 Hey everybody it's Craig back to here and in this video I'm going to walk you through this portrait retouch step by step and we're going to go from this to this. All right so here we are looking at the raw image. I'll show you the raw adjustments first and then we'll go to Photoshop. All right so this is the raw image right out of camera. This is how it was lit. The first thing I'm going to do is adjust the exposure. I suggest you do the same. Hopefully you shot it in raw. You can also adjust your white balance. So I'm going to make a small tweak. You can see we have a red highlight. I'm just going to take that down just a bit until that goes away and I'm going to take my highlight. I'm going to take that up to 10. So I've just made tiny adjustments. I like the exposure. I took the exposure down just slightly and the highlights down slightly. I'm going to leave the shadows just the way they are. The next adjustment is going to be my white balance. You can see here it was shot at 5500. The reason for that is I was shooting outdoors and my strobe is set for 5500. So I set my white balance in camera for 5500. Although I think I should cool it down. You can see if I go left it gets cooler. If I go right it gets warmer. I think 5200. Calvin that's K-E-L-V-I-N. Sometimes I say it Calvin for some reason. That's what you wanted at for me anyway. I'm happy with 5200. I'm going for the skin tone here. I'm really judging the skin tone. Does it look like skin should look like? Is that what her skin tone look like? Because that's the most important thing in a portrait is the skin tone. Now the tint if I go left it gets a little more greenish. If I go right it's a little more magenta. I think one. So 5200 Calvin and one. Those are the settings that I like on my calibrated monitor. It may look different on your monitor whether it's calibrated or not. Now that's all I do. So then I go to Photoshop. I'll show you my export settings. So I'm going to try to keep this exciting. Make sure you stick around to the end. I save some of my best retouching tips to the end of this video. You don't want to miss those. All right. So here we go. We're going to go to a TIF format 16-bit uncompressed color space pro photo. It's the largest color space. I suggest you use that and we're going to go to Photoshop. All right. So here we in Photoshop. This is the raw image and this is a final image that I posted to Instagram. So that's the before and this is the after. So I'm going to walk you through how to get more orange and red in the sky. How to change the background color. How to do dodge and burn. How to do liquefy. How to do color grading and a whole bunch more. So stick around and watch this whole video. I'm going to try to keep it engaging the best I can. Okay. So the format of this is going to be, I'm going to demonstrate the technique and then I'm going to move on to the next one. So I'll say, okay, first I start with this. Here's how you do it and then it's up to you to practice these things at home. I just want to keep this going quickly so that you don't get bored. The first thing is we've got our background image. The first thing we want to do is duplicate that. An easy way to do that is to right click on the image or you could use a shortcut. I'll use some shortcuts as well. We could right click and say duplicate layer or if you're on the Mac, it's command J. So command J and that's a duplicate. Never work on your background layer. Always have that there and think about the layers as a wax paper. So you've got your original picture. You're putting wax paper over it. You're making some adjustments. So if you want, you can always go back or you can reduce the opacity. So your layers are on the right. Also you have your blend modes. You can see we're on normal. You also have your opacity for each layer. Your tools are on the left if you're new to Photoshop. So let's continue on. So the first thing I suggest you do is make a plan. Look at your overall image and say what should I do to this? Does it need dodging and burning? Do I want to change the color? Do I need to heal the skin? Start thinking about those things and make a plan for yourself. Now I always start with healing the skin first and I go from top to bottom. I'm going to create a new layer. If you come down to the bottom right here, click there. We've got a new layer. Now we're going to heal on that layer. If you come to the left here, we have what looks like a bandaid. We're going to use the healing brush. I think it's a little more effective than the spot healing brush or the patch tool experiment if you'd like. Don't take my word for it, but I do prefer the healing brush. Now I'm going to zoom in. Command plus is a shortcut on the Mac. So I like to get in really close. So I'd say anywhere from 500 to 800 until the image becomes pixelated. I like to get in really close, really have a look at what's happening and then make an assessment about what I want to fix. So I'm on the healing brush right here on the left and then I'm going to sample nearby skin texture. Now an important thing to be aware of. See just above the healing brush, we have our eyedropper tool. If you click on that, you'll see a sample size. Now this is going to sample that size. So when you're doing your healing, so if you click on it, you can see there's point sample. You don't want that. That's too small. Three by three average, probably a little too small. So I'm going to go with a five by five or you could try 11 by 11. Make sure that you have that set right. Now click back on the healing brush and now we're going to sample