Hello, my name is Chris Legaspi and welcome to this lesson.
Today we're going to learn how to edit your own slides of your
artwork using Photoshop. So we're going to begin the lesson
by reviewing the concepts that we talked about in the previous
Photoshop lessons, and then we're going to get into some
more advanced techniques, specifically how to optimize
your artwork. A lot of times we take photographs of our work.
They don't turn out quite as good or we can - we want to make
them better and Photoshop is the perfect tool for that. So
I'm going to show you some advanced tips, some advanced
techniques to make the best of your photography, of your
artwork, and then we're going to talk about ways to format and
export it so that you can publish your work or you can
show your work at its best possible light.

Okay, before we begin I wanted to review some of the editing
tools from the previous lesson. So these tools are very very
important. So I want to go over them because you know, they're
a little bit complex, especially if it's your first
time. So let's take a look at some of the major editing tools
that we use in the previous lesson because we're definitely
going to be using them a lot in this lesson and moving forward.
Okay. Let's open Photoshop.
And I'm just going to open a file. So random image here,
so we can review the tools.
Okay.
But first let's review the selection tool. So there's two
major tools, the marquee and the lasso. They're located here on
the toolbar. Top one is marquee, bottom one below it looks like
a rope lasso.
And keyboard shortcut is M for marquee and L for lasso. And
don't forget too there's various shapes.
If you
click and hold inside the toolbar you can call up the
different shapes and lasso also has the polygon version.
You can also hold shift plus the keyboard shortcut. So for
example shift plus L will shift through the various lassos and
shift and M same thing for the marquee. key
All right. So just a quick way to select.
If I want to, for example, quickly select this New Masters
logo and cut and paste it or just paint black over I can do
just a quick marquee.
Then I can make a new layer, use the paint bucket.
And select the background color holding alt to bring up the
eyedropper there and just fill it with a black. That's one way
to cover up that logo if you wanted to do so,
you can merge down that layer
to merge those two layers.
And if you let's say you want to select the figure,
there's a couple ways to do that. I like to use the lasso
tool. So I'm going to use the polygon lasso, so I'm going to
hold shift and L, bring up the polygon lasso. Remember it's click, move,
Click, move. Click, move. Click, move. Click, move. Click, move to
draw your polygon lasso or hard-edged lasso shape and just
going to do a really rough
shape and then when I get ready to close all I do is double
click
and it will fully close the loop when I get near my initial
starting point. And remember too, let me press F to change the
view mode. It's nice and dark here. Remember too you can
subtract from the mask and you can add to it. So
for example, I want to get a little tighter which I do if my
goal is to mask out my figure from the black background
that's what I would do. I can even mask out.
Excuse me subtract from my selection using the same tool.
And I'm holding alt here to subtract and remember we can
add so let's say for example, I accidentally subtract the
selection around your foot and I go oh crap, I got to fix
that. Well to add to your selection you hold shift and
notice the icon change and then I can just start to -
you just hold shift and then click once, you don't have
to keep holding it. I let go of shift. Now and then double click,
boom.
And then subtract
and then if I use a mask
or do a cut and paste, almost the same thing.
You can see that
the mask here is masked out what I've selected which is just a
figure and then the background becomes transparent because of
the mask.
So that's just a quick review of the selection tools.
Okay, next let's look at the transform tools.
So if you want to do
scale, I like to use the transform tool shortcut, which
is command T.
And let's fill this background with another color just so we
know,
fill it with white.
And my layer is locked fortunately.
Okay. Now if I want to resize let's say - well
if I want to resize her, let's say she's a little too big for
my canvas I can just shrink by bringing up the transform tool,
hotkey's command T. And if I like my transform just hit
enter, whatever change I do, but you can also do
edit, free transform. That's the one I like to use.
And you can do a uniform scale by holding shift to do a
uniform scale bigger or smaller. Now remember if you go
bigger, you have to change the resolution, which we'll talk
about later.
And you could also grab within these points to do more of a
warp transform. This is a non-uniform transform, making
her longer, making her more narrow or wider. You can do
that and you can also rotate. Let's say I want to rotate my
figure slightly couple of degrees. You can rotate it
there or type in the numerics, but I like to do this. I don't
typically need precise rotation.
Remember anytime you ready? You like your changes just hit
enter and it locks in your changes.
And you can also do things like warps, bring up your transform
tool.
You can move it around, you can scale it and you can also do
warp. If you hit control, hold control and click inside your
transform tool it'll bring up this submenu and you have scale,
rotate, skew, distort, perspective unit, all sorts of fun stuff. We
played with a couple in the last lesson. Here's just a
quick look at warp. It brings up these arms and you can
pretty much grab any point here and look what it's doing to
your figure.
It's kind of creating this weird stretched out kind of
figure there. It's turning into like maybe
a Mucha or Matisse now.
So that was an example of the warp.
And remember if you don't like your work, you want to undo your
work, I can just go to my history or hit control Z
and I have
my fresh one. I forgot to make a copy. Remember whenever you
want to do operations it's good practice to make a copy
that way you have the original underneath.
So the last thing I want to do is image adjustments. So for
example, if I want to adjust the color I can go to image
adjustments and bring up color and levels to adjust contrast, all
sorts of different tools. You can also use the layer
adjustments, this brings up the layer. I typically like
to do combination of both but let's try layer adjustments for
let's say hue saturation.
And I'm going to remember clip it by holding alt to clip it to
my figure underneath.
The layer underneath there. So it only affect the figure and
let's say I want to change - it has a slightly greenie
tint. I'm going to - I'm going to make it a little bit warmer and
a little bit more saturated.
So I like that. So before, after, let me zoom in a little bit.
Might be able to see that better.
So before, after using hue saturation.
Then if I like that I can just merge it doing command E
or merging down and then if I want to adjust the contrast
this time, I'm just going to use
the image adjustments menu.
Well first let me duplicate so remember good practice is to
duplicate. So now I have a fresh version of the
color correction I just did. Now let's do a quick now, let's do a quick.
adjustment of the contrast, just bring up brightness contrast
nice and simple to make it a little bit brighter and a
little bit contrasty.
Just to brighten up the image there.
And hit OK and now it's permanent. But you know, I have
the fresh layer underneath so you see the difference before
and after. Okay, so that was a quick review of the tools we
use in the previous lesson. These tools are so important
that
they really need to be practiced because you're going
to be using them all the time, pretty much every time you sit
down with Photoshop. So I definitely want to review them
as much as possible and I know if it's your first time.
It can be quite intimidating and quite complex. So again
review serves to help you learn these tools as quickly as
possible. Now, we're going to get into the meat of this
lesson, which is editing slides, editing your own artwork, your
photographs of your own artwork. So we're going to
begin by
getting into the image
adjustments we could do with the actual canvas. So resizing,
cropping, and rotation, so let's get into that now. Okay
so if you have slides of your artwork, you're probably going to
want to be able to manipulate the actual canvas size. So
let's take a look at some examples. All right. Now, I'm
just going to open some slides of my own artwork that I've
taken.
Let's take a look at that.
Now there is a couple
notes that I want to make when you're opening a file, especially
a file from a DSLR digital camera.
Now, if you look at this folder, there's two types of
files. There's jpeg dot jpg, which I shot with my iPhone
actually, but many image files that you'll see will have JPEG
and this one is called the ORF, dot ORF. So let's open both. I'm
going to open the jpeg real quick and you'll see it just
opens straight away into Photoshop, even though it's
upside down right now.
Now if I open a dot ORF, let's take a look at what
happens there.
Let's open this one.
It brings up this camera raw. Now in Photoshop
when you try to open a raw camera file for the first time
you'll open this plug-in called camera raw, which is a
Photoshop file and what that is is it's a way to
sort of edit or
tweak, refine your raw photograph and a raw file is
just the
file, the image produced in the digital camera. I shut this
with an Olympus. That's what the extension dot ORF is
an Olympus extension. The other two common raw camera file
extensions are dot RAW, dot RAW, which is a Nikon, and the Cannon
is dot DNG.
So if you see a dot DNG, RAW or ORF don't worry, just
bring it into Photoshop and you'll bring up this tool
called camera RAW. And if your Photoshop can't open RAW files,
then you'll need to download this extension and it's
free with Photoshop Photoshop this current version, which I
have which is the cloud version should have it already good to
go.
Okay, so
it's just a raw file. I'm going to go ahead and, you know, I
can play with it a little bit here. I want to -
to be honest, I don't use it that much. I do most of the
editing in Photoshop. But this is quite useful actually,
especially when you're
doing photography for reference this is a useful tool, but
for my own artwork,
I'm going to do the bulk of the work in Photoshop.
Okay,
we gotta hit open image. So now I have two files, one raw, and a
JPEG. And I'm going to close the JPEG. We're gonna play with the
RAW file.
Alright, so that was just a quick note on
camera RAW files. Don't get intimidated by it.
It's actually very useful tool that camera RAW plugin.
But if you're shooting your own slides, you'll probably do a
lot of the work in Photoshop like I'm going to show you now. Like I'm going to show you now.
So the first thing we want to do is talk about rotation.
Now, there's a couple ways to rotate an image. There's
fine-tuning and then we could
do
rotation and 90 degrees or even 180 degrees. So
the rotation tools are under image adjustments.
And they are
under image rotation. So you have flipping the canvas
horizontal, vertical, you have clockwise, counter clockwise,
180.
Going to undo that. And there's also another
under edit transform there's rotation too but this, what this
does is it doesn't rotate the entire canvas, it rotates the
image on the layer. So, for example, I have this layer, I
duplicated my original layer. So I go to transform. Let's say
flip horizontal and the one beneath it is still the same.
So
that's good if you just want to experiment or want to take a
look, but what we want to do is actual - Sure.
is to actually flip and rotate the image. So let's close this
real quick. Let's minimize this. I'm going to open one
that is
what shot upside down the previous jpeg, you saw so let's
take a look at this real quick. So if you bring this into your -
let's say this is how you shot it. You took a picture of your
painting. This is my own personal work. And you bring it -
you shot it with your camera. In this case I shot with an
iPhone.
And you bring it into Photoshop. Well, it's upside
down, you download to the computer bring it into Photoshop and it's
upside down. What the heck do you do? Well, we can do image,
canvas rotation. Now
if you go under image image rotation, you can do all these
canvas flips. So obviously I'm going to need to flip it
pretty much 180 degrees.
Whoop. So that was a quick flip and those under the image
rotation. So I'm going to undo that, you can also do image, flip
canvas horizontal and then image, flip canvas vertical, sort
of two steps there.
Now what I want to show you is to make a keyboard shortcut
because this will come in handy later when you begin to do
your own drawings and paintings directly in Photoshop. So I'm
going to go to edit, keyboard shortcuts.
Remember we can make a shortcut for almost everything here. Now
go to image,
all the way down to
image adjustment. Where is it?
Image rotation, excuse me. Image rotation. If I scroll down and
there's my various options here. What I'm gonna do is assign a
hotkey under the shortcut there. Just click to
activate it there under flip canvas horizontal. I'm going to
make mine
F2.
And there's already one assigned but I don't care I never use
whatever this is.
Flip canvas vertical I'm going to make that
F3. Remember got a hold function if you're using Mac.
And I also want to do clockwise counterclockwise. So for
clockwise, I'm going to do shift and F3 and I don't really
care what the warning says and counterclockwise shift F2. the counterclockwise shift if
Okay, that's fine. Just hit OK.
And it's locked in and remember that's under
keyboard shortcuts. Go to image, click it to expand and then
scroll down to image rotation.
And if
the menus need to be just, you know, just kind of click
under the shortcut column and you'll activate it.
Okay, so hit okay. Let's get rid of this window. Now I have
hotkeys.
So what I want to do is
flip this image like a like a clock. So going to go
counterclockwise and my new hotkey is F2 or shift F2 I just Keys F2 or shift F to I just
assigned and boom it's back into place.
