more retouching

I took this group photo and somewhere along the way decided that i did not like the plywood under their feet. We have done the shot in the same location for about 6 years now so moving them was not really an option. Photoshop of course to the rescue.
I started this process by selecting the board. I used a bunch of selection tools, color range, magic wand, and so on until i had the best i could do with them and then switched to the quick mask mode. If you havent used this mode to finess your selections you have to try it. It is located near the bottom of the tools pallate on the left side of your screen. You click on it to get into it and click it again to exit it. It turns everything red that is not selected and you use your paint brush with white to take away the red (adding to your selection) and black to add red (adding to your selection). The nice thing about selecting this way is that you can use a soft edged brush to get a nice soft edge selection.
Once i had the entire plywood selected i hit the refine edge key to feather my selection just a bit then i duplicated my background layer and hit the delete key to remove the board from that layer. I then turned the top layer off (eye on the left side of the layers pallate and clicked on my background layer to work on it.
I went into filter - vanishing point and drew my grid for the walkway. I will not go into detail about using vanishing point here but if you are cloning anything that has perspective then you should do some reading on it. I used the clone tool with heal turned off in the vanishing point window and cloned the walk so it would cover the entire board that was visable. Now when you turn the top layers visibility back on the board, which we deleted, is now walkway.
Lastly i make a selection of the building sign where it was in shadow and did a curves adjustment to it to brighten it up a bit.
Here is the finished product.
Note: tomorrow i will be doing a tutorial on photomatix pro so stay tuned.

displacement map

I have been noticing the use of displacement maps in a few new photoshop books i got recently and thought i would give it a try.
I dont know if i have chosen the best two images to demonstrate this effect but i liked the results so thought i would post it.
You start by opening the image you want to use as the texture, i opened the phone dial pad. Next open the image you want this texture to be applied to, i opened the slot machine image. Then drag the slot machine image onto the phone image using the shift key to center it. note: i cropped both images the same size before i started.
Then click on your background layer, the phone, and duplicate it (ctrl - j).
Move this new layer to the top of the layer stack and then desaturate it (shift - ctrl - u). Now save the image as a psd but unclick the layers button when the save as dialogue opens. This will save the file but will flatten the file.
Next go back to your top layer, probably still on it, and change the blend mode to hard light. This will blend the phone into the slot machine. To make the phone contour better to the slot machine we have to now use a displacement map.
Click on the slot machines layer and then go to filter - distort - displace. When the dialogue opens type in 5 for horizontal scale and 5 for vertical scale and click on wrap around. You can also leave stretch to fit checked. Click ok. When the open dialogue appears, go to the file you had saved earlier and select it and hit open.
I added some saturation and adjusted the curves after all this was done and sharpened using unsharp mask quite heavily.
I know this was a confusing post and i appoligize. I will try it again soon with two different images.
These are the two images below that i started with.

masking multiple frames

I was recently shooting a cross country race in the park and had an idea to take multiple shots as a runner went by and then strip them together. Piece of cake right? Just use a tripod and nothing changes but the runners position.
Problem was i forgot my tripod. I also wanted a very low angle. So, hand held it is. I laid on the ground and tried to hold the camera very still. I prefocused and turned auto focus off. I took multiple shots as he ran by and the shoot part was over.
In photoshop i processed the images in camera raw and then opened all the ones i wanted to use, actually more than i needed in the end. Once all were opened i held down the shift key and using the move tool drug them one by one into one frame. I used the shot where he enters from the right and drug the rest, in order of his position, onto it.
I next used the new function in cs3 called auto align layers found under the edit menu i think. It did a great job and compensated for my not having my tripod.
I clicked on "layer 1" in the layers pallate and then drew a rough selection around the guy and hit the refine edge button. I smoothed the edge a bit and used a feather of about 2, then hit ok. I then select - inverse my selection and created a layer mask in the layers pallate. Since black was my foreground color it filled my mask with black, leaving only the runner to show through to the layer underneath. I repeated this process for each layer until all runners were showing through and all backgrounds were masked except for the original image.
I flattened the image and smart sharpened it. I also used a hue saturation adjustment layer to boose the saturation up a bit and was done.
I am sure no one will ever use the shot for anything but it was just fun to have fun.
Oh, i cropped it a bit also, just height wise. It is full frame on the length.

