Editing with Camera RAW and Photoshop
In this video, I edited an image of a mushroom to show how I edit and the tools and plugins that I use in Photoshop. I will create separate videos for the key tools, actions, and filters. These will be linked below and included in the editing course as lessons.
Link to Features Used in this Video
Why I like to use DxO for removing noise and image sharpness.
A little information on the TK9 Photoshop plugin.
Video Highlights
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Mushroom Photography Processing
02:55 Camera Raw Adjustments for Mushroom Images
06:05 Using Photoshop for Depth Mapping and Color Effects
08:52 Enhancing Background and Foreground Contrast
12:04 Gradient Maps and Color Adjustments
14:59 Dodging and Burning Techniques for Detail
18:10 Final Touches and Enhancements
27:21 Enhancing Image Depth with Dodge and Burn Techniques
30:32 Refining Brightness and Contrast for Visual Appeal
33:06 Utilizing Color Effects for Detail Enhancement
35:05 Applying Smart Filters for Texture and Clarity
39:13 Final Touches: Adjusting Colors and Removing Imperfections
50:09 Conclusion and Future Learning Opportunities
Summary
This video provides a comprehensive guide on processing mushroom photography, covering techniques from initial image capture to final adjustments in Photoshop.
Discussions include the use of Camera Raw for color correction, the creation of depth maps in Photoshop, and the application of dodging and burning techniques to enhance image details. Additionally, it explores the use of the Nik Collection for detail extraction and concludes with final adjustments to achieve a polished look.
Takeaways
Use adaptive color settings for better image quality.
Lower highlights to reveal more detail in subjects.
Utilize depth maps for effective foreground and background separation.
Adjust midtones to enhance overall image contrast.
Dodging and burning can add dimension to your images.
The Nik Collection is useful for extracting details in photos.
Final adjustments are crucial for achieving the desired look.
Use luminosity masks for targeted adjustments.
Experiment with color effects to enhance visual appeal.
Always check for blown-out highlights in your images.
Transcript of the Video (Computer Generated – unedited)
Hello. All right. In this video, I want to show you an image here. Hope it’s showing on the screen of this mushroom and it’s nothing. I mean, it’s an okay picture, but it has a few different things that I want to go over that I think you might be interested in, and how I process close-up images like this. So we have this D and G file, basically a raw file. I ran it through pure raw four.
And it is in Bridge here. So if I double-click this, we’ll open this up in Camera Raw, and we’ll get started, and I’ll show you how I process these mushroom photos. So we’re going to double-click this to open up Bridge.
And here we are in Bridge. The first thing I like to do is, is an adaptive color. It actually has all of my previous settings. So that’s handy. So I use adaptive color.
I generally increase, but I don’t do too much with the temperature. Once in a while, I warm it up just to see how I like it. You can it make those leaves a little bit more red. I’ll probably increase this a little bit more. But my Fuji film always seems to shoot with a green cast. So I like to take the color and move it a little bit more purple.
I don’t do anything with the vibrance and the saturation. I’ll wait to Photoshop to do those, and I’ll be doing a lot of mid-tone contrast. So that’ll increase the vibrance and saturation. So I very rarely even touch these. Down into the light section, you can see that I have, I generally will just sort of start them back here, kind of even. I sort of look at the histogram, and you can see that I have not clipped my blacks. So if the blacks were clipped,
I would raise them up a little bit. And it doesn’t hurt to raise them up a little bit anyway. I usually raise the weights up. You can see they start clipping. I bring them back. I gently, sorry for the dog barking. I’m gonna raise up the highlights. I’m sorry, I’m gonna lower the highlights. The dog is throwing me off here, but we’ll get through it.
So I like to lower the highlights because it actually gives more detail in the subject. And obviously, the subject here is this mushroom cap. So I do like to lower the highlights. If you bring the highlights up, you can see it just gets white, it gets bright, too bright. I like to lower them and then adjust the brightness of the subject and the background in Photoshop. Shadows depend on the image. I generally mess around with them. I am going to…
Use color effects on this, and I’m going to bring out the details. So when I’m planning on doing that, I generally lower the shadows because I have that color effects as a tendency to brighten the whole image. So I generally leave the shadows as shadows. I make them a little bit darker with calibration. You can see I’ve used some calibration here.
It really depends on the image, but again, I add some more purple because of the Fuji film. This is a personal choice, but I like to do it. And I think it looks better in purple than it would in green in this background. When I have a brown image like this and with leaves, I generally go a little bit more saturated on the red. You can see how it brings out the reds and the least. I don’t go crazy somewhere under 10. The greens.