If I want to flip it
vertically or excuse me, horizontally
I could do it easily now with the hotkey and mine's set to F@
and also vertically. So these are just ways to actually
physically rotate the canvas, not rotate the image.
That's what I want because the canvas was messed up.
So now if I hit file save I'm going to save it
to as high as possible the maximum.
So now I took my slide and use Photoshop to rotate it
correctly into its right position. So then I can
continue to further editing, but let me close this real
quick. Let's go back
to the RAW file.
Now
typically when you shoot your your
your artwork, you're going to have a lot of stuff that you
don't need. Like I don't need this piece of my canvas
right here. I definitely don't need that. What I want to do is
crop in nice and tight, crop in nice and tight. So let's talk
about ways to crop.
Now cropping will actually physically chop your your
canvas down.
Now there's a couple ways to do this. The first is with the
crop menu, so go to image
and then canvas size and there's a hotkey there which is
a control command C.
Or excuse me alt command C, option command C and it brings
up canvas size here. Now right now it's set to inches, width
and height set to inches. I can
set it to pixels, typically I like pixels, gives me a little
bit more control. But let's just do inches. So right now
it's at 13.44 with 10.08 height.
Let's say I want to crop some of the junk on the side.
Right, so I'm going to make my width
13, just a nice even number. Make my height nice even number and
then this bottom window called anchor that shows you where the
crop will take place. Now, I like it centered. So I'm just
going to directly center it. So I'm going to hit okay.
And it'll give me a warning that's saying you're about to crop
which is good. You want to double check yourself. And just
did a nice tight little crop. It didn't do too much. I didn't
take too many inches off,
but you can see the size change. If I do a quick undo
and redo you can see undo before and after a nice little
crop inside. Now this, you know, I always tell you to make a new
layer before you do operation. You really can't change this
because we're changing the physical canvas size itself. What I
want to do next, let's say I just want to take some off the
top I can do edit - or excuse me image, canvas size. And let's say
I want to make it nine inches high, but I just want to take
an inch off the top. What I can do is move my anchor point
down. So now the bottom won't be affected, notice the arrow
changes? That means only the top will go, will be cut. So hit
okay and I get the warning again and you see it cropped
all of that junk at the top.
And if I do an undo, you can see before, after, before and
after.
Okay, I'm going to undo that real quick. And also you can do
the same for the side. So you go to image, canvas size. Let's
say I just want to cut some off the right side. Let's say I
want to make my width 12.5 inches, then I'll just move my
anchor point to the left and you see the arrow right here
that means it's going to be cut only on the right, the left will
stay the same. So I hit okay.
Boom, so you see a nice, pretty nice crop there. pretty nice crop there.
Oops so that's before, after, before, and after. So pretty tight on
the side there.
Now the other way to crop is there's actually a crop tool
which is on your tool bars right here right below
magic wand, right above the eye dropper, this little
little box thing. It looks like a
two compasses together, two to squares together, two squares
together. And
when you activate crop and the hotkey is C, the
activate crop it brings up these control arms and have
on the corners just like the transform tool. Corners. This
one's in the middle. This one's in the middle.
And you can even use the corner.
So just another way to crop so I'm going to make mine fairly
tight and make mine pretty tight right there.
Okay, it's pretty tight around my image and then I hit enter,
boom. And it cropped nice and tight. I'll show you real quick
before and after,
before and after. And that was all done with the crop tool. So
just again activate the crop tool, hit C is the hotkey, the
shortcut, and then just draw a window around whatever you want
to crop and then use the control points to control.
This is where a pen - the pen tool is really helpful,
usually a lot of control.
And when you like the crop that you've got, just hit enter and boom
good to go.
And the final way is to use a marquee. Let's say
you just want to do a quick section. You're just like I
don't care about how tight it is. I'm just going to just boom,
just make a marquee. When you make a marquee you can do an
edit -
excuse me image and then crop it'll cut according to
the marquee, the selection that you made that's one quick way
to do it. What I do typically is go to marquee.
Just draw a quick marquee around what I want and then use the
hotkey which is
control command C, excuse me. I don't have it.
Actually I'm going to set my hotkey now.
So under image.
Because I do this a lot. I do a lot of resizing.
So I'm going to scroll down until I find crop. There it is. So
here's crop, go to shortcut and then I'm going to go to control
command C. Is that available? It's available.
Control command C for crop said okay.
Now
I can draw really quick marquee, boom. And then use my hotkey,
control command C is what I set it to boom and a quick crop. So
three ways to do the exact same thing, right? Image,
canvas size which is what we're doing, cropping is affecting the
canvas size. So image, canvas size. You can get very precise
here.
You can do the crop tool again. You can get fairly precise with
the crop tool.
And also marquee. Marquee and image crop. So marquee, just draw a
quick marquee around your box image crop and in this case I said
hotkey. Three ways to do the same thing. But you can see
how useful cropping will be when you start to edit your own
slides. And remember you can do this - doesn't have to be your
slides. You can even do it for your reference photography as
well of course.

Okay. So those are some quick and powerful tools to affect
the actual canvas size. So even though it's virtual canvas, you
know, they're still -
it still does have its own set limit of pixels that it can be.
So those were what the crops
that was affecting the canvas size. Now we're actually going to
affect the image size itself so we can stay within the same
canvas, but the image size, the actual pixels, and the density
we can play with as well. So let's take a look at that now.
All right. So now let's talk about image sizing. I'm going
to go ahead and open one of my slides and this is a -
and this is a RAW file here. So I'm going to play with the
temperature a little bit.
And the tint, see if I can get the tint.
Typically, what I do is I have the painting next to me here so
I can get that right, make sure the exposure looks good.
And all of these controls these are all photography controls.
Okay, so open image.
Alright, so first let's crop some of the junk here. Now
there's a lot of white space here and some useless junk
there. So I don't need that. First thing I'm going to do is
what I like to do is especially with a big tablet like this is
use the marquee tool to get pretty tight
to where I need to be right there. And then I like to use
the marquee tool again
and this time use the subtract. Remember holding alt will
subtract from the marquee.
So I'm going to kind of touch up on some of those brush
strokes and just cut them off,
cut off the top a little bit.
And then
yeah, it feels pretty good till I get my marquee around what I
want then I'm going to use my hotkey which is control command
C or image crop and has a pretty nice crop. I'm going to
crop again, just a little bit of the bottom there.
But I like to use the marquee technique versus the crop tool,
but whatever you're comfortable with.
Let's see.
Okay. Now we want to change the image size and to do that it's
under the image, image size.
And under image size you have a lot of different parameters.
You have the two ones that are most important to look at are
resolution and the actual the actual size itself. Now this is
also the canvas size as well.
The current canvas size.
Right now that the resolution is very high. So 300 DPI is
really really high. You can almost get it print ready. Now
let's say
if I want it slightly smaller, let's say I want to email it to
a friend. Right now this file is huge. If you look at under
image size it's 25.8 megabytes it's a huge
actually has a huge dimensions, huge canvas size, but it's huge
3000 pix. That's a big file. If you tried to email - you
probably can't even email a 25 megabyte file. So let's say I
want to make a little bit smaller. I'm just going to
shrink it.
First I'm going to cut my resolution.
For most computer screens you don't really need
300 DPI if you're just emailing it to a friend. Let's say you want
email it to your teacher, 72 DPI is what most screen resolutions
are. So I'm going to drop it to 72 DPI and then you can see the 72 DPI and then you can see
automatically the pixel size shrunk, right, bring it back. So
image size, resolution will affect the canvas size itself.
Now we can drop the resolution and maintain the original
canvas size if we wanted to.
But that would create
some loss of detail and sharpness. We don't want that.
So what I typically like to do is find a nice medium. So for
web -
and we'll talk about ideal file sizes. Let's just say
I'm going to keep my 72 DPI. Let's say just JPI. Let's say just
for a nice even number I'm gonna do a 1000 pixels wide, which is a
fairly nice wide size. So hit okay and notice that it shrinks
quite a bit.
So you see that. And this is at a hundred percent. It shrunk
quite a bit, which is good, which is what we wanted. So now
I can do a save as, save it as a JPEG
and send it to my friend. I'll call it
painting one and then I'm going to give it like an underscore
web, just so I know that oh, this is a small web version.
And typically you can embed the color profile. I don't really
mess with these.
I just kind of leave it default and hit save.
And then you can play with the file size there and we'll talk
about ways to save more efficiently. So I'm going to
drop it to like a maximum of 10 just because the original is
still very pretty high, 700k. You don't want to bog down your
friend's email. So 300K that
drops the file size quite well, but it will still maintain the
quality pretty high. 10 out of 12 is pretty good quality, and
I don't really mess with these too much. So I just okay,
and now it's -
now it's a nice compressed JPEG. JPEG typically is a compression
meaning that the computer will crunch some of the pixels.
It'll give you a nice balance of file size and picture
quality, which is what we have. I think this looks pretty
great. And now it's you know, it's ready to go. I can email
it to a friend. So that's just one quick example of image
sizing.
I usually have a hotkey set.
It's actually defaulted so image, image size, and the hotkey
is alt or option command I and brings up image size.
So now let's talk about ideal file sizes and image sizes.
Now what I typically do is I'm going to undo this history
here.
So right now you can see it's at 25%, since it's full resolution,
even though the old, the file name that I saved is still there
if you got to a hundred percent, you know, it's pretty full res.
We have nice pretty, really nice detail. So this was a good
slide can use a little sharpness, which we'll get into
as well.
But let's talk about ideal file sizes. Now there's really no
set rules. Oh file sizes have to be this. Unless you're doing
print.
Print is very very high. But for most uses, I think most
artists will probably want two sizes or typically
three. A big, medium, and small. A big file, I would say keep
it as big as your computer can hold, almost like the original -
almost the original RAW file, almost at the exact same size.
So let's take a look at how big this guy is. So right now if
it's a 300 DPI to the original size, let me go to inches. So
it's at eight inches by 11 inches at 300 DPI. So this is a nice
big file. It's a 25.8
megabyte file. Now if I ever wanted to print this guy
at 8.5x11 it would look - it would eleven. It would look it would
look really great. I can even
go higher, I can reduce my resolution and go to a bigger
file size if I wanted to increase the file size, but
for most uses, I think this original file size is quite
large and quite useful, so I'm going to keep it at this size.
Now if you want like a medium size, I would say medium size
is something around -
definitely something under five megabytes. Preferably maybe
like between one and two megabytes, that way you can still email it
but yet it's still pretty high resolution. And then the last
file size is
small and that's just for web like Facebook or Instagram
or your whatever social media you like and definitely email.
I personally make nice small file size for email because I
don't want to bog down people's emails, especially if you're
sending them a lot of slides or if you have them on your
website. Smaller file sizes
load nicely. So one of the things you may be doing or may
want to do is to keep a blog. I have one myself, so when you
photograph your artwork and you want to get it ready for your
blog, I typically like to use as small file size as possible.
And that's - there's two strategies for that. One is that
you can also email the file. Like I said and two it loads
faster. So this I like - I don't like to wait when I go to
websites. I'm sure you don't either especially if it's an
artist you like, you know, when you visit artist sites and you
see that their page load slowly. I mean there's a lot
of reasons for that, technical reasons, but one of the reasons
you can avoid that for your own blog is to keep your file sizes
nice and tight and nice and small. So that's just
I think a strategy that works well if you want to show your
work on a blog or on your website. All right, so let's
save three versions of this guy. So I
cropped it.
It's a pretty nice tight crop.
I'm going to save the full version. So I'm going to go
shift command S and
I'm going to save the full version. A JPEG is fine.
Typically I liked TIFF as well. TIFF is a nice rough, a format
that has
almost no compression. So let's go to TIFF.
And I'm going to call it painting one underscore full
or underscore large.