trying to make something out of nothing

I was asked to photograph this thai shelter so my city could give a gift to a travelling thai delegation. It really is not the best photographic subject so i thought, how could i make it look its best.
I picked early morning to shoot it so the light would be on the shelter and there would be some shadows.
I also bracketed my exposures as i was planning to use hdr to lighten the wood under the roof and darken down the sky and i shot it from every angle possible. I downloaded my photos and made a quick web gallery in photoshop and sent the link to the client. They picked this view and then i got to work.
I had forgotten my tripod so using multiple shots proved difficult in hdr.
I picked the best exposure and opened it by going to file - place so it would come in as a smart object. Now the trick to this is you actually have to open your photo before and do a select all - copy. Then close your image. Now when you create a new document, place, it will be the right size automatically.
After having this open i wanted another smart object layer so i went to layer - smart object - new smart object via copy. This will give you two seperate layers and each is editable in camera raw, independantly of each other.
I double clicked the top layer and changed the camera raw settings for the under side of the roof. I then created a layer mask and painted everything in black except for the underside of the roof.
I then flattened my file so i could retouch. You could also just created a top flattened layer by clicking on shift - control - alt - E. Or something like that.
I used a combination of the healing brush, clone tool, and patch tool to get rid of what i thought were distracting elements.
Like the dead tree, garbage can, sign shadow, just to name a few. I added a curves adjustment layer and a saturation layer.
I then did a selection of the tree in the upper left corner and copied and pasted it into place so that corner would not be bare. Next came smart sharpen and lastly i added a vignette by going to filter - distort - lens correction.
Here is the final image.

white socks

Two posts ago i put up a shot of me looking pretty macho in front of a white mustang. Well guess what, i was wearing my wifes white stubby socks. How cool am I.

previsualization

This isn't so much a post about photoshop techniques as it is about the diary of a job. I will sneak in a photoshop tip however so please continue reading.
I was sent the beautiful brochure you see before you, as a pdf file, and was asked to freshen it up photographically. It is for a library and the main commons area was just redone. They felt the photos were stale and did not portray the new, lively theme of the library.
I booked the shoot for this morning and ended up shooting 4 different areas in the span of about 2 hours. I went in without any preconcieved ideas except for the lighting. I wanted the light to be a bit edgy and dynamic. In some shots i used three lights and in others i used two, plus some ambient here and there.
We did not have models lined up but instead just grabbed people that were there. They all ended up being great which is rare. I tried some different angles at each location and varied my lens choice pretty well through the range of 12mm to 200mm.
I only took about 120 frames but felt quite happy that i may have something when we were done.
I downloaded the images, retouched a bit in photoshop and rated the images. Out of the 4 different shots i ended up liking 2. I then opened the original pdf of the brochure in photoshop and stripped in the two shots i liked. I added a bit of a red border to the top of the page and was done.
One thing i did not plan but just worked out was the fact that in each photo my main subject would be facing the center of the page.
insert: - photoshop tip. In the photo on the left i brightened up and corrected the color of the computer screens (actually on another file and not the one i am showing here) by selecting the screen (1 at a time) with a combination of the magic wand tool and the lasso tool and then applying a curve to that selection. Remember that when you have a selection and you then go to edit - adjustments - curve only the area inside the selection will be affected. end of tip.
Below is the revamped brochure.
Of course i have not heard back from the people who made the initial request for the images so i fully expect an e-mail tomorrow stating that they would like the shots to be brighter (flat light), without any shadows (flat light), and to include someone of a different ethnic origin, perhaps even someone who is disabled so everyone will know that the space is wheelchair accessable.
I will then walk down with an on camera flash and put them all in a row and go click, click and the client will love it.