nearby skin texture. Now an important thing is you want to make sure the lighting and the color is similar to what you want to heal. So don't go sample in the shadowy left part here with a different color and a different lighting and then come over here. You want to be as close as you can and you want your brush to be roughly about the same size as the blemish or whatever it is you're healing and then you just paint over. So I'm going to demonstrate how that works a couple of times and then we'll move on to the next step. Now it's up to you to watch this video again and then practice this on your own because as much as you think you're watching and listening, this happens to me all the time. I watch a video and I'm like, I got it and then I go to do it and I can't even remember what I just watched. So I recommend that you bookmark this video and watch it two or three times and then maybe pause and work on one of your own images and then come back to this and then just refresh your memory. So that's something that you should try. Now this works on hair too. I just want to demonstrate. You can use this to remove hairs, blemishes, moles, just about anything you can use. So that's the healing brush. So that's step one. I heal the skin. I start the top. I work my way down. I won't bore you by going through all that. So once I do that, I do something called a micro dodge layer and I'll demonstrate that for you. So step one, heal skin. Step two, dodge and burn. Now there's a couple different ways to create dodge and burn layers. I'll show you a couple of different ways throughout this video. So stick around so you make sure you see all the different ways to do that. Now here's one way. If you hold the option key on the Mac, alt on the PC, beside the garbage can where you create a new layer, you click that and we have a dialogue box. Call it dodge. I'm only going to dodge. Go to your blend mode, which is set for normal. Set that to soft light and we get a different option. It's filled with soft light, neutral color, 50% gray. Check that box, say okay. And on our right hand side, you can see in our layers now we have a gray dodge layer. This is what we're going to use for our first round of dodging. I'm going to zoom in super close, probably about 500 to 800 times. Really super close. It's going to depend on the image that you shot at, the resolution I shot this and then I can T850. It's quite a high resolution image. I'm losing my voice. And so you can see here, we have lines and I use this for fine lines. Now one thing I do and I suggest you try this is if you come down to adjustment layers here, you click on black and white and you take your red slider down and your yellow slider. These are predominantly skin tones. You can see now we can really see the dark areas of this image and now you're not really seeing the color. You're seeing the lighting. You're seeing the brights and the darks. So you see the difference there. It gives you that focus where you're like, whoa, those are really dark areas. That's going to show up in the image somehow. Now we'll go to our dodge layer, make sure you're on that and we want the brush key. So a shortcut is B. So B for Bob is your brush. Make sure that you're on white. If you look to the left, we have white as our foreground color. Our opacity of our brush is 100, our flow. I suggest one or two percent, just a really small amount. And then you want to use a soft brush. So make sure you're using a soft brush. Now there's a shortcut. If you hold down the controller option key on the Mac, and you go left or right, if you're dragging that, I'm using a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet, and I'm dragging my pen left and right. And if I go up, it's soft. If I go down, it's hard. So I'm holding those keys down. So I've got a soft brush. I can adjust the size. I can also use my bracket key. So left bracket makes it smaller. Make your brush about the same size as that line. And like I said, opacity 100, flow of one percent. And then just lightly paint over that. And so I'll just demonstrate this. I'll show you the before and after and then we'll move on to the next technique just so you don't get bored. So just keep watching because this gets better. All right. So if you're new to this channel, I have a quick message for you. If you're new here and you're not already a subscriber, my name is Craig Bechta. And if you're in a photography, you should hit that subscribe button right now and also hit that bell notification because every week I release a new photography tutorial. Everything from portrait lighting tips to portrait retouching tips and a whole lot more. So go ahead, click on that subscribe button and hit that bell notification. All right. Thanks. And let's continue on with this video. So just keep watching this. I'm going to toggle this on and off in a second and you'll see how effective this technique is. Now what causes these sort of hills and valleys? So let's say you were looking at a mountain, for example, and the sun was shining on the mountain. Well, the peak of the mountain is going to be brighter than the base of the mountain. So that's kind of what happens with a blemish on the skin. If you have a raised portion of the skin and the light hits it, the top part of a pimple, for example, would be brighter than the base of the pimple or a line in someone's forehead because it's indented. There's going to be more shadow. So what you're trying to do is even out the shadows where you see blemishes or lines and that will reduce the look of these blemishes or the lines. For example, instead