Photoshop: Healing Brush and more December 11, 2008

I use the healing brush quite a bit. It’s great for getting rid of acne, discoloration, removing tattoos, any small thing you don’t want seen. I’m going to begin with an okay photo and run through the steps of how I can edit it to make everything look a bit better. This is really useful stuff that studios charge a lot of money to do, but is incredibly easy. Let’s start with the original image and the first thing we’re going to do is remove the blemishes.

Use the Healing Brush tool in the tools pallet. Zoom in on your photo and alt+click an area that’s somewhat close to where you plan to work. Use the smallest brush you can while still covering the blemish in the brush. Generally, the smaller you work, the less obvious the changes are. Just click away at the blemishes. You can click and hold and drag your brush all over an area, but sometimes the coloring gets funky, so it’s best to just click in specific spots. This can get tedious – maybe that’s what the studios charge for.

Teeth whitening is another handy skill to know. Sometimes you can use the dodge tool on teeth, but it tends to make teeth glow, which looks weird. Try just using a select tool, such as lasso, and draw around the teeth. If you click on the Quick Mask Mode button at the bottom of the tools pallet (the front-loading washing machine), it will put everything but your selection in red. Then you can zoom in and make a better outline. Paint brush will add to your selection, eraser will remove. Click the Quick Mask Mode button again and you’ll see the regular image and an outline of your selection. Now go to Layer –> New adjustment layer. Here you can try a couple things. Either select Curves and adjust the brightness that way, or try color balance. Color balance will probably work best with yellowed teeth. What you’ve done is create a layer with only the teeth in it so you can adjust the look of your teeth without affecting the rest of the image.

Make me skinnier! This is a hit-or-miss method, but using the Smudge tool can often be the easiest way to squeeze a waist. In this example, I’ve taken in the arm a little. I select the smudge tool from the tools pallet, again using a fairly small sized brush, and work my way up and down the arm, smudging just a little at a time from left to right. The image will blur where you smudge, so you have to be clever about it. Sometimes smudging down is better than smudging right or left; follow the lines in the image. I’ve also gone over some of the image with the Blur Tool (located in the tools pallet) to help make the smudging less noticeable.

I really like the orange lights in this picture, but that guy in the lower left is killing me. By using the Burn tool, I can burn away the extra stuff in this image and blend it into the darkness. I adjust the range of the burn too to midtones (you can play with the ranges to see which works best) and go over all the extra people and objects. This leaves me with a nice clean background that no longer deters from the focus of the picture.

One thing that really bothers me about this picture is the random strand of hair hanging over the face. So I’m going to fill it in using the Clone Tool. Select the clone tool from the tools pallet. On the image, pick an area very near to where you plan to work and alt+click. You’ve now told the program where the origin of your clone is. After that, I can paint along the bare space and clone in the new hair. This can be a difficult tool, so be patient with it.

Photography: Using Reflectors September 30, 2008

Wouldn’t be so nice and easy if everywhere you went to shoot had absolute perfect light? Unfortunately, good lighting can sometimes be a challenge – but not impossible to find. If you’re doing a formal shoot, a portrait for instance, take the time to find a place with good lighting. Lighting kits are nice, but not always necessary. Sometimes a simple reflector will do the trick.

You can buy a reflector (I have a reversible one that is silver one side and gold on the other and folds up nicely into a little bag), or you can just buy a piece of white poster board. Reflectors simply bounce light. If you’re taking a photo of someone or something outside in the sunlight, you might face heavy shadows in places you don’t want them.  You can angle a reflector to bounce light into those dark areas. It’s much better to have all your lighting and coloring right when you take the picture, rather than trying to correct it in Photoshop.

Here is an example of a portrait taken with available (or ambient) lighting and a reflector. I looked for a room with good natural light. In this case, a glass door. The subject is sitting on the floor of her master bedroom, maybe a foot away from the door. I leaned a gold reflector at about a 45 degree angle slightly behind her to catch the light strongest through the glass and bounce back to her to light the dark side of her face and hair. The gold reflector gives a warm feeling and almost looks like a light is there, rather than a shiny piece of plastic.

In this case, an assistant would have been helpful. I leaned the reflector against a bed post, and hoped it did what I needed it to as the subject moved. This picture could be improved by having the light directed from behind her to give some separation between her hair and the background. An assistant is good to have to adjust the direction of the light without you, the photographer, missing a shot (especially important when photographing little ones!)

Notice the background is almost black. I adjusted my light meter only to my subject, leaving the dark background slightly underexposed and not a distraction. There were some small objects visible towards the bottom, which I got rid of by using the burn tool in Photoshop – totally ligit for something like this.

The burn tool is found in the PS tools palet. You can adjust the brush size simply by pressing [ for smaller and ] to make it bigger. At the top of the screen you can also adjust the intensity of the burn tool and the range it adjusts; shadows, highlights or midtones. But that’s for another lesson…