Photoshop Sisters

crossprocessed blossoms

Just because Keri asked, here's a little bonus post for you. I really like the way my Spring blossoms photo came out when I adjusted it so it looked like it had been cross-proccessed, which is a darkroom technique used in film photography (click that link for a much better explanation than I could ever give you). I think the effect looks like a scene from a 1950's technicolor movie, and who doesn't love 1950's technicolor movies? If you don't, I suggest you go rent The Quiet Man right now. We have it on dvd, if you want to borrow it.

Here's the original image, straight from the camera to my computer. the first thing to do is create a Curves layer, by clicking the black and white cookie icon at the bottom of the layers palette and choosing Curves. Remember that Seinfeld episode? "Look to the cookie!" Sigh. I miss that show.

I still don't know what curves are, but adjusting them is a lot of fun. For this particular effect we're going to adjust each channel. So select the red channel, and click and pull the right  end point over to the left slightly, and then adjust the rest of the line into a gentle s-curve. This is the kind of thing that you'll just want to experiment with, I think, until you get it looking how you want it to look.

I barely adjusted the green channel this time, but again, pull it into a very slight s-curve.

And the blue channel, you just want to move the right endpoint down a little, and the left endpoint up a little. 

That's all I did, and ended up with this:

You can easily stop right there, but if you want a little more turquoise-y glow, add a color layer (again, click the black and white cookie icon, and this time choose Color), and make it a greenish-yellow color. This layer should be the top layer. Now adjust the opacity way, way down. I think I went down to about 10%. It should be very subtle. 

Here's what the yellow layer did to it:

And that's it! Just play around with those curves, and adjust until you like the end result.

I think we should start a flickr group for everyone to share the results of trying all the stuff we're posting about, what do you think? I really want to see what you all come up with. Who's in?   

touching up portraits

I don't take a lot of pictures of people. I'd like to learn how eventually, but in the meantime it's good to learn what to do with portraits. This one was a pretty big challenge for me, obviously, as it's taken me two weeks to post it. Even with the constant nagging of my sister, who berated me for making an Easter Bunny egg cozy rather than posting the picture she sent me. I have been trying, but just couldn't figure out what to do to make this picture look better. Well, I finally decided to just do a little touching up, and then add a tiny bit of a glow. So here is what I did:

It's a nice photo to start with, so you can understand my dilemma, right? I decided to concentrate my efforts on the eyes, and referred to my handy dandy Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby. I have to say, his Photoshop books are very helpful. There's not a lot of technical babble, he just takes a single technique, and walks you through it, step-by-step. So, if you don't know what Curves are, no big deal, you don't have to, he'll just show you how to adjust the Curves to get the effect you want. So I would recommend checking out his book for whatever version of Photoshop you're using.

First I decided to make the whites of her eyes a little brighter. I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to select one section of white, and then held down the shift key while selecting the other sections. Next I went to the selection menu and clicked Feather, and adjusted the feather amount to 3. Then I opened the Hue/Saturation menu (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation). If the subject has a lot of red in their eyes, you  can first select Reds from the edit menu, and then slide down the Saturation level. Switch back to the Master edit menu, and to make the whites brighter, slide up the Lightness level. Watch the preview while you do this, because you want to keep it subtle, and it can turn into freaky alien eyes really quickly. Click Okay and deselect, and there you have it, whiter whites. If only it were as easy with my laundry.

Next I wanted to add a little sparkle to her eyes. I'm going to list this part step-by-step, because there are quite a few steps, but they're not hard, just follow along:
1. First I added an Unsharp Mask by going to Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp mask. You can play around with the settings a little. I used the following: Amount 150%, Radius 1, Threshold 10.

2. Reapply the Unsharp mask several times by pressing Control-F (PC), or Command-F (Mac), until the eyes start to look really crisp. At this point there will be some funny stuff going on with the rest of the picture, but don't worry about that, we'll get rid of it. I did it quite a few times, maybe 8 or so, but you may need as little as 4. You don't want to do so many that your history list only shows Unsharp mask, make sure you can still go back to the step before you started applying it.

3. Now, in the History list, click the last step you completed before you applied the first Unsharp mask.

4. Still in the History list, click the box to the left of the very last Unsharp mask you applied. This will give you the History brush, which you can use to repaint all those Unsharp masks only in the areas you want. Make sure it's a soft brush, and adjust it to about the same size as the iris, and just click once over each iris. Voila! A little extra sparkle!

The very last thing I did, which is super easy, and give photographs a nice dreamy glow, was to apply a blur layer. Just drag the background layer to the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Make sure your new layer is at the top of your layers, if you have more than just a background layer. With that layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Adjust the blur as much as you like. I think I set this particular picture to 25 pixels on the blur menu. Now adjust the Opacity of the layer and the Layer type from the drop-down menu next to the Opacity slider. In this case, I took the opacity down to about 25%, and used the Overlay layer. And finally, after all that, here's what I ended up with:

 

It's a pretty subtle difference, but I think it looks nice. If I were to start doing a lot of portrait photography, I would probably invest in some actions, like these. Touching up portraits can really take a lot of time, and they make it quick and easy to make the subjects of your portraits look fantastic. Seriously, click on that link and see what an action or two can do for a photo.

So, let's compare the before and after side-by-side, shall we?

Coming up this week: another photographer interview, this time with my friend Yvonne, who takes magical pictures of her beautiful home, and I'll explain how I edited the photo in this post.

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.

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.
       

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.