Again, because of the cast that this camera seems to have, I generally bring the green saturation down. Sometimes I even bring the hue down, even though there are no greens. I’m really worried about that green cast that the camera has. And then I will raise the blue primaries, the saturation. That generally has a tendency, if there are greens in the image, to raise them back up. That’s why I lower them here. And I like what it does to the reds and the yellows, the blue. I don’t do anything else.
All the details the details is marked off because I did all the camera stuff and the not the dehazing, but the denoising and pure raw four. So it seems to mark that off. You can see here, I have cropped the image down a little bit. So the original was out here like this.
That was the original. I left it in the same orientation, the same aspect ratio, but I wanted to get rid of this yellow leaf here.
That gets rid of the green, but to balance it out, I brought it up a little bit more and then brought it down so that the mushroom cap is about on the line of thirds. And I usually bring it back and forth. Sometimes I keep it in the middle. I don’t worry too much about it. If I have something interesting somewhere else, I’ll bring it left or right. But here it looks pretty good, sort of It’s sort of diagonal across those three.
These are all empty. They’re going to be in the background, and they will be darkened out, and then I’ll bring the front a little bit more to life. What I might do here is increase this a little bit more, get a little bit more foreground.
Right to the top of that yellow leaf that’s down here. I don’t want that in there. So that is it for Camera Raw or Lightroom if you’re doing it in Lightroom. That’s all I generally do. And then I’m going to open this as an object, which is a smart object in Photoshop. And Photoshop will come up.
There we go. Now I will maximize this. Actually, I can’t maximize it because when I bring up the…
Color effects, it won’t go into this screen. So we’ll just make it quite big. So here is the image in RAW. First thing I like to do, again, I’m using the TK actions and some of the actions that are in the volume three of TK9. And open up this actions and this is actually in button form. Generally, you see actions that look like this.
Right, they’re just sort of like scripted out. But you can now have button mode. anything, most of the actions, not all, but most of the actions come up in the button. So it’s just a one press thing. And what I like to do, and this is an action I made. I can do a whole video on how I make it, but we can make a depth map with a TK9 plugin. So a depth map is gonna set a foreground and a background. So it’s just a matter of clicking this.
You won’t see anything really happen. Maybe it’s going to run a little bit slower because of the screen-sharing software. So yeah, it is taking a little bit longer. So it creates this whole thing, and you know you’re done when it goes back to nothing. But if you go to your channels over here, you can see that there are two depth maps. There’s a foreground and a background. Remember, white reveals, black conceals, and you’ll see more of this. So in the foreground,
All this foreground area in here is white, along with the mushroom.
And then the background, the whole background, is white. That means if we edit the background, this is going to be affected a lot more than anything up here. If anything up here is affected. So that’s all this does. It just makes the depth maps. We’ll go back to the layers. Now I want to do is I want to do a balance and contrast. Generally, I do a balance and contrast right now. In this case, I’m not going to do that.
I’m gonna do something first before I do that. Now there are two ways to do what I’m gonna do. You could do it right here with the background. Matter of fact, let me show you this. So if we do this depth map background action I made, and this B and C stand for balance and contrast, it’s gonna open up the TK9 color effects here. So what we can do with this is we can play with the shadows.
The midtones and the whites. We can use this here to raise and lower it so we can make them brighter or we can make each one of those darker. And we can actually use this here to change the color of them. So what I could do since we’re on the background, let me bring this up. This is another thing nice about the TK9 is that you can actually see the mask. So it’s hard to see these in the little thumbnails. If I click this button right here, it shows the mask.
And you can see that the cap of the mushroom isn’t really affected at all because it’s black. Just the lower part of the stem, this front here and the back is pretty bright. So anything I do is going to affect this area back here a lot more than this area here and this area here and this area here won’t be affected at all. So you just click this button again and it goes back to your color version. So what I could do is click on the blacks or the darks.
And I can make them darker and I could actually use this here and just click this and it puts a puck in the circle and you can see it makes it bluer. Or I could make it red or I could make it green. I can make it yellow. I can do whatever I want to and the further you are from the center, the more saturated the color is and the closer you are, the less saturated it is. So I could do something like this right here with the darks.
And you can see this makes this nice dark background. I sort of want this blue because this is going to end up being mostly orange or a yellow orange, and it’ll contrast nicely with the blue. I’m getting out of the, I’m not doing this as often as I used to. And then you can do again with the mid tones. If you wanted to, you could do the same thing, and you can see you can make it as dark as you want to. Maybe something like that. But I have.
