 Hey everybody, it's Craig back to here, and in this video I'm going to show you how to improve your photos fast in Photoshop. Alright, let's get started. Alright, so here we are in Adobe Camera Raw, and we just open up a raw image, and I'll walk you through how to set up Adobe Camera Raw, a couple of adjustments, and then we'll move to Photoshop. Alright, first thing, look at the bottom of your screen in Adobe Camera Raw, click on that, make sure your color space is Adobe RGB. If you see S-RGB, that's the color space of the web, you want to make sure that you're on Adobe RGB. So click on that, also make sure that you're on 16 bits, not 8 bits. And then we have our default camera settings, resolution 300 pixels, sharpen for screen. If you wanted to open this in Photoshop as a smart object, you would check that box. That would allow you to go back to Adobe Camera Raw and make further adjustments. I'm not going to do that, so I'm going to click OK. So this was shot about three hours before sunset with the Mola SETI, just a one light setup, and it was with the Einstein. And you can see here we have our camera data, so this was shot on the 85 f1.4, and this was shot at f1.8, shutter speed 250, ISO 64, and on the 85mm, the Nikon D810. And we have Adobe Color Profile, and the white balance was shot at 63.50 minus 2. Now what's great about raw images is we can adjust that white balance after the fact, so it was JPEG, we wouldn't be able to do that. So as shot, I don't really like that. You can click on auto, they're suggesting it be a little cooler, 5500 Kelvin. I think I like it more at cloudy, and as far as the slider there, the tint, I'm pretty happy with that. If we wanted to make it more green, we go to the left, more magenta to the right, I'm somewhere happy around maybe, let's say, 12. So you can use the keyboard also too, instead of the slider to drag it around. And I've got my exposure at about plus 10. You can see if I go all the way to the right, we're blowing out. So if you don't see the red indicators of your blown out highlights, make sure you click on the top right. And then as far as the shadows, if you don't see the blue, make sure you click there, that'll show you both. As far as the exposure goes, I'm pretty happy with the initial exposure somewhere around what I shot it at. It's pretty good as far as I'm concerned. Now as far as contrast, highlights, shadows, I don't do a lot of that in Adobe Camera Raw. I don't really think I need to bring up the shadows here, but if you feel like you do, here's your shadow slider. If you feel like your highlights are a little too bright, you can adjust that left. You can see how that sort of tones down some of the highlights. Now that I look at that, I could probably go at maybe minus 10 on that. And then here, if I wanted more detail in our genes, for example, I could bring up the shadow slider to do that. So I'll just leave that at about probably plus 12. So I'm pretty happy with this. A lot of things I'm going to do in Photoshop. I'm going to click on Open Image, and that will open it up in Photoshop. All right, so here we are in Photoshop. The first thing I'm going to do is Command-J on the Mac, and that's going to create a duplicate layer that we can work on. Now when I look at this, I make a first overall assessment. I think I want to adjust the crop. I look at the bottom, I can see some distracting elements around her feet. I want to make sure that all the focus of this is on the portrait. So the first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to come over to the crop tool. If you look to the left-hand side, upper left, that's the crop tool. And I'm just going to drag this down. And I'm going to get rid of that distracting element at the top. And I don't want to have too much headroom there, because I really want the focus to be on her. So I'll bring that there. Again, I don't need a lot of footroom here, just right about there. So if you look at the whole composition, it's slightly improved. I hit the Return key or Enter key, and that's our crop. Make sure you have Delete Crop Pixels checked. That way, if you want to go back and redo your crop, you can do that. All right, so we're going to work on that layer. First thing we're going to do is use the Healing Brush. If you come over to the left, this is our Healing Brush tool. We're going to click on that on the Mac. Command-Plus to zoom in. So I'm just looking for anything that's a little bit distracting that I may want to clear up. So maybe a freckle, a mole, or a blemish, something like that. So what we can do is we hit the Option key on a nearby area. We could just paint over it like that. So make sure that you're sampling from a nearby area so that the lighting and the skin tone is very similar. So I'm just showing you how that works there. So that's just the Option key, Option, and then you can just sort of tweak that like that. And then again, Option nearby, and then you could just sort of paint over any areas that you may find distracting. And we'll just make a couple more adjustments here. But because this is sort of out a little bit, I don't have to go too crazy. If I want to make this bigger, I can just use my bracket keys, and then I could just sort of paint over some areas like that. And again, because this is sort of a zoomed out kind of environmental portrait, I don't have to go too crazy with some of these details. I just want to show you how this works. In a second, I'm going to show you how to use the Clone Stamp tool to clean up the road area. And so we're pretty good right here. Okay, so I'm going to just zoom out Command minus. And then what I'll do is with that road area, I can create a new layer if I wanted to, or we could work on that. But it'll just to show you Command J, I can create a new layer. Now we can come over to the Clone Stamp tool right here, and I'll click on that. And then what we can do is we can zoom in a bit just to make sure that we're getting all of the detail that we want here. So anything that's distracting, again, I can use my