 Hey, how you doing? It's Greg back to here in this video. I'm gonna walk you through this stylized portrait I'm gonna take it from this To this all right a little backstory on this this image was shot by my sister now Here's the edit that she did and she asked me if I would do my own unique interpretation So I said sure and I'm gonna shoot a video and walk her through it now She's a travel photographer and I'll put a link below in the description box where you can go to this page on that Geo and see more of her work. All right, let's get started. So we're in capture one 11 for this and this was shot on a Sony a7r2 With a Zeiss 35 mil f1 4 now if we go down on the bottom you can see this was that ISO 3200 Shutter speed 2000 at f4 now the only critique I have about this is that I would have shot this at ISO 100 Because it was shot outdoors during the day. So you don't really need that boosted ISO She shot it in auto. I'm assuming and it just sort of made these settings for her That's the only thing I would have done differently. I would have shot this at a lower ISO So it would have been less noise I maybe would have shot this at f2 to get a little bit more blurry background But other than that, I think the composition is great I think the image is really unique and I'm gonna walk you through how I would edit this image So let's get started over here and I'll show you the adjustments that I would make So the only thing I would do to this you can see as shot 5400. I'm gonna try this at 52 Just cool it down. Just a touch see how that looks That's pretty good there, and I think I'll take this tint to one And then let's just compare that so to do that and capture one you hit the option key and you hit that backwards arrow So that's a shot pretty warm and then that's what I adjusted it to so again That's a shot a little bit warmer, and then if we go back, that's what I adjusted it to I think it looks a little more realistic right there a little bit more realistic looking skin tones now Let's go to the exposure tab overall I think the exposure is pretty good Let me just see what happens if we take it down a bit because I can always bring it up in Photoshop Yeah, you know, it's pretty good as shot. Let's go brighter. No, I don't like it brighter I'm just gonna go with maybe just very small on the minus. We don't really have that many highlights I'm gonna take it up to about 18 and then I think I'll bring up the shadow detail a little bit in the hat I think I'll bring it up to about five. So those are the only adjustments. I'm gonna make I think I might just give it a little more clarity Let me just say like a six just make his face a little more gravelly and then we're gonna go to Photoshop So file and then we're gonna say edit with and here's the settings. I would use in Photoshop It's gonna be tiff uncompressed Adobe RGB color space, and you can see Adobe Photoshop 2018 and we're gonna edit the variant and we're gonna go to Photoshop. All right Okay, here we are in Photoshop The first thing I do is duplicate the image command J on the Mac now we have another layer that we can work on So the first thing I do is assess the image and I like this image I think it probably needs a little bit more sharpness I'd like the background to be a little more darker to put some emphasis and then I'm gonna try to do a smoke technique You can see there's some smoke I'm gonna try to make the smoke say Cuba and see if that looks okay. We'll see what happens It might look a little cheesy. I don't know so we're gonna go first with the healing brush You can see it over here the healing brush tool. I'm gonna be using that I'm gonna zoom in command plus and I'm just gonna clean up the image a little bit now I'm using a Wacom tablet and to us pro I'm gonna sample option right there, and I'm just gonna clean that up a little bit And I'll make the brush a little bit bigger again option on the Mac I believe it's alt on the PC and I'm just gonna try to clean up his beret just a tiny bit So these are just tiny details. I just want to tweak just so that you're not distracted by any of these little little details in the image And it's not really anything crucial really these little tweaks. You probably won't even see them I'm gonna zoom in a little more and then just clean things up a little bit So I think right here maybe his hairline I'll clean that up a bit. There's a hair there. I'm probably overdoing it already I'm gonna make this brush a little smaller option Clean up some of these little details here These are probably not even gonna make a difference in the end scheme of things But just gonna tweak a few more things here Sort of blend in this image and the goal really is so that you're focused on The portrait not distracted by some little details. Let's get this cleaned up a little bit more And I think that's pretty good right there. Just zoom out a bit. That's really way too close for this guy But that's pretty good right there So one thing I noticed about this image was it wasn't shot with flash So you notice there's no catch light in his eyes his eyes are really dark I think eyes are important in a portrait. So I'm gonna try to bring up his eyes a little bit I'm gonna add an artificial catch light where I think it should be and then I'm gonna sharpen this a little bit Maybe he's saturated a bit more and then just dark in the background. So that's what we're gonna do next So the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lighten the eyes And I think man, maybe the easiest way is to add a curves layer. So what we'll do is go here We'll say curves now. I'm just gonna bring up the brightness here So now I can see his eyes a little bit better And then what I'll do is I'll put this on luminosity so that it doesn't affect the color saturation of the image And then what I'll do is say command I now we have a black mask