Refine: le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

A quote usually attributed to Voltaire (which he attributes to "a wise Italian")—Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien—has always disturbed the perfectionist in me. A few of the English translations are:

• Better is the enemy of good
• Better is the enemy of good enough
• The perfect is the enemy of the good

When I was living with my dad and his artist friend in France, I heard them throw the phrase around, often in reference to her work in ceramics. If you've ever worked at a potter's wheel, you know how quickly a perfect vase can suddenly turn into a muddy heap just because you thought you could make it a little thinner, a little taller. In that context, "better" destroys "good." In other contexts, the enemy line is not so clear. In fact, I often have trouble deciding which side I'm on. Why should I fight for good when I can be a martyr for better? Besides, if I learned anything from watching Six Million Dollar Man episodes as a child it is that "better, stronger, faster" is always right.

In Voltaire's moral tale, La Bégueule, a foolish woman who likes pretty, shiny things learns the perils of always trying to trade up. Improving talents, knowledge, and moral character is always desirable, notes Voltaire, but the rest can lead to a life of illusion. In Photoshop, where, let's face it, we are often creating illusion, the quest for pretty, shiny pictures can quickly go too far. I won't moralize, but I will say a few words about refinement in retouching.

In my dodge and burn tutorial, I try to show how very subtle skin retouching is always better fake, plastic-looking skin. The shortcut skin smoothing methods are useful as well, but the problem is that when you see Barbie-doll skin, it can be hard to dial things back down to "good enough." For example, I have seen a lot of people do something like this...

when this is plenty good enough:
Self-restraint is hard when you have just learned how to make people look perfect. I look back in horror at some of the work I did in my first year or two of retouching. But since then, I have developed a rule:

Do the correction and then dial it down.

It's the Photoshop equivalent of Coco Chanel's advice, "When accessorizing, always take off the last thing you put on." How do you edit accessories in Photoshop?

1. Do your adjustments on separate layers
2. When you're happy with an adjustment layer, go to the "opacity" box in the layers palette and lower it from 100 to 80 or below. Look at step 3 of my "fix dark photos" tutorial and you'll see what I mean.

That's it. That's probably my top rule of refining photos. I always do it. The only possible exception to the rule is when you are looking for an extremely stylized effect. Otherwise, always turn it down. This applies to just about everything:

• sharpening
• contrast
• saturation
• etc.

One of my pet peeves with tutorials is that they almost always encourage excess just to make sure you can see the before/after difference. In my dodge and burn tutorial, I was worried that people wouldn't even notice the before/after difference, but I didn't exaggerate the "after" because I wanted to reinforce my preference for moderation and at least a modicum of verisimilitude.

It's OK to fight for good even though better might be brighter, sharper, more colorful, and more dramatic. Trust me, your photos will end up looking more refined.

Layer adjustment masks for the lazy artsy slob

When it comes to masking, those extra neat and precise detail-oriented types have the clear advantage. But if you're more the sloppy, intuitive, artsy type, and/or you're a beginner then rejoice! This tutorial is for you. Oh, the discipline that masking requires! This is probably one of the reasons that my personal projects involve fairly minor post-processing manipulation. Mastering all of the selection tools (I have a particular fear of the reputedly wondrous pen tool.), loading alpha channels, altering blending modes...it's just so much to learn that I won't even pretend to cover it all by the end of the month. We'll get to some of it (alpha channels is coming soon), but for today, I want to bask in the relative ease of basic adjustment masking. In particular, the kind of masking that doesn't require precise borders. Here it is in three steps:

1. you open your image
2. you add an adjustment layer such as curves, hue/saturation, etc.
3. you use a very soft brush and paint effects in or out in your sloppy, intuitive way.

Maybe you already know the joys of this kind of masking, but then again, maybe you were just avoiding masks altogether and weren't aware that you had such an easy option.

So let me give a basic example.
Some people might call this the "painting with light" technique. I'm not a fan of the term, because it makes me think of Thomas Kinkade "painter of light." No offense if you're a fan of his (obviously a lot of people are or he wouldn't have stores in your local mall), but those cottages of his always have such intense light emanating from the windows that I can't help but think I am witnessing either an alien abduction or a terrible fire.

But back to "painting with light."
Let's take this pretty lame photo of the pont Alexandre III:


It's no prize to begin with, but if it was the only one you had and you wanted to make your friends green with envy over your trip to Paris then some retouching could help further your sadistic aims.

Now I'll add a curves layer:
Click on the curves icon at the bottom of your layers palette, or in CS4 you can click on the little "s-curve" icon.

