ptg To make any of those color swatches your Foreground color, just double- click on it. Getting Rid of Your Empty Layers Fast In CS5, Adobe included a built-in script that will go through your Layers panel and remove any empty layers (layers with nothing on them) automatically (once you get a large multi-layered project going, you wind up with more of these than you’d think). To have Photoshop tidy things up for you, go under the File menu, under Scripts, and choose Delete All Empty Layers. Removing Noise from Cell Phone Photos Since Photoshop is a pro tool, most of us probably wouldn’t even think of using Camera Raw’s built-in Noise Reduction feature to remove the noise from our cell phone camera’s photos, but…why not? Cell phone photos are notorious for color noise, which Camera Raw cleans up really well. Try it one time, and I’ll bet you’ll use it more than you ever dreamed (to open a cell phone photo in Camera Raw, just find it on your computer in Mini Bridge, then Right-click on it and choose Open in Camera Raw). Using the HUD Pop-Up Color Picker If you’ve ever thought, “There’s got to be an easier way to pick colors than clicking on the Fore ground color swatch every time,” you’re gonna love this: It’s a pop-up Color picker (Adobe calls it the HUD [Heads-Up Display], because you keep your eyes on the image, instead of looking over and down at the Foreground/Background color swatches). First, choose a Brush tool, then just press Command-Option- Ctrl (PC: Alt-Shift) and click (PC: Right-click) on your image. It brings up a simplified color picker where you can quickly choose your color (I find it easier if you choose the hue first, from the bar on the right, then choose the tint and saturation of the color from the box on the left). 221Chapter 8Creating HDR Images The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Photoshop Killer Tips Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Photo by Scott Kelby Exposure: 1/80 sec | Focal Length: 18mm | Aperture Value: ƒ/3.5 Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 223 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The title for this chapter comes from the 2009 movie Little Problems (written and directed by Matt Pearson), but I could have just as easily gone with the 2008 short Little Problems (written and directed by Michael Lewen), but there was one big thing that made the choice easy. The first movie was about zombies. You just can’t make a bad movie about zombies. It’s a lock. Throw a couple of hapless teens (or in this case “an unlikely couple”) into some deso- lated location with a couple hundred flesh-starved un dead, and you’ve got gold baby, gold! Now, has anyone ever won- dered, even for a second, why every zombie in the rich and colorful history of zombies, has an insatiable hunger for human flesh and only human flesh? Why can’t there be zombies that have an insatiable hunger for broccoli? Then, in their bombed-out shell of a desolate vacant city, on every corner there would be other zombies selling broccoli the size of azalea bushes. Anyway, it’s just a little too coinci- dental that every zombie wants to eat you, but they don’t want to eat something that might actually keep them alive, and is in ample and easy reproducible supply, like broccoli, or spring rolls, or chowder. Nope, it has to be human flesh, even though you know and I know (say it with me) it tastes like chicken (well, that’s what I’ve been told, anyway). Another thing that drew me to the first Little Problems was the director’s last name, seeing as all my books are published by subsidiaries of Pearson Education, a company who somehow chose to hire Ted Waitt as my editor, despite the fact that they were forewarned by the DCBGC (the Desolate City Broccoli Growers’ Consortium) that Ted might not actually be the strict vegetarian he claimed to be in his resume. I probably shouldn’t say anything bad about Ted, though. I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me. Little Problems fixing common problems Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 224 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers You can shoot outside all day and be getting shots that look just great, but step indoors and everything changes. The culprit is Auto white balance (the default setting on digital cameras, and most people never change from this default). With Auto white balance, shooting indoors (like the interior shot shown below) you get what you see here—a photo that looks way too yellow (or if I had shot in an office, where the standard is fluorescent lighting, it would be too blue). Here are three different ways to deal with the problem:. Step One: Here’s a photo taken in the lobby of a hotel and, of course, it has the type of lighting you’re likely to find in a lobby (or a home), called “tungsten lighting” (by photographers and people who sell lighting for a living), which is why the color in the photo looks so yellow (pretty typical for shots taken indoors when your white balance set to Auto). The first method is to add a blue Photo Filter ad- justment to offset