(clacking)
- In this tutorial I wanna take you through a technique
that I call depth building,
or in it's simplest terms, how to make your portraits pop,
but first this.
Hi folks, Glyn here just to remind you
that if you haven't already,
make sure you click on the subscribe button
on my Youtube channel, and also click the bell icon,
and tick in the notifications check box,
so that you'll never miss any of the live broadcasts.
That's just a great and free way
of showing you like the channel.
Also over on my website at glyndewis.com
click on the newsletter menu item
to join my email group and download your free e-book
called "How to develop your style",
fill in your email address, first name,
and family name, and then click on the subscribe button.
And finally add me in and connect over on Instagram
by finding me with the username @glyndewis.
Okay, so as photographers, retouchers,
and plain old human beings,
we know that when we look at a picture
our eyes are naturally drawn to the areas
that are the brightest, the sharpest,
and have the most contrast.
So knowing that, if maybe we apply one
or all three of those particular things to a portrait,
just like I did on this one here of boxer Steven Cook,
it's going to give the pictures much more impact.
It's actually gonna give much more depth,
much more dimension, and especially when it's printed,
it's gonna make them appear as if they're coming forward
from the screen or the print.
Oh wow.
(Glyn laughs)
So with that in mind,
here's how I use it in my own portraits.
Alright, so here on screen,
and this is a final retouch picture,
it's from my World War Two project,
and you can see, hopefully on your screen,
that the face here really does seem to sort of stand out,
especially the eyes, the nose, and the mouth,
the face really does come forward from the screen,
so what I'll do now,
I wanna show you pretty much the out of camera picture,
where all I've done on this one here,
is I've worked on the eyes just a little bit,
brightened them up,
and I've done a small amount of dodging and burning.
I thought I'd show you kind of what we've got out of camera,
you can see that there,
you can see that I've brightened the eyes,
there's videos that I've got on my channel,
I'll put a little link in the description part
so you can actually go to those techniques,
but that's the eyes.
And you can see here, just a small amount
of dodging and burning to shape the face.
So what we're gonna be doing,
if I just add a blank layer here,
and I'll get a brush and we'll just change it to,
let's say red,
and I'll just take the old pass of the brush down to 50%,
because what we're gonna do
to make the face really stand out now,
especially when it's printed is, I'm gonna first of all
apply a kind of contrast over the entire face,
not over the whole picture,
just on this particular part of the face.
Then I'm gonna do it again,
but this time only targeting certain areas
like the eyes, the nose, and the mouth.
So now we're gonna be really
drawn into looking at those particular areas.
So the face with just that one layer
is gonna start to stand out,
and then the eyes you're gonna really draw into those
when you actually start to add it onto there,
the nose, and the mouth.
So here's how we're gonna do it,
let's just create a merged or a stamp layer
to the top of layer stack
and holding the shift, control, ALT, and E on PC,
on Mac you're looking at shift, command, option, and E,
and I'll just rename this layer, face.
Now what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna go to use a plug-in,
now this is one called Topaz,
it's a great plug-in called Topaz Clarity,
so I wanna go to filter, Topaz labs, Topaz Clarity,
now if you haven't got that, don't switch off,
'cause all I wanna suggest you do here
is use whatever technique that you'd like to use
for adding contrast, okay?
There is a reason why I like to use Topaz Clarity,
and you'll see that in a minute,
but generally any technique that you like will work
for using on contrast.
Now here we are then,
we're in the actual interface for Topaz Clarity,
there is so much you can do within this particular plug-in,
you got presets on the left-hand side,
and you got lots of sliders over on the right-hand side,
but despite all that,
I only ever use the very two top sliders.
We've got one called micro-contrast,
and one called low-contrast,
so you can see just from those two sliders alone there
what this Clarity plug-in allows you to do
is to get into all the fine detail
and add contrast into those areas,
as opposed to kind of blasting
the whole picture with contrast,
this really does start to bring out detail.