Now let's lighten the whole image by taking that black dot and pulling it toward the upper left corner of the curves box:You will see the effect over the entire image because you haven't done any masking yet. With the curves adjustment layer, you automatically get a white mask, which means that any adjustments you make will be applied to the whole image. If you use a black paintbrush on the mask, you can selectively remove the effect. It's just a matter of preference, but I think it's way more fun to use a black mask and the selectively paint in the effect. The only advantage is psychological—brushing the effect in feels more magical whereas brushing the effect out just feels like cleaning up a mess (at least that's how I see it). So dump that white layer mask (click and drag on the mask part—NOT the curves side or you'll trash the whole layer) in the trash:

Yes. Delete. Now alt click on the mask icon to get a black layer mask.

You will just see the dark original...
but by taking a brush (b) and painting white in the mask you can add the light back in as you please. Use the right and left brackets to change the size of your brush and use them with shift to change the softness. For this kind of sloppy intuitive work, I set the brush hardness to zero to avoid strong edges to my changes. You can also adjust the opacity of your brush strokes up in the brush toolbar.

Here's some sloppy painting in action:

Hit the backslash key (\) to see your masking as a red overlay:

You can toggle back and forth or just paint in the overlay view, whatever works. Some more quick painting—and really, this is quick and sloppy but it works—and you've lightened up the bottom:

Remember that this isn't about making one uniform mask, you can change the opacity and make more subtle little blobs of change....

Keep following this process (adding adjustment layers and masking their effects) on as many layers as you want. For example, I think the sky could be less washed out, so I'll add another curves layer and pull the curve down toward the bottom right corner to make everything darker:

It looks like you just undid all of your previous work, but in a minute you'll be painting the effect in and out as above. Once again, I prefer to trash the white layer...


and change to a black layers mask as before.


Mask away....
Notice that I'm not trying to be super precise selections. Instead, I'll use a low opacity brush to feather the effect a little for smooth transitions. I will also take some of the effect off of the clouds to keep them fluffy white.

You can now see the two curves layers...
but since this is a picture of France, two just feels too....too...how you say...conventional. Three is much more interesting.
A little more contrast selectively applied spices things up. And if you think you've gone too far with any one layer, you can always reduce the opacity.

By this point, I'm done, but you could add as many layers and adjustments as you want.
Finally, then, with no adjustments other than our three curves layers, you go from the "meh" photo...
to the "aahhhh" photo:

Closing words...

• use this technique on anything from landscapes to people's faces
• you don't need surgical precision to make artful changes
• if you have never tried adjustment layers and masks, this "sloppy" intuitive way is the least intimidating way to start.
  

Color blending mode in Photoshop

Layer blending modes: too many choices
If you look at the pull-down menu in your layers palette, you will see a dizzying number of choices with names that do not make sense without explanation. If you want to know what all of those blending modes mean, several great posts out there take the time to explain each one of them:

• Northlite starts with a primer on color and then demonstrates blending modes with a leafy background and a rainbow gradient. Excellent concise explanations.
• Digital Art Form's post is not exhaustive, but it is certainly methodical.
• And speaking of methodical, check out Nathan's programming magic. This is the kind of stuff that my son just eats up. For those of us that are less skilled at programming, scroll down past the blend mode math and check out the photos. As a photographer, I appreciate how Nathan demonstrates the blend modes on photos rather than on graphics.
• Photoshop Essentials simplifies the blend modes by grouping them into five categories. Very readable.
• Adobe Press shows us "how blending modes think."

As much as I respect all of the above, I start to get vertigo when so much information is presented at once. And even though helpful people have gone through the trouble to demonstrate the effects of each and every blending mode, I am left unsure about practical use.

A book suggestion
I think that Matt Kloskowski's Layers book is the best thing out there for people like me (i.e. people who prefer not to be overwhelmed), because it focuses on the layers features you will actually use. In fact, chapter two of his book cuts the list of 25 blending modes down to the three modes he deems the most useful (multiply, screen, and soft light). That's not to say that he doesn't use other modes in the book, but simply that he keeps it practical.

My own top three blending modes are multiply, screen, and overlay (which is almost the same as soft light). But in honor of the May monthly special on "color," I decided to dedicate this post to the "color" blending mode with an emphasis on practical use in photo retouching.

Color blending mode: what it does
Let me quote Northlite's pithy definition: "Color [blending mode] changes the hue and saturation of the lower layer to the hue and saturation of the upper layer but leaves luminosity alone."

