simply
click export and you're all set!
If you followed along I would love to
see your results of using this process
with your own image. If you're on
Facebook join my group and share your images
by going to Facebook.com/groups/sonyalphatips
Be sure to include your camera and
lens combo along with the presets you
used. Thanks for joining me today on
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next episode of The Breakdown
Bye everyone!