Great!

Okay, it looks like a few of you are posting and actually doing something! Thanks! I think we're going to need to see prints from some of these things, and then we'll each try doing another persons post or two. or three. We're NOT going to meet tomorrow, October 1st, as I'm taking two classes to Cooper and I won't be able to make it back for lunch. Let's please continue to post more this coming week and plan on getting together next Wednesday. Keep up the good work! vaughn ps. when you post, please put your name in it somewhere, so we know who is making the post... thanks! v

FINAL PROJECT

I know I owe you guys some blog posts but I wanted to make them something meaningful and helpful so its taking me a while. I decided to follow Vaughn's lead and attempt to work on some composite/ collage ideas for my final project. There are several things I want to try but do not yet know how to go about doing it. I also want to attempt to emulate on of my favorite David La Chappelle's images. I'll include it if I can figure out how in the world he did it. Okay so thats a rough proposal of my final project. If anyone has any ideas please let me know. :) Or if you know any artists that do stuff like that. Thanks!! (i've included links so some interesting people below)

http://www.foundshit.com/tag/collage/

http://photoevents.lv/2008/03/13/david-lachapelle-various-shots/

http://lh4.ggpht.com/daniel.abrantes/RnvWnPfgxJI/AAAAAAAAAFA/sTzitJ09D2o/Britney+Spears.jpg

Creating a torn paper look

Okay, so this didn't come from the chapter -- I learned it elsewhere. But I thought it was a pretty neat trick and if you don't already know it, could be fun to play with.

Click to enlarge

Retouching...

I have always hated retouching, until this past week I have watched my intern edit many images and payed close attention to how she retouches. Whenever I cloned it was always harsh and obvious.

in this image I am going to remove acne and a few things on the background that bother me. (yes the wrinkles in his shirt bothers me too but Im going to reshoot later...)

I use the Clone tool... make sure to change the opacity... I use around 20-30 I would rather click on a particular area twice than a higher opacity looking a little funny. Keep the clone source point close to your clone tool to keep the color and textures blended.  With such a small opacity you can lighten up under eyes and blend bags or lines. 

Final Project

My objective will be to get my business going. Learn the tricks that photographers are using in photoshop to make their lives easier and how they run their business. What programs are they using to sell their images, print their images and software used to edit. 

I am working with a photographer out of Frisco and she is teaching me what all she uses in her business, with her help and doing other research from other photographers I hope to get the best websites to use to sell and print images, the best ways to promote my company to potential  clients, as well as what software and other tricks that are being used in the industry.

easy Sepia Tone withsout a pre-set

So when working with my intern I learned this little trick.

Open an image...

Create a new layer...

Paint that layer with a color you want to tint your image with...

To "fade" the color turn on "Soft Light"....

Use the opacity to get the perfect shade... (i did this one quickly I think it still needs work...)

the final product...

   

How to: Text Around an Object.
Click to view full.

Chapter 8 Making Selections

Generally, I just made selections using the lasso tool, marquee, or magic wand with adjusted tolerances. This, obviously, was not the best use of my time and found chapter 8 to be really informative on all the backdoor ways to select portions of your picture that take much less time/effort.

So here is the beginning picture that I took of some flowers that my boyfriend got for me :). I wanted to select the prominent two tulips and really punch up the color.












I switched to the channels and found the channel that had the most contrast for those flowers (the red channel) and manipulated it from there. I created an alpha channel by dragging my selection down into the create new channel icon.








I did a quick and dirty level and curve alteration to create as much contrast as would be necessary to really make the background a non issue.











I used the paintbrush with a eyedropper to match the black background and cleaned up the background noise.











This was really harsh, so I applied a Gaussian blur filter to soften the edges.












I made my selection in the alpha channel and then transitioned back to the original image to alter using hue/saturation.











I also wanted to try to grow and similar commands. So, I took the outer part of the orange petal and selected with the magic wand. Obviously, this is not enough, so I chose the grow command under the select menu to pick up the entire outside of the petal.







I got it to pretty much where I wanted it, but thought the edges could use some work. So I transitioned into quick mask mode by pressing q. Then I painted a soft edge around what I was wanting to select, inverse selected the remainder and came up with the selection.







I adjusted the hue on this petal to resemble the outer petal of the right tulip so that they would match.












I thought the portion of the right flower near the stem looked odd, so I selected it using quick mask, inverse selection and used the color selector to turn down the blue and turn up the red. I cleaned up the edges a bit by painting a soft black around the edges of the tulips and so is the resulting picture. Such is the result.

Vaughn's back.

Or is it Vaughns back? Or Vaughn's arm. The point is I'll be back at school this week, and we need to get on these posts. I need at least one a week from each of you and that's not happening... I also want each of you to do a post with your proposed final project.you'll need to research it a bit and give me a detailed description. Before we met on Wednesday. Seriously. Really. I mean it. Or we're going to all start doing assignments from one book. Let's get busy!

