- [Glyn] Okay, so in this video,
I want to take you through the retouching steps
that'll take you from here to here.
Okay, so this is the final retouch picture,
and I actually took this whilst I was presenting
for The Flash Centre in Elinchrom at
the recent SWPP Event in London, which was in January 2017.
I promised those folks there
that I'd take you through the retouching.
Now, in regards to this picture,
if you haven't seen it already,
if you dive over to my web site,
I've taken you through a little blog post here
which goes through exactly how the picture was lit
just using one Elinchrom Rotalux Octa.
I'll also put the link to that in the description part of
this video over on YouTube, as well,
but I want to take you through some of the retouching steps
to get to this final image here,
when we've originally started with this one here.
So, if there's any techniques
that I kind of brush over quite quickly,
I'll include those at the very, very end of the video
so you can click on them and actually look at
those particular techniques in a lot more detail,
but I do intend to go through this fairly quickly.
All right, so let's have a look at the picture, then.
First of all, I don't have any
kind of systematic kind of workflow
where I always do certain things in a certain order.
Generally when I look at a picture,
whatever it is that sort of stands out to me
that needs fixing, that's how I work
and I'll work on that one first.
Now, when I look at this one here,
straight away we're presented,
I was working very quickly, didn't use the old grey card,
so the white balance is what I want to fix,
so I'm just gonna go to the basic section
here over on the right hand side.
I'm using Lightroom.
Click on the white balance tool,
add a grey background behind,
so I'm just gonna click to the side of our model here,
Louis, on the grey background,
and that's gonna give me a nice
starting point for the white balance.
The next thing I want to do then,
I want to crop it down.
It's got this area in the top left hand corner,
so I want to get the crop tool
by pressing R on the keyboard.
I want to hold down my shift key,
click on the top left hand corner,
and drag downward so it actually
drags it in the same aspect ratio just there,
so something like that will be fine.
And then over the basics panel,
what I'm going to do now is just take the shadow slider
and bring it up quite a way just to sort of
bring a bit more detail into those shadows.
You don't need to go too far,
because it can not look too realistic,
but maybe around about the 50-ish kind of mark.
Sometimes when I do that,
I might need to bring the highlights down,
but I don't think we really need to do that in this image.
Then, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to
the detail tab and add a little bit of sharpening.
Now, for me, my own tastes when
I'm actually working on male portraits,
is the amount that I use for sharpening
is generally around about the 40 mark,
and then I want to hold down my option key on Mac
or alt key on PC, click on the masking slider,
and it obviously goes white,
meaning all of the picture's been sharpened,
and I'll drag it over to the right hand side
to bring in black, which is the areas
that aren't being sharpened,
and kind of get it to a point where I think
the areas that I want to be sharpened,
mainly Louis and a little bit on that stepladder there
are going to be sharpened, nothing on the background,
which takes me around about the 80 mark,
something like that, on the masking slider.
Now, if we move further on down,
we'll go to lens corrections.
What I will also do is I'll put a tick
where it says remove chromatic aberration,
and I'm also gonna put a little tick in
the enable profile corrections, as well,
and you can see, it just reduces a little bit of
that vignetting that we're getting
on this particular lens here.
Let's just take the vignette slider
and drag that out just a little bit more,
just to reduce it to around about there.
Let's have a look what that does for us.
That's gonna add it, so let's take it to the right,
just to decrease it just a touch more, something like that.
Now, one extra little thing I might do
is just get my Wacom pen here.
I'm going to click on the adjustment brush
and I want to bring the exposure up just a touch
and I'm gonna paint over his face
just to bring up a little bit more of
that exposure on his face there.
The lighting pattern is exactly how I want it,
and again, check out that video
so you can see how I did that.
Just want to bring a little bit more
lightness into the face there
so it draws the viewer's eye straight onto it,
so something like that is fine.
Now, I'm going to send this over to Photoshop now
to carry on, do a few more little things.
There isn't much that we've actually done here,
so I won't be sending it over as a smart object.
Instead all I'm going to do is go to photo,
editing, and choose edit in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.
That'll then send the picture over
as a normal, basic layer, not a smart object,
so I can then continue with my retouching.
Okay, so here's our picture of Louis.
Let's just zoom in on him now, so zoom in,
and the first thing I want to do,
I don't like to use the spot remover in Lightroom.
Between you and me, I find it quite laggy.
It really does seem to strain the computer,
even though I've got quite a high spec computer,
it does seem to go quite slow.
So what I want to do is I'm just going to grab
the spot removal tool from the toolbar
over on the left hand side,
and this will do a very, very quick job,
just get rid of that little mark on his nose just there.
That's perfect.
Just a little cheek.
Nothing else I want to do.