of using a healing brush, you could just go around blemish like that and just get rid of the shadow and it would blend nicer. Okay, let me toggle this on and off. So that's before. Look at the forehead and that's after. So before and that's after. Now you probably wouldn't want to do this if you're doing 300 wedding photos, but if you're working on portfolio images and that you want to just display your best work, this is a technique that you can really get in and fine tune those fine lines and blemishes. And so that's a micro dodge layer. That's what I call it. And then when you're done, you can just get rid of this black and white layer. You can just delete it and carry on. So that's my first round of dodging. Now the second one, I like to call that my global dodge and burn. So my global dodge and burn, another dodge and burn layer. So what I'll do is I'll demonstrate a different way to create a dodge and burn layer. So you go down to your adjustment layers here and you go to curves. If you click on curves, you can drag that up. Do you see how much brighter it got? So what you want to do too is also to change the blend mode. Now the reason for that is look at the color on her face. If you hold down the space bar or you've got a little hand, you can move that around. Now I'm on a normal blend mode. Now watch how the color changes if I go to luminosity. You see how it kind of changed? So when you're not on the luminosity mode, it affects the color as well. We just want to affect the brightness and darkness. So when you're using a curves layer, switch it to luminosity. And then what you have is this white mask. To change that to black, you just hit command I and now we have a mask. So just like you would dodge and burn on the gray layer, if we paint on that black mask in white with the same brush capacity 100 and the flow of one, we're also dodging and burning, but we're using the curves layer. So I like to separate dodging from burning. So I'm only going to dodge on this layer. Now let me point out areas of the face that you should be concerned with. So I'm going to create a new layer so I can draw on that. I'm going to click over here and I'm going to pick red and I'll show you where you should be focused on. So there's a few areas of the face that a makeup artist would add some highlights to. And so you should be thinking about that too. So you want to enhance what's already happening on someone's face, whether it's a man or a woman, it's the same kind of area. So what I'll do is I'll look at this area here. I'm just going to change the flow rate here to 100 so you can see that better. I'll focus on this area here. I'll also look at say the highlight on the nose. I'll think about under the eyes. I'll look at this area here on the cheek. I'll also look on this area here. And then I'll look at the area of the chin and then I'll probably put a little highlight on the lips. So those are the key areas that I'm looking at. Also if I see any areas that don't look right, and another thing is too is all back out. So constantly go to what you would look at this image say maybe on the web and then zoom in, zoom out and look at how you're dodging and your burning is progressing. And always keep in mind that it's on a different layer. So if you went too far, you can bring it back. So I'm a fan of really creating multiple dodge layers so that you have more control and you didn't do all your work on just one layer and then you go, I screwed it up at the end. So often I'll do the micro dodge, then I'll do the global dodge, then I'll do hair only. So I separate it into portions and then I might do a dodge layer for the body only. And then that way if I make a mistake, I can just go back easily. So let's just say that I went through those dodge areas. One tip I can give you is to vary your brush size. So like I said, have a soft brush and have a low flow rate, but also vary the size of your brush. So you may want to start out with say a larger brush say on the forehead and then go to half that size and then half that size again. The reason for that is so that your highlight is gradual. It's not just one big white spot. So think about that too, varying the size of your brush and then starting in the forehead, then the nose, under the eyes, the chin, and then back it off if you think you went too far. So that would be the second round of dodging. I don't even get to burning at that point. Let's look at the hair. Now I would make another layer. Let's create another one. We'll do the gray layer just because it's either or. I don't really have a preference and we'll go soft light again. We'll say fill with. I'll say okay. Now again, we're just painting in white. I'll look at the areas of highlight and I'll only highlight those areas. So I'm not trying to take up dark areas and make them bright. I'm just sort of brushing over already bright highlights and just sort of giving them a little emphasis and I'm moving quickly. I'm not spending a lot of time doing that. But one tip I can give you, if you switch to the black brush, you can see I was just painting there in red so I probably didn't do anything. Make sure that you're conscious of what your foreground and your background color are and you can hit D to get to black and white and X you can toggle back and forth. So make sure you're on white if you're dodging, black if you're burning. One tip is you see how the part here is a little bit brighter? What you want to do is you want to darken that part as well. When you're doing your dodging and you're burning of the hair, that's a good tip. You can darken