Hello, this is Rob here from Rob coven.com. And today I'd like to improve an image by licensing certain parts or selections of the image. And this can happen more often than not, you rarely want to brighten the hole of an image by exactly the same amount, it's much more likely that you're going to do certain things to certain areas of an image. And that's where selections come in. And you can make selections or masks or in fact paths. A lot of Photoshop tools are actually all about making selections.

So I've got a an image here that has been taken with a flash and the foreground is lit very well in the background. As you See is very dark. And this is the interior of the Natural History Museum in London. And let's pretend we want to bring up the interior. So in order to brighten something, in order to change the brightness or contrast of an image, you would go up to image in Photoshop adjustments. And there are several tools that you can use for this.

Of course, there's brightness and contrast, that doesn't give you a lot of control, really. So I'll just put the brightness up in this and you're beginning to see that you're getting a bit of detail at the background there. But of course, we're losing the foreground completely. This isn't a good tool to use in this example, and it's pretty much never a good tool to use at all. So we'll forget about that. So we could also use levels and this gives you a chart showing the shadows the very dark areas and the very light areas.

Mid tones. So as you can see this slider here is for the dark area, and you can see most of the image is dark. And then more or less, all of the mid tones are pretty even. And then actually, there's a little bit at the top there, because that's the very, very bright part of the image. So here you can drag that slider in, and that will make more of the image dark, you can drag that slider in and that will make more of the image light. And then this is the mid tones, which is where you control most of the image.

And you can as you can see, reveal what is in the darkness by using the mid tones. Unfortunately, again, we're making the figures in the front more bleached out and you're actually losing this gentleman here, which wouldn't be a bad thing because that's me. But again, we haven't got enough control because we're not isolating the different parts of the image. The tool I do like to use you can use Levels if you want, but I actually like to use curves, I believe this gives you more control, it works very similar to the levels in that this is the dark area. And you can make the dark areas darker here. This is the light area, and you can make the light areas nicer in here.

And therefore, this is the mid tones, which you can lighten or darken as well. But you've got more control isn't that you can isolate an area of mid tone more than the other areas of mid tones. And therefore this is an image adjustment tool that I prefer curves. And of course, you can also adjust the different channels in different ways and put different colors into the image like that. So that's the tool I'll be using. But first of all, I've got to isolate the parts of the image and before I do that, I'm getting To copy that layer, so we've got a copy of what we had.

And we're going to work on the top layer. So that's going to obscure the background layer, and there's no reason to make it invisible. And in order to isolate or select certain parts of the image, I'm going to use the list suitable. Now, as you remember, the important value here is the feather. Remember, if we don't change the feather and we leave it at zero pixels, it means the edge of the selection is going to be very, very hard and we want it to be soft, because that will make the image adjustment less obvious. And what can happen in these situations is you can chop around these figures in the foreground and you can just give them a halo effect or something like that.

And we want to make it look natural. As though these figures stood in front of a well lit background. So the feather is all important and the feather is the way as you remember that you do believe to the edge of the zoo, so you make a more gradual edge to the selection and choosing the feather radius is all important. And we can't really choose it properly unless we know the size of the image unless we know the width, height and resolution. And we do that by getting up image size Command Option I. And here we see it's quite a large image, but it's only 72 dpi.

So it's absolutely huge. It's bigger than a foot across, bigger than a foot high, but it's 72 PPI which of course is the screen resolution. So as you can see up here, it's 50%. So on this screen, it's just half the size that it actually is. So it's a fairly large image. In all it's about eight Meg's so there's a lot of information in there, and that means we need to choose a large number for the feather so a feather of 10 probably Won't be big enough, we want to further have about 25.

When you're starting out, you'll have to sort of pick these feather radius is out of the air. And I've guessed this number at 25. This is just my estimation of what the feather should be. I may be right, I may be wrong, we'll have to see, but we'll find out by drawing selection and I'm going to draw the selection around the dark bit of the image so we can lighten it up, I've held down option, so we only have to click once, in order to go around the selection that we want. The alternative is we can just freehand click and drag, I'm holding my finger down on the mouse, but as you can see, I'm making a few mistakes here. And it's not going to be very good.

Now I'm holding down option. And so again, I can do Do these straight lines, which is very much quicker, and I can come back here. And I need a straight line here, of course. And there we go. Now this isn't very good. I'm outside the figure there, but I'm inside the figure there, we want to lighten up the background.

We don't want to like not the foreground. So I've actually got to inverse the selection. Because I've selected the wrong parts, I need the other part. And when you've done this, in order to inverse the selection, you go select inverse, or Command Shift I. And as you can see, now the dark bit is selected. Now another thing I like to do at this point is to make the selection invisible, so we don't see these marching ants, as they're called this black and white dotted line that moves along because it's very distracting and you're looking at an image trying to decide if you're improving it or not.

The last thing you want to see is a load of marching ants. On the image, so to do that it's command Ctrl I, or view show selection edges is checked there, we want it unchecked. And there it's disappeared, but don't worry, it's still there. You just can't see it. The way you know it's there is if you hover over it, you get that icon, meaning it's a selection. And if you go off it, you get the list su icon, which means it's outside the selection so you can see the icon changing there.

So it's still selected. We just can't see those marching ants Thank God. So now we get the curves up image adjustment curves or Command M and now we can brighten up the mid tones and there you can see all I've done is just move this the middle of the curve up like that quite extreme brightness there but because we put the feather on selection, we are able to brighten The background without touching the foreground. So that's how to use a list su with a feathered edge to lighten certain areas of an image. Now in the next lecture, I'll be further improving this image and adjusting the selection. But for now, this is Rob from Rob cabin.com.

Thank you very much for watching.