I don't want to make him look to perfect.
Male portraits always look, in my opinion,
when it's got a little bit of kind of grunge in there.
Not totally perfect, but that's fine.
Now, the next thing I want to work on is his eyes.
I want to use a technique that I call amazing eyes,
and you'll see at the very end of the video,
there will be a thumbnail where you can check out that video
to show this technique in a lot more detail,
but what I want to do is I want to go to the quick mask.
There's a certain way that you need to set quick mask up,
so if you haven't seen that video,
make sure you check it out.
Then, I'm just going to get a normal brush
and I'm going to just select the area of
the eye that I want to brighten
and also add a little bit of colour in there, as well.
So, just come over here.
I like to use quick mask because it's a very visual way
of me actually adding into a selection.
Just get [Inaudible] there and a little bit in.
Like I said, I'm going through this quite quickly.
Let's just go there.
Okay, come out of quick mask,
and we get our visible marching ants selection.
To brighten the eyes up, I'm going to use
a selective colour adjustment layer,
change the colours to neutrals,
and to brighten them up, first, we'll use a blend mode.
And over on the right hand side of the blend mode
I'm going to use is linear dodge, and when I click on that,
you can see the eyes go really, really bright,
but the great thing is because
we're using an adjustment layer,
we've also got opacity so we can bring it up
or bring it down to get the exact kind of look that we want.
Now, that we're using this selective colour,
and you'll see this in that video
at the very, very end of this that you can click on,
you could also then come in and use the sliders
to change the colour of the eye, as well,
but this look pretty good actually.
You can see his nice brown eyes.
If I add a bit of contrast, we'll go from neutrals to blacks
and take the black slider at the very bottom here,
bring it over to the right just for
a bit more contrast in there, like so.
That's looking good.
Let's just zoom out a touch.
I might take that opacity of this layer now
down to around about maybe 50%, something like that.
Actually, maybe 40 is good.
Now what I want to do is I'm going to add a blank layer
and I'm going to call this one
eye sharp, oops, eyes sharpness,
and here, I'm going to actually sharpen the eyes.
I like to do this within Photoshop,
and I'm going to use the sharpen tool over in the toolbar.
You can see we've got the blur tool,
sharpen tool, and smudge tool.
If I use the sharpen tool at the top now
where we've got the options bar,
obviously each tool has its own
unique options that you can use.
Got the blend mode set to normal.
The strength, generally around about
25 to 30 is what I'll keep it at,
but because we're using a blank layer,
we need to have some pixels that Photoshop can sharpen.
At the moment, all it's seeing is a blank layer,
so you need to make sure at the very, very top here
where it says sample all layers,
put a little tick in there so it allows
Photoshop to see below that blank layer
and find some pixels below that it can then sharpen.
Once we've done that, let's just have a click.
We've got this sharpen tool, there we go.
So now what I'm going to do is just click down on the eye
and brush over it without lifting off,
one, two, three, four, five times.
Whatever I do on that eye, I'll also do on this eye,
so click down without lifting off,
one, two, three, four, five.
Now, you might see on the video
before and after, before and after.
You've got to remember that when
you're using the sharpen tool,
it kind of works like a spray can,
so if you imagine now when using a spray can of paint,
when you press down that nozzle and you from left to right,
if you don't let off or release that button,
the paint is going to build up and build up and build up,
and that's exactly the same as the sharpen tool.
Once you press down and keep going over the same area,
the sharpening effect is going to increase,
so whatever you do on on eye,
make sure you do on the other eye, as well.
All right, so let's just again, go in very, very quickly.
The next thing I'll do is just
maybe do some dodging and burning,
so now what I want to do is I want to go to layer,
new, layer, and here we'll call it
D and B for dodging and burning.
I want to change the blend mode here
from normal to soft light,
so I'm going to do some dodging and burning on skin,
so I think of soft skin, so we're going to
use this soft light blend mode.
When we do that, we'll get this little check box appears
where it says fill with soft light,
neutral colour 50% grey, and we'll click OK,
and we'll click OK in there to do that.
Now, without that blend mode,
all you're going to have is a grey layer.
We need to have some pixels that
we can make brighter or darker,
because obviously we're doing dodging and burning.
This has now given us some pixels,
but we can't see the person beneath it.
That's why we need to change it
from normal to something like soft light,
which is a great one for doing skin
because the grey goes, but the pixels still remain
so that we can now do our dodging and burning.
Now, I'm going to go and choose
my dodge tool over in the toolbar.
At the top of the options here,
the exposure's set to 10%.
I tend to go below 10% or around about 5%,
something like that,
and always make sure that you put a little tick
in this protect tones checkbox just there.