Gradient maps and I sort of like it. Let me show you what the gradient map is. So we’ll get out of this, we’ll actually delete this. The other thing is you don’t have to drag it down to the trash can or your layers, you can just click this little lightning bolt here and it’ll get rid of any of your layers that don’t have an eyeball. So what I first want to do is go down to an adjustment layer and get a gradient map. Now, when you get a gradient map.
It turns the gradient, whatever the colors of your.
Little pucks are right here. So you can see it’s black. The left side of the gradient map is the darks and this is the lights.
But I want to add some color to this. So if I double-click this, another window will open and there’s a whole bunch of gradients. So TK has some gradients in here already. Photoshop comes with a whole bunch of basics, blues, purples, but I’ve made my own. I’ve added them down here and I like this one right here. Now you can see, I guess, when I click this, you’ll see that turns blue. But if you look down on this bar, this is the actual bar.
This hex pattern, this checkerboard pattern, this fence pattern, whatever you want to call it, means that this is transparent. So none of the whites at all are going to get any color here and it’s gradually going to shift back in a gradient to the very darks which are going to get a little bit more blue. Now you can see it has changed the whole screen to blue. You can basically see some outlines of it where it’s not affected by the lights.
So there’s not a whole lot of bright whites in here; there’d be more white. Now you can change these, can click on this right here, and then you can change the color if you want to. I just have made this one and this is where I start. And then you can drag this anywhere you want, and the color gradient will change. I like it back here. And again, you can click this, and that color gradient will come up by half at the same. And then this little button here will actually make it softer, if you will.
It just makes the grading a little bit more gradual. So this is OK. I know it looks like it’s blue, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to change the blending layer from normal.
There’s all these different ones to soft light. Now you can see it’s a little bit more transparent. You can see the brightest whites aren’t affected at all. And the blue gradually comes darker and darker until we get back into the black tones. Because if you remember right, here’s the original color. So these are some of the dark tones. And the original image, we click this on, you can see that those have become bluer.
But we can modify this even further with opacity. Generally, I like to be below 30%. So I start at 30. You can see this color right here.
So you can see I’m getting the same thing with a depth map as I could with the puck. But I like this because it just seems easier to me to change the colors. So here’s with nothing, here’s with 100 % and soft light. Again, I say always somewhere around 30 to start. And I don’t mind it that blue because again, I really want to contrast this yellow and this orange off this mushroom off that blue.
So I can also come here and change this color if I want to. I can make this blue a lot brighter and lighter. Click OK. And you can see it becomes brighter. I can even change it. Oops. Yeah, I can even change it to red. Right here. Hit OK. So now it’s going from red to blue to nothing. Hit OK. You can see it’s red back there.
I just like to make it pretty simple. So I’m to keep this back to blue. Oops, click this. Change it back into the blues somewhere in there. That’s a little lighter.
this color right here. We’ll make it darker back in here, but you can adjust these. You can also adjust this one. You can adjust this. You can do any kind of gradient you want to. You could even make the lights or the whites a warmer color and the darks a blue color or a purple color. And you can see the front is very, isn’t affected at all. And if anything is affected, it’s the darks in here.
And again, it’s the blue color. And if you know your color theory, blue makes it recede. So it gives it a little bit more depth.
So that’s the first thing I do, this gradient map. So I went from here to here. Don’t worry about the mushroom being a little bit duller. That’s okay, we’re gonna work on that. All I really wanted to do is work on this background. Next thing I’m gonna do is again, the depth map, depth, that’s a tough word to say, depth map background. So I am gonna go back and do this here. This is gonna make a new layer. And I have this set up wrong, put it on the bottom.
I think the blacks are okay. I’m going to darken them a little bit more. You can see I click this black up here just to do the darks. That’s a little too dark. I like the blue that makes the mid tones. I want those a little bit darker.
I’m not gonna change the color. And then the whites, I’m gonna bring up. Again, this is just the background. I’m sorry. So the background, I’m gonna make it darker. I don’t want any brights back here. I don’t want this whiter. All right, I’m trying to make these recede.
Okay. And you can see it’s, this is an interesting thing. It’s making it darker because of the blue tint, right, from the gradient map down below. So as I make these more white,
it’s going to affect them a little bit differently than a normal one would. That looks good. I just do it by eye and I just move it around. You could warm those up if you wanted to. The whites add a little bit of color to them. I’m just going to leave them alone. And now I’m going to do another depth map, only this time the foreground balance and contrast. So what the balance and contrast does, I didn’t get into that, is it makes a midtones three.
