Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2006 10:13 pm Post subject: Pictures for the photochop of the month!
Well months nearly over and what a great response to the 'Photochop of the Month'. So many thanks to those who took part.
Right we are after images i think maybe a portrait this time (what do you think?) so if anyone as a picture that they would like to see what our choppers can come up with. Post it here so we can take a look.
We will then decide on suitability and i will move it into the chop of the month section.
How's about a picture I took of Leah, that did not really happen, as I was putting my studio space together and practicing. Definitely needed some TLC, lousy background and unflattering picture.
I have to say that for a quick makeover, working between Coral PSP X and Photoshop gives fast results. PSP X has a digital camera noise removal option which allows you to select the areas you want to focus on and at the click of a button cleans up an image a treat, especially useful to give women and young ladies that flawless look. The judicious use of blemish remover cleaned up any remaining flaws. I adjusted the facial tones to remove a slight redness to her face by lassoing her face and feathering by 30 and adjusted the blush. I lassoed most of the background and got rid of the bulk then went round the outline with the eraser tool working as close to her outline as possible. I then used the magic wand to select the background area and feathered by 3 and hit delete a few times to blend with the background image.
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Last edited by creators on Sun Dec 24, 2006 1:37 pm; edited 2 times in total
Very glad it meets her approval. PSP X is a great program, with some very useful tools. Have a great Boxing day.
I may have said this elsewhere, but PSP X is a whole lot better than PSP Photo XI, and it's available on Amazon for £23, if you don't mind a used copy. _________________
How's about a picture I took of Leah, that did not really happen, as I was putting my studio space together and practicing. Definitely needed some TLC, lousy background and unflattering picture.
First job was check the levels, to up the contrast I altered the midtone grey to 0.86.
Looking at an image I create an inventory of what I need to do to make an image workable, on this one getting rid of the eye shadows comes first, if I can't do that well, nothing else matters. Using the healing brush, select a source by holding down the ALT key and left clicking on the area you want to sample from. There is an Aligned option on the tool bar, if this is ticked the source point will move relative to the target point, if this is not ticked the source point will start at the original source point each time you left click on a target area. Cleaning up the skin I left this unticked as the source areas are critical and I don't want them movimg around. Having cleaned up as much as I could with the healing brush I finished off with a little smudging below the left eye where a little bit of hair comes over the eye and the shadow was a bit dark.
Time for a bit of noise reduction. I will be sharpening up the eyes and lips so I don't want to reduce noise on them. I select the eyes and lips with the lasoo tool, invert the selection and feather by 10. Then I choose, filter> Noise > Reduce noise. below are the settings I used. If you want to compare the changes with the original click on the image in the left window and it reverts to the original, let go and you see the changes.
Once I was happy, I ok'ed for the noise reduction, then inverted the selection and chose, Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.
I am happy with the image so I can now do something about the background. Using the magic wand with a tollerance of 15 I selected all the background including the area between her arm and body lower right and feathered by 3. Using the eye dropper I chose a colour from the background and filled the background and cleaned up with the paintbrush to get rid of some stray hairs.
The face was looking a bit pale, so I lasooed the face and hair, feathered by 10 and upped the contrast by 10. I then inverted the image, used Diffuse Glow, Graininess 0, Glow Amount 3, Clear Amount 15 and re-inverted the image (Contrast shown but not Diffuse glow in the image below).
I duplicated the image, desaturated the duplicate image and blended it in the layers palette using the lighten mode. As the image was still looking wan around the face I upped the Brightness +20 and contrast +5 on the underlying image, not the desaturated one. And that's it.
Lastly, this is one I did in PSP X, I prefer it and am more familiar with the program, just using Photoshop for the Invert/Diffuse Glow/Invert.
Thanks Dave, you probably noticed when you were working on it, because of the soft edge to her top it would be incredibly hard to change the background significantly. _________________
I probably couldn't reproduce this if I tried, I was messing with all sorts of stuff from PSP X, XI and Elements, but thought I'd put it up anyway. The one thing I did do, that started me messing about in the first place was, I wasn't happy with the dark shadows on her staps in the last image and wanted to see if I could use the inverse diffuse glow but not have the strap shadows. I took am elliptical selection of her face and neck and feathered it by 30, copied and pasted it as a new layer and just inverse diffused that. It worked better I thought. Oh, and I softened her image quite a lot.
wow you guys have been busy in my absence.
Love the two of Dave's daughter, some great chopping there. Think you've had to much practise at these so I'll put a different one up later for you to have a go at.
Ok, you can have a go at this one, classic with Wonky horizon and the obligatory lamp out the top of the head shot, just shows we can still get it wrong!!!
The post isn't a problem but that horizon sure is. Interesting, as they say... Dave, any chance of a larger image? And just for the record, for any chops, can we have a larger image as standard? Don't know if that will create hosting problems for some. _________________
The post isn't a problem but that horizon sure is. Interesting, as they say... Dave, any chance of a larger image? And just for the record, for any chops, can we have a larger image as standard? Don't know if that will create hosting problems for some.
No mprobs, need to get a standard size for chopping, this one is 150ppi and 1000 on longest edge - Is this OK?
Before we start getting creative, the post and straightening were much easier than I thought they were going to be, even on the small pic, especially with the trees at either side right on the sea line. This is a first chop, I got rid of the post just by cloning, choosing different target points and going over it, then carefully round the hair. Straightening the image was what I thought was going to be a nightmare, but the figures were very forgiving and required no work at all. Ok, now it's play time.
I've been very cheeky here, but I think I can get away with it. The light source is off to the left, but as that's one hell of an electric storm they've been caught in, who knows what was happening over there? I removed the entire sky, pole and uncle Tom Cobley and all, and straightened the picture. I put the storm in behind them and reduced the green in the foreground picture to match the sky and darkened it a bit as well. I magic wand-ed-ed the blank sky area in the foreground and feathered by 5 and hit del a few times to blend foreground with background and that was it. 'Having a lovely time, wish you were here, anyone want a stick of rock?'
Later, with a judicious increase of red and decrease of blue in the layers palette they were able to come out to play again and enjoy a lovely evening.
Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2007 5:30 pm Post subject: Re: My first wedding shots!
Venom wrote:
While digging through my old pictures came across this:-
Taken on my old Nikon Coolpix 5700, was wandering if you could do anything with it?
Mike
Now that's an interesting one, I haven't a clue at this moment what to do
about the blown highlights, I've never bothered. First thought is to try to paste
or clone in some flowers from another picture. Great challenge. This is
one to really learn on. _________________
I've (finally) had time to have a go at this one, life has been a bit hectic lately. I duplicated the layer and used the magic wand to select the blown area, feathered the edge by 20 and deleted it. I pasted a picture of some white roses behind the main image and resized it and moved it around to get something like a realistic effect. I needed to adjust the pasted image to match the lighting as best I could and lastly used the saturation brush to bring out a bit of pink in the pasted image. I think that was a much easier route than attempting cloning, and I think it is slightly odd still, but in an album I doubt you'd notice.
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