the yellow and make the color look more natural, so click on the Photo Filter icon in the Adjustments panel (it’s shown circled here). Step Two: Just a heads up: when you choose Photo Filter, the default filter is yellow, so your photo looks even worse at first, but that’s easy to fix. From the Filter pop-up menu, choose Cooling Filter (82), as seen here, and then drag the Density (amount) slider to the right until the image looks more natural. Here, I dragged it over to 50% (the amount will be different depending on the photo, so this is a judgment call you’ll have to make). This correction looks okay, but if you have the original RAW image, you can get a much better correc- tion than this using Camera Raw. Three Ways to Fix the Color in Indoor Shots SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 225Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: If you took the original shot in RAW, this is the best case scenario, because you’ll usually get much better results by opening the image in Camera Raw and choosing one of the built-in pre- sets in the White Balance pop-up menu, like Tungsten (shown here), which pret- ty much fixes the problem, and does it without washing out the red color in the chairs (if you look back at the image in Step Two, the chairs lost some of the saturation in the reds. It was a fair trade—to lose some of the red to get the rest of the color fixed—but this method, with a RAW photo, is much better all around). In short: you’ll get better results fixing the white balance of RAW images in Camera Raw than you will for JPEG or TIFF images. Step Four: If your original shot was taken as a JPEG or TIFF, you can still use Camera Raw to adjust your white balance, but the results won’t be as good as if it had been shot in RAW. Click on the photo in Mini Bridge, then Right-click on it and choose Open in Camera Raw. When it opens, you’ll see that something’s missing—there is no Tungsten preset for JPEGs or TIFFs, only As Shot and Auto (Auto seems to look okay as a starting place for this photo, but I had to drag the Temperature slider to the left a bit to remove more of the yellow, and it still doesn’t look as good as the simple Tungsten preset used on the RAW image in Step Three). Your other choice is to get the White Balance tool and click on a light gray area in the photo (I tried this, as well, and in this case, it looked worse than the Auto preset). Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 226 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step One: Open a photo where your subject is in the shadows (it can be a person, or a building, or anything backlit). In this example, the light is coming from the windows behind our subject, so he ap- pears almost like a silhouette. Ideally, we’d like to brighten him up, and darken the light from the windows and the wall to the right by pulling back the high- lights. To do this, first go under Filter menu and choose Convert for Smart Filters. This lets you apply the adjust- ment as if it was an adjustment layer (meaning you can re-edit it later if you need to, or even delete the adjustment altogether). Even though the adjustment we’re going to apply isn’t found under the Filter menu, for some reason Adobe lets it act like it is a regular filter, so why not take advantage of it, eh? Now go under the Image menu, under Adjust- ments, and choose Shadows/Highlights. When Your Subject Is in the Shadows We all wind up shooting subjects that are backlit (where the light is behind your subject). That’s because our eyes automatically adjust to the situation and we see the subject just fine in our viewfinder. The problem is our cameras aren’t nearly as sophisticated as our eyes are, so you’re almost guaranteed to get some shots where the subject is way too dark. Although I feel you get better results using Camera Raw’s Fill Light and Recovery sliders, Shadows/Highlights does a fairly decent job, and there’s a trick you can use to make the adjustment re-editable. SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 227Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Two: If you’re choosing Shadows/Highlights, you probably have a problem in the shadow areas, which is why, by default, it’s set to open up (lighten) the shadow areas in your photo by 35% (as seen here). In pre- vious versions of Photoshop, the default setting was 50%, but most users felt it was too high a setting, so in CS5, Adobe set it down to something more reasonable. However, in this case, our subject is so bur- ied in the shadows that we’ll have to open the shadows quite a bit, but the problem with opening the shadows 50% or more is your photos tend to look “milky.” To get around that, turn on the Show More Options checkbox, as shown here. Step Three: This brings up an expanded version of the dialog (as shown here). I have a little for- mula that I use that usually gives me the opened up shadow areas I need, with out looking totally fake. First, I usually leave the Amount some where around 35% (the final amount depends on the individual photo, and here I had to increase it to 75). Then, I drag the Shadows Radius slider to the right to between 65 and 80 (as shown here), which smoothes out the effect even more. (The Radius amount determines how many pixels each adjustment affects, so to affect a wider range of pixels, in- crease the amount.) TIP: Save a New Default If you come up with some settings you like, click the Save As Defaults button in the bottom-left corner of the dialog, and now it will open with your settings. