Photoshop Sisters

buttons

I very, very quickly made some buttons which I would love for you to steal and put on your blog, if you would like to link to us. Here you go:

I think this will work, if you just want the code: <a href="http://heylucy.typepad.com/photoshop_sisters"> <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2076/2299297728_c633dda2f4_o.jpg" border="0" alt="photoshop sisters"></a>

And for this one:  <a href="http://heylucy.typepad.com/photoshop_sisters"> <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3220/2299297714_7b85585f02_o.gif" border="0" alt="photoshop sisters"></a>

Grayscale and Sharpness

Hello folks, how's it going?  I'm really impressed with what Lucy did this week with the photo that I sent her.  Yeah, she says I'm being a show-off sending her all these exotic pictures, but it's really her that's the one that always has to one-up me.  Case in point - I got my Nikon D40 last spring.  Last Christmas, she got a Nikon D40x.  I decided that Photoshop Elements was perfect for my photo editing needs, and at a price of $70 at Costco, I thought it was great deal.  But Lucy, always wanting to be a little better than me, updated Photoshop on her computer so now she has the most recent version.  I can't keep up with her.  She's apparently into researching on the web about other neat ways to do her editing, while I'm still here, tinkering around in Photoshop Elements with some of the basic tools. Do you sense some sibling rivalry on my part?

Here's the "boring and domestic" (Lucy's words, not mine) photo that she sent me this week:

Lot's o' Lichen.  I actually think lichen is very pretty and whenever I see it while out hiking or snowshoeing I feel like it needs to have it's picture taken.  Lucy told me that in reality, there was a lot more color to it, but it just didn't show up in the photo.  I played around a bit with saturating the colors, but then I thought maybe we should just take out the color.

So I went to the Image menu at the top of the screen, then selected Mode, and Grayscale.  A pop-up window appears asking if you want to discard color information.  Select OK.

I got a basic black and white version of the photo, but decided to play around with the sharpness.  I went to the Enhance menu at the top of the screen, and selected Adjust sharpness.  This is a fun tool, as you can make some abstact images, or just do some minor adjusting to define or soften details.  On the pop-up window, I adjusted the Radius to about 1.0.  I added a little feathered edge in a shade of gray color instead of straight black, and this is what I came up with:

Before and after side-by-side:

So there you have it my friends.  Now you know a simple way to make old looking black-and-white photos.

other ways to edit your photos

I know we're all about Photoshop here, but there are other options out there. One of the funnest I've found is Picnik, a free web-based app you can use to do all sorts of fun things. You can upload photos from your computer to edit them, but what's even cooler is that you can connect to your flickr (or facebook, photobucket, picasa or webshots) account and edit your pictures stored there. Besides the basics, like cropping, rotating and re-sizing, you can also do red-eye correction and lots of fun effects. Here's this weeks' picture from my sister with the boost and vignette effects:

That took me about five seconds to create.

Flickr user beebee mod used the cross-process tool to create this image (check out more in her photostream to see lots of good examples of this effect).

It's free to register and use, but there is also a premium version for just $24.95 per year, which includes more editing tools, effects and fonts.

It's super easy to use, and quick. I could spend a lot of time playing around at picnik :o)

playing with textures

Sijbrich sent me this picture this week:

I think she's showing off that she's been to a lot of exotic locations. That's okay, I've been to this one myself. Sadly, it was before I had a digital camera, so you'll just have to believe me. Anyway, since this is a rather well-known, very old place, I thought it would look nice with an old postcard kind of look. Also, I just discovered some great textures right here. Aren't they nice? And free! I decided to try out this one, and clicked the 'all sizes' link and downloaded the original size, and opened it up in Photoshop. I then opened the image you see above, and created a new layer. I copied the texture to the new layer and changed the blending mode to multiply:

I played with the opacity of the texture layer, and settled on 83%. After that I upped the saturation a bit on the background layer, and that's it! Here's the after:

Easy peasy! That was fun. And now, side by side:

Many thanks to Bea for the textures. Have a look at some more good examples in this pool.

Feathered Edges

Feathering the edges of the photo seems like a popular trick to Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.  Lucy just taught me how to do it a few weeks ago over the phone, and when I told a friend of mine about my new discovery, she expressed her interest in learning how to do it, as well.  So this one is for my friend, CM.  May you happily feather many photos in the future!

Let's get started.

Lucy sent me this cool pic of one of her chickens:

As with just about any photo, there are a thousand and one things that could be done to edit this one in lots of fun and funky ways, but I thought it would be nice to just put a simple feathered edge (ha! "feathered"?  And it's a picture of a chicken!  Get it?) to bring out the color and let you focus on the detail of the feathers and her face.