Get out of this. It makes a midtones three mask, and what that does is it affects all the midtones. It doesn’t affect the darkest darks or the lightest lights. That way I don’t have to worry about blowing out my highlights or crushing my darks. So I’m only affecting the midtones with this depth map. So again we’re in the front here so I am going to definitely brighten up the midtones. I want that brighter. You can see the mushroom is getting much brighter.
I could make this a little bit more yellow or red if I wanted to. I think I will make it a little bit more red.
And then the highlights. So again, I can really blow out those highlights if I want to. I don’t want to do that. A lot of times I will actually make the highlights a little bit darker.
Because it brings out a little bit more of the texture of the mushroom. And then I will dodge it later to brighten it up. I’m going to make this a little bit more yellow too. Just give it a little bit of color. See how it doesn’t really do much. There’s not too much. I might actually make it a little bit more red since it’s not doing so much. So let’s turn this on and off. There’s with it off. There’s with it on. You can see I’ve brightened the midtones.
What I want to do now is add a little bit more contrast to the midtones. And again, I’m going to use these quick actions. So I have a midtones one, midtones two, and a midtones three contrast. And you’ll see what it does is just a, well, it’s just easier to click it. I generally go start with midtones two. So we’ll click that.
And it brings up a curves and puts in a medium contrast curve off of here with a mid tones too.
Luminosity mask. So here’s with it off, here’s with it on, you can see that it’s actually made it a little bit darker, so it’s going to bring out the, it’s going to make the whites in the mid-tone brighter and the darks in the mid-tones darker, so it adds a lot more contrast, and as you increase contrast, it increases your color. You can see these leaves are a really nice color now, I didn’t have to mess with any of the sliders in Lightroom.
I’m just gonna let the contrast do it all.
So that is a Midtones 2. Now you wanna see what a Midtones 3 will do. I shut this off, right? So this layer is not showing at all. If I went to a Midtones 3, which is gonna be a lot more contrast, I can click that on and you can see how much darker it got in the background, how much lighter it got in the front. That’s the Midtones 3. Shut that off. There’s the Midtones 2. I like the Midtones 2 a lot better. And again,
I’ve unclicked the eye of this mid-tone three contrast. I can just hit this lightning bolt and that layer goes away. So that’s it with the contrast. I sort of like this image. black, the back is a little bit darker, got a little bit of blue tone. The subject, this mushroom cap is a little bit more orange. It’s against the blue. The front has some nice light onto it. It’s showing great texture in these leaves. The stem looks great.
And there’s a little bit of texture here in the in the cap, but I want to add a little bit more dimension to that. And I’m going to do that by dodging and burning. So I am going to click close this Illuminosity mask. I want to paint through the Illuminosity mask, and it defaults to a lights one. I want darks. Generally, if you go darks one, this is way too much.
Again, I’m not too worried about the background I’m just going to be doing the mushroom. In fact, I could probably make this easier on myself by going to the TK9 panel and hit this and we’ll see if it picks out the subject. So this little button here is just going to do a selection of whatever it thinks the subject is and you can see it’s doing pretty good. We blow this up it’s done a great job in selecting that mushroom.
So now I can hit this button right here and this brings up this for a new channel. I can just call this mushroom, hit save or okay. Now that’s gonna save it as a channel. So now I can bring that up anytime I want to. Now I’m going to deselect it. But what we wanna do is darken the darks. I usually start with the darks first. So again, mid tone or darks one generally is way too much and darks two, you can see again, we’re looking for white here, and we don’t have to worry about the background because we’ve just created a mushroom selection. So this is a nice, this would add a little bit of dark black here and some dark along here, a little bit of dark in the gills and I could add some more black along the stem, which is gonna add contrast, right? So remember this black is actually in reality a light color because it’s dark in the darks mask.
I know it’s confusing. Lights is a little bit easier to think about. But remember when we paint this with black, only the white is going to be affected. That looks pretty nice right there. If we go darks three, it’s still not too bad. The stem would be good, but we lose it here. So I think we’re just going to go with the darks two. And then we come down to here and this is the dodge tool. When I click this, it’s going to give me a black paint brush.
Now all I’m gonna be painting is those white.
I’m going to click this. It’s going to make a new layer. It’s called a burn layer of black paint. I have a little paint brush here. I’m going to use the brackets to make it bigger, not too big. And I really want to paint where it starts. So I want to get the shadow areas on this rim. And I want to get the blacks that are in this gills so I can bring out this texture a little bit more. And I want to get this back here. I generally set my opacity on burns around 15.
