Approaching Photoshop Efforts With an Eye toward Layers A Step-by-Step Procedure

Explained

By: Marty Kesselman June 3, 2009

We keep talking about layers and that they are useful and important to use in Photoshop. It may seem to many people that are not that proficient in Photoshop, that to make layers for this or that is just extra unnecessary work. Yes it may be unnecessary extra work but it helps you to organize your enhancements and permits you to focus your attention on specific efforts. It could also make it easier to make certain changes to work efforts by keeping similar enhancements on the same layer.

To help explain, I will take you through a typical workflow. Along the way you will learn various techniques and methods to do things. This work is done using CS 2.

1- Open an image. This image was purposely under exposed to accommodate the bright tent roof.

2- Immediately make a copy of the background layer by pressing ctl+j. This will protect your original image for possible future use of the untouched image.

3- Adjust the lighting using levels (layer>new adjustment layer>levels; click OK in the new Layer window).

a. Make your adjustments and click OK.

i. Adjust white level ii. Adjust black level

iii. Adjust midtones iv. Make correction to color balance (set

gray point) using the middle eyedropper

b. The process has created a new layer for you, above the background copy layer. Since this is an adjustment layer it comes with an attached mask layer that is filled with white. White reveals so all the adjustments that you made affect the entire image.

i. This adjustment has brightened everything including the tent roof, which is now blown-out.

ii. To restore the tent to the original exposure we can mask the image so that only the tent is masked.

1. Select the tent using any tools you like, I used the magnetic lasso.

2. How do I get the mask into the already created levels layer? With the selected tent active (marching ants) I create a new levels adjustment layer above the old one, click OK. This will create an adjustment layer, but will also create a mask for it of the selection you made.

a. This selection is the tent roof. To invert the selection, activate the mask by clicking on the mask icon. A border will highlight the mask icon to indicate it is active.

b. Press ctl+i to invert the mask. This will make everything white that was black and visa versa.

c. Now lets replace the previous layers mask with this mask.

i. Drag the desired mask icon down to the previous layer.

1. Answer yes to the replace mask question.

2. The mask has been moved to the original levels adjustment layer and is removed from the new layer.

3. Throw away the new layer since we dont need it.

a. With Levels 2 layer highlighted, click the garbage can.

iii. We have now masked the tent roof from the levels adjustment. Everything except the tent roof has now been lightened by the levels adjustment.

4- I now want to check the image for dust spots on the sensor. a. To do this we will want to fix any dust spots so I make a new layer for

spots. i. With the top layer active (highlighted) click the new layer icon

(page in a page next to the garbage pail). ii. Double click the word layer 1 and after the name is highlighted

type spot and press enter. iii. We will use the spot healing brush to fix any spots we find. iv. Enlarge the image to look at a full pixel image by double clicking

the magnifying glass. 1. Press the home key to navigate instantly to the upper left

corner of the image. Check where you are by opening the navigator by clicking the tab in your workspace (or window>navigator).

2. Navigate down, one box image at a time by pressing page down, continue to observe any spots.

3. When you get to the bottom press ctl+page-down to navigate to the right one column (ctl+page-up navigates to the left).

4. Navigate up by pressing page up check for spots. When you get to the top, navigate to the right by clicking ctl+page-down.

5. Continue looking for dust spots on the sensor. a. When you find one use the spot healing tool to

remove the spot by adjusting the size of your brush with the hard bracket keys ([]) so that the brush is slightly larger than your spot and single click over the spot (blending info is taken from the edges-leave room). This should blend the spot from the image. Some times it takes more than one click of the healing tool.

Notice spot of dust (slightly grey circle) located above tree (center of cursor is on the spot).

Healing brush pressed twice removed the dust spot.

5- The spot repair is on its own layer and can be later modified without concern of changing the body of the image pixels. I have turned off the other layers so that you can see the repair.

6- When done, double click the hand tool to restore the image to fit on the screen. 7- Lets now lighten the riders face without lightening anything else. We will do

this with a mask and on its own layer and use blending modes to dodge. a. Create a new levels layer. This time we will do it by clicking the black

& white cookie icon create new adjustment layer. Select the levels adjustment. Do no adjustments and click OK.

b. Change the blending mode of this new adjustment layer to screen. Click the drop down menu arrow along side the word normal and select screen (to darken choose multiply).

c. The entire image will become lighter. i. Now with the mask icon active (click on it if it is not), we will

make it all black by pressing ctl+i to change the white to black. The image will return to its normal brightness, since the entire image is masked.

ii. Make foreground and background colors default by pressing d. Make foreground color white so that you can paint with white on the black mask (use x to toggle).

iii. Select the brush tool (press b) use a soft edge (30 to 70) brush with opacity at a low number 10% to 20%.

iv. Adjust brush size with the hard bracket keys ([]) and paint over the face, or what ever you want to brighten. Each brush stroke is

additive (the low opacity allows you to carefully adjust the brightness).

v. After doing this I discovered that making the face lighter also lost some detail, so that I needed to restore contrast.

1. To do this it might have been better to use the curves adjustment instead of the levels adjustment. Therefore, create a curves adjustment above the levels adjustment layer (use any method). We will compare results later. Do not make any adjustments yet on the curves layer.

a. Alt+drag the mask from the levels layer to the curves layer and answer yes to replace the mask. This will add the mask that you used for the levels layer to the curves layer but will not remove it from the levels layer (it makes a copy).

b. Turn the eye OFF on the levels layer so that the affect of that layer is not seen.

c. Activate the curves layer and change the mode to screen (as done before). The area that the levels layer affected will now be affected the same way as before but we are now using a curves layer to accomplish it.

d. Double click the curves icon on the curves layer to open the curves adjustment window.

i. To increase the contrast in the vicinity of the unmasked region, first bring your cursor into your image where you had been working and click your mouse. A circle will appear on the graph where the brightness of that point is on the graph. Place a point on the curve by holding the ctl key while clicking in the area.

ii. We now want to increase contrast in that area. This is accomplished by causing the slope of the curve to be increased.

1. Place two other points on the curve (ctl+click on the curve), above and below the desired point and drag these points so as to increase the slope in the vicinity of the desired point.

2. Click the eye ON and OFF for the curves layer and compare affects with the levels layer.

Original Image levels Adjusted Curves adjusted

.

Lets now clone out the paper in the grass below the lady in the image. To do this we must have a pixel carrying layer of all the work we have done so far.

1- With the top layer active. We will hold the alt key down and click and hold layer>merge visible. This will create a composite layer of all of the visible layers below.

2- I then used the marquee tool to select a section of grass to the right of where I want to remove the paper. Select layer>new>via copy. This will create a copy of the grass on a new layer.

3- Activate the move tool and move the square of grass on top of the paper. We now need to blend the edges of the square so that they are somewhat transparent and are not noticeable.

a. Click the mask icon (front loader washing machine). This will add a mask to the layer that has the square of grass. The mask is white.

b. Assure the default colors are in the foreground and background tool. Assure the mask is active. Select a soft edge brush with a low opacity and paint with black (foreground color) around the edges of the square piece of grass. This will allow you to erase the edges gently from being seen. Observe the affect on the image as you paint around the edge of the selected grass that you placed over the item being cloned away (paper).

Original Partially Enhanced Completed

Of particular interest to take note of is the fact that there seems to be a lot of picture information available in the dark areas of a digital image. These can be brought out fairly well and quite easily using the tools in Photoshop. Those areas that are far too bright are lost forever. Therefore, always expose for the highlights.