All language subtitles for 02-10-Stumpys-Masking.mp4

Now that we have our rough comp put
together and looks like everything

checks out,

I'm going to dig into a little bit of
masking,

do some global masks, do some label
masks.

I'm not going to worry about any
retouching masks just yet.

I just want to isolate some elements

so that I can get rid of a few
distractions here.

And I know I'm going to need to cut a
final mask in the inn.

Someone just going to go ahead and do
it.

Now, before I get into my retouching,

and for this image, I've got so many
straight lines and

long arcs,

so I know I'm going to need these paths.

I'm not always a big fan of Paz.

I try to avoid them when I can.

I just like to use quick selection
tools, pain paintbrushes,

quick mask, that sort of thing.

But for

objects like this, I really,

unfortunately, need to use a path.

Now that we have our rough masks made,

everything's checking out.

I'd like to get started

on my more precise masks

before I do my retouching.

You'll understand that process and why
I'm doing things in this order as we

proceed through this image.

But

at this moment,

I'm getting really distracted by

the stand.

I think it's a piece of glass, maybe
some plexi kind of looks like optical

glass to me, I'm not sure.

But I'd like to get that out of the
way.

So I'm going to do a global mask around
the bottle.

Unfortunately,

the only way to do that that's going to
be clean, that I know is going to be my

final product, is to use a path.

And

I've made so many path masks in my life,

and I'm just over them.

I'd rather not have to use the path
tool, the pintool,

ever, again in my life.

But it's a necessity,

and we're going to use it,

probably not too much in this image, but

on the rest of the images that we'll be
working on it's going to become a

common theme

with this

bottle.

I fortunately, have already created the
mask.

So you're not going to see me in action

in all of my passing glory right now,
but later on will just

go

bonkers with paths, and you'll get to
enjoy

that time that we're going to spin
together.

So we're hop and down the path.

There's my beautiful path.

I'm going to activate it.

I'm going to do something fancy right
now and group all of my groups.

I'm going to call this my mane.

You'll see why.

Going to

make a vector mask

from my path.

And as you can see, I've done a
fantastic

job

of pathing this bottle out.

We know that our image is going to go
in black.

Going to just do a quick solid color
fill, turn it black,

send it to the back.

Take this file, which I'm not sure what
it's for yet, but we're going to put it

down there as well.

And there's our cutout.

And we no longer have our

standard

that's, our first mask.

The next thing that I would like to mask

is going to be the label.

Even though

rough mask for the top includes the
cork,

I think I'm going to wind up doing
quite a bit of cleanup along the edge

of the edge of the label.

So I'd like to do a clean mass cut out
of that.

So I have a nice edge to clean up
against.

Back to paths,

this one's a little bit faster simpler.

Kind of want to use a quick selection
tool for this one.

But I know my edges are probably going
to be pretty rough.

This has a lot of really beautiful
straight lines,

so I'm just going to follow

the lines.

I'm not going to worry too much

about making this perfect just yet.

Because as I clean up the image,

I imagine I'm going to be straightening
up this line, because at a glance I can

see that it's not

perfectly vertical.

Might not be a big deal.

But as I'm cleaning up the label,

straightening out that

edge will only take a second.

I'm going to go ahead and put this
where I want it to be,

which is straight.

And

this

nonvertical has nothing to do with
photography.

It's just

the way things work.

I'm not sure if, yeah, we're going to
go straight down and build out this edge.

We're using photoshops cc, seventeen
today.

I wanted to use eighteen

because we have, in

Photoshop, cc eighteen.

We have,

finally, after twenty years of asking,
we have colored paths.

Anyway, we're on cc, 172017,

and that's where I want my edge to be.

Eventually.

I think this one's fine.

There's a little bit of bubble here.

I might clean that up when I get to it
and straighten it out, but for now,

we're just going to leave that as we
have it.

This is our

label, work path.

I'm not going to put it up on this
group, because I also have the cork in

this group.