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 228 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Four: Now that the shadows are opened up (and look reasonably realistic), you can work on the highlights. In most cases, you’ll only have to fix one or the other— the shadows or the highlights, but not both. It takes someone special to actually take a photo that is so wrong on every level that it needs both areas adjusted (like I did here). So, to pull back (darken) the highlights in the window and on the wall on the right, go to the High lights section and drag the Amount slider to the right (as shown here). Now, if later you need to tweak these changes, be- cause in Step One you applied this as a Smart Filter, you can go to the Layers panel, double-click directly on the words “Shadows/Highlights” (as shown here), and the Shadows/Highlights dialog will appear again, with the settings you used previously. Just make any changes you want, then click OK. Before After (opening up the shadows and pulling back the highlights) Download from www.wowebook.com ptg SCOTT KELBY 229Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Continued Step One: Here’s a shot taken in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and the sky is that flat gray that we all hate for travel and outdoor shots. Before we go any farther, the first thing I usually try is to press Command-L (PC: Ctrl-L) to open the Levels dialog, and darken the midtones by dragging the cen- ter Input Levels slider (circled here in red) to the right. If there is any detail in the sky we can’t see, this will usually do the trick, but unfortunately for this image, it just made the gray, grayer, so once I tried it, I hit Cancel instead of OK. Of course, to adjust the sky, you’ll have to select it first. You can use any selection tool you’re comfortable with, but for something simple like this, I usually just use the Magic Wand tool (press Shift-W until you have it; it’s nested with the Quick Selection tool). Nothing ruins an outdoor shot like a dull gray sky (well, except for one other thing—later in this chapter, you’ll learn how to remove tourists), but luckily, in many cases, you can save the shot by darkening the midtones a bit, and adding a blue tint or gradient to the sky. Here’s how to do both: Fixing Shots with a Dull Gray Sky Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 230 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Two: Click the Magic Wand tool on the gray sky to select it. I set my Tolerance (up in the Options Bar) to 10, so it doesn’t accidentally select the buildings at the bottom of the image, as well (when I tried my usual Tolerance setting of 20, it selected too much). At 10, one click won’t select the entire sky, so press-and- hold the Shift key and click in any areas it didn’t select (it may take you a few Shift-clicks to get the whole sky selected). Now, although this isn’t exactly what this project is about, you could paste a to- tally different image of clouds into this selected area. You’d do that by opening a photo of clouds, pressing Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to Select All, then pressing Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to Copy that image into memory. Then, you’d switch back to the first image, go under the Edit menu, under Paste Special, and choose Paste Into to paste the clouds into your selected area. Step Three: Instead, we’re going to open a photo that has a sky color we like (you can download this same photo, and most of the key pho- tos used in this book, at the Web address listed in the introduction at the front of the book). Once you open the image, switch to the Eyedropper tool (I), and click once on the darkest blue area in the image (as shown here) to make that your Foreground color. Now, press the letter X to swap your Foreground and Background colors, then click the Eyedropper on the brightest blue in the photo (lower in the sky), so that now your Foreground is a lighter blue, and your Background is a darker blue. Download from www.wowebook.com . choose the hue first, from the bar on the right, then choose the tint and saturation of the color from the box on the left). 221Chapter 8Creating HDR Images The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital. Raw. Three Ways to Fix the Color in Indoor Shots SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 225Chapter 9Fixing Common Problems Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step. Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Two: Click the Magic Wand tool on the gray sky to select it. I set my Tolerance (up in the Options Bar) to 10,