Okay, so here's what I did:

Go to the Layer menu at the top of the screen - new fill layer - solid color.  Pop up window appears - make sure Color fill 1 is selected - press OK.
"Pick a Solid Color" window pops up - choose black, or white, or whatever color you want (I'm doing black on this one) - press ok - the new layer appears on top of your photo in the color that you selected (so I had a black layer covering the chicken photo).
Choose the Rectangular Marquee tool on the menu on the left side of screen.  It's a picture of a rectangle made of dashes
Select the area of the picture where you want to have a darker edge.  I usually select a large area, creating a very thin frame around the edges, but feel free to experiment.
Go to Select menu at the top of the screen and select Feather.  The Feather Selection pop up window comes up.  You can adjust the feather radius to your liking.  I have a default of 175 pixels.   Click on ok.
The edges of your selected rectangle should become rounded.  The bigger the number of pixels you selected on the Feather Selection window, the more inward the curves go.
Push backspace, and you should see your picture again with a nice feathered edge.  Click on your mouse to remove the rectangle marquee lines, and viola.

Note: Make sure you select the background layer again on the Layer menu in the lower right hand corner of the screen if you still want to adjust color or anything else.
I adjusted the color saturation just a tad by going to Enhance - Adjust color - adjust hue/saturation

Here's the finished product:

Before and after:

It's a subtle difference, but I think it looks nice.

tilt shift

I really do want to get to some good, old-fashioned color correction, and exposure adjusting kind of stuff here eventually, but there are all kinds of crazy effects that are just so fun and easy to do. So let's have a little more fun today, and we can do that serious stuff later, right?

This is something I originally saw on flickr, and having always loved miniature things, I thought the concept of creating tilt shift (tilt shifting?) photos was pretty neat. Real tilt-shift photos are created with a tilting lens that focuses on a narrow band, while the rest of the image is blurred, creating a photograph that looks like a miniature train set. Here are some good examples of real tilt shift photos. It's an easy effect to fake in Photoshop, though, if you don't want to invest in a special lens. I found this tutorial and just followed it step by step. The picture my sister sent this week is a good candidate for the fake tilt shift technique.

This works well because the viewer is looking down on the scene. Okay, here we go:

With your image open in Photoshop,  press Q to switch to Quick Mask         mode, then click on the Gradient tool. Set the color to         the default black and white by pressing D, and set white as the foreground color and black as the background. Select the gradient tool, and make sure it is set to the cylinder gradient (fourth from the left, it was the default for me).

Now, decide where you want the focus of your photo to be, and mouse over that area. Click and hold down while you then drag up with your mouse. You don't have to go up straight vertically, it's good to be at a slight angle. You'll end up with a red glow on your image, but don't freak out. Press Q again, to exit Quick Mask mode (just for the record, I have no idea what quick mask mode is, when I learn, I'll let you know). An area of the image will be selected, so make sure you don't de-select it.

The next step is to apply a lens blur.         Choose Filter > Blur > Lens Blur to bring up the         Lens Blur filter pane. It can take a little tinkering to         get the settings just right, but try these values to start: Radius 57, Brightness 35 and Threshold 254. Click OK to apply the effect, and now you can de-select.

The last thing you want to do is deepen the colors a bit. I used the Curves menu on this particular photo (Image > Adjustments > Curves). It takes a little playing around, but here's how I adjusted the curves on this particular photo:

And here's the end result:

So let's look at the before and after side-by-side:

And there you go, a miniature Machu Picchu.
       

Shutter Sisters

Oddly enough, a couple days after discussing the idea of creating this site, and calling it Photoshop Sisters, we both learned about a wonderful photography site by women, for women. Shutter Sisters is fairly new, but I'm already loving what they are doing. Here's a bit about their philosophy:

At Shutter Sisters, we encourage you to feel your way as you go. If the passion is there, the rest will follow. It’s not our photographic background, education, or expertise that is important; it’s our pictures. We don’t need to be paid professionals to be recognized as talented photographers. A great image is a great image whether it happened by beautiful mistake or meticulous calculation.

 

Whether we are using an inexpensive point and shoot camera or a pricey SLR, one common thread remains: when we take a picture, we are telling a story.

I like that the contributers are all levels of photographers, and there is no snobbery when it comes to the cameras they use. You can also join their flickr group, and share your very best shots, and the forums are very welcoming and supportive. I love to look at the images in the Daily Click, which are taken right from the flickr pool! Shutter Sisters found via the lovely Slice of Pink.