place into

Yes I know, this is an easy one. Could be done in your sleep. I know.
I started by showing you the finished version and if you scroll down you can see the starting image. This is a photo of yours truly just out for a sunday drive in red rock canyon in las vegas. I was there for 6 nights for photoshop world recently and wish i could have done some more exploring.
Anyway, back to photoshop.
This image screamed for a sky. I didn't look far and perhaps could have picked a better one, but this one was in the same folder. I started by selecting the sky, not with the magic wand because that is bad, but with the select - color range command. The secret to this tool is to not just click once in the area you are selecting and then playing with the fuzzy slider. Just like adding to a selection with the wand tool, you hold down the shift key and click around the area you want selected. Then if need be slide the fuzzy stick.
After i had a good selection of the sky i used the lasso tool to deselect the car and my socks as they too were white and got selected. I then hit the refine edge button and expanded my selection so i would avoid the white line on the horizon.
I opened the image i wanted to take the sky from and did a select all, and then hit edit - copy. I went back to my main image and did an edit - paste into.
This placed my paste on a new layer with a layer mask all done. With this top layer selected i could then move it around with the move tool to place it where i wanted it. It looked pretty good but i then just flattened the file and retouched the little parts of the horizon that didnt look so good.
I did a curve adjustment, bumped up the red a bit, and then smart sharpened about 40%.
I would not reccommend a mustang by the way. Stick with volkswagen.

person swap

This image is from a shoot i did last week where i had to photograph about 70 deans list students shaking hands with the dean. Well, the girl on the left was early and the dean was late and she had to go. Bring in the stand in. My co-worker/boss did a fine job but deans list students are smart and she may rather be seen with the dean.
I looked through the other photos to find one that had his hand shaking hand in about the right place to start. I did a loose selection of him (very loose) with the lasso tool. Then using the move tool i drug him out of that photo and into the one in which i needed him. I moved him into place and then created a layer mask and with a large soft brush i painted in black on the mask to blend the backgrounds from the two images together. This was very easy. I then made my brush much smaller and started carefully masking out the excess from my top layer. I did a bit of cloning where needed and then healed it a bit to blend better but for the most part just masked the layers together. The fingers on top of the certificate ended up way above where they were suppossed to be so i did another rough selection of her fingers and copied it and pasted to a new layer. I then slid them down into place and rotated them a bit using transform. I made another mask to clean up around the fingers and was done.
I should also mention that i used one light here placed to the right and bounced into an umbrella.

letter enhancement

I recently was asked to take a photo of a friend of mine who has just been inducted into the radio broadcasting hall of fame. He brought with him a prop which looked like a microphone but was actually a fm radio. When you plugged it in the letters on the top lit up. Well of course they were not that bright so i brought them to life in photoshop.
At the time i did this i used the magic wand tool and selected the letters. I selected one and then held down the shift key to add to my selection. When they were all selected i then hit the refine edge button and feathered the selection just a touch so the edges would look better. I then used a curve adjustment to add contrast and while still selected then bumped up the saturation. That pretty well did it.
Looking back now i would reccommend trying the selection with the color range command. I'll bet you could get it in one click. This is by far the best tool to use for selections as it gives you a great natural edge. If you saw a selection from the magic wand tool beside a selection made from the color range command I guarantee that you would never use the wand again.

coming soon

Sorry for my lack of posts lately.
I just got back from photoshop world in las vegas and i have a ton of new photoshop tips and ideas to share.
I also took about 1000 images while i was there so some of those should be appearing soon.
Thank you all for your patience.
I will try to get something up tonight.

combining elements

This is just another example of why i love digital photography.
I saw my cat sleeping very comfortably and thought i would grab a shot without disturbing her. After i took about 10 frames i noticed the pillow on the bottom left of the frame and decided that it was distracting. I snuck over, moved the pillow, and took some more shots. But she moved, just a bit, and the light on her face was not as good. No problem, its digital.
I made a selection of the dark part of the image, without the pillow, just using the lasso tool. I hit the refine edge button and feathered my selection by 3. Then holding the shift key (to center the move) i dragged the selected part of that image onto the other image, creating a new layer and covering the pillow. To refine the edge just a bit more and soften it I then made a layer mask on my new layer and painted over the edge of the selection with a large soft brush. Just like erasing the edge of it but the mask allows me some flexibility.
I then got really fussy and decided i wanted the window frame to be more square. I used the transform - skew command and drug the corners a bit till the window looked better. I then sharpened the image, did a bit of healing on some stray hairs and was done.
Here is the final product.

