More Photoshop Fun - and a Confession ...

First thing, lets get that confession part out of the way, shall we?

Last night at a get together at a friends house, a few women mentioned that my photos were very good. I mentioned something to Gary about this on the way home. I told him that whenever anyone says that to me, I just want to blurt out "But they are Fake!" because I Photoshop them ... some to within an inch of their lives!

I realize that this is probably not true - unless I put say ... someones head on the body of someone else - it is JUST Photoshopped, but it is Photoshopped AND fake.

That being said - the real confession? I really don't take great photos at all ... just average photos that I make look good with Photoshop.

Why am I 'confessing' this to you? Well, I want to share some fun stuff I did - sort of like a Kindergartner on their first day of school ... and you will see my 'original' photo and don't want y'all to feel the need to sheepishly come to me and take back what you said ...

Whew! Well, with that out of the way - I was playing today with two aforementioned crappy photos, that I felt with a little work could be pretty photos. The problem with both? Photoshop was, in some ways, doing more damage than good - so I had to get creative. I was so thrilled, I made Gary sit down and watch like I was some five year old and he was my mother.

He was sufficiently impressed, but it was not enough, apparently - so now I need to shout it off the roof tops. It could help any of you out there Photoshopping, but if you aren't I won't feel bad if you stop reading ...



So: Photo #1: Problem: Too Dark:


OK, and if you must be PICKY, crooked and in need of a bit of cropping ...

So - I straighten using the ruler tool and Image-Rotation, crop out the extra ground that is doing nothing for the photo and I lighten it. To lighten it - I use a fairly non-destructive process.

1) duplicate the photo (using Layer-Duplicate Layer - or just [ctrl]J)
2) on the new (top) duplicate layer, I change the blending mode to 'screen' - this must be a throwback to regular photo developing since it seems like a random word to me ...

this lightens the photograph significantly and often, you will need to increase the opacity to make it darker (I know - confusing - but you are making it more and more transparent therefore letting more of the bottom, dark photo show through - thus - darkening it)

Problem: I am loosing definition - like the wooden slats of the church - stuff I would like to keep around:

You can see them much better in this, darker photo:

But it is all depressing and whatnot - so I am going to fix it. I was very clever - but it is a bit complicated. I realized that helping a friend who uses a different version of Photoshop, that the stuff is really not in the same place - but they rarely (OK, more often than 'rarely') change the name of something so I will just describe what I did.

This is going to sound sort of familiar since it is the first major steps I used making a sketch (in "You Too Can Be an Artist").

I take the photo I have above and make a duplicate layer again ([ctrl]J) and the rest of what I do until I say - will be working on the top layer of the photo.

Then I apply a filter: Filter-Stylize-Glowing Edges:

I then inverse (from a negative looking thing) by Select-Inverse:

I then take all the color (desaturating it) by hitting[shift][ctrl]U or: Image-Adjustments-Desaturate:

I then add a Levels Adjustment Layer and dick with the black and white levers to darken the black and make the white ... well, whiter:

You want the white all white (no grey) since the next thing we are going to do is select our 'Magic Wand' ...

... no kidding!

You thought I was exaggerating when I said Photoshop was magic? So not so!

With the magic wand, you can (make sure 'contiguous' is unchecked) select every pixel in a photo that is the color you click on. This comes in very handy (like, say in the next example I show you. ....... By the way y'all - this is going to be LONG - with all these photos and explanation - not fun if you are checking it out on your Blackberry).

I want to select white (and hopefully this means everything that is not black, but if there was some gray - I could select black, then do that Select-Inverse and it would change to everything that was not black). This will put 'marching ants' around everything that it selected. And if you are not familiar with that term, there isn't much I can do about it. If you are following along - you will notice when you take your magic want and click it on a white section that little moving dots cover your photo - thus the 'marching ants' ... not my term - Photoshop's

With the white all selected - I want to hit delete - and since I have photo below me, it will delete the white and replace it with nothing - so you can see through to the photo below. But I wanted to use a lighter photo - I used the darker photo so I could be sure to pick up the lines I wanted to pick up.

So, after hitting delete, it will show through, but I am going to delete the lower layer, leaving only the layer that has transparent parts - thus it cannot be created as a .jpg file or all that would go white - so I save the file as a .png file:

I then pull both the .png file of the lines in, and the lighter photo of the church, combine them into one photo (this is done many ways). I then reduce the opacity of the lines (the top layer) to about 20% to make it look realistic:

Lovely, yes?

Here is a side by side comparison of the light photo and the one with my newly created lines added on top (left):

Yes, well, and all those comments about my beautiful Wildflower photos? Y'all will discover that they / I am merely average ...

Here is my original photo and it lacks 'oomph':

I add a duplicate layer and change the blending mode to 'color burn':

I REALLY like what it does to the flowers and grass - gives it some oomph, but makes the background and fence so dark that you cannot see them.

I tried something very clever where I selected all the yellow, put it on another layer and did a blending mode of 'Linear Burn' but it looked too fake.

I then tried this - which is using the 'Selective Color Adjustment Layer' which will let me select a color (say, yellow) then change that color by using a bunch of adjustment sliders. I did this for yellow (who knew green had so much yellow in it? When I changed the flowers, I changed the grass, so went back using green to try to fix it), blue, red, green and cyan. Since I don't understand the color wheel (getting there) I had to just try it and see what looked good, what didn't.

It looks better, but nothing like my first one:

So I just decided to put in some time. I selected each section of the photo that was not fence (that would be one on the bottom, three in the middle and one on the top). I put the selected piece (which I basically outlined in by just drawing along the line of the fence and edge of the photo - put each section on it's own layer. When I was done doing that, I decided that I wanted the yellow flowers to 'pop' but the back - I just wanted it to look natural. So I changed all the modes for the 5 new layers to 'Linear Burn' - which changed everything on my photo but the fence (you with me?). But this would not look natural at 100% and the fence at 0% so the bottom I made 88% opacity, the middle three I made 50% opacity and the top one I made 25% opacity. If you look, you can see that the photo gets progressively darker, but it does not slap you in the face.

I flattened out all the new layers that I had just made. Then I made a copy of the original, light
version and put it on the very top. I changed it's opacity to 19% so that it was almost not showing - thus letting my kluge show through, but lessening the effects. Flattened it and called her done! (Can you see the lines? Sort of looks fake, but was just having fun - so just still learning, no major disaster one way or the other ...)

Here I show top: the too dark one, middle - original, too light one, bottom - just right one!

So, there you have it. I am no Super Woman Photographer ... I just own software that lets me pretend that I am ...