I'm gonna hit save and I'm going to get another menu of TIFF options and
I want no compression, meaning give me the most -
my original file is RAW and original as possible. But yet a
little bit - still a little bit more portable than the camera
RAW file.
Hit okay. And the good thing about TIFF is that most programs can
open it, even image viewers can open it while RAW files you
need special plugins to open it. So this is my original large
size. Now with this I can now reduce and make various
versions. So now I'm going to make a web version. So one
thing we could do - well
let's make a medium version. Let's say I want to make a
medium size to put in my
portfolio. This could be like on your iPad. Let's say you
want to bring your iPad to show some clients, to show
to show some friends, to show your art director, or maybe to
show the gallery, you want to bring your iPad or even
bring your laptop and you want to have a nice medium file size
to show, let's make that now. So I'm going to go to image,
image size. And what I typically do is I just like to cut the
resolution in half or I like to cut the file size in half, the
actual canvas size, or do a combination of both. Now the
advantage of keeping a high resolution is that you can always -
it maintains pixels. So your image is nice. It has a lot of
pixel depth so that you could resize it if needed, DPI
image you can definitely resize it meaning going up if you want
to make it bigger. So that could be useful and also,
you can zoom in quite nicely, maintained a lot of nice pixel
depth. So what I do is I like to just cut the resolution and
also cut the canvas size. So go to 200 DPI
and then four pixels,
I typically like anywhere from 2400 to 1200. So let's
say I do a nice 1,200.
Max width, height is of course going to be a little bit
shorter.
And nice 200 DPI. So hit okay.
You can see
this zoom in at a hundred percent. Now, this file is
still - still looks good, still very big but still pretty
portable. If I do a file save as and this one I'm going to
save as JPEG. I don't mind the compression at this stage.
Because this is -
because I want some of that -
some of that -
the optimization of the file size. I'm going to call this
painting one underscore medium or MED.
Hit save and this window comes up. Now I can play - if I go to
full size, 12 maximum, it's at one megabyte, which is pretty
good.
I'm gonna drop it to 11. You know what? I'm going to drop it to
11. Actually, let's keep it at one megabyte. That's a nice big
RAW almost, a RAW size.
So there so that's my medium.
And this one's pretty portable. If I go to image, image size
you can see that it's a 3.28. It's actually one megabyte file
now on your if you go to finder folders, one megabyte file,
which is great because it won't hog up all your memory and it's
still really nice quality and really nice size. If you bring
this to the gallery or to your client art director and you're
showing them your work, you bring this up on your iPad or
your laptop it will look really really nice on display
because it's still nice and big, it's 1200 pixels wide. That's a
good medium file size.
So let's open the original and then we'll from the original
we'll make -
here's the original it's a TIFF.
So here's the original and here's my
medium 50%.
Now you notice my original at 25% is still bigger than the medium
size file. So now let's make
a smallest size possible and this is for web.
So typically what I like to do if I want to make a web file,
once I get my crop and the rotation, everything looks good,
but I like to do is go to image, image size.
And then I go to a resolution I like. Now for websites again
72 DPI is probably your best bet. And one thing I like about
72 DPI is that if someone were to download your work, they
really can't do much with it because it's such a low pixel
depth but on a display it still looks great. If someone comes
to your website or your Facebook or your social media
and they click on it, it'll still look great even at 72 DPI.
So what I want to do is I'm going to chop it in half to 150.
And I like to keep my height and width pretty low. So what
I'm going to do is
I'm going to keep mine at 150 and then I'm going to drop the
pixels to under a thousand pix so the widest will be 900.
And hit okay.
So now it's pretty small, right? Pretty small even at 100
percent.
It's only 900 pixels wide, but it's at 150 DPI. So I
still have a little bit of upsizing options, which we'll
talk about next.
And so I like the size. I think it's pretty good. 900
pix wide. I think it's ready to go on my website or on my
blog or on social media. So what I'll do now,
okay. So now I'm going to instead of going file, save as,
which is unique. I'm going to go to a
an option that's unique to photoshop and it's called save
for web. So I'm gonna go to export and save for web. Also a hockey
which is quite complicated, it's shift, alt, command s and
it'll bring up this submenu. Let me try the hot key. Shift,
alt, command S. I need one - I need three fingers and the
thumb.
And there it is and what this does is
it does a very efficient optimization. I don't know
exactly how it works But I know it works good. So first
thing I like to do is go from GIF to JPEG. Typically for your
paintings, your own artwork, you won't be using GIF. GIF is sort
of a very low, very small file size. JPEG is a nice balance.
Here you have
the dimensions, but one thing that's important to look at is
this quality. So once you switch
the - and the preset here set to JPEG, which is good, JPEG high.
Once you set this drop down to JPEG the output you want to go
to quality. Now quality you can see will affect your files your
of course the quality, but look at the file size you get. So at
60 percent quality we have a very low file size, which is
good. Remember I said you want a small size as possible for
websites.
Now let me drop it really low. You can see it starts to
degrade. See it start to degrade, quality at 7 versus
quality at 80. It's kind of pretty good. So now what I do
is find a balance. I'm looking down here at the file size, 340k.
Let's just type in a number 70% has 205K. Typically
I like around
around a hundred - between 150 and 250 or little bit over.
In that range is a nice compact file size range so I can go a
little bit higher with this one. So it's at 70. Let me try
72.
Let me try 75. So 75 is nice.
It's a nice good file size. 239k. I'm just going to hit case. I'm just going to hit
done
and
it's saved in my folder. So now let's take a look at all three
versions. So go to medium, so there's a medium. And then we'll
open
the small one that I just made.
Painting one underscore web or underscore small.
So this one's at 50%.
So it actually saved it on my screen. So let's just open the
original to compare. Painting one underscore large and that's
a TIFF. Remember TIFF is great because it's the least amount
of compression. So this one's at 25 percent and it's huge. This
one's at 50%.
We're zoomed at 50% and it's still fairly huge. This one is at
a hundred percent. Let's bring it down to 50. You can see the
nice compact version. So 50% medium, 50% at my small compact
size. And if you look at the quality
it's still pretty good, right? Still pretty good. Of course
not as good as the medium of course, medium is much more
dense and sharp. And of course the original it's got the most
pixels to play with. This is why I like to save a nice
non-compressed original so I can do these various things and
still have the original pixels there ready to go.

Okay, the last image sizing to I want to talk about is
uprezing and uprezing is sort of a slang term for increasing
the resolution or uprezing the file. Now hopefully you
won't need to do this that often but this is for the case
where
if you, you know, let's say you're kind of short on time,
you're short on budget maybe and you're taking slides of
your work or you had slides of your work done, but they were too
small or let's say you're like me you got a little lazy you
took it with your iPhone and you know, the resolution is not
quite as high as you want or the actual canvas size is not
quite as big as you want, you know, even if you take a
nice beautiful slide
with
your DSLR, with your Canon or Nikon or whatever, and it's a
nice big RAW file, let's say for whatever reason you need to
make a poster, make it a billboard. Who knows? Maybe you
want to take a big file and make it even bigger. So this is what
uprezing is. We're going to try to use the Photoshop to
increase the actual canvas size and the pixel density of
our slide and still make it look good. So there's a -
there's a couple of ways to do that. I don't really recommend
it. Of course the ideal is to take the best slides possible.
But for whatever reason you need to do this, let's take a
look at actually how you can do this if you ever need to.
Uprezing. Okay, let's open our friend the apple again. And
this guy's pretty big. If I go to the image size 300 DPI,
13 inches wide. It's a huge file.
But let's say for whatever reason -
and I save it as a JPEG.
Okay.
So right now let's say this is the slide I took, it's 150
DPI, it's six inches wide so it's still fairly big file,
has some - has a lot of pixels, you know, we could still use it
but let's say
you want to show a client or the gallery and they have a
giant HD, Ultra HD, whatever gigantic monitor and you don't
want to show
this, see that fuzzy kind of pixelness?
So what we can do is we can uprez it. Let's say we know - present let's say we know
let's do it. Let's do an extreme case, let's do an extreme case.
Let's say this is -
oh, yeah, this is nice and small actually, good. So it's
only 900 pixels wide.
So let's say I want to make it let's say the client or the
gallery has a monitor that 2,000 pixels wide. It's almost
double the size. So if you bring this JPEG in to the
gallery or to the client and they put it full screen on
their Mac or their computer or their display it's going to
look fuzzy and crappy. You don't want that. You want it to
stay nice and tight and sharp. So ideally again you want it to
take the best slides possible. But there are some things
we could do to kind of kind of help ourselves out.
Alright, so one thing we could do
is to do an uprez and what I'm going to do is to an image.
Well first I'm going to duplicate -
I'm actually going to duplicate this entire -
well, I don't need to duplicate actually.
What do I do? So go to image -
I'm trying to think in my mind is like a couple ways to do
this.
So let's say
I know for a fact that the monitor is 2000 pixels wide.
All right, and I still have a nice 150 DPI. What I'm going to
do is I'm going to drop my DPI to 72.
You go two hundred thousand pixels wide and what that does
is I'll borrow some of the DPI that I already had. I had
double size. So even if I dropped it to 22 and made the
width - it was 900 - 1800. It'll still look good. So I'm
basically just kind of taking advantage of the fact that I
had double the resolution of most computer monitors. That's
all it was. That's why I like 150, it's double the size of
computer resolution.
But don't get too -
don't get too confused by that, the main thing you want to keep
in mind is that if your file is 72 you have fewer options to
uprez. If your file is higher DPI pixels per inch you
have much more options. You just have more pixels to make -
to play with to make sharper. So I'm basically doubling - more
than doubling the size.
And you know, it didn't lose too much.
It looks okay. So now what I'm going to do is if I want to
make this sharper
I'm going to double it again and bring it back. So this is a
kind of a neat little trick. So what do I do is make a new
canvas. I'm going to
do command A and then command select all and then command C,
cut or copy, then command new, which is create a new file. And
when you have something on your clipboard, that's what this
document type is. We do command C it copies to a virtual
clipboard. So it copies to the virtual place where it's stored
in your computer.
Then I'm gonna hit, okay.
It's going to be a blank then I do command V and it'll paste
exactly the image to a new file. What I'm gonna do with this
file is I'm going to double it again. So I'm going to do
alt command I.
I'm going to double the resolution again to 4,000.
So what this will do now, it's huge but
I lost a lot of the sharpness. It looks looks very fuzzy,
doesn't look good. So what I'm gonna do here is apply a couple of we do here is apply a couple of
sharpening techniques. First we can use
of course levels and contrast, my first way that I like to
sharpen.
I don't want it to be too contrasted. So it doesn't look
like the painting.
Okay so I'm gonna
bring that down, just merge that that layer effect. Next I want
to do a filter.
A sharpen, unsharp mask. Remember we played with this in a
previous lesson.
And look what it's doing. You can see it previewing and say I
drop it here you'll see it preview here. If I make it
really high it gets very exaggerated and I kind of like
that actually, look it bring it back the sharpness in the edges.
Kind of wanted it to have that sharp edge chunky look.
And I could play with the radius. I said bring up the
radius it gets a little
unnatural looking. Just reduce the radius and basically want
to find a nice balance of sharp detail and kind of keep it
original looking. This is really high. I'm gonna change it
to like 200%.
A little fuzzy.
Yeah, so about - let's say 150. I can type it in. You can use the
sliders or type it in it. Hit okay. So here's a quick look
before the sharpness, after. You can see a little bit sharper.
Now what I want to do is
I want to try one more filter and this is
really really
it's a really interesting filter, I use it quite a bit but
for uprezing, it's quite useful. So go to filter,
filter gallery and make sure I can see it.
Then I'm going to go to artistic and cut out. What cut
out does is it creates sharp edges. Look at that. Look at
that. Wow.
I can play with the edge simplicity.
What I want to do is increase a number of levels.
So you see how it creates like these cut out shapes.