I may change my layer set, my groups
eventually

and pull those things out into their
own groups.

I'm not sure to see it.

But now we have this path built.

The next mask I'm going to want,

and I'm going to want it primarily when
I get into

my color correction.

I don't think I'm going to need it much
for retouching.

And that is

really shapely label.

Now

this is an element that I do not want,
a path.

I have no interest in pathing

all these shapes out.

It's going to take forever.

So I'm going to use a little trick I
have,

where I'm going to find an exposure

that has a lot of contrast between the
label and the liquid.

It might be the base.

I'm thinking, at this point that one's
no good.

Pardon me while I undo what I'd just
done.

This one's no good.

This one's ok,

tiny bit better than the base.

So I can use that for my

process.

My technique that I'm about to use.

What I want to do

is

use the luminosity of

this exposure

to

autogenerate a mask.

And the way that I do that

is, I'm going to take a look at my
channels.

This is kind of a neutral color, a
little bit of yellow.

They're all going to be almost
identical.

I just figured out a preference that I
need to change.

We'll do that in a second.

Yeah, about identical.

I think red got the

green's, got the most contrast.

So

I'm going to pull a green channel to
create a mask.

One other quick thing I'm going to do.

Maybe this Will Blow your mind, maybe
it's not going to work.

I'm not sure.

I'm going to add a

black and white adjustment layer.

I'm going to go ahead and

undo what I just did.

Come down a pause and select that path,

go back to black and white.

Adjustment layer,

converts it to black and white,

and allows me to control and

brighten

the yellows

and the reds

and all the other colors.

And I'm just going to see if I can
create a little bit more contrast in

that label,

just for the hell of it.

And also, I may not use that, but it's
a technique, that's kind of fun to play with.

So I just wanted to show you a quick.

It gives me a little bit more contrast.

That's great.

Go back down on my green,

deep, the green.

And I'm going to go into levels.

I'm going to try to create a black and
white image,

just paying attention to the edges here.

All the interior stuff I don't really
care about.

There's going to be a little bit of
messiness down here.

I just want to create a nice edge,

because

mass

masks are black and white.

And

that's what I'm trying to do here is
create a mask.

Not really worried about what this
thing actually is or how sloppy it

looks, because it doesn't matter.

I think that's good enough place to
start.

Click.

Ok.

Yeah, that's kind of what I want.

And before I commit to this and doing a
bunch of painting,

try one

other thing,

which is the

quick select tool found under the wand

tool.

I'm going to sample all layers.

I'm going to auto enhance

if you don't know what those things
are, figured out, it's important.

Just going to do a quick

to see what kind of selection this tool
is making.

It may go a lot faster than trying to
pull a channel mask.

And lo and behold,

it's grabbing all the edges,

looking really good.

Little bit of stuff down here, as
expected.

But

this will take far less time than
trying to clean up

the green channel that I just

may try to make a mask from.

I would need to clean up all these
interior white

areas.

And we're not going to do that right
now.

Instead, we're going to go back to

our composite channel,

realize what a nice mask we probably
have here.

And for now, I'm not going to do
anything with it.

It's just part of

the process that I know

I'm going to make use of later on

in this tutorial.

So for now,

we're just going to put it on a curve.

It's a mask it's there,

and

looks good enough

for getting started.

And I didn't have

to use a path.

And I'm happy

with that mask made.

We're going to

turn everything back on,

see we're at,

think about any additional cleanup we
need to do.

And there definitely are a few things.

If you remember,

we had created rough masks at the
bottom.

I didn't really pay too much

attention to the blending at the time.

So I'm going to check out the rough
masks that I made earlier

to see if there are any

areas of

that part of the image.

Which stands out,

because in

my world, and especially in this image's

world,

we aren't

operating on a huge budget for this
shoot.

And I don't need to worry about things
that can't be seen.

I need to worry about what I can see
and what I think other people can see.

And in this case, for these bottom
masks,

what I'd like to do real quick is I'm
going to put

a layer.