Not making sense yet? Let's look at an example. I will start with a color photo:
In the layers palette, I add a new empty layer. Just to show how the color blending mode works, I will fill that top layer with white by using the paint bucket tool with the foreground set to white.
This leaves me with a plain white screen. Next, I choose "color" from the layer blending modes.
Because the color blending mode leaves all of the shades of gray (i.e. the luminosity) intact, my white top layer blends down to create a black and white image.
Although I would recommend different methods for customized black and white conversion, the example above should help you visualize what the color blending mode changes (hue, saturation) and what it leaves alone (luminosity).

And now on to real-world use...

Toning an image with color blend mode
If you fill a new blank layer with any color (as I did with white above) and set the blending mode to "color," you will get a toned image. So this time I will use a beige color on the top layer.
The result is a nicely toned image:
This is exceptionally easy, because I go straight from color to a toned image. Change the color of the top layer, and you change the tone:

Enhance or change color selectively with the color blend mode
Two more tricks with the color blending mode start with the same steps as above, but then modify the top layer in one or both of the following ways:

1. Play with the opacity
If you lower the opacity of the top layer, your background color will start to come through. This can look very ugly at 60%, but can be very useful at 15% to either add or correct a color cast. In the photo below, I applied a yellow layer at about 20% in the color blending mode. The right half shows the new warmer version, and the left half is the original more ruddy complexion. Just to make sure you could see a difference, I set the opacity higher than my ideal.
2. Color blend + layer mask = selective color change.
Add a layer mask to a toned image, and then paint color in or out. I usually prefer to paint in rather than out, so I add a layer mask filled with black by clicking the layer mask icon while holding the alt key.
Now I can use a white brush (b) on the mask to paint in color selectively. If blue is my top color, and I mask out everything except the eyes, I end up with...
AAARRRGHHH! Ridiculously fake bright blue eyes!!!! But if I dial down the opacity, I get a realistic change:
Or I can do the same thing to shift his hazel eyes more toward green:
Since the color blending mode leaves the luminosity alone, you get all of the shading of the original image. Even the super intense blue might be believable if more people in the world had the eyes of Paul Newman. Back to the real world...In my own work, I never have any reason to change hazel eyes to blue or green, but I might want to enhance a person's actual eye color if a photo didn't do it justice.

In the end, our only potential obstacle to realistic color manipulation is self-restraint (the lack thereof). But then again, who says realism has to be the goal? Start to experiment with the color blend mode and you will appreciate its ability to create highly stylized effects.

Fix dark photos in Photoshop or PS Elements

The problem:
I love this photo of Eva that I took in Paris last year, but it's a little dark and it will look even darker as a print (without the benefit of computer monitor backlighting). And to top things off, the lighting in my home is not very bright, so a dark photo in a dark room will not stand out.

The TOP "starters" solution:
A quick disclaimer that I will try not to repeat every time I give Photoshop tips: Any given photo problem may have a dozen or more possible solutions. It's good to learn several methods, but since this is a "starter," I will stick to quick and easy ones. The following solution can be summed up in one sentence (Make a duplicate layer and choose "screen" to blend it.), but I don't want to assume prior knowledge, so I'll walk you through every step.

This works in both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but since I want you to learn keystrokes there is one step that Elements users will need to do that is not necessary in Photoshop.

Elements users (If you have Photoshop, skip to step 1):
See how the photo you have opened says "Background" under the Layers Palette? Well, double click on it, then you'll see this:
Just click OK and it will now be called "layer 0" instead (Or, I just ran into a comment on a blog that says you can hold "alt" and double click on the background layer. This won't change the name of the background, but it will do the trick even faster). Now you're set for the actual instructions...

Step 1.
Press "command J" to duplicate the background layer. It will look like this for PS Elements 6:
And like this for Photoshop:
Step 2.
Make sure your top layer is active (see the images above). Now click on the arrow next to the word "Layers" and you will see a pull-down menu of blending options. We'll explore more of these in a future post. For now, choose "Screen"And watch what happens:
Your photo is about twice as bright.

Step 3.
Too bright? No problem. You can dial in the exact amount you prefer by adjusting the opacity. In the image below I decided to dial it down to 70%:
Step 4.
You want to end up with a regular .jpg file that you can print, so there's one more thing to do. Make sure you "flatten the image" before you save. There's another handy pull-down menu in the layers palette where you can select "Flatten Image" (see the image below):
Now you can save a print a much improved photo.

Here's a photo showing BEFORE and AFTER (with my final choice of a screen at 70% opacity):
Doesn't it look like a layer of grime has been removed? So much better and so easy to do.

Postscript tips

• If you need to brighten even more than 100%, copy yet another layer (command J), blend with "screen" and dial the opacity as needed.
• You can follow these same instructions and choose "Multiply" to make photos darker. Be warned, however, that blown-out highlights (parts that are pure white) won't get darker (a good reason that an underexposed shot is generally better than an overexposed one).