that down because you don't want your eye to go to the part and the hair. You want the eye to go to the person's eyes, so their face and their eyes. So the whole key when I'm doing any retouching of a portrait, how can I get you to look at their face before you notice this part of their hair is too bright, that kind of thing or maybe their clothes are too bright or maybe the background is too bright? Remove distractions. That's the key with portrait retouching is to remove any distractions in the image so that the person is drawn to the person's face and eyes first. That's what you want to do. So that's the whole goal is to remove any distractions and I'll walk you through how to do that. So I've just brought that down a bit. Look at the part in her hair. See how it just got darker but it's subtle? So everything I do is subtle. It's very subtle and it's all in layers and that's why I like Photoshop. We've talked about creating multiple dodge and burn layers. Let's go to what I would call would be stage three. So I'm going to look at the same image and I say okay well I've done some skin healing. I've done a couple layers of dodging and burning. What else does this need? And I'll look at everything and I'll say well I could probably fix the hair with liquefy. I could probably take the shoulder down, maybe tuck in the arm, tuck in the jeans, get rid of these creases. So those are things I'm thinking about. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take all those layers. I'm going to merge them to the top but the thing is when I do that I can always go back. I'm always going to keep these layers in the right in case I need them. So a shortcut is shift, option, command E. That will merge everything to the top. Now if I want to go back, all I have to do is delete that layer. All of my original layers are still there but the reason why I'm doing that is so that I can use liquefy. I can't use liquefy on a dodging burn layer or a blank layer so that's why I had to merge it to the top. So I'm going to go to filter. I hope you're still with me. I'm going to go to liquefy and we're going to liquefy some images. So I'm going to show you my settings. If you look at the right here top corner, my pressure is 20, my density is 50 and then I'm going to show you how to use a freeze mask. If you come to the left here we've got a freeze mask tool. I'm going to just freeze your face because I don't want to affect your face at all. So I'm just going to paint over that. Anything we paint in red when we make adjustments in liquefy tool it won't affect that. So for example if I want it to just tuck into her arm there and I don't want to affect the rest I can do that. If I want to bring in her waist a little bit I can just do that. Same with this if I can protect her arms here if I'm making some adjustments out of the hand. So any areas that you don't want affected by the liquefy tool paint them with the freeze mask. Then you want to go to your forward warp tool. That's right there and you want to make sure that this is large enough. And again like dodging and burning you probably want to zoom in and out of this image. Hold the spacebar down and then you can drag the image. And so I'll have a brush size like that. Be conscious of your brush size in the area you're in and then when you get to a bigger area like this where you just want to affect everything a little bit more evenly make your brush bigger. If it's a little bit smaller of an area adjust that brush and really I'm just demonstrating how to make some tweaks in the hair. Say you're outside and it's windy and for some reason the hair just looks a little flat one spot or you want to add a little body to the hair. You can do that with the liquefy tool. I'm going to exaggerate it a little bit just so that it's easy for you to see when we go out the changes I made. But you can be as subtle as you want with this and I suggest you be more subtle. So I'm going to bring this down a bit there and I'm also going to make my brush bigger. I'm going to tuck in her arm just a touch there. And you can see the jeans here. If you want to tuck in someone's clothing you can easily just sort of tuck that in and then if you want to sort of tuck in their waist you can do that. Again here with the jeans right there where she's got them crumpled up if I want to tuck in that part I can. So it's really just a matter of making these fine tweaks because I don't want something to catch your eye and take it away from the focus of the image. So again here I'm going to tuck in her pocket a bit there and it's really just about taking some time and doing it properly. Even if you wanted to say these are very baggy pants if you wanted to you could even bring in the leg a little more because sometimes the camera will make someone look heavier. So these are things to think about. Now I wouldn't say take someone's you know down like a hundred pounds or something but you know be conscious of things that you know don't look proper when you're taking the photo. So then if they click on and off you can see it'll zoom in a bit more and so just look at the areas of the hair the shoulder the arm the pants and you could see these little tweaks but they did make a difference. So that's the liquefy tool and that's how you use it. So I'll employ this sometimes sometimes not at all it's really depending on the image but I wanted you to see how to use that. All right so let's recap so we started with the background image we healed the skin first top down then we did our first dodge and burn we only did dodging micro dodge layer with the black and