It's too simple.
It's not simple enough.
So I'm going to go to full levels and this just gives me
nice sharp edges as possible. It manufactures sharp edges.
Now, of course, I don't want it to look like that, looks
nothing like my original. What if I drop the opacity of it?
Can see it starts to bring it out. Well for this case, I'm
going to make it very very subtle like an 11%.
Almost barely see it. And right now it's on its new layer.
Remember you want to always duplicate your layer when
you're making changes.
Then I merge that.
So now it's pretty sharp. Now the last thing I want to do is
do some hand brushing. So let's say there's some
areas that got really fuzzy. I don't really see too many here.
A lot of these are intentionally fuzzy. like this
area got a little bit fuzzy so you can take your brush and
just manually I like to make a new layer and just manually
kind of tighten up your edges.
And these are for the edges that you want sharp. Of course,
sometimes your lost edges, you want them to stay soft.
And you can see how this can be a real pain in the butt and you
know, it takes away from the original a lot. So you
definitely like I said earlier,
you don't want to do this if you don't have to but I just
thought it would be useful to show here because you know,
it's practicing with the same tools that we've been
using over and over again.
And I'm also going to soften some of this work here
and change my brush to
brush that has transfer and drop my opacity.
Just kind of soften some of these crusty
look, I don't really like that.
Looks a little artificial.
I'm just using the color picker.
I'm basically blending these two edges.
This is a nice, simple - it's like a little monochrome study
I did a couple years ago.
So obviously this was
a more complex object. This could be quite a pain in the
butt.
I definitely want to minimize
this as much as possible.
I'm using the eyedropper here just to color pick some colors
in the area.
So it looks pretty good, pretty happy with that.
That was just manual correction there.
So I'm going to hit command E to merge.
So this is before the sharpness after me zoom in real quick
before, after. Some work we just did. Now I'm going to -
what I'm going to do is now going to bring this in to my
old document. I'll really - I don't even need to save it. So
gonna do command A, command C,
then I'm going to bring in my old document and make a new
layer and do command V, paste, and now it's there. But of
course, it's double the size so I go to command T and I can use
the transform tools to shrink it or I can use the numerics to
shrink it to 50% because I know it's exactly double, make sure
that this link is active so that it's uniform height
and width. Hit enter.
And then I'm going to move it into place with the move tool
and ba boom. So what happened was look at the difference:
before,
after. So it's got a little bit brighter because of that
filter. Well, it's much much sharper. So now we took a
double sized image and uprezed it and tweaked it and present and tweaked it and
played with it and did our own
fixes, sharpness and things like that and then brought it back
to half size, which is the size that we want. And now
it's -
we've been able to maintain some of the integrity of the
edges and gonna drop the opacity a little bit just to make it a
little bit more subtle.
And there you go.
So that was just a quick little trick taking a new document,
making it double the size of the final output. So for
example, in this case, if you want to uprez to 2000 pixels,
make a 4000 pixel version of your artwork, of your slide or
your image, and then do your sharpness and corrections there
then bring it back and you'll be able to maintain some of the
fixes. So this is just a quick digital tip, digital trick.
Hopefully you'll never need to use it but it can be useful if
your slides are of low resolution or of lower quality.
And of course what you just saw was, you know, we played with
simple apple and a portrait, obviously the more complex your
image or your painting or your artwork the more of these
steps that you're going to need. So definitely play with
these tools, review them as much as possible. There's a lot of
stuff covered here. And again what you just saw me
demonstrate which is one simple example as your
paintings become more complex as the things you want to
uprez or sharpen or your paintings have more detail you
definitely going to need a few more steps, but the tools will
be exactly the same. So just review as much as possible and
as soon as you start playing with it and start
using it on your own artwork, you'll be able to get it
quickly with practice.
Okay, just last thing I want to show in this section is just
to quickly show some ways that we can format
for websites and social media.
So I'm going to open the portrait sample.
So remember, we took the slide, the RAW slide, the RAW shot of this
painting.
We made a full-size uncompressed TIFF,
a medium sized, this would be good for like a portfolio.
This one we don't need to uprez because we have a nice big Res because we have a nice big
original file.
That's the original.
That's the medium and here's the web. Okay, so if you want
to add some ways to identify yourself, maybe you have a logo
or signature prepared or you can even write your name, we'll
talk about that now, so that's typically two ways to do it. One
you either have a logo prepared, some type of logo or icon that
you can put as a sort of a digital watermark. That's one
way to think about it, or you can actually write your name at
the bottom with the text tool. Let's take a look at some ways
to do that. So I have my my JPEG, it's ready to go online. I
want to put some way to identify me as an artist so I
can first way is to if you have one prepared, so I do have one
here on my computer. This is a
New Masters Academy logo, and this one is a - what's called
a PNG and if you notice what PNG, the advantage of PNG file is
that it's transparent, This is a small PNG, you can see it's all
pixelated, but
it's actually transparent. The background is transparent. All
you see is the artwork, the logo in this case, so it could
typically be also a PSD file, can preserve transparency what
PNG is another way to do that. If it was a JPEG this
would be - it wouldn't be transparent, it would be the
logo against a white background for example. So just open my
logo file that I've already created. And one thing you
could do is do control A, control C, copy and paste, and
you'll be able to paste it directly on your artwork like
that. Or what I like to do is once I open my file I like to
just click and hold the layer and then boom, drag it into the
window. So is window view, remember you hold F, if you
click F
you'll scroll through the view modes and this is window view.
So if you're in window view, I just select my the file that
I want to bring into the - my logo that I want to bring into
my artwork, just click and hold on the layer and then boom, drag
it in or you can do cut and paste, exact same thing. So
that's - bring it in the logo there and just call it
logo.
And of course if you save it will save it to that file.
Another thing you could do is to use text. So if you have
your small file size,
you can actually literally write with the text tool and the text tool is
on your toolbars that T, that big uppercase T or the hotkey
of course is T. So I bring up T and I'll bring up this
options menu.
And now you have this new cursor. So what I'll do is I'll
just click wherever I want to write, then brings up a cursor
and then
up top you can see the various options you have for your text.
So it's almost similar to like a text editing program. So here
I'm just going to type my name, Chris Legaspi.
2016.
Then I'm going to put
my website.
That's it.
And just kind of move it to whatever corner you want.
You can also of course you can play with the font. Of course
this font is ugly and it's a little too small. So I just
bring up the text tool. Right now it's at 12 point. We can go
to -
let's go to 24.
It's pretty good. And this is the character and paragraph
menu, it's under window ,one of the many windows.
Paragraph.
But you can also activate it. If you have text tool active in
your options menu, remember this top bar is options you
have this little icon here and this is
paragraph and character. So you click that you'll activate the
menu and then you can play with the type. Let's change the
font.
Let's go to
impact. Impact's nice and bold. I mean you don't have to choose
impact, whatever font you like.
You can even download a cool font.
So fresh impact is built-in. Then I can also play with the
color. Right now it's pure black. I can make it like
slightly grey
and that was brought up here. If you look at color it's
right here like that.
It's also here in the options menu, this little color box
here. So that brings up this color picker cube. Just change
the color to whatever you want. I typically like it keep it
kind of grey like a dark mid-tone value or if you want
to match a color on your painting, you click this box,
move your color picker out of the way, and it'll actually
default to eyedropper. You see the eyedropper icon? Then I can
just click anywhere in my painting. Let's say click this
nice dark area. Boom. And now it color picks the dark color in
my painting so my painting kind of makes - the color of my text
kind of makes sense. And what I like to do to typically is I
like to lower the opacity of my text a little bit.
So it's semi-transparent, a little bit more subtle. Right now the
size is a little crazy too. So it's a little bit subtle, little
bit more subtle and it picks up some of the canvas color
underneath which is cool. And you can also create a
background to your text, sort of like a black bar. I typically
like to do that.
So you can either make a black bar using
your
marquee. Make a new layer, draw a slim rectangle.
Marquee. Fill it with black for example or white in this case.
Just going to fill it with black, change my -
the brightness.
Change the size again, it's a little too big. So that's one
way you can do that. You have a black bar and you have your
text.
Or if you don't want to like cut into your artwork, let's
say oh I don't want to cut into to those brush strokes, what
you can do is expand the canvas. So first duplicate your
background layer or if it's flattened. Remember duplicate
the layer whenever you want to make an operation. Now, I'm
going to do canvas size. So image, canvas size. The hotkey's
alt command C and then we're going to it a little
bit bigger. We're going to expand it. So under height,
let's go to pixels.
Under height let's make it from it - right now it's 796. So
let's add 820,
just a nice even number. 820. So we're adding about twenty. So we're adding about
24 pixels.
And then going to change the anchor so that it doesn't
affect the top. If it's in the middle top and bottom will get
bigger. We just want it to expand at the bottom. Let's hit
okay.
So now we've expanded the canvas.
And but we still see
it expanded the canvas to the background layer. If you want
to change the color what I'll do like to do is make a new
layer right above my duplicate and then fill it with a color.
So pure black in this case or you can fill it with pure white.
But let's see pure black and you can also because it's on
its own layer you can bring up your hue saturation and you
know, you can play with the brightness or add color but you know
typically use an all black bar strip like that, then I just
bring my named layer down and looks pretty good, the size.
Also too remember let's say you went too big. Let's say
you went too big, you're like oh crap this no, that's
too tall. That's too much of that black bar. So again, you
can just crop it. I like to use the marquee to get to a nice
tight crop and hit control command C, my crop hotkey and
boom now it's the perfect size.
Then you all have to do is do another save, flatten your
image. Do a file save and boom. It's ready to go.
Now I do save as.
But it's ready to go. That's just a quick way to label your
artwork.
The other way was if you had a prepared
image with your logo or your website and things like
that. So two different ways to label your artwork. Now it's
ready for display on my website or on social media.

Okay, the last section we're going to cover are some
advanced image adjustment options, some tips and tricks
that we can do to really fine-tune our images, our
slides of our artwork. Now this section can get a little
complex, but don't get to meet him intimidated. We're going to
take it nice and slow and you can review at any time and the
cool thing about these techniques even though I'm
calling them advanced techniques is that you'll be able to use them
for almost every single one of your Photoshop projects moving
forward. So you're going to have a lot of time to practice
and review them as well. So with that in mind, let's get
started. Alright, so the first thing I'm going to do is open
an artwork that I want
to edit and optimize.
And this is a RAW file. So this is a RAW shot shot with my
Olympus camera.
So it's why I brought up camera RAW, remember if you're shooting
your artwork
would most DSLRs the typically the format you want
is RAW, that way you can get the most out of your picture.
You want to use a Photoshop to edit. So let's just open this,
looks pretty good.
Okay, and this drawing, this isn't my drawing. This is a
drawing by my good friend Mark Westermoe.
Okay. So the first thing I want to do is make some selections.
Let's talk about selections. Remember we talked about
marquees, different shapes, and lasso. So we know that. Let's
talk about some ways to be little bit more efficient with
the lasso.
So I typically almost always start with the big lasso. And
what I want to do is select as much as a drawing and there's
little of the background as possible. So I'm just going
to select
here and I can't get too tight.
And I don't really want to get too tight anyway.
So that was just a quick little lasso I drew
with the polygon lasso. It's my favorite.
Now we know you can do plus and minus
to make it tighter.
So let's say I want to tighten this area up right here, cut out
this little notch. I just use - hold alt to subtract.
Cut out.
Like that,
it's pretty good. Same with here.
And of course we can add to this as well at anytime. That's
why the beginning I always make my lasso fairly - I don't want
to say sloppy but you know, it's close enough for what it
needs to be because I do all my fine-tuning with the lasso
after I get
thing blocked in so this little bit of subtraction technique
there. Should be familiar with this already.
This is something you'll be doing quite a bit.
And notice how
I always start at a point that I know I can reach. See now if
I have this point here, my start point here. Whoops.