Doesn’t matter if it’s 14, 16, doesn’t really matter. So somewhere around 15. And I’m just gonna paint once. I’m gonna paint here once. And I’m gonna paint the stem once.
Now can see I’ve painted over this. It’s not going to matter too much because it’s already dark. But if I paint here, it might affect where this stick is. And I’m painting again, so it’s actually adding a little bit more darkness.
It’s okay, we can go overboard because we can use opacity to change that. So let’s take a look and see what it’s done. So you can see right here, this is darker, this is darker, and the back of the stem is darker.
So that is with the dot, that is with the burn, that’s without the burn. With, without. And if we’re worried about going over, I can just click on this, hit this calculator, and this is where you’re gonna see how handy TK9 is. Hit this calculator, it opens this up, I can go mushroom, right? That’s the subject we picked, the mushroom, and just intersect it with just the mushroom. So it’s only gonna go on the mushroom. Or I could go with the background and subtract it.
We’re just gonna go with the mushroom, hit this X. And now you can see the mask. Let me bring the mask up. Again, we hit this button right here. And you can see the only thing that is being affected is this mushroom. Now it’s not all being affected because it still has the…
Darks, Darks 2 mask on it.
So here we are, there’s with this off and on. So now that I’ve done, I generally deselect this. You don’t need to, you can actually, anytime you pick a luminosity mask, it will actually change the selection, but there’s some things that it doesn’t. So I’m always in a habit of hitting control or command D just to shut off the selection. Now I wanna dodge, I wanna make these a little bit brighter, only I don’t wanna, if I hit this,
Luminosity mask, I’m generally wanna pick like a lights two. There’s a lights two. You can see, remember the only the white’s gonna be affected. Lights three, not as well. Really good here, not so well there. I’m go with the lights two.
And when I click this dodge tool, it’s going to make a new layer and it’s going to put it in the overlay blend mode and it’s going to give me a white brush. see the brush is already ready, but I generally don’t paint with a white too often. I usually paint with a color. So if I click the little template there, open this up, gives me the little picker and I generally pick whatever color I like this yellow tan brown color right here. Gives it to me right there. And then I make it darker. I mean, lighter.
Because I’m dodging. I’ll bring it, you can make it more saturated. I’m not, I’m just gonna make it brighter. Click OK. So now I’m actually dodging on a Lights 2 Luminosity Mask with some color. And again, I’m just gonna hit the light spots, this mushroom area here, maybe up here.
And again, I’m at 14%. And I am raising, I’m hitting this three or four times. This is more than once. Same with here, this is one time. This is two times. Dodge generally doesn’t affect as much. You can see the mask over here. It won’t show me because I did it gray, but you can see here it’s affected this cap quite a bit. So if I turn this off, that’s what it was before. You can see this is sort of tan, sort of dull.
And now I’ve added a little bit of color to it.
I think what I want to do is get this stem a little bit more. I want to bring that out.
So you can see that the white and the black have actually made this look a lot more round than it did before. It’s bring out some dimension. It’s not so two dimensional. I don’t like this right here, but we’ll deal with that next. But what I like to do also, and again, if you think you’ve painted on this, we can hit this, hit the calculator, hit the mushroom, hit the X, and that’s the only thing that is going to be affected.
Nothing in the background is hit. It’s all right to the mushroom. What I generally do is I put these into a folder. So I’m to deselect the selection. We have this top layer already active. I’m going to hit the shift button, click this one, make both of these active, put it into a folder. And then you can label this D dash B if you want to for dodge and burn. But this lets you see both at once. So that is with no dodge and burning.
This is with dodging and burning. You can see it’s added quite a bit of dimension to that mushroom cap. I think it’s too bright here. So how I deal with that is I go up to a luminosity mask and I start with a bright six. And you can see some of it is very bright. It’s kind of too bright. There’s a five. There’s a four. Probably the five is good. Just this cap right here is what was bothering me. You can see this leaf over here, which we’ll take care of in a little bit.
If I turn this off, this is a bright leaf. I wanna make this less bright. So I’m gonna use this Lights 5. I’m gonna go to a brightness.
mask or brightness layer. So now I have this mask right here. If I click on it, that’s what’s going to be affected. So this mushroom cap and this leaf, we’ll shut that off. And I have clicked on this, which will bring up the brightness. So now I can lower that brightness. You can see how it added a little bit more color there. So here’s, here’s about zero. You can see it’s almost too white.
can bring that brightness down, and it’s actually added a little bit more color there and then I can actually add a little bit more contrast to it. So without, with, without, with, so it’s added some color to it. It’s taking that really bright right away.