That's going to help me visualize all
this black stuff, because it's really

hard to see what's actually going on.

And I just want to throw some checks
down here.

And I'm just going to put a curve up on
top,

open up the shadows.

This gives me a way to visualize what
these masks are doing down at the bottom.

If I hit the

backslash, that shows me where my mask
is.

Let's go to the top one, because that's
on top.

You can see somehow I made a

glare over here.

On the left

that's the mask visualization.

This doesn't need to be here.

I think that's there because previously
I had these layers stacked differently.

This mouse is kind of sticky right now.

And putting those layers back in order,
ok, that's what I had intended.

So toggling between those two,

I don't really see any issues.

Even with my rough mask, you can
definitely see that there's an issue

right here.

And if you'll remember,

I had just made this mask,

knowing that I was going to need it for
something.

And lo and behold, I needed

one quick step I'm going to take is

run this through select and mask, which,

as you hopefully know by now, is a
piece of garbage.

Nobody likes it.

Everybody's frustrated with it.

It doesn't work like it's supposed to
work.

Adobe can't seem to fix it.

Let's hope they

figure it out someday soon.

Because as a retoucher, we all depend
on refining our selections.

And if you look closely at this, quick
select,

I've got all sorts of garbage along my
edge.

Because

quick select

is also broken.

When you

use it.

It does not create a clean edge.

Right now

something's going on.

Anyway

for now, let's go ahead and refine this
edge a little bit to get a smoother

transition from white to black.

I'm not going to use select a mask
because I really don't like it.

I'm going to use the hidden feature of

holding down the shift key, going
select,

going to select and mask, which isn't
select a mask.

It's actually

select and mask.

Oh, they have

potentially disabled

that in this version.

Nope, there it is.

The old refined mask works better

for this.

I just need to go to black and whites.

All I want to do is smooth this out,
and should get rid of a lot of the

noise in the edge here.

Just like that.

I don't think I need to shift my edge
around it all.

I think I'm going to add a little bit
of contrast to

lessen the amount of transition from
white to black, because I do need this

to be a clean edge.

That's all looking really good to me.

Click, ok.

Previous,

current, previous.

Current.

Refine edge does a fantastic job.

Select a mask,

slow its garbage,

avoid it if you can.

And so now I feel like I've got a good
mask for this label.

It's going to load this as a selection.

I'm going to

do what I

thought I was going to do earlier,

and put these into a group.

Let's try it out.

Do that,

add an inverted mask,

and it cleans up this bottom edge here.

And with that done, I can then take

these two masks,

and I can extend them

underneath

the label, because I have a

top controller that's preventing

these exposures from

coming up on top of this label.

Hopefully that makes sense.

It's a little weird way to think about
it, but it's

going to work

with that done.

I can show you the before and after of
those two areas.

That looks like a pretty clean
transition to me not seeing any major

issues right now.

I might need to realign

this base,

which we're going to call

bottom glass.

Just like that.

Things are looking a little bit weird,
because I have got this

curve controller on top.

Don't worry nothing's going wrong.

And

we have our bottom rough mask dialed in
now, just like that.

Quick and easy, not going to spend too
much time pinning and masking, because

this is all black and dark, and it's
not really going to show too much when

it prints or goes online.

With that mask out of the way.

I'm going to

do a quick run through with the image,
see if anything standing out.

Because the next part of my process is
to begin cleanup.

And

when I do my cleanup,

I'm essentially going to be flattening
the image.

But of course,

as

any pro retoucher is going to do, we
don't flatten anything.

We always

work nondestructively.

But

my next process is

slightly destructive.

Not really.

But

if you go too far down the road, you'll
have to redo a lot of work.

It's unfortunate.

But

when you see what I'm about to do,
you'll understand why I'm making the sacrifice.

So essentially, the base image just
needs to be dialed in.

And that's not a big deal, because what
we've just done is we have constructed

a new base image.