I put my start point here let's say I want to - I want to come a
little bit tighter in this section. And I know I'm going
to finish here, right here. So that means I want my start point
to be somewhere where I can reach it from here. So in this
area would be a good place to start, right?
Versus if I start to close here then I have to come
around with my endpoint. So
for example, let's say I start too close, let's say I'm
right here. I'm very close to the inside of her arm and if I
get too
far over here right now, I have to go all the way around to
close the endpoint because if I double click here,
right, it makes this weird - it closes. It goes from point to
point and it closes at a weird shape. So you don't want to do
that. What you want to do is start somewhere where you can
reach it from your end point. So I know my endpoint is going to
be around her head.
That means I want to start here, put my first starting point
somewhere where I can easily reach it from the endpoint. So
I'm going to start here and then come in.
Come in.
Right, and now my endpoint I can just reach over.
And then it'll tighten it. And don't forget to and don't forget to to to
subtract. You want to hold
alt, make your first click and then you can let go of alt. You don't
have to hold alt the whole time.
Here and also you don't want to be too ambitious with your
chunks. For example, if I want to come really tight around
this cloth,
right,
it's a better idea to do it in small chunks sort of
what you saw me do here versus try to do this whole thing. So
for example, if I try to go really tight here and then I
get kind of sloppy here and I go it's sloppy here then, you
know trying to get to the foot. I'm like, oh my God, and then,
you know, then something happens and then I close it
wrong and it's all messed up.
So don't be too ambitious with your masking, with your
selections I mean.
Start fairly small
and close it like that. Do one more here.
Like that. Let's do one more here just for fun.
Now this isn't to necessary.
I just kind of want to demonstrate some masking.
Okay.
Let me come in a little bit tighter up here.
Sometimes - let's say I'm going to start here. I know I'm going
to end here. So I'll finish - I'll start at the end near the
end points. So I know I'm going to end here and I want to start
here. So I'll put my first point here, boom, then come
across to my start point.
Then now I'm ready to close, boom. So this selection stuff
you'll get with practice.
Once you become mindful and once you get comfortable with
the selection tool,
these lassos and things. Then you want to be mindful of where
your start and end points are and then you become really fast
and efficient with it. So I have a pretty decent selection.
Some areas can go tighter. I'm using primarily
polygon lasso. Here I'm using the freeform lasso. So to draw a
nice curve
because his hair is fairly curved and organic so I can kind
of draw.
This is really
a cool option if you have a tablet, of course, it's really
hard to do this if you don't have a tablet.
Okay, so this is just some selection tips.
Now we can also save and load the mask or our selections. So
you go to selection, save selection. Under the drop-down
menu there and then it'll give you this option, the channel
it'll save it in a channel, which we'll get to in a second.
And you can name it whatever you want. Call it
outer one,
outer mask, and then if I ever -
if I ever accidentally lose it by hit undo or deselect on
accident now can you go back to my channels and it's right
here.
And remember you hold command and you click on a channel
and then you have your selection again, or you can do
select, load selection
and there it is under channel, outer one. Boom.
So remember you can save your selection,
you can save your selection by going to select, save selection
and then call it up again by select, load selection. Now
what I want to do is make a mask. Let me talk about
feathering first. Feathering and using airbrushes. What I want
to do is kind of make a mask around this figure, but I don't
want it to be really tight. So for example, let's say I want
to just clean up the background art.
Let's say using brightness
contrast.
My channel again.
What I really want to do is make a mask.
And then have it to really clean tight background like
that. But the edge is too hard. It looks a little unnatural. So
what I want to do is soften the edge. So to do that
I'm going to delete my mask.
I'm going to go to select, modify and then feather
then pick a feather radius. What feather does is it
actually softens the selection?
So five is not that soft. You can go all the way up to - you
can put a big number. Let's say - let's just - I'll show you what
100 looks like. So I'm going to put in 100,
going to do the same thing.
The selection. You can see how soft and fuzzy it got. I'll
make this
really bright so you can see how soft and fuzzy that got so
that's 100.
Use my history to undo now. Let's see go to select modify
feather. Let's just go to something a little bit more
manageable like a 20. Let's see how that looks. And then boom. So
that looks, feels a little more natural, right?
Put it against a white background. So that's a little
bit more natural edge. I like that. So I'm going to keep like that so I'm going to keep
that.
And the cool thing about using selections and masks is that if
I don't like this I can undo it, but I can also load the
original selection and they'll still have that tight edge.
Remember we can do select load selection.
And the final thing I want to do is to talk about in this
section.
Let me bring back this guy here.
Is the idea of
using -
using the brush to edit your mask will first
this thing is way too saturated.
I don't like that pinky color, I'd rather just drop it down to
like sort of a grey. That's what I did here with this image
adjustment.
Just drop it and I put it way at the top of the stack so that
it affects everything beneath it. So what I'm going to do
is apply brightness contrast to the entire thing.
At least to this layer.
Because what I want to try to do is get a nice tight -
it's not working. Sometimes
the one you grab doesn't work as well. It's still a lot of
color here it's going to make it a little more difficult to
edit.
What I'm trying to do is get the background to be nice and flat,
but I don't know if that's possible really.
I want it to be a little bit brighter.
Okay,
so it's pretty
it's pretty flat and even. Still needs some work.
And I'm going to take this guy right here, the one with the
mask, then I want to apply -
actually what I'm going to do
is
yeah, I think I can do that. I'm going to take a levels to
this guy, to the figure itself.
Sort of just tighten it up clean it up.
Get it to a nice place. Trying to find is if the right balance of
getting the half tones.
But also keeping it fairly bright and contrasty.
So that will come with taste and practice, you'll see which -
how much you can crank on your levels.
And this one is still -
this whole thing is a really annoyingly too saturated.
Just too much like little too much color everywhere. I don't
like that.
Okay.
I basically have two hue saturations working there. So
now what I want to do is kind of clean up the parts of the
mask that aren't really cleaned up. And I can do that with my
brush.
So I'm going to take a soft airbrush.
And then I'm going to
make sure I have the mask layer active, not the object layer, the
image layer, but the mask layer. And then I'm going to take
black - pure black and pure white and sort of
go into the mask and edit my mask. So right now though that
was pure black and I'm going to take pure - that was white. I'm
going to brush in black to soften the mask and what that
does is it'll make what's beneath it show through and
what's beneath it is that really to blown out version of
this drawing
and more contrasty version. That's why I didn't want to put
like a plain blank sheet of color down there.
Now these things we're going to clean up next but
it's just really helpful to see -
you can use the brush to make a really tight
selection,
really tighten mask.
And I'm going to adjust these levels again, making a
little bit brighter.
Okay, that feels pretty good.
I may just - I think I will just put a nice flat wash of color
underneath.
Okay, so I use the mask, tighten the mask. It feels
pretty good. I can even go inside, you know, some of these
areas. I'd like to have them a little bit -
little bit brighter.
Not so dusty.
That feels pretty good right there.
Okay. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to merge my
work.
Just kind of merge what I have here.
If you see
what's happening here
it looks pretty cool. Check it out compared to the original.
Wow.
That looks cool. Now the last thing I want to do is I want to
clean up this junk up here.
So let's talk about ways to do that using masking and
vignette.
So one way is I'm going to take - I'm just going to color pick
this nice even tone down here and then I'm going to take my
gradient tool, make sure it's set
to the right settings and I'm going to sort of just drop it.
Now there's a layer -
this top layer is just my drawing, just the figure. The
bottom layer is the whole thing, but it's been adjusted.
So now this thing comes into play just to clean up this
little area. This is where the paper is bending and folding
Gonna drop that there and same thing with the bottom.
And that's another way to clean up this mess at the bottom
here. It's needs to be cropped properly. I can just use my
grab tool.
Color pick a color in the in the neighborhood
and sort of feel that in there. Use the grab like that. Now
it cleans up that space. Can also
clean up some of the other dirt in that area, same here.
Pretty much wherever I see dirt on the paper I can just
lightly clean it up.
Now luckily this was a pretty good slide so there's not a lot
of dirt there. I want to drop the opacity just a little bit just
so you can see some of the paper texture underneath. Want
to preserve some of that.
Make it a little more subtle and this one obviously
now we need to to repair that but we'll do that
in a little bit.
So now I have my figure, have this guy, and
figure blends nicely now.
Right here I could even put a mask and just clean up this
area. So little bit of cleanup it needs to do.
And I'm gonna drop the opacity of my brush a little bit.
So that's a little bit more subtle, drop it down the 40
percent. Remember the numeric keys
can do that for you as a quick shortcut.
So just tighten that mask up there little bit.
I'm going to go ahead and merge the cleanup work I did.
My figure is still there. I'm going to go ahead and merge
that. So now I have a clean, pretty clean drawing. Still have
to repair the bottom.
So it's before and after.
Now one thing we could do with the gradient tool, let's say -
let's say
I want to darken just the face, like some of the tones look
good, but the face still needs - it needs to be sharpened
as well. So what I can do is I'm going to duplicate my
layer
and I'm going to take a -
let's try brightness contrast. What I'm going to do
is
sort of darken it in a way.
Still gonna
turn down saturation and kind of got a pink on me there. I
don't like that.
Okay, and then turn down saturation again.
And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put both of
these in a group.
Grouping is a great way to combine layer adjustments. Put
them in a group. So that's before and after with these
image adjustments then going to put a mask in there because
what I want to do is I only want to affect the head.
So I'm going to take my mask and right now it's pure white.
I'm going to invert it
to pure black. So it hides it right. The stuff is still there,
but the mask sort of hid it.
So now I'm going to take my gradient tool. I like circular
gradient for this case and I'm starting to do like a subtle
gradient from her face outward. So check this out. So we take
my gradient tool, make sure it's set to the color that I want to
reveal which is a pure white in this case.
And put it right in the center of her nose and then boom.
See that, see how the face is very subtle. I'm going to make
it a little more obvious for you. So you can see what I just
did with the gradient tool.
I'm going to -
going to delete that.
I'm going to redo that, take the gradient tool
remember, it's in a group that has a bunch of selections and
then our image adjustment, layers, layer adjustments and
then boom using gradient tool there. So what this did was it
kind of revealed what's in the folder.
So
I'm liking that. I'm not crazy about what it did to the
background.
So I can go to levels. Let's try levels. I like - so far I'm
liking levels more because it's really affecting the background
as much.
But again, I can change that as well in a minute. I'll show you
in a minute.
That's pretty good, pretty happy with that.
I'm going to delete this brightness contrast.
So now I have a nice
set of image adjustments, but they only effect the head is
because I use a gradient tool in my mask.
So let me try another example. Let's say I like this, now I
want to do a gradient tool.
Just the entire upper body from the head down. So I'm just
going to take just take another levels.
And just drop it down.
I'm liking how sharp that looks. So now I'm going to take
a gradient tool. I'm going to invert this mask.
Or let's say I'm going to invert this mask. I like what
it did to the feet actually. So now I'm going to use my
gradient tool again. And this time this time going to use
rectangular gradient, flat gradient. So now this only
affects the upper half and that's because I have a
gradient tool on the mask. So that's one quick way and notice
how its subtle it is, the transition is very subtle. Same
with this guy even though I have two new adjustments the
transition is subtle from from the new work to the old work and
that's because of the gradient tool, creates a beautiful subtlety.
And I could also just say I just let's just say for example,
I want - I just want to try it on the feet. So I like how that
looks, it looks pretty good. Now if it's a little too harsh, a
little too strong, what I can do is just drop it down because
it's on a layer I can drop it in opacity to make it more
subtle. It's one thing I like to do.
See that's a little too strong. I'll adjust on the feet.
See where needs to go is the hands. I'm going to bring that
back actually.
And then I'm going to bring it back on the hands.
And then also on the face one more in the face, so I got one
more layer.
The hands and on the face, so I'm pretty happy with that. I'm
going to make that little bit more subtle.