xray filter

If you have cs3 and have not yet found the xray filter dont feel bad as your not alone. They hid this very well and i feel fortunate to have found the filter that can turn your photos into xrays with the click of a button.
Are you excited, well of course you are , and now i feel bad as i have been pulling your leg. This is actually an xray of my sons hand as he broke his baby finger this week. Can you find the break???
The original image , two put together here, was quite low contrast and really not that sharp. I applied an adjustment curve and tweeked the shadows (darker) and the highlights (lighter) and then applied a smart sharpen to crisp it up.
To get both images into one i created a new window (sized so both would fit) and made the background black. I dragged both images into the new window and moved them around as i wanted them. I then used a layer mask to erase the top layers parts that were blocking out the bones on the underlying layer. I flattened the layers and saved as a jpeg.
This was just a fun post and as i am approaching 1000 page views so far this year i will put the push on to create some informative posts in the near future.

hard color correction

I was hooking up my slide scanner to a new computer and thought i would try a scan to make sure it was working.
This above image was shot on daylight slide film inside a bar (having breakfast in boston) full of tungsten lights.
I made the scan and saved the file as a tiff.
I then opened it in camera raw (just go to file-open and when the dialogue opens select camera raw as the file type on the bottom left of the box, assuming you have cs3 of course (works with jpg and tiff)) and made some highlight recovery corrections and clarity, vibrance, etc. The temperature and tint however did not help me much in taking out all the red color.
I then opened the image in photoshop and applied an adjustment curve, adding some cyan and green and blue to highlights and shadows. This got me closer but not enough. So now what, how can i correct the image so i can live with it.
I converted the image to black and white using image-adjustments-black and white. Still not happy.
I then brought back some of the color by going under edit-fade and brought the opacity down to 38%.
This was the best i could muster with this one.
I should have just picked a different slide to scan.
Finished result is below.

sepia toning

This is a little lesson on sepia toning as a result of being asked how to do it tonight and me not remembering, how to sepia tone that is.
There are always a few ways to do one simple thing so here is two.
1. Open your photo in photoshop and go to window - actions.
Expand the default actions tab {by clicking on the little triangle to the left of the words default actions} and then scroll down and highlight {click on} the sepia tone action.
Next just hit the play button at the bottom of the actions pallate and presto you have a sepia tone image.
Personally i did not like what the action did all that much so i went into my layers pallate and double clicked the round half black and half white circle on the hue/saturation layer which allowed me to edit the sliders. I lowered the saturation a bit and moved the hue slider to the right just a bit.
Much happier.
If you then look in the history pallate you can see how this was done.
First a duplicate background was made and then desaturated. Next a hue and saturation adjustment layer was created which gives the image its sepia tone color.
The really important thing to notice in the hue/saturation box is that the colorize box is checked. This allows the color to show on a desaturated image.
Have to put my son to bed now so will finish the other method soon.

photoshop for flowers

I know, i promised camera raw stuff and believe it on not i am half keeping my promise. The image above was shot by myself tonight with a lensbaby and a macro lens adapter. This version has not been tweeked and is how it looked out of the camera. So what would i do to improve it.
First of all i opened it in camera raw and set my exposure and black settings to get the contrast looking right with no blown out highlights. I moved the recovery slider to 7, the clarity to 15, vibrance to 15, and saturation to 3. I then went under the lens correction tab and set the lens vignetting to an amount of -24 and the midpoint to 18 to apply the vignette i wanted. I then opened the image in photoshop.
I used the healing tool to take out a few blemishes and then smart sharpened about 50 amount with a radius of 1. I did not need to use curves as i had already did all the work in camera raw so i moved to my apply image effect to add some information into the red channel to give some depth to the flower. I wrote about this in detail in an earlier post which you can find on this blog.
The results of all this work are subtle but when compared side by side the tweeked version looks much better.

more camera raw

The photo above really does not mean anything to this post, it was just one i was playing with and thought i would add it for eye candy.
I have been experimenting with the new vibrance and clarity sliders in camera raw and have found these settings work good.
Clarity at 12 - 15
Vibrance at 12 - 15
Saturation at 3
I also played with the spot retouch tool in raw and it worked great.
To use this you click and drag a circle over the dust spot and then drag the other circle that appears to the spot you want the heal to sample from. If you want to resize the circle just put your curser over the edge of the circle and click and drag your mouse. I took a flash spot out of a guys glasses that i did a head shot for. I retouched about 20 images of him in a matter of minutes.