If we are just doing retouching,
normally, we would just have a single exposure.

We could do my next process.

There'd be no flattening or any of that.

But essentially, what we've just done
is constructed a new base image that

we're going to use to work from.

And so I'd like to go through the image
really quickly, make sure that my

exposures are where I want them to be,
that my masks are clean, that I don't

need to make any more masks, that I
don't need to add any other exposures,

and

get started with the next part of the
process, which is going to be cleanup,

refinement, color, all that good stuff.

So where we're at, I'm going to start
up at the top.

I seem to remember a note about this.

Highlight

let's

just check that roll, quick

neck label and cap.

It's rounding back

to.

Rob,

thought this was getting a bit hot.

I agree with them.

I

don't feel like I need to fix that in

capture.

So I'm just going to leave that as is.

So I'm happy with that.

One thing I did notice is I did make a
rough mask for this top.

So I'm going to check

by just turning this on and off

to see what's going on.

Because, as you remember,

I needed to make a decision about this

side.

And

by turning this on and off,

give me just a second, I think I
accidentally group something.

Not a surprise.

I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

I do things very quickly.

Sometimes my hands

do things while my eyes aren't
watching.

And I wind up with groups that
shouldn't be there.

All right?

Toggling this back on and off.

I

think what I'd like to do for this
section is

pull the

top exposure out of this.

Because,

I'm almost

nope,

no.

I'm going to leave it just like it is.

Just clean up the mask a little bit.

I kind of like what's happening.

I don't like

this glare on the side of the glass.

I feel it's a little bit distracting.

I think when I'm retouching, I'm going
to wind up cleaning the stripe,

making it a little bit more uniform,
perfect.

And so the left side

there's a little bit of movement
happening,

but it doesn't matter, because nobody
knows where it used to be and where it

is now.

I like the exposure I'm going to get
rid of these two little things.

In turn.

In regards to the rest of the area,

you can see I have just a sloppy mask,

but when you turn it off,

you don't really even see it.

But I'd like to see what's underneath,
to see if I'd like to use any of that

stuff.

And I think I would.

So I'm going to clean up this mask.

Come down here,

see what's happening

at this all critically

important area of the transition from
liquid to glass.

You need to see what I have to work
with.

And it looks like

pretty even exposure between those two.

But I'd like to clean this up a little
bit.

And I don't need to make it perfect.

I'd like to make it as perfect as
possible right now.

But I'm going to be doing so much
cleanup

in this area

that any of these tiny little

pixel in perfections are just going to
be a brush stroke, as I'm cleaning.

So I don't need to spend too much time
right now making that perfect.

This area.

So part of my process

in masking

multiple exposures together.

I don't know if this is

my own personal technique, or if it's a
widely used technique,

but I like to do a lot of really
creative masking as I'm compositing

these elements together.

And what that means is,

oftentimes at the intersections

of exposures and masks,

you'll have a lot of really strange
transitions

that

don't make sense when the exposures
come together

if you were to create a perfect mask.

And so what you can do in those

instances and areas

is to

adjust the masks on the individual
elements, to see if you can find a way

to blend those areas of transition
together,

to create

the illusion of just a seamless

transition between exposures which
might be wildly different.

And

a lot of times

you're accomplishing retouching in
those moments.

Because

for instance, in this transition right
here,

you can see

that

the original,

or the top

exposure,

for that area,

the highlight,

for some reason, got cut off right here.

But

in the base exposure,

which is this one down here, we have

a highlight that goes all the way down
into the liquid.

And so if we were to

use the exposure as intended

for this top area,

we'd have a cut off highlight.

And

we would need to

then draw that in, or remove the upper
highlight I'm not sure which it was

going to be.

I'm assuming that the highlight's going
to extend all the way down to kind of

mirror what's going on with the left.

So with creative masking,

we can

see that we have

an exposure now below, that's going to
work for this area,

and combine it with this top exposure.

