Zillah's Basic Touch-Up Tutorial

Zillah

So, we begin with a photo of some nice people I met in New York.





Cropping

First things first, we crop it for better composition. We'll chop out the empty bits (highlighted in red above). Use the crop tool, found here:




Select the area you want to keep and then double click it. The rest will vanish from the image, like so:





Levels

Next, we adjust the "levels", found here:







Which leads to a graph like this:



The bit in the middle is different for every photo. Essentially it represents the amount of light and dark in the image. You can see three arrows at the bottom of the central piece.

The left arrow is black, this one controls the darkest parts of the photo. The right arrow is white and controls the brightest parts of the photo. The centre arrow is grey and controls the balance between light and dark. Moving the centre arrow left will brighten the darkest parts and visa versa.

The black wave in the centre shows how much of light or dark there is in the photo. As you can see in this photo there is lots of dark and very little light.

In general you should make it so that the Black and White arrows match up with the edges of the shape in the centre, this gives the correct balance between them. To correct this image I moved the right arrow until it lined up with the edge of the wave shape and I moved the centre arrow a little to the left to brighten up the darker parts a little, like this:



The net result being:





Levels is a very natural way of improving the tonal balance. For example, simply using "Brightness" to brighten it results in this (which is very washed out and mucky):





NEXT UP - Removing Red Eye and Sharpening.

EDIT: Clarification and Image reduction.

DeVore

Good tutorial, I always wanted a clear explanation of levels, I use them but I just mucked about until I got something I liked. now at least I have pointers as to how to do that better!

DeV.

Zillah

Thank you! Its nice to know its actually useful. Although some of the images appear to not be working at the moment. Stupid imageshack. Maybe it's just work computers not cooperating...

I'll check when I get home and redo the broken bits. The images are also a bit large I think.

311

A nice post zillah ,certainly what people like me need to know ,
I've found with photography that people come up with stuff that you don't expect ,thats makes it even more exciting for people like me.

Again ,thanks to the originators of this idea for this sub forum.
I never have the chance to use photoshop ,much appreciate all the info.

Brian.

5uspect

Very good explaination of levels, this would work great with an explaination of curves as it leads directly on from there. Maybe show how to obtain the same effect with curves as an introduction.

Zillah

5uspect wrote:

Very good explaination of levels, this would work great with an explaination of curves as it leads directly on from there. Maybe show how to obtain the same effect with curves as an introduction.

I'm actually not familiar enough with curves to do a tutorial on it. I've never found the need to use them in terms of photographic post processing.

In fact, the only time I recal using curves for a genuine purpose was when I was trying to highlight a spooky shadow in a photo from the paranormal forum

[rest of tutorial impending]

Zillah

Removing Red Eye

Note: There are many ways of doing most things. This is just one way, one I happen to like.

So, we take our photo above and we go "hmm, those levels made it look real nice...but, she looks like a vampire with her glowing red eyes". Lets fix that.

First things first, make a new layer (on the top bar go to "layer", then "new", then "layer". Simple) and call it "Eye Fix" or something similar. Make sure it is on top. Everything should look like this:



The bit highlighted in red is called the "Blending Mode". Its a pop down menu, one for each layer in the image.

The Blending Mode dictates how the layer interacts with the layers below it. This one is currently set to "normal", which means that the layer will simply sit on top of the others, blocking them from view. For this tutorial we want to set it to "Colour", which is near the bottom of the list.

"Colour" blending mode makes it so that photoshop will take the colour info from the top layer, and apply it to the texture and saturation (colour density) of the layer below. This is a great way for changing the colour of something and keeping it looking natural.

For removing red eye this means that we won't lose any details from the eye, it'll look natural.

Now, with your "Eye Fix" layer selected, zoom in on the subjects eyes, like this:





Now. Go to the brush tool, here:




Select the brush and you'll see a tool bar appear at the top. On the left is the word "Brush" along with the current size of the brush. Click the little arrow beside that, here:




When you click that you get this control panel:



The two factors here are "Master Diameter" (aka "size") and "Hardness". Size is obvious, its how many pixels you'll paint at once. "Hardness" measures how fuzzy the edge of the brush is. 100% will give a sudden solid line, while 1% will gives a very large and soft area around the brush.

Personally I like it nice and soft for this kind of thing, so I'll set mine to 20% hardness. You'll need a pretty small brush, but the number depends on the size of the image. Anywhere from 1 to 5 or more is fine. I'll set mine to 3 pixels.

Make sure you're painting on the "Eye Fix" layer, make sure that layer is on "Colour" mode and set the brush to the colour black in the bottom left. Once all thats set, slowly paint over the red parts of the eye.

Don't worry about being too precise, its quite forgiving with a soft brush, and don't worry about going over that bright spark in the centre, it won't be affected, its white so the "colour" blending mode will ignore it. Here's mine half done:




If you turn off the background layer you'll be able to see the brushwork on its own, like this:




Its really that easy. Zoom out and look at the rest of the image, no red eye:



Note: This method can be used for all sorts of stuff, not just Red Eye correction. You could change someone's brown iris to blue, or purple if you like. Clothes, flowers, anything.

Next up, sharpening, then framing!

slumped

Hey man, great tutorial.

Keep it coming. I've been fumbleing around now for a while is PS and missed out on a couple of things and this has helped greatly.

Cheers.
S

blastman

Great tutorial, Zillah, thanks. I found the levels part very useful indeed.

eamon234

Hi Zillah - great tutorial thanks.
Mind you when it comes to red-eye I find Adobe Photo album has a great edit feature for getting rid of it as does most off the shelf software that comes with cameras and printers these days. I normally remove the red eye with these first it's much quicker and just as effective and then move to Photoshop for the rest.
Are there any PS plugins available for removing red-eye?