highlight clipping view button thing

I have hit a very busy workload recently and felt bad about not posting something for those of you that have been following my blog. Here is a neat little piece of info that should help some of you with your highlight clipping.
First and foremost i will just assume that you are shooting raw. If not, slap yourself now as you have been very bad. The advantages of raw far outway the disadvantages, which really are limited to file size in my mind. Rant over.
In photoshop cs3's raw plug in (see photo above) there are two little arrows at the top corners of the histogram window. The one on left is the shadow clipping view and the one on the right (see my pink arrow pointing to it) is the highlight clipping view. If you click on this the highlights that are clipped, or too bright, will turn red. This means that these areas are pure white with no detail which may not be the best, especially if they show up in the middle of someones forehead. To bring some detail back to these areas we could lower the exposure slider or even better, move the recovery slider to the right. This is a highlight recovery slider and when you move it you will see the red areas start to dissappear. Too cool.
I will spend some effort in making my next few posts about the camera raw plug in window.

book review

I did not open photoshop today and therefore have no images to show but i thought since i have been making more regular postings to this blog that i would at least put something up tonight. I was at chapters tonight trying to spend a $20 gift card that someone gave me and since there was mostly crap on the shelves i still have the card. I looked through all the photography books (too expensive for what you get), and also all the photoshop books. Cs3 books are starting to trickle out but nothing really good yet.
Here however is my book suggestion list for those of you that need some reading material.
I guarantee that you will learn something from these:
- "camera raw" by bruce fraser (amazing book for learning the raw process, a must have).
- "retouching and restoration" by katrin eiseman (she really knows her stuff and shows it well).
- "the channels book" by scott kelby (channels are very powerfull and very under appreciated).
- "adobe classroom in a book" if you are just learning photoshop.
- "photoshop cs2 studio techniques" by ben willmore (very good overall book)
- "professional photoshop, a guide to color correction" by dan margulis (more than you will ever need to know about color correction)
As you can see, most of these books are on very specific parts of photoshop and i find them much better than the overall photoshop books.
There is also one more that i want to get but i cant find it locally yet which is called "the dam book" by peter krogh which is all about digital assett management (how do you find that photo you took of the kids 4 years ago when you have 100,000 photos in your collection).
Happy reading, and if you have any books that you feel should be on this list then please comment. I have had 584 visitors to this blog so far this year and no comments. You could still be the first, now theres some bragging rights.

hummer

I put up a hummng bird feeder last week and have been looking at it often in hopes to get a photo of the little critter. It is in shade which really give me two options photographically, silliouette or light it. In this shot i chose the silliouette and shot it using a 200mm lens and a 2x converter.
This first shot is the original, shot in raw and opened and saved in photoshop. Nothing else was done to it.
Not sure if i like the photoshopped file better but here is what i did.
I tweeked the raw adjustments a bit more, clicked on the convert to greyscale box first, added more exposure and added lots in the blacks. I also moved the highlight recovery slider close to the middle of the scale to get a bit of the background to show.
I then cropped it and rotated it a bit to straighten the base of the feeder. To rotate it i went to the rotate canvas menu under arbitrary and typed in about 5. I then changed the mode to rgb so i could add some color. I then went under the image menu - adjustments - photo filter and chose the yellow filter. I smart sharpened the image and thats it.
Here is the final image, still not sure what one i like.
Im going to try lighting it this weekend.

more desaturation

I was fooling around with some photos i took on the weekend and thought i would post another desaturation idea.
I wasn't crazy about this shot but a little photoshop time can often make something out of nothing. I'm not saying that happened in this case but i tried.
First i duplicated the background. I used image-adjustments-black and white in cs3 and converted the layer to black and white. This adjustment in cs3 is really cool. Just place your mouse over the image when the control panel comes up and a slider appears. If you just play with the sliders in different areas of the photo you could get lucky.
Then in the layers pallate i created a layer mask and painted in black over my daughter.
This resulted in her being in full color and the background being in full black and white.
I then lowered the opacity on layer 1 to 50 percent which let a bit of color back into the background. I used my burn tool set to midtones and darkened the edges a bit and some of the lighter parts of the ground. I used the dodge tool also set to highlights and set the amount to a very low setting and dodged her face just a bit.
I flattened the image and sharpened it using smart sharpen set to motion blur, as i was hand holding at a very slow shutter speed and it was blurry. I finished by cropping to a pano and i was done.