This week’s tutorial comes from a question by one of my readers where he asked if there was a way to get the best of both worlds. In one photo, he had it sharp all the way through, but the water wasn’t quite the look he was going for. In the other photo, the water looked great, but the rest of the photo was slightly soft. With a little masking, we have an easy fix. Enjoy!
PS: My discussion of shooting without a tripod doesn’t necessarily reflect the photos in this tutorial. It was an idea that seeing these photos gave me. Sorry for any confusion. Thanks! 🙂
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I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
another good training video
Thanks again, Matt.
Thanks!
Really really helpful information. But, my real question is:
Just how much do you actually need Photoshop given that it is a pretty complex thing to get to grips with and Lightroom actually has so many of the tools that an enthusiastic amateur photographer like myself needs such as for example, generative fill. Seems that almost every few months Lightroom and Photoshop are getting closer together as it were but Lightroom is just that much easier to use without all of the layers, complex techniques and so on. Probably it does lack some capability but just how much do you need. The other issue is that if you go out and buy a course on the subject, it’s almost out of date immediately. I paid for a Photoshop course not that long ago and generative fill wasn’t even mentioned, but now it’s the hot topic and available even in Lightroom. Plus, it is amazing and incredibly capable.
Hi Paul.
“Probably it does lack some capability but just how much do you need.”
I never said you need a lot, but when you need it you need it. And how much depends on you, what you shoot and how you shoot it and what you prefer. There’s plenty you can do with just Lightroom and if that suits you go for it, but it is necessary for many people and that’s okay too.
Lastly, find me a Photoshop course that is out of date. Layers, selections, filters, masks, blend modes, and 90% of Photoshop features haven’t changed. If you learned how to use Generative Fill 18 months ago from a course, nothing about that would be out dated today. Don’t get caught thinking PS changes all the time. Like most things, the basics of using something are the foundations and they haven’t changed in Photoshop in 25+ years.
Thanks.
I agree with Matt. I’m still using Lightroom for only basic raw processing and Photoshop for the heavy lifting. I’m a landscape guy, my processing uses masks a lot and I find it next to impossible to persuade Lr accurately to select a lake or a boulder, or to do the complex additions and subtractions I do in Ps. For example, if I’m on our Lake Ontario shoreline I may have a selection for the sky and another for a bay; Curves on each. I add ’em, invert the selection and put a Curve on it. Now I’ve got three masks, sky, bay and everything else. Then I work on each and perhaps clip other layers to them. Lr just doesn’t do clipping, doesn’t like adding or subtracting masks, especially if you’ve already done some work on the mask in question. It’s is great for complex masks based on selecting people and bits of people, inverting and creating backgrounds, adding spotlights. But I can’t make it work for landscapes.
I watch all of your videos and have purchased a number of your courses. You do a great job. While I learn from seeing and listening, I learn even more from doing. I would appreciate it if you would include some exercises in your courses that we could do on our own photos or on some you supply. This would help to cement my learning.
Hi Diane. Nearly every one of my courses includes follow along files where applicable. Check your downloads for those courses and you’ll find them. Thanks.
I love your stuff Matt – it’s always so easy to understand – thank you for doing these.
Will you PLEASE put a cover on your electric outlet.
Thanks, Matt! I’m pretty comfortable with using masks to merge the best parts of photos, but I hadn’t thought of your trick of using invert to turn the mask all black so the part you have to brush is the smaller element. I’d have put the blurry water image below the sharp image, which, of course, would have accomplished the same thing, but your trick is quicker!
Currently, I’m using masks to combine multiple versions of photos I’ve “oil painted” using Photoshop’s AI. I know strict, realist photographers hate that “fake stuff,” but I love using it to turn some of my photos into paintings. I spent several years learning and loving photography as a hobby. I’m nowhere near your level, but I’ve come to a place in my hobby where I am not as excited about taking another photo of a bird, beach, sunset, or landscape. Plus, as I approach 80, I find I don’t want to lug around camera and gear so much anymore. Instead, I’m having lots of fun going through my thousands of photos and picking the ones that I think would make a great oil or watercolor painting.
I use the Channels method of selecting the whole photo at a certain percent of brightness and then typing “oil painting” or “watercolor painting” in the AI bar. I view each of the three versions it produces and delete any versions that I don’t like. I repeat several times until I have maybe 6-10 versions that have elements I think look good. I label each version with the name of the elements I like (e.g., water, hillside, etc.). I select a “main version” that has the most elements I like in one image, then use masks to replace the elements I don’t like with the ones I like better from the other versions.
If you are curious, here’s a link to my most recent digital photo-oil painting (if links aren’t allowed, feel free to delete this part of my comment): https://susan-molnar.pixels.com/featured/green-pleasure-pier-avalon-digital-oil-1-susan-molnar.html
So glad you’re doing this presentation Matt.
Your tutorials are excellent and easy to follow.
Another excellent tutorial Matt. I heartily endorse your Photoshop Systems course. It has helped me immensely and I am always going back to it to refresh.
I watched a Serge Ramelli youtube years ago in which he showed how to fake long exposure smooth water by stacking and aligning multiple exposures as layers in a single photoshop doc, then applying mathematical magic to the layers via smart object manipulation. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/GeFvtjmLid0?si=MZY9BWLeEi_THB0o I’ve used it several times and it does a credible job. Way more complicated than Matt’s method, certainly.
Probably a good idea to align the photos first