All right, so I’m feeling pretty good about that. I think what I want to do is still lighten this up a little bit, lighten this mushroom up a little bit. So I have an action for that. There’s lots of ways you can do it, but I’m going to use this action. I like these actions because there’s one button and it sets everything up for me. I’m going to go on mid-tone lighten. It’s going to actually make another mask here and it just brings up a curves. It’s pre-made.
Right, so it’s brightening everything up. I just want it on the mushroom.
So how do we do that? We click the calculator, click the mushroom, click the X. So it puts it right on the mushroom. So now all that we’re affecting is the mushroom. You can see it’s made it a little bit brighter.
I’m just worried about this backside.
I don’t want it brighter here. I don’t really want it brighter here. So how do we deal with that? That’s very simple. We’ll click on this mask. This brings up the mask. I can get a black paint brush. That’s another thing about TK, the paintbrush is already picked. You just pick that. I already have a black paint brush. I can change the opacity to say 33 % and I can paint more black on here.
And what that’s doing is it’s taken away from the mask.
All the adjustments underneath that will now be less. So now when I click it on and off, you can see it’s not affecting this side of the mushroom at all. It’s not lightening at all. There’s with it off. can see this is kind of too dark back here, but I’ve just lightened it up. And what it’s done is it’s actually changed these tones. So I don’t mind the very back of this mushroom stem being black or pretty dark, but I thought it was too dark in the middle. Now that I’ve
Add a little bit of lightning to it. You can see that it’s actually added another, basically a mid tone two it. And we can see a nice curve back here still. And this ridge is nice and light. This little dimple here is a little bit darker. The rim is white. I think it looks a lot better like that.
It’s going to show up a little bit more, especially what we do to it after this. So now that we’re done with that…
I want to burn this leaf down. This leaf is too hot. So I generally do these again with luminosity mask, generally with a lights one. You could go to a midtones. You could check out what it would do to yellows. Yellows actually is pretty good. it’s a mid, it’s a, sorry, not a midtones. It’s a lights one mask in the yellow channel. You can see that’s nice and bright. So I can just burn this now. So I’m going to just pick the burn. That gives me a black paint brush.
We can change the opacity, we’ll leave it at 33%. We’ll make the brush bigger and we’ll just click on it. And you can see that it’s made that leaf a little bit darker. This one might be a little bright. This one, this one, this one. Maybe these back here.
I don’t mind these too much because that’s where the light’s coming from. This one over here is a little bit brighter. Now I’m going to make it little bit smaller and really work on the lighter parts. I might increase the opacity.
So here’s what it was before, here’s after it’s burned. You can see it’s sort of taken out the brighter spots, it’s taken out the hotness of that. And if we don’t like it later, we can change it. I might actually get this back here too. So maybe this way, if I get this painted down, then maybe I don’t have to take it out with the remove tool.
This will help. We add a little vignette, pre-vin, pre-vin-et-et here. All right. So there’s with that adjustment. I think that’s pretty good. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to go into color effects. And what I’m going to do is bring out the detail. What I want to do is make the mushroom cap a little bit more detail, a little bit more detail on the mushroom cap and these leaves in the front.
So we’ll deselect this. This is where we need to deselect it. And this button right here actually opens up Color Effects, the NIC 8 Color Effects panel. And I can pick any of these one filters I want to, or I can just open it up. I really just want this detail extractor. So I’m just going to click that because it automatically opened in that. It’s going to, I made it, I left it so I could select mass. So I can take any mass that I created.
In Photoshop and it’ll carry it over into the Nik Collection 8 that I can use, but I don’t really mind the mask that’s over there. And I’ll also show you what I’m going to do when I come back from Nik 8. So I’m not going to bring any of my Photoshop mask into Nik 8. I’m just going to open it up.
Just opens it up here. So here it is, we’ll shrink it down. So what I wanna do is bring out detail in the mushroom cap and in the front here. And we’re already into detail and it’s already added some. So here’s what I brought in from Photoshop. This is what detail extractor can do. You can see it can brings out details.
So again, I’m worried more about the mushroom and the front of the leaves. So let’s concentrate on the mushroom first. So let’s take a look at this mushroom cap. We’ll bring it a little closer and the stem. So now we’re not affecting it at all. The detail extractor is off, so we’re gonna add some. It takes a little bit, and you can see it adds a little bit of detail to the mushroom cap. I can bring up this comparison slider.