Diffuse Glow Effect

Lucy sent me this photograph that was taken just last month with a Nikon D40x when I went to visit her in San Diego:

It's the Contemporary Museum of Art and the boats make a cool effect, like they've just burst out of the the building are are headed right toward us.

Honestly, I wasn't quite sure how to edit this photo - I didn't really have anything in mind, but just fooling around a bit, I came up with an edited version that I quite like and I discovered a tool that I'll definitely be using in future.

I pulled up the photo in Photoshop Elements 6.  I went to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, selected Distort, and then Diffuse Glow.  Here's what it did:

It definitely added a dream-like vintage-y look that I really like.  With the "Diffuse Glow" window still open, you can adjust the graininess, glow amount, and clear amount to your liking.  I played around with them a bit, but I decided to just leave it in it's original form.

Here's a "Before and After" look:

This is a slightly monumental discovery for me.  I usually go for the saturation tool first to bring out more color, but this very different effect has grown on me and I think it will make for a much more diverse collection of photos.  I'm curious to see how the Diffuse Glow effect would look on portraits with people...

I learned this bit of info from this podcast for Photoshop.  While I couldn't perform all of the same steps, since I have Photoshop Elements and not Photoshop, I still found it useful since some of the tools are the same.

lomo effect

I though I'd start with something kind of fun. A Lomo is a little vintage Soviet era fish-eye 35mm camera that has a cult following. Lomos are now produced by an Austrian company. A Lomo search on flickr yields all kinds of fun, super-saturated images. Here's one way to duplicate the effect with a digital photo.

 

I started out with this picture my sister took on the island of Lantau in Hong Kong with her old point and shoot Kodak camera (may it rest in peace). Nice, isn't it? Here's how to make it look like she used a Lomo:

1. Open the picture and go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Increased Contrast by 20.

2. Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Increase Saturation by 20.

3. Choose the rectangular marquee tool and change the feather amount to 1/12 the width of the photo. This photo is 299 pixels wide, so I set the feather amount to 25. Select the entire picture (select: all won't work, you have to drag the tool across the entire picture). Then select the inverse (Select > Inverse).

4. Create a new layer. Make sure your primary color is black and fill the selection on the new layer (alt-backspace). Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay (that's the drop-down menu next to the Opacity).

5. Duplicate the layer you created in step 4 (just drag the layer in the layer palatte down to the new layer icon).

6. Select the Background layer (the original image). Create a new layer.

7. Select the Gradiant fill tool and change the gradiant type to Spherical (second from the left) and set the gradiant style to foreground to transparent. Change the primary color to white. Using the fill tool, click in the middle of the picture and drag out. For a portrait format, like I used, drag to the top or bottom. For a landscape format, drag left or right. Change the blend mode of this layer to Overlay and change the Opacity to around 80%.

And you'll have something like this:

Let's look at the before and after side-by-side: 

Oooh! Aaaah! That was fun! There are probably a lot of ways to do this, I followed the steps I found here.

welcome

Last year my sister and I got new cameras. She got herself a copy of Photoshop Elements, which she had never used before, and I upgraded my version of Photoshop from 6 to CS2. I once took a Photoshop class at my local community college, where I quickly established myself as the teacher's pet and got an A+, and then forgot most of what I learned. We were using Photoshop 6 at the time, so you can guess just how long ago that was. So, to become better photographers, and to learn how to process our images, we decided on this little collaborative project.

Here's how it will work: each week we'll swap photos. Sometimes they'll be recent, sometimes older. Sometimes we'll have a theme, and sometimes we won't. But each week we'll take the photo we receive, and play around with it in our respective versions of Photoshop, noting the version we're using in the category at the end of the post, so you'll know what program we're using. I suspect that a lot of what I'll do in Photoshop CS2 can be done in a similar way in Photoshop Elements, and vice versa, so I hope you'll find all the posts useful.  That way, we'll learn our way around both versions of Photoshop, and we'll share that knowledge with you! We'll each post before and after photos, along with exactly the steps we followed. So even if you don't know anything about Photoshop, and not much more about photography, well, neither do we, so we can learn together!

We'll also include useful links and our favorite resources, as well as really great photographs by other people. Maybe there will even be a guest poster every now and then who is a bit of an expert. And of course, we hope that we'll have lots of smart visitors who will share their own tips and tricks in the comments. So stop by every week, and see what we're learning, it should be fun! Or at least maybe it will just be funny, and you can laugh at how stupid we are. Either way.