Now, I'm not going to go all the way through
the actual dodging and burning process here,
but basically what I like to do
is add highlights where there's bright parts
and darken down any mid-tone or shadow areas,
and that helps to add contour to the picture,
so let's just do a little bit,
a little bit of highlight on the side of his face there.
Now, if I want to use the opposite tool,
at the moment, I'm using the dodge tool,
if I want to use the opposite tool,
all I need to do is just hold down
the option key on Mac or alt key on PC,
and it automatically flips me to the opposite tool,
and that saves me from having to keep,
having to change it over in the toolbar,
so it's a really quick way of working there.
So let's just do this,
and we'll darken down the eyebrows,
something like so,
a little shadow on that side of the nose there,
maybe that there, and we'll just darken down
a little bit of the old five o'clock shadow just there.
Now, I've only done literally seconds worth there.
I would spend a lot more time on this,
but you can see when we turn it on and off,
if we turn that layer on and off there,
you can see already in seconds, we're getting
some of the dodging and burning effect coming in.
All right, so let's double click on the hand tool,
go back to full screen.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to
add a texture onto the background,
and this is the way that I save myself
around about six or 700 pounds
by not having to purchase one of
these textured canvas backgrounds, and they're fabulous.
I do want to get one, but because I'm mobile,
it can be quite expensive and they do get creased
if you don't leave them hanging up all the time.
So one way that I tend to do this or fake this look rather,
is by using a texture, and this has been photographed.
This is literally just a piece of
concrete taken with my mobile phone,
so I've got mine stored in my libraries here,
so let's just bring this up.
Let's just go to my textures,
drag this down so we can see in there.
There we go, this is the one that I want to use.
I've called it my faux oliphant, fake oliphant background.
I'm going to drag that into my picture.
That'll go on top of Louis.
Let's just close that down.
Now, because I want to use this as a background,
we don't have to worry too much about stretching it out,
so I'm just gonna hold down my option key
or alt key on PC and drag upwards like so
so it drags it the opposite way, as well,
just to fill that canvas up like so.
Now, this has actually got a little bit of colour in this,
and for this to look good,
you don't really want to have any colour
when you're using textures to add them
onto grey backgrounds, so I need to desaturate this.
Now, if I go to the image mode, adjust and desaturate,
you can see the desaturate is actually greyed out.
I can't use it, and that's because
I've actually got this texture stored from my cloud library,
and you can see a little icon in
the bottom right hand corner.
This would also happen if you actually brought
the texture in as a smart object.
What we actually need to do now then is rasterize this layer
to make it into a normal layer,
and the way I'm going to do that is go to the layer menu,
come down, and we're going to choose rasterize layer,
and that will just take it a normal layer.
Now we can go to image, adjustments,
and you'll see desaturate now is available to us.
Click on that and it removes the colour from there.
To get this onto the background, let's go from normal.
I like to use overlay, and that puts it
all onto that back textured background there.
You can see if I turn that layer on and off.
The problem now is it's actually on Louis, as well,
so what I'm going to do is add a layer mask.
I'm going to get a brush with a black foreground colour
and then all I'm going to do is just
paint it off Louis so the texture is not on him.
So I'll very quickly just come in
and paint this off him, like so.
There we go, come down here.
Something like that, it's looking good.
Now, you could if you wanted to,
to check where you've done this,
just turn that, turn that layer on and off,
see if you can see it appearing anywhere,
which I can just on this bottom bit down here.
Or another great way to see where
you've painted and where you've missed
is actually to click, or press rather,
the backslash key on your keyboard,
and when you do that, it gives us this red overlay,
almost like quick mask,
to show you exactly where you've painted.
Whoops, so I need to just continue to paint
just in some of these areas just here.
I'm actually going to leave it on the ladders.
I think the texture looks quite good on the ladders,
and you can't really see it that much, anyway,
so just bring it down to there,
paint that little bit off there, as well.
That'll do me, and just go in really quickly.
Yep, that's looking good, so now,
press the backslash key again to come back to normal mode
so now we can see when we turn that on and off,
we've got it pretty much just on the background
and obviously on that stepladder, as well.
Now, I don't need to use this at full strength.
I can also take down the opacity of this layer,
but before we do, I want to click on the thumbnail of
the texture and go to philtre, blur, gaussian blur.
I'm just gonna blur it just a little bit
just to fake that look of depth of field.
So we've got our values of two,
that's enough, okay on that,
and then I think I'll take the actual opacity of this layer
down to around about maybe 50%.
It doesn't need to be a lot, but that's just right for me.
Yep, liking that.
All right, now the next thing I'm going to do,
I'm going to create a merged or stamp layer
to the top of the layer stack,
and I'm going to call this one topaz,
and this is the only plug in
generally now that I tend to use.