now I can paint in with the brush tool over his eyes Just brightening his eyes so we can see his eyes there And I'm gonna come over here or hit the B key either or and then I'm gonna just make that smaller with my bracket key And I think what I'll do is probably take this up a little bit at a time So maybe 20% for the flow you can see my opacity is 100 The flow is 20% if we go to our brush We just have a soft brush right there and then I'll minimize that and I could see his eyes I'm just gonna bring up the areas where I think they should be a little brighter. Of course, we're gonna keep the pupil dark We're just gonna bring up the eye around the pupil and then what we'll do is we'll add an artificial catch light So over here too looks like his eyes might be rather dark normally anyway But let's just see what we can do to just bring up a little bit of that brightness Now what you can do to see if The areas are highlighted option and you click on the mask now you can see the areas that I've Worked on and now what I can do is just sort of tweak those areas a little bit more Make sure that that mask of brightening is even so I've done that Option and then click on it again And then if we toggle that on and off you could see his eyes have become brighter We can always adjust that opacity that'll be the next step So what I'll do next is I'm just gonna add another layer and then I want to add a catch light So I want to try to make this look Like it's real. So I'm gonna put it at about I'd say the 12 o'clock position So the catch light should be between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock I'm gonna put it right there at the top of the pupil and I'll do the same right here 10 and 2 I'll try to make it in the same position. So it looks like it's uniform Same equal brightness. Now. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take that I'm gonna try soft light first see what that does and that dimmed it too much So I'll keep it on normal, but what I'll do is I'll take the opacity down So it looks a little more natural So I'll take that down to about 60 and then let's just toggle this out now once we go back Let's just see if his eyes are any brighter. And if they're too bright, they look to me like they might be too bright So what I'll do is I'll take that down the curves layer I'll take that down to about let's say 70 percent. Let's see how that looks Toggle that on and off still. I think a little too bright. We'll go down to about 60 percent toggle that on and off So we got a little more brightness in his eyes. Let's toggle the catch light I think we can go down to about 50 on both. Let's try that So we'll do 50 there on the curves and then we'll go to about 50 on the catch light And then if you go to the bottom layer the background layer hit the option key You can toggle all changes right there So you can see his eyes have gone from dead to a little bit more life Although I think I'll take them both to 40 percent So it's about 43 there and about 43 there So just subtle changes to his eyes, but I think it looks natural It doesn't look like it's totally overdone, but I think you can see his eyes again option on the background a Little more life in his eyes. So I'm happy with that now The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut him out from his background So I'm gonna hit shift option command E and Push everything up to a new layer and then what I'll do is I'll come up here And then I'm gonna cut them out with the quick selection tool out of the background So I'm gonna just zoom in a bit and we'll refine this and it should be pretty easy because he's a different color than the background Now the reason I'm doing this is I want to separate him from the background because I want the emphasis to be more on him So that you're focused on him It's a portrait and I find the backgrounds a little bright This is gonna happen naturally unless you're shooting say with a flash and then you can bring the background down But if you're just shooting a natural light This is gonna be something that you're going to have to deal with basically and so I'm just gonna make these Quick little adjustments here and then hopefully this looks good and I don't have to tweak it too much But I'm just sort of going over this and we can do some refinements as we get more of him cut out He's gonna command minus to zoom out Make sure I get everything and then we'll go in and we'll take a quick look make sure everything looks good All right, so I'm just gonna keep going around So if you have any comments or questions post them below I haven't done this image yet So I don't know how it's gonna turn out But I can try to create a realistic looking smoke look with this smoke And then I think what I'll do is export two different versions So one with smoke saying Cuba and then one just plain that way I'll just take whatever looks the best and I'll show you the technique I use for making The smoke look somewhat real. So I'm just gonna zoom in check the outline. It's looking pretty good so far It's doing a pretty good job. I think there's a little bit here in his beret that we could tweak Right there to get that outlined a little better Don't want to go too far and then it'll bleed into the background But over here on the right side. It looks pretty good. It's up by his ear. You hold the option key to Retract some of that mask. So if you go there It creates sort of a minus and you can go back over areas that you don't want and you can see his ear We might have to refine that I'll show you a technique to do that And we're just gonna tweak this here a little bit more. I know this is like watching paint dry really isn't it? It's not that bad really some portraits are easier to to cut out using this tool this one's Turning out to be a little more harder than I thought it would be but it's still looking okay