So what I'm gonna do then,
my particular settings when I do this,
I'm gonna take the micro-contrast slider,
and take that all the way to around about 30-ish,
let's try and take it to 30, say 30-ish,
and then whatever I put the micro-contrast to,
the low contrast I take to pretty much half,
so we'll go, at the moment it's like 33,
we'll take this to around about 16, 17,
something like that.
Now if I bring my cursor into the picture area here,
if I press down you see the before,
and you see the after, hopefully, when it pops in.
But what I wanna do now then I gonna come over
to the bottom right-hand corner,
click okay to process this,
you'll see a little progress bar at the bottom here
as the Topaz processes those particular settings
and that will then send it back over into Photoshop.
So here we are then now in Photoshop,
and you can see that if I were
to turn that layer on and off the actual contrast
as you'd expect has been applied to the whole picture,
but just like I showed you with that red kind of overlay,
I only really want it to be on the face.
So first of all then I'm gonna hide the effect,
I'm gonna add a layer mask,
now I'm gonna add a black layer mask,
'cause black will hide it,
and to do that quickly all I'm gonna do
is hold down the Alt Key on PC, option key on Mac,
come down to the bottom of the layers panel
and then click on the layer mask icon,
and you'll see now, that adds a black layer mask.
So black conceals, white reveals,
so now then I'm gonna get a brush,
change the foreground colour to white,
make sure the opacity is up at 100%,
and let's just make sure there's no crazy
kind of settings in there, let's just turn that off,
and a nice soft brush,
let's bring the hardness right down to zero,
and then all I'm gonna do is just paint in
that particular effect of that Topaz Clarity
on all of the face, like so, something like that,
so only around the face, and again we turn that on and off,
you can see now already,
we're starting to get some improvement
and your eyes are really being drawn into the face
as opposed to anywhere else in the picture.
Okay, so the next stage then,
I'm gonna create another merge or stamp layer
to the top of the layer stack,
so shift, control, alt, and E on PC,
and like I said before, shift, command, option, and E
if you're using a Mac, and we'll just rename this one too,
we're gonna go for eyes, nose, mouth,
ENM, eyes, nose, and mouth.
So again we'll go to the filter menu,
I'm gonna dive back in to use Topaz Clarity,
you would obviously now dive in
and use your own particular technique
that you like for using to create contrast.
Great thing is, when I dive back into Clarity,
it actually remembers the settings that I used before,
and you can see over on the right-hand corner here
we've got 33 on the micro-contrast, 16 on the low-contrast.
Generally though, I like to be around 30, 15,
something like that.
So again we'll click okay, it'll apply that,
again you can see the progress bar,
it applied to the whole of the picture,
and then once it's back in Photoshop again,
now I'm gonna add a black layer mask to hide the effect
of that extra bit of clarity,
get my brush, white foreground colour,
and then all I'm gonna do is paint over one eye,
paint over the other eye, put a little stroke down the nose,
and then just a little bit over the mouth as well.
Now let me just zoom in,
I'm gonna double click on the hand tool
to bring it just a little bit closer,
let's just put these two into a group,
so the top layer selected, hold down the shift key,
click on the one below, so they're both now selected,
and I'll come to the menu
at the top right-hand corner of the layers panel,
and we'll put new group from layers
and we'll put contrast, like so.
And now you can see when we turn it off, then on,
off and on, the impact that has
really does start to stand out on my screen,
now I really hope this is coming through on your screen,
but your eyes are really drawn to it
as opposed to anywhere else in the picture.
And believe me, you get this printed,
especially on metal, it looks absolutely fantastic.
Oh wow.
(Glyn laughs)
So there you go, just a really, really quick technique,
but incredibly effective,
especially when you go and get these printed,
so I highly recommend you give it a go,
and if you do give it a go,
just tag me in it on social media,
or even just drop me an email.
All the details that you need,
links to all the other little techniques
I kind of mentioned at the start there
with the eyes and the dodging and burning,
those are in the description part,
but thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
(soft music)