And what I'd like to do is just take a
soft brush, if that works for that area.

I'm a flow guy.

I don't like opacity, opacity creates
just bad masks.

So I like to use flow.

So I usually just take a low flow brush

and just blend that area in with

what's

going to be the exposure that I want to
work with.

And just like that, I've accomplished
ten minutes of retouching that I would

have had to do had I not checked this
area

with my rough mask,

with the exposure for the top.

I'm just going to go ahead and just
check to see what's happening in this

upper section, see if there's anything
else I can use.

I think there might be.

As you can see, there was a glare right
here.

This might actually be the reflection
of somebody.

It kind of looks like a skin tone to
me, like

a stretched out face.

Maybe I'm just going to go ahead and
get rid of that real quick.

Just like that.

A kind of like

this less glare up here as well.

You can see that I'm still using my
mouse.

I don't know why that happens.

It's just in my hand.

It works.

I don't need the pin tool for that.

Do you?

Quick before and after?

That's great.

I can see a little

bit of weirdness down here.

Just like that.

It's gone.

Look at my mask.

It's terrible.

It doesn't matter.

This isn't

about creating beautiful, perfect
masks.

This is about creating a beautiful,
perfect image.

But I do want to check to see if
there's any weirdness.

There's something there?

It's gone.

That's always going to be there.

Can't get rid of it.

Edge looks good.

All this top stuff, I'm not worried
about.

All right.

So, that's that piece?

Tops done.

Mask looks weird.

If you're a little ocd, it's fine.

You can get rid of that.

Ah, that

can just go away, can't it?

Not really.

We're going to leave it like that.

Sloppy.

All right.

Next section is the neck liquid.

I'm seeing a little bit of white wrap
from the initial exposure.

I'm just going to go ahead and take
that down a little bit, so that I'm

going to do less retouching here.

This area, actually, I think I need to
spend a little time with, to be honest,

see if we've got any

side glares we can get rid of,

I think.

So I'm just going to take a

higher flow brush,

paint this area out.

Yeah,

better color over there.

I'm feeling really good about the top.

I know it's just a really small part of
the bigger picture,

but like I said, we're going to be kind
of making a composite here in a minute

of everything that we've done so far.

So I'd really like to get this as

pristine and perfect as it can be.

So I do a little bit less clean up
later.

Let me just make sure that I've got
everything

just as I want it

up.

See,

more creative masking.

You can see I had a little accident up
here

kind of unmask this area, but

it actually worked because

I like this highlight edge.

I like having a little bit of
separation between the background.

So we're going to leave that as is.

Nothing stands out right here.

So moving down, I can see that the neck
exposure

is looking a little bit green.

And that's

because our original background

on the neck

is a bright white.

And you're seeing the

wrap

of the ambient light come down in front
of the bottle and also shine through

the liquid,

which Rob needed to do to get that
whiskey to illuminate the way that he wanted.

And what I'm going to do right now,
before I combine all these exposures,

is kind of balance it out a little bit.

I could redo it and capture and bring
it back in again, but I think this will

be pretty easy to do with a curve.

I'm going to do a quick test

to see what I have to work with,
because there are some odd highlights

on the side here.

Creative masking.

Once again,

I really love this

side highlight that we have right here.

So I think I want to keep that one and
then try to combine it with the neck liquid.

One quick thing I'd like to do and show
you is that

right now we're black on black, we
can't really see where our edges.

And so I'm going to take my

black background layer that I'd created
earlier,

and I'm just going to give it a little
bit of contrast.

In the end, this bottle might actually
have a gradient in the background.

There may be a

gray glow behind, or a red glow, who
knows, what's going to happen.

It might not go black on black.

And

no matter how you cut, I'd like to see
where my edge is.

So I'm going to put gray back there for
now.

That works for me.

You can put whatever you want back
there, but you probably should keep it

on a pretty dark background.

You don't want to be correcting and
retouching

in a reality.

That's never going to exist.

