You'll change the way you edit after watching this!

You might never need to use selections and filters in Photoshop to make changes ever again

You’ll change the way you edit after watching this!

Hello, I'm Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Last week, I was working with a client, shooting some headshots. I like to ensure that the lighting is as good as possible, so when it comes to the editing process, I don’t spend hours on retouching. However, when I received the selections back from the client, there was a request that I don’t often get.

“Hi Rich, anything you can do about my collar?”

I have to confess, I probably could have noticed that the collar on the client’s left side was sticking up very slightly. Unfortunately, I didn’t, so I had to go into Photoshop to do a bit of jiggery-pokery. There are probably a couple of ways you might think we could fix this issue.

First, we could navigate to the Filters menu and apply a Liquify effect to adjust the collar into place. I’m certain that anyone who has attempted this will find that the effect isn’t the best. Secondly, we could use the Transform tool, but once again, the results can be sketchy.

I could head over to Google to try to find a solution, but then I thought I’d give something else a go. The power of AI was going to come to my rescue (and quickly!). Make a selection around the collar area and then hit Generative Fill in the floating Contextual Text toolbar. All I need to do now is type in Straighten Collar and press enter. Photoshop’s AI goes away and does its magic, and there are three suggestions in just a few seconds.

If you don’t like the ones provided, simply hit the generate button again, wait a few seconds, and three more attempts will be added. I think you can see that at least one of these looks really natural and ready to be sent back to the client. 

I believe this is the shortest video I have created so far on Coffee Break Photography, which indicates that resolving complicated problems does not need to be time-consuming. Please let me know in the comments below how you have used this tool to help fix issues that previously took much longer before the contextual text bar was added.

By the way, if you can’t see the taskbar, make sure you are using the latest version of Photoshop. Then, go to the Window menu and check that the Contextual Text Bar is ticked.

If you’ve enjoyed this video, it would be great if you could like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs-up button below the video. That way, a few more people will get to see it. You can also subscribe to the channel by clicking on this button here. I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers with news about photography, as well as exclusive offers. Scan this QR code to sign up. My name is Rich Dyson, from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time.