bracket key, the option key nearby, and I can just clone out this area here. So anything that maybe would draw your eye to that area, then we can fix that. So these are quick fixes. So I've shown you the Healing Brush, and now this is the Clone Stamp tool. And these will help you to clean up any little area. So be conscious of where there's a shadow. You don't want to take light and bring it into the shadow. So just be conscious of that. Now I'll just make my brush a little bigger here, option, and I just find this a little bit distracting. So I'm just going to get rid of this. Now you can take as much time as you want on this. I just sort of wanted to show you how this works. Just by your foot there, I find that little distracting there. I'm just going to fix that. So I'll make this brush a little smaller so I can get close to the shoe. And then we're just going to take this element out so it doesn't look like it's part of her shoe. Just to give that shoe a little bit of detail there. And so that's how that works. So that's the Clone Stamp tool. So let me just show you before and after. So if I hold the Option key and I click on this, you could see the road there where I've taken out a few elements. And what we can also do is we can put a vignette on this if we want to just darken down that road even more because it doesn't even really matter. Now when I look at this image, it really doesn't need much more. Now what we could do is we could bring a little more warmth into the highlights, maybe a little cool in the shadows. So let me show you how that works. If I come down here and I click on Levels, you can see our levels pop up. If I go to the blue channel, if I'm on the bottom slider here, if I slide it to the right, you could see how we have a lot of blues in the image there. So I can bring a little blues into the shadows, but also I can bring a little yellow into the highlights. So I don't wanna go too far with that. You can see 255 is sort of the peak white point. So if I go to about maybe 250, 253, you can see I'm just bringing in a little bit of yellow and again, zero would be zero. And then I just bring in a little bit of blue in the shadows. So that's a way to just bring a subtle amount. If you thought you went too far, you can adjust your opacity on that level. Now another thing we can do too is bring in some extra contrast. So if I click on Curves, I could create what they call an S Curve. So I can bring the shadows down and the highlights up and you can see how this is sort of an S shape. Now I don't wanna crush the darks. But now what's happening here is we're affecting the color of this image as well. So what we can do with our blend mode is we can go from Normal to Luminosity. Now you can see how we're not affecting the color as much. And then what we can do is we can adjust the opacity of this layer. You can see we're 100%. If I drag this down to say, let's say 24%, if I click on and off, you can see that we've just sort of enhanced that a bit. I could probably go with about close to 30. And you can see that we've got a little more pop in that image, a little more contrast between the highlights and the shadows. Now overall, this image doesn't need a lot more work. But if you click here, you can see, if I hit the Option key, I can click on and off. So that's before and after. Now if we wanted to, we could bring a different color tone. I'm pretty happy with that yellow. So let's say for example, that we wanted to bring a different color to that area. What I could do is I can create a new layer, I can click here, and then I could use the color palette. So if I went over here, I could pick a tone that I wanted to put in there. So let's say I wanted to bring more of an autumn kind of feel or tone to it. So let's say we picked a, let's see what color that is. Let's get one that's saturated. So it's a bit of an orange color. Now if I hit the X key, that switches, and then if I hit Command Delete, that fills that layer with that orange kind of autumn tone. Now what we can do is we can create a mask for that. So if I hit the Option key and I click here, then I've created a black mask. So you can see that is black. Now what I can do is I can brush over that mask and bring in that color tone and then adjust the opacity for example. So if I hit the B key, you can see we have a flow of about 30. I could go with maybe a flow of about 10%, the opacity of a hundred. And then I just wanna make sure that my brush is soft. So if I click here, now again the softness is gonna be determined also by the size of your brush. And then I can make this brush a little bit bigger by using my bracket keys. And what I can do is I can bring in some of this orange tone into here if I wanted to. I can just sort of take this and just sort of make it a little orangy in this area. And really this is just sort of to taste. And then what we can do is we can adjust this a little better. Now if you're looking at this and thinking I can't really see what's happening, if you hold the option key and you click on that mask, you could see here where it's lighter in some areas and where you've brushed over. So we can just make sure that we've got some evenness there. So it's not brighter in one area. Again the option key, click on that mask and you can see we've brought in that orange. Now it's a little bit too much I think. So what we can do is we can drag that opacity down to something like say 20%. Still too much. We can bring it down to maybe 5%. And then if I click on enough, and it's just a personal taste. That's just a way to maybe add a little something to an image to the background to change the color. And I think maybe orange probably wasn't the best color. But I just wanted to demonstrate that. So that's about maybe 5% opacity. It adds a little something there in the background, not too much, but it warmed it up a little bit. But that's just one way that you could do that. Now let's just finish this off with a little dodging and burning. In order to do that, we can hold the option key and click on a new layer. And