It'll mess you up

to the neck liquid.

I thought I wanted to

keep this highlight.

I do.

There's

just

a lot of visual noise on the side here
that I don't want to deal with.

So we'll just paint that out

quickly.

Easily.

Check this side.

We've got to highlight over there.

I've got some other thing happening
over there.

Not sure in the end, which I like.

But either way, I'm going to have to do
a bit of retouching.

I think this is going to be more
difficult to deal with.

So let's see what happens if we

create a transition between those
areas.

Going back to a low flow brush,

going to go real low this time.

Just gradually

paint out

my

neck liquid exposure.

Try to create

a non apparent transition.

Between those two areas.

I think that's looking pretty good.

There's a little bit of cloudiness over
here, which I'm going to fix in just a second.

Let's get this transition

balanced a little bit better.

You can see the before and after

it's just slowly peeling it away.

I feel like I've got a little bit of
greenness over here still.

And I can probably either

paint that out,

or I can do what I intended,

which is to

throw

a quick curve

on that layer

and

lower the exposure a little bit to
match the surrounding.

Areas

you can see that if I go real dark,

it still keeps blending.

These are in shadows.

It doesn't really matter.

But I know that the reason Rob made
this exposure

is to put aglow in the separate liquid.

So I don't want

to take that down too far.

But at that brightness it's

unbalanced.

I feel like it's a

big distraction.

Clients always want the label to be the
hero

they love seeing their branding.

So I'm going to go ahead and just take
that down overall a tiny bit.

I can always dodge

that area with color later on, if I
need to.

But for now, I don't want it to be too
distracting.

I want it to feel like it's a natural
part of the image,

and make sure that nothing is happening
along my edges.

Turn that on and off.

I know there's this keyboard shortcut
for that, but I always forget it

because I just like using

my mouse.

Cool.

I think that's looking really good.

I don't see

anything at the bottom.

And do you see a little bit of a line
here?

So I'm going to modify my mask just a
tiny bit.

I'm painting it 100 percent opacity.

There's just this

little area of transition down here

that

isn't

present in the lower areas.

So I can

mask it out of the neck exposure.

And this will save me some cleaning time

later on.

Once again, not really a beautiful
mask.

It doesn't matter.

We're not here to make beautiful masks.

All right, check that real fast.

I think

that's

hundred

liquids.

Moving on.

Again.

We're just trying to work quickly here.

This isn't a five hour image.

I'd like to keep this image.

And about the hour, hour and a half
range,

I am having some issues down in the
bottom.

I just want to see if I can correct
real quickly.

This mask right here is only
controlling this area.

It doesn't really have any influence
anywhere else.

So just to kind of keep my mind

isolated

to this area,

I'm just going to go ahead and make the
rest of it black.

As I'm looking at this, I know it's
just the bottom of the glass and

nothing else.

So I'm going to see if I can fix this
little line down here a real quickly.

And the way I'm going to do that is to
move my mask around first.

Didn't really help.

So let's take the actual

pieces of the bottom of the glass and

tap those up a little bit, see if that
helps.

Nope.

So it's actually

just kind of a byproduct of all these
things coming together.

It's in the photography, it's aglow
from the bottom, from the original exposures,

it's

this thing down here.

And I don't really like

the unlit version of it.

I don't think let's try that one more
time,

just see.

Yeah, it doesn't really do it for me.

Fortunately, I have this mask already
made.

So as I'm retouching, it's going to be
really easy to get rid of that bottom line.

And

I feel

like I'm happy with everything.

That's the amount of attention you need
to pay

to

creating this base,

this new base image that you're going
to be working from,

because, as I said, we're going to be
kind of flattening these layers.

So you want these to be

as perfect as you can.

And

at that point, you're going to think
about

this image

being the one exposure that the
photographer gave you.

So that's what we'll be working from in
this next part.

And I hope you're ready to see
something really exciting.

Because what I'm going to show you has
made me very happy,

and I am dying to share with