though It's gonna get his neck tweaked up here. We'll just look at this plaid shirt plaid can be difficult sometimes You want to make sure that all areas of the plaid are chosen and we'll just sort of do this here And we're getting there. We're almost done the more I get this refined here The less I'll have to do to kind of tweak it at the end. All right, so the shoulders looking good I'm just gonna go over to this side and make sure this is cut out properly. That looks pretty good I'm checking out the outline of his hand and his cigar that looks pretty good. That looks good there I just see I can miss in his thumb a bit right there. I just want to make sure I get that All right, that's looking like it's gonna be a pretty clean cut out I just want to check the beret again. You can see it's not perfect at the top I'm just gonna tweak it a little more and That's pretty good. Let's just see how this goes. So we're gonna go up to select and mask We'll click on that. Now. I've got this set for red so I could really see what's happening here Now I can just tweak this a little bit here So what I can do is I'll just go over this a little bit more right here in this area here Just a tiny bit there and maybe just a tiny bit right there. And so that should be okay There a little bit right here on his face I can make the smaller using my bracket key now another thing we can do too is what we'll do is we'll go output New layer with layer mask. We'll say okay. I could tweak just the layer mask So you can see here we have the white mask So if I want to bring in an area or take it back if I hit the D key and then the X key If you look over to the left I can toggle between black and white and what I could do is just disable everything in this photo Now we can just see the white I can zoom in command plus and you can see right here We have a part of his neck that looks a little off. So if I hit the X key I'm on black and make my brush a little smaller than what I could do is I could just tweak this back a bit So I'm on the wrong brush right now So I need to hit the B key and then we'll be on the right brush So to deselect I go command D. Screw it up a bit there I'll make that a little smaller and I could just tweak this gray right here and really get a little bit closer So that it's a more even of a cutout. We look at his ear. You could see it's a little bit jagged But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take down the back a little bit So you're probably not going to notice this X key here to bring the image back in So if you miss some of the image you could just hit the X key to bring that back So I'm just going to do that. But overall, I think it's pretty good for what we're going to do You'll see that this should work pretty good. All right So I'm going to bring everything back and again an easy way to look at both Hold the option key and the background key and you can see we've only got the eye adjustment showing So I'm going to do next is take a curves layer You can see right here curves and then before we brought the the brightness up I'm going to bring it down to about there And then what I'll do is hit the option key and I'm going to click on it You can see that downwards arrow right there What that does is it applies that curve darkening to this mask But you could see it's the opposite So what I want to do is click on the mask and click command I and now you could see how the background got darker And there's more emphasis on him It's almost like we lit him up in the background darker So command I again so you could see the darkening layer is applied to him But if I command I on that mask command I now the background is dark Now if you think that's too dark You just go to the curves layer and then also to put that on luminosity So we don't affect the color information on the back And then you could just slide that back and forth the opacity So if you just want to bring it down a little bit If you felt like you went too far you could do that with the opacity slider I'm going to go to about 80% I'll toggle that on and off so you can see it So that's without the curves layer on the background And that's with So you could see he really stands out a little more So I'm really starting to like the look at this Now I'm going to merge everything to the top And I'm going to try to make this look a little more gravelly So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to filter Other I'm going to go to high pass And we're going to add a high pass filter to get some added sharpness So I have it at a radius of about 30 And I'm going to say okay And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to soft light Now you could see I'm going to toggle this on and off You could see how this adds some added sharpness But it also is a little jagged But in this image it's kind of working But I think it's too much I'm going to take this down to about maybe 50% And we'll toggle it off and on again You could see it adds that added sharpness I still think that might be too sharp I'm going to go to about 40 Now another thing I'm going to do is add a contrast curve So we're going to go to curves layer And what I'll do is I'll bring the darks down a little bit And then I'll bring the brights up a little bit So I've created a contrast curve there Now I can toggle that on and off You could see that contrast Now we could go to soft light and see what that looks like That's way too much contrast I think We could also go to vivid light And you could see how this really affects this You could also go to hard light And that's too much too I'm going to go to soft light And then I'm going to drag this down to maybe about 20% We'll see how that looks Now we'll toggle that on and off So you could see how it adds that pop of contrast there And I think that might be too much I'm going to go with about 15 We've just