So this is before, this is after.
So you can see that it’s brought up some detail. You can see all these little pores in the mushroom cap right now. Here, you can barely see them. Bring up the detail, you can see the pores. See how it looks a little fuzzier? Same with the stem here. All right, just a whole lot of contrast. It just like dark and white, but now it some detail to it. You do have to make sure that it hasn’t added any ghosting.
It doesn’t look too bad. You can see up here now how well it’s worked on the gills.
And it does lighten it. But you can see here, you can see a little bit of texture, but when we bring over, you can see a lot more texture now.
But it’s also brought it up in the front here. It’s also brought it up in the back so I can shut this off. So that’s what it was before. Here’s what it is now. I don’t mind more texture up here. I don’t mind more texture in the mushroom. I don’t want any texture back there. Now I can use, and I’ll go over this before, you can use the local adjustments in X8 to make adjustments.
But I’m not gonna do that because we already have a depth map in Photoshop. So what I’m gonna do is turn this back on. I’m gonna click this button here and I can bring it back as a smart object. So that means I can just open this up and change this if I want to. Hit apply and it’ll send it back to Photoshop.
So now it’s adding a net collection as a layer.
Smart filter, and you can see if I turn this off, that’s what it was when I sent it over, now it’s back. You can really see it well in the stem, but you can see it here too, it actually does affect, but I don’t like what it’s doing back here, I don’t like that at all. So how can I do that? Well, I can make a folder, can create a folder, click a folder, and I can put this inside the folder.
You know you’re inside the folder when you close it and it’s closed. So now I can just click on this group, right? This folder. I can hit the calculator and I can hit, we’ll just do background. We’ll hit background and subtract.
So now that I’ll put this mask on this folder. So now you can see the background has not been affected, but the foreground is nice and sharp and good texture. So here’s with it off. Oops, sorry, I gotta open it up.
Well, it’s got the mask on. I can take this mask, hit this there. There’s before, there’s after.
So you can see that this is our back to our blue, softer blue. This is nice and textured up front. And if you think it’s too much, you can still use the opacity here and lower it a little bit.
So there we are. There’s one more thing I want to do. There’s another nice action, or is it TK action that I like to use. I’m going to try a couple of different ones. So what I like to do is add this thing called soft pop. It adds some contrast, some texture. It generally increases the colors. And you can see it made this nice red, made that nice golden brown, left the back dark. So here’s without the soft pop, here’s with it. It actually looks very nice. If you think it’s too strong.
Again, you can take the opacity down on it. I generally take it down a little bit. There’s a couple other things I like to try, but I think I’m just gonna stick with this one. Well, I’ll try it. So we’re gonna take this soft pop and we’re gonna shut it off. We’re gonna, yeah. We’re gonna just make a screen blend mode here just to get another layer because whatever I do with this group that’s open with a smart object.
It messes it up when I do another action. you just need this. This layer here is doing nothing to it. It’s just this just a straight curves adjustment with nothing happen. It’s just there as a placeholder, if you will. I want to try. There’s a couple of things I want to try. There’s this other action I found.
It is by Blake Rudis, it’s called Tone Sculping with Glow. If I click on this, we don’t need this one, but you can see it makes it really darker, and it will glow. It makes it too dark. You can also take the.
fill on this and make it lighter. It adds a little bit of glow, but I don’t think it does a great job. So we’ll get rid of that. We’ll turn soft pop back on. So if I click this, it’ll get rid of the toning. But there’s this other one I want, which is kind of cool. This is just to show you the power of Photoshop.
It is, let me find it here, shadows spotlight. This is an action again by Blue Kratos, Blake Rudis. Can’t even say his name right, Blake Rudis. And what this does is add a spotlight with a gradient fill and a radio mode at 50%, 90. So I can take this spotlight and move it wherever I want to in the image. See that?
So lights from over here, I can put it here. I can make the lights smaller.
And just as long as this panel is open, I can grab it and move it. You can see it’s a lot smaller now, right? It’s just that little thing. But I think this isn’t the image because it lights up the back. Now I could actually do this like right here, make this larger.
It’s just too much. You can also change the gradient, but in this image, it’s just too much. So we’ll cancel that and we’ll get rid of this. We don’t need that. I don’t need that curves anymore either. So we’ll just delete that. So that’s, that’s my image right there. I think this is still a little hot this time. So what I want to do again is I can use another Blake Rudis function or I’ll just, I’ll just stay with this. We’ll make a
Get that yellow again. Let’s see if there’s any other one. that one’s really nice because it’s just going to affect that leaf. That one’s actually not bad.