white layer then we did more of a global dodge with just the dodge layer again. Now you can use curves or you can use a gray layer for that then we did some liquefy. So once I get to this point I start to look at the entire image and I say well how can I enhance this image? So for me I want to make the skies redder I want to make the background a little bit different I want to make it darker so how do you do that? So I'll show you a great technique and again we're just going to shift everything up. Stick around I'm going to show you how to sharpen and brighten the eyes as well too coming up. All right so what I want to do here is I want to create a mask so I can use this mask over and over again. So we're going to use the quick selection tool which is never quick. They call it the quick selection tool it's never quick. I don't think it's going to work that great in this image because her pants are the same color as the background so it's really going to depend on the image of the background how well this works. I'm going to do this really fast I suggest you take your time if you're working on some portfolio images but I'm just going to show you how to do a quick cutout and I'm going to explain why I'm doing it and how I use it in my work and I think it's really important to do this. All right so you can see I've got some of the background if that happens you hold the option key or alt on the pc and then we just want to take away that area that it selected and I'm not going to do the whole pants I think I'm just going to leave it the way it is there's a little bit under arm so if you do this yourself take your time go through do a proper selection I just want to show you why this method is so effective so I'm just going to do a partial mask but you'll get the idea. So you can see we've got a cutout except for our pants I would cut that out normally. Now look right down here output two new layer with layer mask you want to make sure that's set if you don't see red you can adjust that up here too so I'm going to say okay and now we have a mask but nothing really changed right so watch what happens so I'm just going to make sure that I have a layer above this so again shift option command E I'm merging everything pushing up to the top I'm always keeping my layers below in case I want to backtrack so now what I want to do is I want to go up to filter and I'm going to go to camera raw filter so I've clicked there and so this takes us back to Adobe camera raw so if you're familiar with that that's great if you're not what this allows us to do is to make some other changes so we can play with the color temperature so we could cool down the background or we can warm it up I'm going to show you how to just mask the skin so I've warmed up the sky a bit we can play with the tint I've added some more tint there but we can get even more refined if you go for in we have the HSL adjustments which stands for hue saturation and luminance we're going to play with just the hue so we're going to affect the sky so we're going to take the red we're going to drag it far to the left we're going to drag the orange to the left you can see it's making your skin go crazy but we've got that mask right I showed you how to create one and we're going to drag those yellows now we've created a really cool sky it may be exaggerated but I just want you to see what you can do now we can take the aquas and we can adjust the background as well I'm going to say okay now this doesn't look great right now the way we have it right so you see how we have our mask here at the layer below that one if you hold the option key or alt on the pc you can drag that mask up now so we dragged up the mask but you can see that the effects on her and not the background so what we need to do is reverse that so if you click on it and hit command i on the Mac we've reversed that mask now you can see it looks fine because it didn't affect the jeans too much or the background but you would have that cut out properly now if I toggle this on and off look at the difference in the sky like sure that maybe that's a little bit overexaggerated but you can always adjust the opacity because that's a different layer right that's the own layer so if you thought it was too much you could adjust the opacity but now what else you can do because you have that mask so we're going to go and create the curves layer I'm trying to go fast keep it interesting so I hope you can stick with me I can drag this curves layer down and then drag that mask up so again like I did before holding the option or alt key on the pc grab the mask drag it up say yes and now if I toggle this on and off you can see that not only did we change the color of the background but we also made the background darker to put more focus on our subject and again because it's on its own layer if you went too far you just adjust the opacity so it gives you a lot of range really as far as being able to change the background separate from your subject make it different colors make a different lightness and brightness great trick master subject and then you have more latitude as far as doing things all right so let's get to adjusting the eyes we want to brighten and sharpen the eyes the reason for that is in a portrait the focus is someone's face and eyes and your connection is with the eyes so we want to make them stand out so I'll show you how to do that we're going to create a curves layer for the eyes so I'm going to zoom in and we'll get really super close and I'll show you what to look for here I'm going to create a curves layer click down here click