Selection trick using the smudge tool in Photoshop

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Course info

107 lessons / 16 hours 21 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Course Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan and I am an Adobe Certified Instructor for Photoshop  - this is the Advanced Photoshop course.

This course is not for people new to Photoshop. This is for people who already know the fundamentals. It is for people who have their own ways of doing things but believe there really is a better, faster way to work. 

We will start by learning the best selection techniques available. I promise, by the end of the first section what took you 30mins to mask will now take you 30 seconds. 

What am I going to get from this course?
  • 13+ Hours of content!
  • 10+ Interactive exercises
  • 68 downloadable resources
  • You'll learn the best selection and masking techniques
  • You'll know how to fix images that look 'hard to fix'
  • You'll master advanced levels and curves tricks, specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colors
  • You'll learn how to enlarge images without distortion and what to do when things go wrong
  • You'll know how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images
  • My favourite: You'll master the ability to distort, bend and reshape images
  • Lets look at how current trending styles are super easy to duplicate
  • You will become a type nerd. We'll use font pairing in Typekit. We'll also use Photoshop's ability to guess fonts
  • Your Artboards skill will be mastered
  • A master of retouching, you will become!
  • You'll learn to edit videos in Photoshop, who'd have thought?
  • We'll also create awesome cinemagraphs, AKA: Moving pictures!
  • You'll learn to master 3D in Photoshop!
  • You'll learn lots about professional, reusable mockups, techniques and shortcuts!

Here's some of the things we'll be doing in this course:
We will correct 'hard to fix' images and learn what to do with blurry images. We will master Advanced Levels & Curves tricks and will work specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colours. 

You will learn how to enlarge images without distorting them and also, what to do when things go wrong. 

We will learn how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images. My personal favourite section will show you how to distort, bend & reshape images.

We will look at how current trending visual styles are easily created, duotones, glitches and orange/teal colour grading.

We get 'type nerdy' and use font pairing in Typekit. We will use Photoshop to identify the fonts used in an image and learn how to work with hidden glyphs & ligatures as well as variable & open type fonts.

You will master artboards while you are learning how to make easily updatable multiple sized social media & ad banner graphics. 

There is a big section on advanced retouching techniques, advanced healing, advanced cloning & patching. 

You will learn how to edit videos in Photoshop. We will also animate static images creating parallax videos plus the very cool cinemagraphs sometimes called 'living pictures' - great for social media. 

You will learn to master 3D in photoshop. We will finish off the course with professional, reusable mockup techniques & shortcuts. 

This course has a strong focus on workflow. We use real world, practical projects and show you the professional techniques and shortcuts which will save you hours using Photoshop. Throughout the course I have many class exercises for you to use in order to practice your skills. 

Who am I? 
As well as being an Officially Certified Expert by Adobe, I’m photoshop guru and user with 18 years Photoshop experience. I make tutorial videos directly for Adobe and will again this year be presenting a seminar on  Photoshop at Adobe’s 20 thousand attendee strong Max Conference.  

If you can’t remember the last time you sat down and went through the updates in Photoshop, let this course be your one stop professional development and upgrade path.   

Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your Photoshop mind. Sign up now!

Course duration 13 hours 45 mins + your study.



Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

All right, it is a little trick for doing Masks, this video. You'll be doing lots of Masking video, selections of Masking. And I heard you say, "Another one, Dan, give me one more." This is just a small one, it's a little trick that I wanted to keep in here, because I use it all the time. It's a little hard to get placed in. So let's say we use this image in the last one and we went, Focus area, and that worked great, to a point. We minus this chunk out, went to 'Select & Mask'. Radius, Smoothing, I might shift the edge in a little bit. Kind of got it to a nice point, right? But there's a couple of parts, this bit here is the main offender. Click 'OK'. There's one there as well. So I'm going to show you how to use the Smudge Tool. 


I use it because-- I'll show you why. Let's do this one first, he's the easiest one to get. Because I'm going to work on my Mask, and what people tend to do, is they grab the Brush Tool, then they just make it really small. Then how small do you make it? You keep like-- let's actually do it so I can show you. So in here, really small. What's my Opacity? I will put it at 100%. I just get that bad, and then I make the brush a bit smaller. I'm going to get that-- you end up in this kind of like-- it always ends up looking a bit fake doing it that way. So, along comes the Smudge Tool. 


What does the Smudge Tool do? If I work on the actual image-- I'm going to zoom out a little bit. The Smudge Tool is this little finger here. He is normally the Blur Tool, if you hold him down, grab the Smudge Tool. Now up here, just make sure it's set to-- you might have been playing around, just pick one of these top general brushes, pick any brush. And what we'll do is, the Strength, around about 50%, and we'll set the Hardness to 0. Basically if I'm working on the actual pixels, it just smudges things, you can kind of see it there. Smudgy, smudgy, smudge, but if I undo, that same little thing, when I'm working on the actual Mask, does some really cool stuff. 


So I'm going to pick an appropriate Brush size, and then kind of smudge it in, and look, let go. Cool, huh? Just kind of smudges it in. I'll show you what I mean, or what it does. I'm going to hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, 'Option' key on a Mac, just to click on the Mask to show you what it's doing, and I undo. Because the Smudge Tool-- watch this. If I make it nice and big, if I just push from the edge, watch what happens. When I click and drag, I'm just holding the mouse key down, no Wacom tablet, you can see it kind of, as it's moving along, it kind of slowly makes the radius smaller, and the effects smaller, so it's really good for pushing into those edges. 


Just going to turn it back on, pick a Brush size. Zoom in. And in this case I might make the Hardness just a little bit less. I'm just pushing here. You can see, it just gets in the corners really quick and easy, rather than messing about with the-- yes, making the brushes bigger and smaller. Same here as well on these corners, ah, look how cool that is. Same for this one as well, where is that one? Oh, sneaky trick there. If you hold down the 'H' key on your keyboard-- so I couldn't find where this was, right? I was down here, and I was like, we're all done, you're like, "I want to go to this other part." You're like-- oh man, should have zoomed out, you can't find it, right? If you hold down the 'H' key on your keyboard, moves to the Hand Tool, but the extra perk for it is, if you click and hold down the mouse key, it zooms out to like full zoom. Then you can move it around and say, "I want to look at this bit." Retouch it, retouch it, fix it, hold down 'H', click. 


Holding the mouse key down over here, and now I'm going to kind of work in this bit here. You can see it's not starting down here, so I might have to grab my Brush Tool and just kind of start a little bit. Back to my Smudge Tool, then just kind of work this out into the gaps. You might not like it, you might do. I hope you do. Can you see those corners? Nice! Look at that. If you're using a Wacom tablet you probably wouldn't have to do this, because it's pressure sensitive, right? And you can just hold it a little bit lighter and it goes and pushes it out. This pesky one, and a pesky one again. Now I'm just moving around, but you get the idea, right? Smudge Tool can be handy for those kind of corners that you need to get into. Just a little, quick little bonus video. All right, let's move on.

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