Let’s do this cyan. We’ll do this cyan. We’re just going to darken this down and we’ll put it in burn mode. And we’re at 30 % or so. Make the brush a little bit bigger. And again, we’ll just darken this down.
All right, I think everywhere else is pretty good. This spot right here, it’s out.
I think we’ll darken this right here. Darken this. This is why like to use these burn tools at the end. I did not put a vignette on this. Generally, I put a spotlight, but that’s pretty good. I don’t mind this being brighter. This back here I don’t particularly like as well.
But it’s okay for now. We can always look at this later. I’m not printing this right now, but I do want to clean it up. So I’ll hit deselect. You can see this is highlighted and moving when the marching ants are there. The TK9 plugin also has a nice remove function. Hit this, it gives you a nice new layer with the remove tool already picked. Make this a little bit bigger. I don’t like this stop right here.
Just click that, get rid of that. Again, it’s being slow because of the recording software. Sorry about that.
But what I really want to do is I want to get rid of this light area up here. Get rid of this on the edge. This one down here.
Might get rid of this. Get rid of this. That twig is okay. This up here is kind of annoying. i
Okay, come on. There we go. We’ll get rid of these, see what it does.
Again, it’s slow because of the recording software. This is kind of bright right there. I don’t like this vertical line right here. I don’t mind this leaf. That one’s fine.
Maybe this here.
These are, these are right. could darken these if I wanted to. Maybe I’ll do that just to show you. There’s another thing that we can do with the TK9 plugin. And so I hit the shift key and this MUL, which stands for multiply. It brings up a screen, screen, it brings up a curves and the multiply blend mode, which makes things darker. And it gives it on a black mask. So this is actually what the multiply, I’m going to make this white so it shows through.
That’s what the screen blend, the, that’s what the curves adjustment with the multiply blend mode looks like. It’s really dark, right? A lot of people don’t like that to edit their photos. So we’re gonna put a black mask on this.
And what I want to do is darken down the bottom. So I am going to click this here, which is going to be a linear gradient. And if you haven’t got it yet, click on this. This TK gradients is free and it’s a lot easier to use than the regular gradients that are Adobe Photoshop, because this one here automatically sets it up to what we need to darken the bottom. You don’t have to adjust any of this stuff. Worry about dither or reverse.
Or what method it is, it’s automatically offset. And what I do is I start down here out of the frame, bring it up and it’s in radio gradient. So we’ll control Z that. It should not have done that. you know why? Because I use that glow feature. So we’ll click on this here. Now let’s try it. Hit the shift key to keep it straight. There we go.
So it’s too dark, but again, we have the opacity. We’ll go like that, makes the bottom a little bit darker. We’ll get rid of that little line. And there’s our image. Now maybe this does need a spotlight. Maybe this needs to be a little bit brighter here. So we’ll get this lasso tool. I’m going to go around it like this.
We’re going to go to TK Actions. We’re going to go to Spotlight.
Hit OK. And that’s made a spotlight around that whole area. See it right there?
Now, what I can do is I don’t want it in the background, just in the foreground on the mushroom. I can take the calculator, go depth map background and subtract it. All the light behind goes away. So now that spotlight is just on the front. Set it 30 % opacity if it’s too much. You just bring it down some until you like it.
So there’s that mushroom image. anything, this might be too bright right here. And again, to check that, this button right here, we’ll open this up. And if there’s anything that’s blown out, it’ll look just like it does in Lightroom. If it’s too dark, it’ll be blue. If it’s too light, it’ll be white. So nothing’s blown out. We don’t have to worry about that, but I still think that’s too light. So we’re gonna go again and check. Here’s six, five, four. I think four is a little, that’s too bright. So we’ll bring down the exposure on that area right there, the brightness I mean. Let’s bring it down, add a little contrast just to balance it out. And then we go from here to there, here to there. Much better. So there’s that mushroom image. That’s one of the ways that I go about doing the mushroom things.
What I want to do is set this up as a whole edit from start to finish. And what I’ll do now is I’ll go through and I’ll make individual little videos on all the different things like depth maps, how we make them, how we use them, all the different actions. So down below in the text, I’ll eventually do those videos and I’ll link them down below. Again, if you like this video, just subscribe. And when a new video comes out, I’ll give you an email when one comes out once a week.
And you can take a look at the new videos. So that’s the end of this edit. And then we can just hit File and Save. I’ve already done this image, so I’m just going to get rid of this one. Let me know what you think.