we can name that dodge if we wanted to. And then what we do is we'd go to our mode. We'll click on soft light and check the box here. Fill with soft light, neutral color, gray. That's gonna create a gray layer. Now we can use this to dodge. Then we can use another layer to burn. So for example, what I'll do is hit the B key. And then what I like to do is maybe go with about 2%. So our opacity is 100 or flow is two. I'll zoom in a bit. And what I can do here is take the areas of highlight and just highlight them a little more. So I could just sort of take this and brighten that existing highlight on her arm. For example, I could take her hair and I could just adjust the highlights of her hair. So we could just take the already highlighted areas and we could just emphasize those. Now I've just made a mistake. If you look over here, I've got a black and an orange brush. So what I want for highlights is white. So if that happens, you hit the D key and then the X key. And now I have white on the top. So let me just get rid of that layer and we'll do that again. So I hit option, I create a new layer. I'll call that one dodge. And then I'll hit soft light here. Fill with neutral color, gray. So if something like that happens, if you do work with layers, you can always get rid of that layer and start again. So that's one thing about that workflow. So again, now we're on here. Pass these 100, flows two. We have a white brush on that gray layer. Now this is gonna work. All right, so sometimes that happens. So again, here we can just take that and now if I toggle on and off, you can see that we have a bit of a highlight there. So I'll just do a little bit on her hair and then I'll show you how to do the burning. So what I'll do is I'll never try to really brighten an area that isn't already bright. So we'll just check that, get off that box there. And I'll take that down here. So I kind of wanna do individual strands here. So I'll just sort of lighten these strands that are already light. And I'll just put a little more emphasis here on some of the brighter areas of her hair. And I'm just kind of going over lightly and then you can build this up over time. So that's why I like to have that flow of two. I don't really wanna go crazy with these highlights. I just wanna bring them in subtly. And again, you can reduce the opacity or you can create a new layer. Now also, when it comes to the hairline, let's create a burn layer here, same thing. Option, I'll click here. I'll say burn and I'll click on soft light. I know this was to be how to improve your photos fast but I wanna show you as much as I can in this video. All right, so now we have a burn layer. So the opposite, I hit the X key. Now I'm on the dark brush. Now what I can do is to give her more emphasis, I can sort of darken this area of her hairline here. So if I toggle on and off, you can see that I'm just sort of bringing the hairline in a little bit. And then that's just gonna help to frame her face a little bit. Now if I want it to, I can darken her eyebrows, for example. I don't think she really needs that. I could do this too. I'll show you how to bring up the eyes in a second but I can darken the pupils and then that'll help when it comes to brightening her eyes. And then I could just sort of darken where she has a little eye shadow here around her eyes. I can do that as well. I can just sort of darken the lip a little bit. And anywhere there's a shadow, I can just sort of enhance those shadows a little more. So this is just the burning. So I'm just sort of giving this image a little more dimension. Now I can create multiple burn layers and I can sort of bring up shadow areas, for example, too. So I can go to her arm here and I can just sort of emphasize this shadow just a little bit here if I wanted to. So that's how you would burn. And there's also another way to burn. So dodging and burning can be done with a curves layer as well. So I'll show you how to do that. So let's say we wanna dodge with our curves layer. I can bring that up and then again what I wanna do is go to luminosity so I don't affect the colors and then what we wanna do is go command I and then that becomes a mask and what I can do is I can paint on that again. So I'm on white there. You can see on the left, I'll zoom in with command plus and then with a brush again, I could dodge with the curves layer. And the one thing about using a curves layer is you're never going to go brighter than how you've set your curve. So that's a good thing right there. So what I can do is just make this small enough and then I could just go to the area that I wanna brighten. We can also make sure that that catch light, we can brighten that catch light in her eye a bit. And then usually what I do is I'll just lighten the bottom portion of the eye. All right, so we're gonna wrap this up. I'm gonna zoom out. We'll have a look at the before and after. I'll just show you that curves layer there. So on and off, you can see that it's just subtle on her eyes. If you wanna bring it up more, you can. If you feel like you're maxed out, you can always just sort of raise your slider here too. That'll give you a little more brightness. That's just another way to do it after the fact. All right, let's have a quick look at the before and after. You hit the option key on the Mac or the alt on the PC. You click on the background layer. So that's the before image right there. And then if I click here, you can see that's the after. So I've added some subtle enhancements. I've done some healing, some cloning, some color toning. I brought in a little bit of a hint of color to the top. I've done a little bit of dodging and burning. But that's pretty much all you have to do to really take your images to the next level in Photoshop. All right, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, post them down below. I'd like to hear some of your feedback. If you'd like to see future videos, let me know. Hit that like button. Subscribe if you're not already a subscriber. And I'll see you in the next video.