The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers part 26 doc

Step Six: First, press Command-D PC: Ctrl-D to Deselect, then go to the Layers panel and lower the Opacity for this gradient layer until the sky looks more realistic and blends in better

Step Four:

If you’ve never used the Magic Wand tool

before, you’ve already learned that

some-times it leaves little white gaps where it

didn’t quite select every little pixel That’s

why, when I use the Magic Wand tool to

select something like a sky, I usually

ex-pand the selection outward by 1 pixel to

pick up that little edge pixel it sometimes

misses To do that, go under the Select

menu, under Modify, and choose Expand

When the Expand Selection dialog appears

(shown here), enter 1, and click OK to grow

your selection by 1 pixel

TIP: The Color Selector Ring

That ring that appears when you use the

Eyedropper tool is new in CS5, and it’s

there to help you see which color you’re

selecting The outside ring is a neutral

gray, which just helps to make sure you’re

seeing the right color without being

influ-enced by other colors around it The

bottom half of the inside ring shows the

old color, and the top half shows what

your Foreground color would change

to if you clicked right now

Step Five:

Go to the Layers panel and add a new,

blank layer by clicking on the Create

a New Layer icon at the bottom of the

panel, then switch to the Gradient tool

(G), and click-and-drag your gradient

from about the bottom 1/3 of the photo

upward to about the top 1/3 (the light

blue color should be at the bottom of

the gradient) This fills the photo with a

gradient made up of your Foreground

and Background colors (as seen here)

For some images, you can leave this

gradient as is, but I think it usually looks

Step Six:

First, press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D)

to Deselect, then go to the Layers panel

and lower the Opacity for this gradient

layer until the sky looks more realistic

and blends in better with the rest of

the image (in the image shown here,

I thought that was around 78%, but

you’ll have to make the call on an

image by image basis)

In previous versions of Photoshop, when we wanted to dodge and burn, we

had to jump through a bunch of hoops (creating special layers, and using blend

modes and such), because the Dodge and Burn tools were…well…let’s just say

they weren’t the best Luckily, Adobe greatly updated these tools, which totally

fixed the problem, and now it’s safe to use the Dodge and Burn tools for

lightening and darkening different parts of your image

Using the Dodge and Burn Tools

Step One:

In the photo shown here, we want to highlight the store at the top of the stair-case (and the stairstair-case itself), but the light simply didn’t fall where we wish it had, so first we’re going to dodge (lighten) the staircase and the store (so they’re the brightest things in the photo, and draw the eye) Then, we’re going to burn (dark-en) the areas that we wish were darker (like the walls on either side, and the area above the store at the top of the stairs)

Basically, we’re just going to rearrange how the light is falling on our photo Now,

I don’t dodge and burn directly on the

photo Instead, press Command-J (PC:

Ctrl-J) to duplicate the layer That way,

if we don’t like what we’ve done, we can lessen the effect (by lowering the layer’s opacity) or undo it altogether by throw-ing the layer away

Step Two:

Get the Dodge tool (O) from the Tool box

(as shown here), and begin painting over

the area you want to lighten (in our case,

we’ll start by painting over the center

of the staircase—you can see the brush

cursor near the bottom of the stairs in

the example shown here) Keep holding

the mouse button down as you paint,

because the Dodge and Burn tools have a

build-up effect—each time you release the

mouse button and start painting again,

the amount of Dodge (or Burn) builds up

TIP: Your Brush Cursor Works Better

Back in CS4, Adobe tweaked how the

brush tip cursor works, so that if you

move it over something darker than it

is (which happens very often), it

actu-ally has a very tiny glow around it, so

now you can see the size and location

of your brush dramatically easier when

you’re over dark areas

Step Three:

Release the mouse button, and paint over

that same area again, and you’ll see how

it gets another level brighter Remember—

while the mouse button is held down,

you’re painting one level of brightness

Release the mouse button, then

click-and-paint over that area, and you’re click-and-painting

over the original brightness with more

brightness, and so on (it’s kind of like

polishing a silver platter—the more times

you polish it, the brighter it gets) Now

look at how much brighter the staircase

is here, compared with the original image

in Step One

Step Four:

Now, let’s work on the store’s front at the

top of the stairs Start painting over it

to dodge (brighten), release the mouse

button, paint it again, and repeat, until it

really stands out (like you see here) Now,

before we switch to burning in the

back-ground, take a look up in the Options Bar

for this tool, and you can see that we’ve

been dodging just the Midtones (and

that’s generally where I do my dodging

and burning), but if you wanted the tool

to just affect the Highlight or Shadow areas,

you can choose that from that Range

pop-up menu Also, the 50% Exposure amount

is fine for something like this, but if I were

doing this on a portrait, I’d usually want

something much more subtle, and I’d lower

the amount to around 10%–15%

Step Five:

Now let’s switch to burning: first start

by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to

duplicate your top layer (so, at this point,

you’ve got the original untouched image

as your Background layer, the brightened

Dodge layer in the middle (I renamed it

“Dodge layer” just to make it easier to see),

and a copy of the brightened layer on

top, which is the one we’re going to burn

on (I named it “Burn layer”) By keeping

everything on separate layers, if you don’t

like the burning effect, you can reduce it

by lowering the opacity, or delete it

al-together and you won’t lose the dodging

you did on the layer below it Now get the

Burn tool (as shown here), and paint over

the walls on either side of the staircase

By darkening those areas, it puts the focus

on the staircase even more, which leads

Step Six:

