ptg 231Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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 a little too fakey, which is why there’s a Step Six. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 232 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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). Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 233Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Continued 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 staircase 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. SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 234 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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 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. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 235Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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 the eye. (Whether you realize it or not, you’re painting with light. Cool!) Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 236 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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. Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg SCOTT KELBY 237Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Continued 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 Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 238 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 239Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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 such a huge brush, it fades off behind her into the blurriness. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 240 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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. Before After Download from www.wowebook.com . www.wowebook.com ptg 236 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Six: Now, paint over the wall area above the store, and then I’d go over the. Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Six: First, press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect, then go to the Layers panel and lower the Opacity for this gradient. Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 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