curves and I can drag it up now before we're dodging and burning we went to luminosity I'm going to leave it this way because I don't mind if there's a little extra color in there because we're just sort of making some enhancements to the eyes and again like before we have the white mask we want to hit command i and invert that mask so now what we want is we want to hit the b key like bob that's a shortcut for brush opacity is 100 we're going to put that flow at about 20 percent so we want to bring this in quicker make sure you're on a white brush and then size your brush smaller so you can paint little areas in the eye now we have the catch light at the top that's our soft box that's in her eye I suggest you have that at about 10 to 2 o'clock range here it's about 12 o'clock I'll bring those up first then what you want to do is to bring the light in opposite that so below the eye so below that catch light so not the whole eye but the part opposite that's where the light would bounce out of the eye don't brighten the pupil keep that dark so I'm just going to bring this up and then I'm going to show you a trick to really blend this and make this look natural now the left eye I would bring up but not as much because where the light is is to the right so this left eye shouldn't be as bright as the right but it should be brighter than it is so I'm just going to bring it up a little bit we'll toggle it on and off but let's put the focus on this right eye now I want to show you something here if I right click and go to blending options I'll have a little box pops up here and I'll keep it right here so look in the eye as I make these adjustments so if you look at this here it says blend if gray this layer or underlying layer we can click here you can see red green blue make sure it's on gray the go to underlying layer if you hold the option key or alt on the pc and drag this you can split this you can do that at the high end as well the reason we want to do that is watch when I drag this now watch the brightness in the eye see how it goes down as I drag it to the right so we can sort of blend this in so it just blends in naturally and that's the blending option and then we could click on and off now what I suggest you do is to back out to what it would look like on the web and then toggle on and off and see if you went too far or not far enough if you went too far then adjust the opacity slider and bring it down to say 50% and say okay that looks more natural if you didn't go far enough you could just easily click on that curves layer and you could drag that up so those are some things you can do to brighten the eyes and it's really a personal choice I would err on the side of caution of going too bright on someone's eyes it's going to look fake people are going to know all right so I went overboard but I just wanted to prove a point there of how to do it I'll just drag that slider down it blends a little more now the next thing you want to do is sharpen the eyes so again I'm going to merge everything to the top shift option commande is the shortcut again I'm keeping all these layers here so if I have to go back they're still there the reason why I merge them is because I want to sharpen that you can't sharpen a blank layer so filter and then you go to sharpen unsharp mask so there's lots of ways to sharpen this is just one of them this is the technique that I use I click on the eye so I can see it in the box my amount is 200 my radius is 1.2 my threshold is zero I click okay so when I do that now the whole image is sharp you can see that the image is much sharper I only want the sharpness on the eye so I'm going to create a mask quick way to do that hold down the option key or the alt key in the pc come down to this little rectangle right here click on that you see we have a black mask now just like you were dodging and burning wherever you paint in white you'll bring that effect back I'm going to keep my flow at 20% I'll zoom into the eye so you can see how effective this technique is and again I'm just going to paint over the eye so I'll make this a little smaller I'll paint over the eye I'll paint over the eyelashes around the eye here and you can see that it's not working because I wasn't on that properly so let's just make sure I'm on that okay good so if anything's not working in Photoshop like you think it should have a look around look at the layer you're on look at see if you're on a white brush check your settings you'll find that you get frustrated easily sometimes in Photoshop if you're not set perfectly and it happens all the time all right so I'll toggle this on and off watch your right eye see how much sharper that is also I might sharpen say the eyebrow and then I might put a little bit of sharpening on the bottom lip or her lips of course I'd heal the lips I dodge the lips I get rid of these hairs but I'm just trying to go through this quickly showing you the core techniques that you can use and how to do them and then it's up to you to really apply them so I don't you know bore you to tears with this video but again we're going to toggle that on and off and then you can see here if I go to the bottom and I click here you can see the changes we've made to the eyes to the hair and of course I would do more dodging and burning more skin retouching than I have in this video but I just want to demonstrate these techniques okay so we've got to the eyes now I look at the image again and I think okay well what is left we could heal those pants so by healing those pants I mean we could use the patch tool we could use the clone