Now, paint over the wall area above the

store, and then I’d go over the walls on

the side of the staircase one more time,

because they’re still pretty bright, and

still drawing the eye a bit too much One

more thing: up in the Options Bar you’ll

see a checkbox for Protect Tones That’s

the checkbox that helps to keep the color

of what you’re dodging and burning

in-tact, so things just get brighter or darker,

and not sunburned and color saturated

I leave this on all the time, even when

I’m not dodging and burning portraits

(which is when it’s most useful) Below

is a before/after, and while I’m usually

fairly subtle with my dodging and

burn-ing, here I took things a little farther

than I normally would, just to show a

clear example of the power of dodging

and burning

Step One:

Here’s a photo I shot in the middle of the day, using an off-camera flash with

a shoot-through umbrella (up high, aiming down toward my subject, and placed to the left of my camera position) to add some dimension and depth to the light

The problem is that the scene was too bright to shoot it at f/2.8 without stacking

a bunch of neutral density filters on

my lens (which I didn’t have with me

at the time), so my f-stop wound up being f/13, which means everything is

in sharp focus (great for landscape shots,

or in-studio portraits, but not so great here on location with a busy, and fairly unattractive, background)

Shooting at a wide-open aperture (like f/4, f/2.8, or f/2, etc.) is very popular with

outdoor portraits, because it creates a very shallow depth of field, putting the

background out of focus, which adds separation and helps your subject stand out

from a busy background The problem is that you can’t always shoot at

wide-open apertures—especially in bright sunlight—but luckily for us, there’s a

fix we can apply in Photoshop to create that “shot wide open” look

Fixing Depth-of-Field Problems

Step Two:

Start by getting the Quick Selection tool

(shown circled here), and paint over the

bride As you do, it does all the hard work

for you, and selects the bride (there’s a lot

more of the Quick Selection tool later in

this chapter) The one problem area is

the gap beside her arm on the right—it

selects that area, too (which shouldn’t be

selected), so press-and-hold the Option

(PC: Alt) key, then use the Left Bracket

key to shrink your brush size way down,

and paint over that area (as seen here)

and it gets deselected

Step Three:

By itself, the Quick Selection tool doesn’t

always make nice, smooth selections, so

once your selection is in place, click the

Refine Edge button up in the Options

Bar In the View pop-up menu, choose

Black & White (so you see a white/black

mask view, as seen here), then turn on

the Smart Radius checkbox (make sure

you read “Making Really Tricky Selections”

later in this chapter for why we’re doing

this) Now, since this is a fairly simple

selection (no fine hair blowing in the

wind, etc.), you’ll just drag the Radius

slider a little bit to the right (as shown

here, where I dragged it to 3.6 pixels)

to smooth out the selection and make

it less jaggy Down in the Output section,

make sure Output To is set to Selection,

then click OK

Step Four:

This returns you to your image with your

smoother, more refined selection in place

Press Command-Shift-I (PC: Ctrl-Shift-I)

to Inverse your selection, so the

back-ground is selected Now it’s time to add

the blurring The Gaussian Blur filter looks

too fake and tends to smear things a bit,

so go under the Filter menu, under Blur,

and choose Lens Blur, which gives a more

lens-like blur When the Lens Blur dialog

appears, drag the Radius slider to around

50, then click OK (this isn’t the fastest

fil-ter, so it’ll take a minute or so), and press

Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect

Note: We’re not putting her up on her own

separate layer, then blurring the Background

layer, because the original image of her

would still be on the Background layer She

would blur back there, then you’d have to

clone away her smeared edges

Step Five:

If this was a close-up head-and-shoulders

type shot, you could get away with leaving

the entire background behind her really

blurry, but because this shot is a ¾-length,

it looks kind of weird seeing the ground

a foot behind her totally out of focus, so

we’re going to tweak this just a bit to get

a more realistic effect for this particular

image Get the History Brush tool (Y),

which I think of as “undo on a brush,” and

choose a really huge, soft-edged brush

tip size from the Brush Picker up in the

Options Bar (like the one you see here—

I used the Right Bracket key on my

key-board to jump up to a 900-pixel brush),

then paint a single stroke from the far

left, straight across to the far right This

removes the blurring from this area right

behind the bride, and because you used

Step Six:

When you’re painting with that brush,

don’t paint all the way to the bottom

of the photo—leave a little bit blurry at

the bottom to mimic what real shallow

depth of field would create, which is

a little bit of shallow focus right at the

front of the image Lastly, I would finish

this photo off by adding a dark edge

vignette Go under the Filter menu and

choose Lens Correction When the

dialog appears, click on the Custom tab,

then in the Vignette section (shown at

the bottom here), drag the Amount to

–88 to darken the edges, and the

Mid-point to +29 to extend that darkening

farther in toward the center, then click

OK If your bride looks a bit dark, press

Command-L (PC: Ctrl-L) to bring up

Levels and click the Auto button That

should do the trick