Yeah notice when I drop the opacity becomes super subtle.
So now I have - there you go. Now we have two sets of
adjustments.
Actually now I'm not liking this bottom one. I'm going to delete that.
I just like this levels right here. So and I use the gradient
tool in three areas. So I can go ahead and merge my work.
So before, after. Adjusted the hands. Now if I want to adjust
the sharpness I feel the face could use a little bit of
sharpening. So I'm going to duplicate my layer. I'm going
to go to filter, sharpen, unsharp mask.
And just going to sharpen it a little bit. So remember you can
play with the radius.
And the amount. Just to get the right effect that you want and
I'm going to make this pretty subtle.
Yeah I like what it's doing overall actually, it's quite nice.
Yeah, like it was doing overall. So I'm just going to
leave that then I duplicate it one more time. I'm going to
apply it again.
Actually let me -
let me make that a little bit more settled by dropping. I
have the original before sharpening, the new one after
sharpened. So I'm going to drop the opacity to like 75 percent.
So it's a little bit more subtle. I'm just going to merge
it. So I'm pretty happy with that. Before sharpening, after.
I'm going to duplicate that and I'm just going to sharpen the
face so filter, sharpen, unsharp mask. One more application only
on the face.
So that's pretty good.
So what do I do put on a mask and just like what we did with
the value correction or the contrast correction. I'm going
to invert the mask and now I'm going to use a circular
gradient and then boom.
It only affects the face, right, not any other part because
there's a mask and it uses a gradient to make it very
subtle. And now I'm going to come in and brush
and hide
some of the areas.
My brush is it a high opacity there.
I just kind of want -
I don't want the shadow details to be too sharp, but I want
like all his Line work to show through and then before, after.
Drop the opacity just a little bit to make it a little bit
more subtle.
Boom.
Merge my work. So wow looks sharper and crisper. Before,
after. It looks a lot better. Look how beautiful this line
turned out. So that's just a small sample of the
things you could do when you apply gradients - the gradient
tool to your masks.

Transcription not available.

Okay. Now it's time for your assignment. In this assignment
we're going to go through three different projects. It will be -
first it will be a portrait slide. It will be a landscape
slide second and then finally a still life and all three of
these are photographs of artwork that I took and what
you're going to do is optimize them in Photoshop. So the first,
for the portrait first we have to open the file,
adjust it, rotate it, and crop it. And then optimize the artwork
itself and then export it. For the landscape we're going to do
a slightly different assignment. This one we're going to take a
lower quality image and try to make it
a fairly high quality slide. So it's going to be a little There's going to be a little
bit tricky and then we're also going to export that as well to
show off our work and then finally the still life we're
going to take another RAW file and do some tweaks to make it
very presentable, very optimized and also export that as well so
you can display it and show off your work.

Okay. Hope you enjoyed the assignment. Now it's my turn.
I'm going to take a shot at optimizing the slide I took
of a portrait. Alright, so let's open the slide first.
Okay. So this is a RAW DSLR camera file
with my - shot this with an Olympus. So it's going to bring
up camera RAW so don't get scared by this. So a lot of
this stuff really is -
we're going to be doing in Photoshop.
So I'm just going to go ahead and open it and I'm going to
mess too much with it because the shot looks pretty good
overall. So just go ahead and open it.
All right. So obviously the first thing we need to do is
rotate this thing. So let's rotate it. And if you haven't
already you want to make sure you make a hotkey. So it's
image, image rotation, and you'll do flip canvas OR rotation.
So I already have hotkeys set up.
I'm going to go 90 degrees counterclockwise.
Now we're good to go. Now it's the right orientation. So that
was step one.
Step two is we got to get the nice crop. So how do we do
that? There's a couple ways we know about crop tool,
right? We know about making a marquee.
But what I want to do is I want to be able to test my crop
because I'm not a hundred percent sure how much of this
negative space I want to keep. I kind of like some of this
stuff. I like the stuff at the bottom of this kind of
painterly stuff. So I might want to keep some of that. I
don't want to go super tight and just lose it all. So to
test it, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first make a mask
using an alpha mask. So I'm going to duplicate my file,
duplicate the image,
and then
what I'm going to do is I'm going to
delete the background layer or the original layer,
make sure that it goes to black.
Right? So
and I still have the original image, it's own a duplicate
layer so, it's cool. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to
draw a marquee, just a rectangle around it and just kind of
approximate where I want the crop to be and while my marquee
is active, going to click our friend the layer mask button
and boom and then it'll draw the mask based on the marquee.
So now I have a pretty nice crop. It looks okay, but I want
to be able to test it try out different crops and to do that
I'm going to first unlink the mask. So we just click that
link icon, now make sure my mask is selected and I'm going
to bring up transform tool which is command T. This is
free transform. Now, I can whoop, resize, play around with the
crop and you see it doesn't affect the image because it's
not linked. The mask is not linked. So let's say - let's
start with the bottom, how much of the bottom stuff do I want
to keep. Do I want to lose it all, keep some of it? I think
it looks pretty cool if I see some of it or more of it. I
like that.
How about there? It's a nice compromise left to right.
I don't want too much of that. So going to get rid of
that
on the right side. Let's see how much of that stuff I want.
It looks pretty good. It looks okay. Let's see. I mean, I'm
just - I'm just guessing. It's really up to you how much of
that stuff you want. Because once you crop it, it's really
hard to bring it back. In fact, it's impossible to bring it
back. You'll have to reopen the RAW file.
So just going to give myself a little bit more space top to
bottom and
hit enter. Now the mask isn't applied yet where we haven't
cropped it. So I'm just going to flip it
just to double-check. I did a canvass flip and the shortcut
is - my shortcut is F 2, flip canvas horizontal. And let me
play with the mask again just to make sure that I get just
the right amount of pixels that I want.
Yeah, that's pretty good. Looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and
keep it, flip it back. Now to apply the crop what I'm going
to do is hold command, click on the mask and it'll draw a marquee.
And once you have a active marquee you can go edit - oh
image, excuse me, image crop. Boom. Now it's totally cropped
and it's going to flatten my work. Boom.
Now it's cropped the way I want it. So that was step two,
the next step is to optimize. So this slide looks pretty good
actually, has pretty good sharpness,
has pretty good contrast. I mean, it's pretty close to
the original and you kind of want to have your painting next
to you when you're doing this when you're optimizing your
slides. So the first thing I'm going to do is I apply levels
just to see if I can increase the contrast a little bit.
You don't want to go too much because then it's not really true to
your painting. So I like that. And remember you can always
play with the opacity to make it more or less subtle.
So I like that. And I'm going to turn up the saturation just a
little bit.
The reason why I do that is because this was shot in the
shade, I actually shot this outside
in the shade of
a building outdoor. So
the light tended to be a little bit grey, little bit cool. So I'm
liking that so far. One way you can test
is to merge your adjustment layers. So I duplicated the
bottom layer, my original layer of course, you always want to
duplicate your work. Merge these two so select them all just by
holding shift.
And clicking and then command E, which is merge down, will merge
all those layers down then you can test so this is before,
after, before, after.
So actually this one's a little too bright. So what I'm going to do
is drop the opacity a little bit. What I want is more of a
vignette.
Duplicate the bottom layer again. My original layer I
don't want to ever - I always want to duplicate it before you do
any operation and merge down because I drop the opacity. Okay a
little brighter. Now I want to try to do a vignette, just a
little bit of a vignette. So I'm going to do brightness contrast,
turn down the brightness, increase the contrast.
Well, let me actually decrease the contrast, how about that.
And then what I'm going to do is use the
circular gradient tool to create a vignette. So whatever
is outside gets a little bit darker. So it's a nice
vignette, which is what I wanted. I'm going to go ahead
and merge that and the last thing I want to do is increase
the sharpness. Just want to make it a little bit sharper.
We can do that around the face. So to do that I'm going to
duplicate this layer and I'm going to apply a sharpen filter,
so filter,
sharpen, unsharp mask. That's the one I use the most and then you can
play with a radius, remember these two work together member these two work together
if you have a high amount but a low radius you won't be able to see
it and vice versa. A low amount but a high radius you won't be
able to see it. So you kind of got to find a nice balance.
You don't want to go too aggressive because then it will look
Photoshop-y, it'll look all pixely and too fake.
Okay, so I like that. So overall that looks pretty good,
sharpened it overall. So to give it more of a vignette
effect again what I'm going to do is this is the sharpened
layer.
See before, after. You see that? I'm gonna zoom in. Before, after.
Look at the nice sharpening overall. I kind of like that
actually, overall sharpening. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going
to drop the opacity a little bit. So maybe like 75.
Then I'm going to merge these two layers. Boom.
Have my original, have my optimize and then gonna do one
more sharpness filter, sharpen, unsharp mask. One more
time, but only in the features.
So I'm going to put on a alpha mask here. And what I want to
do is put a nice vignette. So I'm gonna take my alpha mask
and reverse it. So inverse it, turn it from all white to all
black. What that does is it sort of hides this layer but
it's still there. You just - it's being masked out and to bring
it out we just have to brush white or in this case use
gradient tool and wham.
Excuse me. Use white. There it is.
So
without sharpening
before, sharpened, the features only, after look at that, it's
pretty sharp actually. So I'm going to tone this down just a
little bit, about 75%.
So little too - let's try 60%. Yeah that's working. that that's working.
That's why I like about this feature. You can fine-tune it
almost to perfection. Let's try right 50. There we go. almost right 50. There we go.
There we go.
And let's go ahead and merge my work and boom. So this is
the optimized. This is the original.
So let's take a look before
and after. This nice sharpness going on. Now I have a nice
beautiful slide. perfectly optimized slide. So I'm going to
go ahead and merge this. Well, let me drop
just a little bit.
Try to make it even more subtle. That looks pretty good.
Actually drop the opacity, decided it was too - started to get
too Photoshop-y looking too aggressive, started to get too
aggressive with my optimization. So go ahead and
merge that so now
so now I'm locked and loaded.
And what I can do now is save a couple different versions to
output. I need one really large version just for
my archive. I need a medium sized version that I could show
my portfolio, bring it to galleries and to clients and
things. And the small web version. So let's start with
the full size version first. So I'm going to do an image, image
size. And the shortcut is alt, command I.
So for the full-size I'm going to leave it -
let's drop it a little bit to 10 inches in height. It's
nice print size.
Well, actually, let's save it.
At this - let's just leave it at full pixel size, 300 DPI at
eight by eleven. This was painted on a nine by twelve. So this is
full-size. I'm gonna go ahead and save it.
And I'm going to use the TIFF format because TIFF you can do
uncompressed meaning it doesn't - you don't lose a lot in the
pixels. So save it as portrait
underscore large and put underscore TIFF so I know it's
a TIFF file.
And it's save and then image compression none. That's why
TIFF is really good for uncompressed full size files.
Now, it's a huge gigantic file. But now every time you want to
use this file in you know, making different versions. You
now have a full uncompressed full-size TIFF ready to go. So,
this is my first one. Now I'm going to make
a medium sized version that I can put on my iPad or show my
laptop if I want to bring somewhere. This full-size is where this full-size is
gigantic. It's like three megs or something crazy like that.
You don't want to have a gigantic file like that. You
want to turn it into a JPEG just to make the file size a
little bit more manageable.
Oh, so a quick note on file size, you know most computers
these days are really really powerful and probably by the
time you see this they're going to be even more powerful,
right? So,
what would I do with file sizes and making three different
versions. It's not a hundred percent necessary. I mean you
could take this gigantic TIFF and just slap it in your iPad
and show it to people as a portfolio. That's no problem.
But but for me, I'll I just like to have
file sizes that are a little bit more manageable and that's cool if
you want to transfer them, that's probably why it's a good
habit. And it's especially true for web in my opinion.