It's called topaz clarity.
It's an effect that's very, very difficult to replicate
just by using Photoshop on its own.
So let me just show you this.
I'm going to go to philtre, topaz labs, and topaz clarity,
and there's a huge dialogue box here
that's got loads and loads of options available to us,
lots of presets and lots of sliders.
You see on the left hand side here all the presets,
right hand side, all these particular sliders.
We can actually dial in the settings that we want here.
Now, out of all these sliders here,
I generally only use the very top two,
micro contrast and low contrast.
I'll take micro contrast around about 30
and the low contrast pretty much halfway,
so 50-ish, something like that will do me.
And then once I've done that,
that's pretty much what I always do.
Click okay, that'll process it.
You can see the progress bar at
the bottom of the screen here.
That's gonna build up and send this now
back over into Photoshop,
and it's then that I can decide whether or not
I've either done too much or not quite enough,
but we'll just wait for that to finish processing it.
Now, back into Photoshop,
and we can see now if I turn that on and off,
I'm quite liking that, actually.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
Yeah, I might take it down to about 80%,
something like that.
Now then, the next thing I'll do is
maybe a little bit of colourizing,
and generally what I used to do before
was use the nick collection.
We had Colour Effects Pro 4
that you can actually download for free from Google.
I'll put the link in the description if you haven't got it.
It's free, so why wouldn't you,
but generally now I tend to use what's called lookup tables,
and again, there's a video where I show you how I use those.
Those are found in the adjustment layers
up in the top right hand corner here,
so we've got the second row down,
it's the far right hand corner
that looks like a three by three grid.
And to give you an idea of the kind of thing I did here,
let's just click on the colour lookup table here.
I generally only ever use the top menu
and we'll come down to something like,
let's say moonlight or something like that.
I'm going to load the opacity to around maybe 20%.
Let's add another one, and just play around now
just to dial in some kind of a recipe,
so I want this one to be quite a cool-looking picture,
so we can go horror blue, what does that do?
Maybe take that down to 10%.
Okay, I might try just one more, make it nice and cool,
and we'll go to crisp winter.
What's that one do for us?
That's quite nice.
Take that down to 20%.
Let's just put all these three into a group now.
We've got the upper one selected there.
I'm going to hold down my shift key
and click on the first one,
so now all three of them are selected,
and then we'll go to the flyer menu
up at the top of the layers panel there
and choose new group from layers,
and I'll call that LUT for lookup tables, and click OK.
So now I can click that on and off just to see if I like it.
Great thing is it's in a group, I can also dial it down,
so let's take it down to maybe 70%.
It needs to be quite subtle.
Something like that's looking good.
All right, let's just create one more merged layer
to the top of the layer stack
and just sort of do some finishing touches now.
I might just dive back over into
the philtre and camera raw.
Let's just see what we can do here,
so we do need to bring up some shadows.
It's got the shadow slider,
bring that up just a touch maybe.
That kind of works.
And do you know, I might actually use
an adjustment brush just one more time
and might just put a bit more exposure
back on that face again.
Now, just so you know that when you've got,
in your camera raw here when you've got all these sliders,
you might have them all over the place like this.
If you want to set them back to the defaults
so they're all down the centre there,
all kind of going back to zero,
you can either double click on
each of the little dials there to bring them back,
but to do them very quickly all at once,
just go to the menu at the top right hand corner of
camera raw just at the top here,
and it says reset local correction settings,
and you'll see all those sliders when I click on that,
they all go back to zero,
so it's a nice quick way of doing it.
So, we've got that adjustment brush.
Let's just bring up the exposure a tiny amount
and we'll just paint over the face just a little bit,
just there like that, so we'll go there, dial in.
Something like that's looking pretty good,
and then we'll click OK.
Now there were a few other little things that I did,
one of them, you'll bring over my cartoon painting look.
I generally add that to about 99% of my pictures.
I did do that with this one,
but I reduced the strength of it down quite a lot,
but I do like to add that effect in.
There is a video on that, as well,
and I'll put that in the description part,
but that's pretty much it.
That pretty much takes you all the way
through the retouching.
We didn't do much in Lightroom,
but if we just look at the original image,
this is what's brought us from Lightroom.
We've added the selected quality work on,
oops, let's just do that.
Don't know what's going on here.
Let's just turn those off.
We then worked on the eyes and then we sharpened them.
We did a bit of dodging and burning, not much.
We added a texture on the background and we blurred it.
Use of topaz clarity, little bit of colouring,
and then some final touches in camera raw
bringing back in the shadows.
If you've got any questions, by all means,
drop a comment in the comment section there
and I'll definitely make sure I get back to you,
but I hope that's useful.
Check out the video at the end, and I'll see you later.