added some contrast So let's go back to the background option And now you can see the differences We've made in this raw image So I think that's really coming together I'm starting to really like this Now the only thing I'm going to do now I think is I'm going to add A little bit more saturation to this I want this to be a little bit more Like an HDR type image Easiest thing I think would be To bring this up to about a plus five And let's have a look at that I'm going to toggle that off And then we'll toggle that on You know what? That might be a little too much I'm just going to tweak it just a bit I'm going to bring it down to about maybe just plus one That's about it there Now one thing I like to do when I get to this stage Is you can add some different colors To different areas So if we go to selective color You can see we can just adjust the blacks So we could put a little blue In the shadows if we want So if we go to the blacks here And then we're on neutrals If we go to blacks If I take the cyan to the right You'll see how we're kind of adding cyan to the dark So I like to do that with my images But not too much I'll say maybe let's add two to that Also you can go with your magenta slider You can see how that looks a little more purple Looks a little more green I like to take that to about a plus Plus one plus two Then you can take your yellow slider Again, looking at what colors you want to bring I think I want to go with maybe like a minus one on that And then if we just close that out And toggle it on and off You can see it just added a subtle difference To the darks Give it a bit of a bluer And then if we wanted to We could take some of the brights And add a little yellow Another way to do that too Is if you go to your levels Right here, click on levels, blue channel Now you can see here If I take the shadow slider You can see we're adding a little blue to the shadows And then if we take the right hand side The bright side, we're adding a little yellow So I think what I'll do is 255 is normal I think I'll go maybe 252 there And I think I'll add maybe two Ah, three there Now if any of this is too much for you Alls you have to do is adjust the opacity slider So I'm gonna toggle it on and off again I think that's pretty good I'm just gonna take it back to 80 I always like to kind of do a setting And then just take it back a bit So I'll put those both at about 80 And then we'll go to the background So option and then background So that's the before And then that's the after I'm gonna zoom in So you can see that a little bit better So that's the right image right there And then this is what we have Now I'm gonna do the last thing Is the smoke And so we'll come up here And I'll create a new layer And what I'm gonna do is go to the brush tool So I hit the B key I'm gonna pick a soft brush So if you come up here You'd see I'm on a soft brush And then what I'll do is I think I'll just take it in at about maybe 30% We'll see if that works And then what we'll probably have to do Is add a bit of a blur to this Now this may or may not work at all I haven't tested this so we'll see what happens I think I wanna make this to be about the same size As his smoke strand So I'll probably go about there And then what I'll do is I'm just gonna write Cuba And try to attach it to this part of the smoke We'll see what happens So I'm just gonna say Cuba And then I'm gonna attach it to that smoke Now that doesn't look real at all So what I'm gonna do Is I'm gonna go up to filter And I'm gonna go to blur I'm gonna go to Gaussian blur And then I'm gonna blur that So it looks like it fits with that smoke Which it doesn't at 40 I'm gonna try it at 30 We'll see if that looks a little more realistic Vaguely there Let's try 35 Let's see how that looks And we'll try 25 35, it's a little bit blurrier Let's try 25 Cause if it looks too sharp It's not gonna look right That's probably too sharp I'm gonna go with 30 And then what we can do Is adjust the opacity of that So I'll say okay And bring this over Now I don't know if that adds Anything to the image at all It's kind of neat I think I'm gonna just fade it out A little bit more So it looks like it's barely there And you'd have to kind of look to see it So I think we'll go with about 70% Let's just toggle that on and off Now that's too much I'm gonna toggle that to about maybe 50% And we just vaguely see that I might even go 40 And maybe it'd be subliminal Actually you won't even see it I better go about 45 So I've got a little subliminal cube over there I don't know if that does anything to the image or not I just thought I'd show you How to do kind of a fake smoke effect So that's what I would do If it was me I could probably also do some Dodging and burning of this image I could probably lighten up His eyes a little bit more But you know overall This is pretty good I kind of like it the way it is I just made a few tweaks Let's have a look one more time At the before and after The option key I click on the background And that was before And then so just look at his eyes And look at the sharpness And the colors of the image And how the background gets a little more darker And detailed And then we've got our added cube there That's just subliminal And then I could always take that off It's barely there I could maybe take it up to 50 Why not? All right so If you enjoyed this video Just leave a comment below Also hit that like button Share this video On the web with your fellow photographers And if you're not already a subscriber Just click on that subscribe button Also if you click on my name Craig Bechda You'll get to see a listing Of all of my videos I have over a hundred free videos So make sure you check out some of those videos as well All right hit that like button Leave a comment below Subscribe if you're not already a subscriber And I'll see you in the next video