It's best to keep your web images as small as possible so
that they load quickly. But like I said most computers can
handle huge files.
The main advantage to doing this being mindful of your file
sizes and making these three versions is for portability.
Alright second file size, the medium. So what I'm going to do
is
what's a good medium file size? So first I'm going to shrink it
to 200 DPI.
And
let's
you know, that's a pretty good pixel. Let's do 2400.
Max pixel height.
Okay, so it didn't shrink it too much, still a huge file. And now
what I can do is
do a save as.
GOnna save this as JPEG and gonna call this portrait underscore
medium.
Must be two files in there. So medium two, okay.
Well, this is a huge file. 3.1 MB. Meg.
That can be problematic for transferring it. So let me show
you, get some more actually. So let's do two thousand,
two hundred DPI, hit okay.
Now
what I'm going to do is
save for web, which is hotkey is shift, alt, command, S.
You can also find it here,
file, export and save for web. Says legacy, which means
it's old. I guess that's a nice way of saying it's an old
function. So now this is pretty nice size. One point MB. Let's
see if we can make it 1.5.
Yes. It's pretty good.
Yeah, 1.5 is a huge is pretty big file to cart around but
it's okay. It'll survive. Actually, let's drop it down to
80.
Yeah one about a one megabyte file. So hit
save and now here we go.
Medium two. Cool.
Save. All right.
So I just saved a medium-sized. Let me undo the file size here
because I believe - yeah, you see what happened was I took my
my large TIFF and I did some operations on it and what it
did was
this TIFF is acting - now it's become the new file size. So if
I want
to make a smaller version I want to take the fresh
uncompressed TIFF to start with. So either I can close it and so either I can close it and
reopen it or just undo it in history. That's why I like
having history tab. So I'm just going to undo both of these
image sizes. Boom. So now it's back. If you check the image size it's
back to its full size 300 DPI at a limit inches height,
max height.
Okay, so now we're going to make a web version
and we're also going to put our name on it, our name and our
website.
So first thing I want to do is I'm going to
put my name on a black bar, right under the thing. Now you
don't have to, you can put it right on your
artwork. Let's try that, black bar's kind of some black bars kind of
annoying. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take -
actually what it really needs is a signature. I'm just going to
draw like a black rectangle I used - here I used an object
which is a shape.
And drop the opacity little bit so you can see through it.
I don't really like that.
Let's see and it looks okay.
Let's try to type - going to type with
the text tool.
And I will put my name
and a website,
website.com.
Looks pretty good. Actually, I may not need the black bar.
Kind of like that. Just right over here.
What I normally do is I expand the file size, expand the canvas
size to get a nice black rectangle, but this one seems
okay.
Yeah, this one seems okay.
Let me try it with the bar. It looks pretty good. Actually, I
like that with the bar, drop the opacity a little bit.
Looks pretty good.
Let me see if I can
make a file size. Let's just increase the file size to 12
inches.
And it expanded to a black canvas.
So I like that, I'm going to drop the opacity even more so
it's more subtle.
Now I'm going to crop it just to make it a little bit
tighter.
Draw a marquee. Oops.
And do edit or excuse me, image crop. There you go.
That looks pretty good actually, I don't like it on
the painting. I kind of like that extra black bar.
Alright, so now we got to shrink it for the web. So
do alt, command I. Now I like to keep the resolution pretty low
so I can go 150 or 200. Actually 72 is the DPI that most
monitors are at at least at this moment. So
72 is a good DPI. I'm going to
bring it up to 150 so that just in case it needs - I need to work
on it or use it use this specific JPEG I can have it,
those pixels. And would pick my max height to 900.
That's a pretty nice height, 900, anything around a thousand
is a good height to have or max height or max width. So I got my
thing at 900 pixels. I'm going to bring up save for web which
is shift alt command and S is the keyboard shortcut. And now
our jpeg you want to keep it around 250. You don't really
want to go over 300 because even with today's internet
speeds
you want it to load really fast.
So now this is a nice compromise, 75 quality gives me
240k JPEG. So I'm gonna call it a portrait underscore
small or low. Let's put low meaning low res.
And make sure format is image only, which will be JPEG, and hit
save. Baboom.
So I got this one. So let me -
let me bring up all three so you can see and compare.
So I'm gonna go ahead and close this, so don't save, I'm going to open.
Medium two
and large. There you go.
All right, so I got all three versions on screen here.
So this is my full size. 11 inches high, 300 DPI,
the medium size, perfect for iPad and portability.
And the web, the small low-res perfect for
putting on your blog or your website or social media.
Alright, so that was the portrait.
Next I'm going to optimize a slide I took of a landscape.

Okay. Hope you were able to optimize the landscape. I know
it's a little bit tricky. We started with a fairly small
image size. But now you're going to see how I
were to do this assignment and optimize this this low-res
slide of a landscape. So let's open this bad boy.
Where is it here?
Okay, so this is one of those
sub optimal conditions. So what happened is I'll tell you a
little back story and this may happen to you is that I painted
this painting
and it sold.
Somebody bought it actually before I could take a good
slide of it. So all I have is is crappy iPhone slide and I
can't get ahold of them, the person who bought it. So this
may happen to you. That's why I wanted to include it and
in this lesson, so let's take a look at what we have to work
with. Oh my God, it's a tiny thing. So what we can do is
probably double its size. We can keep this as the web
version then I could double its size. It's probably the best I
can do to get the most out of this slide,
but definitely not an optimal situation. So first, let's get
rid of all this black stuff.
And there's a couple ways to do that. You can use let's try the
wand. Okay, it's not going to work. So let's try marquee.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
I'm going to use the
mask technique to make the edge tight, let's see.
Yeah.
I just inverted the background to white, shortcut is command I
inverts everything so I just want to use the mask to make
sure that my
crop is really tight, get rid of that black space.
This is really unfortunate. I should probably
try to contact the new owner. Okay, so I got my nice tight
crop. Alt, command C. Excuse me, image, crop. Boom. Crop she's image Krupp boom drop
that.
All right. So now I got my thing cropped.
So what can we do here? What can we do?
This was an iPhone shot.
So some of the colors got lost, the contrast is pretty good,
actually iPhone has a pretty nice contrast but a lot of this
stuff is just so messy and noisy. It's really
frustrating to look at. So
first let's double the size. Let's make our canvas a
little bit bigger.
I'm going to alt, command I
and
let's leave the DPI where it is. Let's do percent so I know
it just doubles height and width, 200 percent. All right,
so now let's look total crap.
So what we can do
is first apply some sharpness. Go to filter, sharpen, unsharp
mask and this is way too crazy.
The radius is too big, just looks too unnatural in
Photoshop-y.
All right,
so I like that overall.
Now, let's try to clean up this sky.
I know the painting was little bit more orange, little bit more
purple because a lot of these the colors being washed out by
the reflectivity and that's,
you know, obviously you do, you know, you don't want that when
you're taking a slide. Probably I should have let
it dry.
But you know, it's one of those things where you sure some of
you can relate.
You have a show.
and
you know running down to the wire.
Okay. So what I did was I just did the levels a little bit
just to brighten up the sky, just the hue saturation a
little bit. And so what I want to do is is I kind of want to
separate the sky because the sky
is what looks the worst in my opinion. The bottom stuff is
okay.
So
first thing to do is command plus J to duplicate my background
layer. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put these
adjustments in a folder and then I'm going to try to do a
mask around the sky. So first, let me try to use my magic wand
so it's kind of working. Good.
If you hold shift you'll be able to pull this - it's kind of
working, it's good. It's selecting everything but the sky so I'm
pretty happy with that. So what I'm going to do is apply this while
it's active.
Well, let me clean it up first. I know this bottom stuff I
don't need so all that - whoops. All this extra
things that the lasso tool didn't pick up.
And you know, I can always clean up my mask in
with brushes, that's what I like to do to get the tightest
mask possible.
Okay.
And switch to polygons remember holding shift
Gives you the ability to add, alt gives you the ability to
subtract, to cut into your mask.
Yeah, so hopefully you guys won't ever have to do this.
You'll always
be more cautious.
Or
you'll always be ready
to take good slides of your work, of course, be more
professional but you know these things happen and what you're
learning here of course can be applied to your own work
whenever you make - let's say you want to blow up a sketch. Let's
say you do a sketchbook sketch in your Sketchbook and you
lose your Sketchbook and you want to turn that into a nice
high res JPEG. This exact technique will work for that.
Or let's say you're making your own comps. Let's say you draw a
beautiful composition
on a post-it note. It's like a two inch large size
drawing and all you have is a crappy iPhone pic of it and you
want to blow it up to turn it into a comp that you can use,
these exact same techniques will apply. File size. Excuse me
image size and then sharpness, using adjustment layers. So all
of this stuff will apply to multiple uses, not just blowing
up small set - small files.
This is a nice painting actually. I wish I still had Actually. I wish I still had
actually
enjoyed this painting actually. Okay, so I got pretty good
slide and I'm going to activate my mass, just click the button.
As long as - oops. As long as the mask is active you see little
marching ants if you click the alpha button, boom. It'll draw
it perfectly for you.
So right now it's inverted. So I'm going to invert. There you
go. That's what I wanted. So you see before, after.
You see the color start to change. And now what I'm going
to do
is I'm going to try to get rid of some of this noise - some of
this
brightness noise there. I'm just going to draw some purple. I
color pick the purple that was there and then I'm going to do
command U. Going to make a little bit more saturated,
little bit darker. Make sure it's the right temperature of
purple.
So what I want to do is drop the opacity just a little bit
there.
Then what am I going to do now is do a color balance, so color
balance
and I try to increase the warmth
underneath right there over the sun's coming up and then I'm
going to apply a gradient to that. It's not at the top.
There it is.
Rearrange that.
That looks pretty good.
Just making it a little bit more subtle.
So I'm pretty happy with that. That's probably the best I can
do to be honest with you.
It's just way too small. I could probably clean up some of
these things, clean up some of these edges. So let's try
that a little bit.
Now we're getting into dangerous territory because
we're altering the original quite a bit.
You don't do that too much. What I'm going to do is just taking like
a nice textural brushes. Remember we have the ability to make all
sorts of brushes.
This one is a little too texture-y, let's see if I can find a
one that kind of looks like a paint brush a little bit.
This one's not working.
You don't want to use airbrush either because it's not -
it's not
texture enough. It'll feel really unnatural. Let's try
this guy. Let's put on a transfer.
And we'll give it a little bit more spacing, little more
tooth.
There you go. Okay, that should work.
Just want to clean up some of this.
You don't want to do too much because it'll stand out. It
won't look like the painting underneath and that you had to
be careful with but some of these edges are just just
dirty.
You're not - it's not dirt from the painting I don't believe,
that dirt from the
just the ugly low-res slide that we had to work with.
Just to clean up some of these edges little bit you, don't want
to do too much.
Again this is sort of like an emergency
situation you definitely don't want to rely on this. So the this
is again just a useful thing. Also another thing I thought
of too is that
you can do this technique of course for photos. So for
example, if you have a photo of a relative, a long-lost
relative, of course, this would be perfect for
doing a retouching.
All this bottom stuff I like. Just wanted to clean up some we just wanted to clean up some
of the edges up top.
So that looks pretty good. Just cleaned up some of the edges.
They still feel a little natural. There's not too much
of them. And as long as you vary your colors in your work,
should be okay.
Do enough blending and randomness.
I'm trying to
pick colors from the area so it feels a little bit more
random.
And then of course
if you do it too much, you'll lose the texture underneath
which won't seem natural.
Okay, so I think that's about as far as I can go, as far as
doubling the size and optimizing it. I think it looks
pretty good.
So what I'm going to do is
go ahead and merge all my work just so you can see
before and after
so just merge all my work. So this is
optimized before, after. Sky looks a little bit cleaner,
little bit more contrast. So I like that and -
yeah, I think that's as good as we can get. So what I'm
going to do is
check out the file size.
