This tutorial will show you how to smooth your backgrounds in photoshop using Camera RAW and Photoshop. I am using Photoshop Elements 9, but they should basically be the same.
This is my image SOOC (straight out of Camera). (If you shot in JPEG skip down past the Camera RAW edits) The background is more of a greenish black and there are lots of wrinkles in my blanket. The first thing I do is adjust all of my levels to my liking. Because the majority of my image is black and baby is naked, I can bump up my black levels to help deepen the blacks in my blanket before going into Photoshop. If you have an image where someone is wearing black clothes or if you bump up the blacks and then your subject looks funky, just readjust your blacks and we will continue fixing them in photoshop. : )
SOOC:
After Bumping Blacks to 20:
See? That helped a lot! : ) Now let’s open our image by clicking “OPEN IMAGE” in the bottom right hand corner of Camera RAW and this will open our picture into Photoshop. If you shot in JPEG, you will already be there!
Okay Here we Are:
Find your Layers tab to the right and click on your background layer for good measure to make sure that it is selected. Now, hit CTRL and J and the same time on your keyboard and this will duplicate the layer. (If that didn’t work for you for some reason, right click on your background layer and click “Duplicate Layer”).
You should now have two layers in your Layers Panel and it should look like this:
Now, after making sure that Layer 1 is selected, look down from the layers box and you should see a little gray square with a white circle inside it. This is the layer mask icon. Click on it and it will bring up a white box next to layer 1 like this:
A LAYER MASK is basically a fool proof way to “paint” on your picture without screwing the whole thing up. It allows you to “mask” the brush strokes off anything you messed up on or when using actions, to remove the action from a specific area such as skin tones.
Right now, the Layer Mask is selected. But, we still need to paint our background so, On LAYER 1,( click on the image BESIDE the layer mask). We want to be painting on to the actual layer at this point and not the Mask. Get your Brush out. Make sure that is just your regular old Brush and not any of the special brushes. Pressing “B” on your keyboard is the shortcut to your brush tool. In the top of your screen and to the left there is a brush box. Make sure that it is a basic Soft Brush at about 300. You can change the size of your brush as you need to by touching your bracket keys on your keyboard. Play with them a bit until you get familiar with what they do. : ) Ready?
Now, make sure that your brush color is set to black. If you wanted your black to be the same tone of black that you are already using you can touch the “I” key on your keyboard and then take your cursor and click on part of the background to select the color. You will notice that your brush color has changed to that color, in your color palette at the bottom left of your screen. Also, make sure your brush opacity is set to 100%!
Anyway, for this specific photo, I want nice deep blacks, so I am sticking with the default black as my color. Now, Start painting black on your image. Don’t worry if you get too close to your subject and some of it gets on their skin….that’s what the layer mask is for! So just do a rough paint until all of the wrinkles are gone.
This is what mine looks like now:
Okay, now for the fun part (and the most tedious part). Click back on that Layer Mask (white Box). Now, since the box is white, we are going to stick with a black brush. If you decided to keep your original tone in the blanket with the eye dropper tool, you will need to switch back to the default black by pushing “D” on your keyboard. You may have to swap them so the black goes back on top, but this is the fastest way to change back to your default colors. J With the black brush selected, we are going to paint on to the skin of the subject (and any other parts of the photo that you do not want black) and the mask will magically remove the black paint strokes from that part of the photo. TADA!
Now, this is where is gets tedious and a bit tricky. If you go too far off of the skin and part of your background starts to show wrinkles again or it looks blotchy, you are going to need to switch your brush color to white and paint the black back on to the background (You are still on the layer mask, don’t click off the layer mask).
Basically, When your Mask is White…Black takes the action on the picture away and White brings it back again.
The goal is to get as close to the skin as possible without actually going on the skin. Zooming your image in when you get to the edges is key! If you do not paint the fine edges you will have a halo around your images. It takes a lot of practice, but the more you do it, the easier it gets! : )
Zoomed in at 200% to get around baby’s hairline.
This is my final edit. It obviously involved adding a bit more arm to keep it from looking like it was floating in thin air and I smoothed baby’s skin, ran a couple of actions and then settled on a black and white conversion.
When you are finished with your layers ALWAYS REMEMBER to flatten them before saving or before moving on to a new edit (such as using actions, smoothing skins, or messing with layers). To do this, right click on the background later and select flatten image.
Good Luck and hope this helps! If you have any questions, you can email me!
Tips to remember:
1. Adjust your brush size constantly. Make it bigger to get big areas and make it smaller when working around the edges.
2. Stay on the layer mask once you have finished painting on the image itself. If you start to see black or white streaks on your image stop and make sure that you are still clicked on the Layer Mask. If you accidentally clicked on the image, go to edit and undo until you get back to where you want it to be.
3. Pay attention to detail and zoom in and out and look at all the edges to make sure you do not have a halo. Watch little toes, creases around fingers, and especially hair lines!
4. Rest your eyes! Sometimes when you have been working at it for awhile, your eyes start to see things that aren’t really there LOL!