stamp tool we could use dodging and burning so some of these techniques I've showed you we can also do that on the clothing as well to even out those lines and wrinkles now one thing I like to do is color grading and I suggest you have a signature color grading style so that all of your images kind of have a similar feel so I'll show you a technique to do that so if you come down here to your adjustment layers and you go to selective color you can change the different colors so you can pick a tone and change that so what I like to do sometimes is go to the black layer which is going to affect the darks in the shadows of the image and I'd like to add a little blue to that to do that I can take the science slider and go right so you can see how that changed the darks but I'll do it very subtly I'll go maybe plus one on that and then the magenta I'll go plus one and then for the yellow you'll see in a second here I can't get that to work okay so let's just say plus one okay there we go if I go to the yellow you can see all the blue that comes in so I'll go maybe minus one on there and then what I'll do is because it's on its own layer again I can reduce the opacity to about 50% but if I toggle on and off it made a subtle change but all these subtle changes that you're doing with all these layers really add up to a complete image and that's why I like using photoshop over some other applications now I'll show you another way to do that if you come down to your adjustment layers you go to levels and you go to your blue channel now look down here at the bottom where your output levels are if you go from your left to your right you could see I'm bringing blue into the shadows again so another way to do it so maybe you could bring in say five on your output level on your left if you want to bring in some yellow in the highlights like split toning you can do that as well and you can just bring in a subtle amount of that again I suggest backing off some of these adjustments so that looks a little more natural now the last thing that I would do to an image is crop it we'll get to that in a second but also I'll show you how to bring in some contrast to an image so again we're going to go to a curves layer and I just want to bring in some contrast so I think what I'll do is I'll change that blend mode in a second but if you look at the bottom here if I drag this down this sort of brings the shadows down I drag it up here it's more between the mid tone and the highlights and I'm creating s curve is what it's called and that gives us more contrast we're going to change that blend mode to luminosity so we're not affecting the colors and then we're going to drag that down to about maybe I'll give it to about 16% so you can see how this works toggle it off and toggle it on toggle it off toggle it on you can see how it gives a little more punch to the image and you've got that its own layer there you can adjust the opacity to your taste but that's how to give it a little more kick and then I would crop it so some cropping rules if it's a portrait I don't like to have a lot of space above the head because it's really about the person not about the sky so I'll often crop close to their head and then cropping points would be at the knees or at the waist or at the elbow because I missed her shoes in this shot I can't just show her with no feet so I have to crop at the knee so I'll look for the knee crop and then I'll crop it like that and then I'll do one last look at the image and sometimes what I'll do is I'll export a really large image I'll go take a break and I'll come back and I'll just look at the image and I'll say oh I missed something oh I should do that again and I might do another round of dodging and burning or I might tweak the colors or I'll say you know what that's oversaturated if I put that on the web her skin tones are too saturated so one last trick if you want to desaturate someone's skin a little bit sometimes people go the other way they oversaturate well you can do that's a color balance tool that's good if you want to balance certain colors but I want to show you another way to do this if you go to hue saturation and you go to the red channel so this is going to affect the skies too because we're going to affect the whole image but you can reduce the saturation of just the red so you can go plus or minus so you can go minus say four yellow minus four and then you can go master which is the whole image and then you can reduce that by saying minus five and then that'll take down some of the saturation of the image if you feel someone's skin tones are overly saturated or certain colors so that's just the tip right there so I hope you enjoyed this video if you found these tips helpful give me a thumbs up and if you're not already a subscriber hit that subscribe button and also share this on the web either fellow photographers if you found it helpful share it in forums facebook groups all over the place blogs wherever you want hey it's Craig back to here again and you made it to the end of the video if you found these tips helpful give me a thumbs up for this video also share it on the web just look below this video click on share you can share it on blogs you can share it on facebook groups photography forums wherever you'd like also if you're not already a subscriber hit that subscribe button and make sure you hit that bell notification and you'll get important updates when I release new video tutorials all right thanks again for watching the thumbs up if you found it helpful share it like it subscribe anyway I'll see you in the next video