Let's see. It's still - it's still pretty small. I would
consider this may be a good medium size.
So we'll do shift. What I'm going to do is do shift command
S
and want to call this
medium and make sure it's a JPEG. I'm going to save it at
full 12 maximum so it's still it's about 800 k which is perfect.
Under 800 k so, you know, we took a tiny 600 pixel JPEG. We
doubled it, optimized it. It looks pretty good.
And if we want we can even make a web version. So let's go
ahead and do that now.
So duplicate the original
and add some pixels to the bottom
its height. So let's just add 1500. I'm just guessing right
now. Make sure your anchor is at the right spot canvas
extension color. I like it black for this scenario. So
boom.
Bring up your text.
You don't have to use a particular font. You don't even have to
put your website.
You can put your name and the year, whatever you
feel. This is a little too small. So I'm going to change
it from 20 to let's try 30 point.
Okay, it looks pretty good. Got my name there.
I'm going to drop the opacity
a bit more subtle. Okay, then I'm going to crop it.
Crop it pretty tight to the name. Not too tight.
Image, crop.
Merge my work. Now I'm going to do
image, image size. Alt command I is the shortcut. Now I'm going
to make this 900 pixels high. It's a nice maximum width
and I'm going to try save this at a nice small file size.
So 90's too big
85 is a little - still too big. I'm looking at this number here. So
80% quality produces this 247 kilobyte JPEG, which is perfect
size. Hit okay, and now we're done.
And I'll make sure to don't say because right now it's it's
acting as if it was the original file. So let's bring
up all three just to compare, go one. All right, perfect.
So I got one that's 1200 pics high. Hi.
The original 600 picks, crappy JPEG, we optimized it as best as
we could, double the size and added some sharpness and
cleaned up some of the edges and colors and here we made a
newer web version based off our optimized version. So just
basically an emergency
optimization for
the small image size. Okay. So that's the end of the landscape.
The last example will be a still life.

The still life is pretty straightforward. It's a lot
like the
portrait that we did. So now you're going to see how I
optimized this slide of a still life. Alright, let's open our
slide.
So again, this is going to be a
a RAW file from my Olympus camera, this one right here.
So when you try to open it in Photoshop, you bring up camera
RAW and just going to leave it as is. Right now the default
settings. I'm going to all of my optimization in Photoshop.
So open the image.
So obviously right away we need to do two things. We need to
crop and rotate. So let's start with the rotation. So if you
haven't already make sure you have your hotkey to rotate and
flip canvas. I'm going to do counterclockwise rotation,
obviously. So my hotkey is set to shift F two and baboom. And
of course, it's also here, image, image rotation. You can see my
hotkeys.
Okay. So now we have a crop. Now now.
to be honest, I don't really want to keep all of this mess
as I want to keep it tight. I'm just going to go straight crop
tool. It's going to be straight crop tool. The shortcut is C.
And what I like about crop tool too is it kind of darkens what's
outside of the boundaries? You can kind of - you can kind of see
a little bit what the crop would look like, kind of like what we
did with the portrait.
So just left to right. How much do you want to keep, how tight
do you want it, that's really up to you at this point.
Remember we really can't undo this part.
So once we commit to a crop, we have to reopen the file if we
don't like it.
So actually I don't like a lot of this stuff.
Looks pretty good.
I'm going to do a canvas flip just to test it - that looks okay.
Looks okay.
There's a lot of this noise, this brushy stuff I didn't
want to keep. Brushy stuff probably should not
keep that either actually, all this stuff right here on the
left side.
Just clean that up a little bit. Of course, you can use or
you can repair it in Photoshop if you want. Alright. So first You want it? Alright. So first
the contrast seems a little flat.
Then I shot this one in the shade as well.
So I like to use levels.
Looks pretty cool.
A lot more contrasty.
You can see the nice texture. I don't think we'll need too much
sharpening with this one. This was a pretty good slide. This was a
really nice
shot slide. This is ideal.
So I like that I'm just going to merge it down. just going to merge it down.
And now I'm going to do a
subtle hue saturation
just increase the sat a little bit.
Don't want to go too far.
Like 10% right there, real subtle.
So I like that.
Going to drop the opacity a little bit.
Okay, then merge it down.
So I like that.
The last thing I want to do is
let's look at the sharpness real quick. So just duplicate
this. So go to filter, sharpen, unsharp mask.
Looks pretty good right there, just wanna
do an overall sharpness kind of like that.
Just makes the slide look really crisp. I like that. So
drop the opacity again, about 20% just to make it more subtle.
I like that. So this is before, after, I'm gonna zoom in. Before or
before, after look at the details, little bit sharper, just
subtle enough.
And the last thing I want to do is let's patch these up because
that just looks - that just looks ugly and I don't want to crop it
even more.
This is sort of a dirty trick, but
Who's going to know, right? Who's gonna know? So what I'm doing
is clone stamp tool the shortcut is S. So, I'm going to
pick this area, just hit - hold alt and click the crosshair. So
that's my anchor point and then just subtly brush to close that
bit of plain white canvas, do the same thing for this half.
Just a subtle.
Same thing for this little pink area, and I'm going to mess
with that, that's too big, and I kind of like it. Maybe this one
I can play with a little bit. It's just really subtle, just
killing some of that bare white canvas, you know, it's
kind of ugly looking back. I should have
toned this canvas. Wouldn't be so ugly. It wouldn't be peeking
through so ugly like that.
This is before, after, it's pretty good. I like that.
So I liked it so much it's going to be heading merge my
work. So now pretty happy,
you know, I could do a couple more things to increase.
Let's try -
what I'm gonna try to do is
do the - make the highlight pop a little bit more. So what I did
was a brightness contrast, see the make the area brighter and
I'm going to use the vignette technique, which is basically
putting a mask on it, inverting it, right? So that it doesn't
show through. It's there but you can't see it because it's
masked out and then using a white with the gradient tool or
a brush to - boop - to bring it back only in the area that I
want which is the highlight.
See if I like that. It's a little
too bright, I think.
Make it a little bit more subtle.
I like that. I like that. Let's make it a little bit more
subtle. 29%. There you go. percent. There you go.
Boom. So I like that. All right, so we did some repair
work.
Now I'm pretty happy. Let's save it as the large file size.
So let's check the image size. 300 DPI.
This is a fairly small painting. It's a little
nine inch painting. So
yeah, this is a nice full size file. Going to shift command S,
change the format to TIFF.
I'm going to call it a pear underscore large.
And hit save, make sure my image compression is none, boom.
Ready to go.
We got a nice full size TIFF.
So next we need a medium. So I'm going to show you guys an
interesting technique.
So we want - we want three, right? We want medium and a small and
I want to keep this file open, but still have my new files, my
new version. So what I'm going to do is because this is merged,
right, it's flattened. It's my beautiful large full-size
optimized slide. This is the most - as good as it's is the most as good as it's
going to get, right? The most pixels, full size. So what I'm going
to do is I'm going to select all so command A, then I'm going
to copy command C. What that does is it copies this layer
which is my full optimized painting onto the clipboard of
Photoshop or actually clipboard of the computer. So what
I'm gonna do is once I hit command C it copies the
clipboard then I'm going to do file new. So command N is the
shortcut. And what this will do if you look up top it says
document type clipboard, what it is it's reacting to the fact
that I have some pixels and image copied to the clipboard
which is a virtual clipboard then I'm going to hit okay.
And it has the pixel size and resolution all set up because
it's copying what's on the clipboard
and then when I have this new document open or created,
command new, I'll do a command V which is paste. Boom. So now I
have two documents that have the exact same thing.
And this one I'm going to turn it to my medium. So do alt
command I.
Turn it to my medium file size. Let's drop the pixel resolution a
little bit and let's see pixels. Let's take it to -
what's a good medium file size? Let's do 1,200.
Well, let's do 2000.
Because it's really about the file size is more important to
me.
Try to keep the file size under a megabyte. Oh, that's too
small. So let's do command Z. Woah, that's too big. What I
meant to do was 200 DPI at
2,000 pixels not 200. 2000 pixels max height. All right
now we're good to go. Oops.
So now I can do alt command I, looking good. Now I can do alt
command - well, let me merge it here and paste it to a new
layer. So it's not merged. I'm going to merge it down, command
E. Now I have a flattened medium sized image. I'm going to save
for -
save for web. Shift alt command S
and let's see if we can get it to around a megabyte. That's a
nice medium file size.
75 let's try 77 is pretty good. 1.02 megs this was pretty,
pretty close. It's fudging a little bit so hit save and then
I'm going to call it
pear underscore medium or med and saved as a JPEG, dot JPEG. JPG hit
save. But boom.
So what happened is saved it virtually
Right now this is still the virtual PSD files. I'm going to
open or just to bring it on screen. So we have it on
screen.
Did I save it? Yes, there it is.
Okay. So now -
so you see that?
The medium sized, get my full large, have 25% still pretty big. My
medium have 25 percent, right? It's smaller. So now what we
have is this one, which has all the settings, that image size
settings
of the medium. So now we can keep going and make
an even smaller file size for web. So what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to - well first I'm going to expand the canvas, but
let me try - let me just try to write on here. I don't really
care about
this bottom half. I'm not going to write my website. Just going
to put my name and the date, whatever.
This font is - font is too ugly. Let's try
Trajan, which is a movie set font.
There it is Trajan three, let's try Trajan regular. Okay, stretch region regular. Okay,
and you can get any font on the web. It's very easy to just do
a Google search.
Almost any font. Make sure the file size is 30 point is too
big. Let's go to l 20. See what that looks like.
Yeah, that's nice file size and I'm going to drop the opacity
to make it a little bit more subtle. Perfect. About 30
percent, perfect. So I don't need that extra black bar for
this example. So now I'm going to do alt command I and I want
to save this at 150 DPI. Just give me a little bit more
pixels and max height 900 pixels. There you go. Boom.
Now do alt shift command S
and
around 250 to 300 is pretty good. So I have a little bit
more room. So to 78 - 78 is pretty good.
Hit save. We'll call it pear underscored low and make sure
it's set to JPEG. It saved ba boom. So now I don't need this,
ba boom, don't say we just made a virtual file from the
clipboard, remember. Now, I'm going to open the small
version you can see it on screen.
There it is. Ba boom. Yeah.
So this one's at - I'll show you this one. This one's at 50%, this is
at 25 percent our medium. Our full size is that we'll blow it
up to 100. Wow, that's huge medium or low 100%, very small
compared to the big guy. Our medium that 100%. in our medium that 100%
About half the size of the full. So we got three different
versions ready to go. Alright, so that was the pear. So this
was an example of what happens when the slide is taken really
well. Notice this one went a lot faster than say the
portrait. A lot of the stuff we didn't really need to do but
I just wanted to show you just for fun. And that's the end of
the assignment. I hope you
found this useful. I can probably - I can imagine the
lights going off in your head you're like, wow. I'm going to
try it on my slides or my photos blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You
learned a lot of stuff in this lesson, so please review, review,
review, and practice. Don't stop at this assignment. Bring your
own slides next, keep practicing, keep experimenting, and you'll
get this down no problem. So with that that's the end of the
assignment and I'll talk to you later.
Okay. Hope you enjoyed the lesson. Now, we went over a lot
of Really powerful and useful techniques for optimizing your
slides of your artwork. But remember it's best to shoot the
best slide you can, do whatever it takes to take great pictures
of your artwork, of course, but of course Photoshop is there so
that you can really maximize the look of your work and
you can really make your work look as best as they possibly
can.. Now you know how you can show off your work no matter
what format you're using. We just covered a couple. You can
use it for web, for print, and even just to show off in your
portfolio. Now you know how to do that. You can let your
imagination run wild and now you have a powerful new set of
tools that you can use to make your artwork look as best as
possible. So hope you enjoyed this lesson and I'll see you
next time.