Hello everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School.

Now let’s get right to the post processing part of this tutorial, and we have our sexy SB-800 right here. And let’s look at it here, and let’s see what we can do to improve this image. Now the first thing I want to do is to remove some of this blackness here, it’s a little bit too much. We don’t need all of that reflection to get the desired effect. So the first thing I’m going to do is select my crop tool, and crop it down to just below the Nikon reflection here, double click. Now I still find this part to be a little too wide, so I’ll show you a bit of a trick to squeeze that in and it’ll still look good because the reflections aren’t always as symmetrical. So control J to duplicate your layer, go into select your marquee tool here, your rectangular marquee. Make sure your feathers at zero. Your styles at normal and we’ll just go ahead and select the bottom part here.

Now I want to edit this, I’m going to, you can do control T or going to edit, free transform, and taking the bottom part of it we’re going to squeeze it up a little bit. And this looks good. Double click inside your selection, control D to deselect. And we’re going to use our crop tool once again, and we’re going to go remove that bottom part that’s not needed. And there you go, we have our image. Now the next thing I want to do and I’ll spare you this part because you probably already know how to do it, if not go check out my portrait make up tutorial on the healing brush and this is what I’m going to be doing here is using a combination of the healing brush and the clone stamp tool to remove the branding here on the speed light in here and in the reflection as well. And the only reason I’m doing that is because it’s an image used as part of a tutorial on general off camera flashes, well not only Nikon.

All right let me go through this, and we’ll be right back once that’s done. Ok I’m back, and I’ve removed all the logo branding, now the next thing I want to do is fix this table up a little bit. I want it to be pure black, and as you can see the back edge has a bit of lighting reflection and right here we got some dust reflection here, and actually you zoom in at a 100% you’ll see lots of little dust spots that you can’t see at this zoom level, or probably even on this video because of the video quality.

So I want to remove all of that, I want this to be a perfectly black table with a piece of glass that’s impeccable. So what we’ll do is cheat, all right. So the next thing we want to do is create a new layer, you do that by going into layer, new layer or shift control N and we’ll call this one table, all right. Now we want to select our marquee tool and we won’t add a feather here because if you look at the table in the background here, it is soft, it is blurred slightly because of the aperture used, so you do have a depth of field here. So let’s try 7 pixels as a feather, select our marquee tool. And then we want to select this just above the line of the table, all the way down. Get our paint bucket tool, make sure your foreground color is set to black and click it in. Control D to deselect this layer, and wala! And you’re going to say “Well Yanik where’s the rest of our reflection, this is looking awful?” Well, that’s what we’re going to do now is fix this. We’re going to start by reducing the opacity of this layer so that we can see our reflection. And now what we’re going to be doing is adding a layer mask and then painting over this to erase and this does this. And the reason why we do that instead of using the eraser brush it’s just easier to go back if you do a mistake after. And I’ll show how that’s done.

We’re going to click on this icon here which is the layer mask icon. Now as you can see it’s white so we need to paint black to erase. Let me zoom in at a 100% here, and again I won’t go through all of this with you and I’ll fast forward through, but then all you need to do is select your brush, make sure that it’s black. And I actually recommend if you want to do a really good job at this to go at around 150-200% and then use a smaller sized brush, but I’m just going to go through this really quickly. And you want to avoid going on the table and then you can just stroke here. All right, we’ll see you in a bit when I’m done with this.

Now as you can see here, we’ve painted black here, if we ever want to bring some stuff back, all we need to do is use a white brush and it’ll bring back the black background. So it’s that simple and that’s why we would use a layer mask. Using an eraser brush, you have to go back into your history and then start over, so this way is much better and it’s non destructive. Now we have our table and our reflection, we’re happy with that. The next thing we want to do is add our flare. Now let me flatten all these up by going into layer flatten image. I do this often so I created myself a shortcut key when you might have wanted to do that.

Now what we want to do, we’ll almost done here, is to create a lens flare like we have in the image. I’ve given it a bit of oomph and it also shows that it’s an item that lights. So I like the lens flare effect, and you can find that effect, it’s already in Photoshop, by going into filter, render, lens flare, all right. Now we want to hit the corner so it’s already there since I’ve already done this, and you want to play with your brightness to have it. If you go overboard, it’ll look something like this and it’s not pretty for this effect. So we want to reduce that, and right about here looks good and you can choose different lens types for this effect. I like to keep the first one there, click Ok. And nice! Here’s our lens flare and we’re almost done. The next thing we want to do is just tweak the curves up a little bit. Image, adjustments, curves, or control N and we’re going to pump it up a little bit. Yes that’s looking good. A bit more contrast and click Ok. And there you go; we got our final product image. Now let’s look at the before and after, before and after. And that’s how I created that image for my do-it-yourself photography guest post.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.