GET BETTER VAUGHN!!!

Get better fast! :) and by the way... you didn't miss much on the movie.. we are watching robo cop. 

How to: Diptych.
Click to view full.

Distressed look and Texture: Daniel Mendenhall

(Sorry about the format, I have been at it for 2 hours... I give up)

1. Pick your photo and find some texture.  You are going to need two separate photos to achieve this effect.   

2.  I like to warm up the texture using the hue and saturation tool. Then intensify the colors in the photo you are going to edit.  Get the photo how you want.  You need to do most of your editing now because the effect will wash some of the colors out

3. Now it is time to combine.  With the move tool (quick key:V for Vaughn) drag the texture image on top of you other image.  Make sure that all the images are unlocked. Click on the lock in the layers pallet. You can stretch if you like to increase the size of it.  Pixilation may accrue but it is fine because it will not show.  

4.  Now we want to adjust how the layer interacts with the other layers.  In the layers pallet.  Click on the texture d layer and choose overlay from the drop down menu at the top.  You may also want to change the opacity to make it less intense. 

Using a Gray Card for White Balance Adjustment in Another Image

So this is a relatively simple thing to do but I truly was puzzled because the way I was trying was just not working. So I will tell you a few different ways to do it.  First you have to make sure that you take a shot with a gray card in it with the same light as the other images. So like I said there are a few ways to do this.  Both the images are on the left. The first one is to open both your images up in photoshop. 

1. Make sure the image with the gray card is selected. 

2. Open up levels (Image>adjustments>levels) or (Apple-L will open it)

3. There will be three little squares on the lower right, each with an eyedropper. Click on the one in the middle. If you run your mouse over it will say "Sample in image to set gray point".

4. After you have that dropper selected click on the gray card. Your image will instantly adjust to the correct white balance. 

5. Then , still in levels, click on save. It will ask you where you want to save it, choose somewhere you will remember. Then close out of levels. Select the other image that you want to correct.

6. Open levels again (Image>adjustments>levels) and then click on load. Find where you saved the profile you just made with the other image. It should instantly correct to the same settings as the last image. 

Okay now for the second way. I did the above way and it wasn't working for me so here is an alternative. This way will only work if you have the raw files. So if you do:

1. Open them in photoshop. Camera raw should pop up. 

2. Select the image with the gray card(still in camera raw). There is a bunch of icons on the top of the camera raw screen. The third one over should be a eye dropper that if you run you mouse over it should read "White Balance Tool". Click on this. 

3. Then after that icon is selected, click on the gray card. It like the first method should instantly correct. 

4. Then on the upper left corner there are two buttons, one that says select all and one that says synchronize. 

5. First click select all, or manually select the ones you want to be color corrected, and then click synchronize. All the images you selected should now be corrected. 

6. Click open image and finish the rest of your editing. :) happy editing. 

Im almost positive there is another way to do this, as there are a billion ways to do anything in photoshop, so if anyone else has another way feel free to post it. Thanks!! and happy photoshop-ing!

Okay...

hi guys- so far two people have posted to the website. that makes two "A's" the rest rest "F's". not too good. we need to get moving with this or we'll have to change the format so that we all work from one book doing the same chapters... let me know by how busy this blog is...

Color Image to B/W with some color :)

ok so I know this may be super easy to some but I have always wanting to learn just never did it. :) So here is what you do....

open an image in Photoshop...

Turn the image black and white by going to --> Layer --> New Adjustment Layer --> Black & White. A screen will come up and you can name it whatever you wish. 

The next screen will come up and you can play with the "colors" to make your b/w image look the way you want. 

Now on the right you have two layer... your background color image and a b/w with a white box next to it... click on that white box and select the brush icon on the left. on the bottom of that toolbox there is a white and black box stacked on top of each other. Make sure you select the black box... now in your image "paint" what you want the color to show through, like in my image "Jackson" is in blue.

Hope this was helpful to those who has not done this before...If I left something out let me know...

Is Everyone Onboard Now?

hi guys- i finally fold jesse's email- (sorry jesse!) so all of us should be on this now. Please add your projects to the blog ASAP! Also tell us what you plan on doing for the final... one project for this week, one for next. I'm lecturing in Oklahoma next Wednesday, so we won't be meeting, but please start working on chapters! v

My attempt at color adjustment

Basically, this chapter is all about color. So many of the example pictures are landscape and, as a scrapbooker, I don't really take pictures other than of people. I also don't want to use a picture from my psych lab because those don't really require color adjustments. So, I found a picture in need of help (not coincidentally because I was not the photographer) and worked what little magic I could.


After a slew of information about adjusting black and white photographs, this chapter moves into levels in color, something with which I had never previously worked. The book suggested using auto color, but with some minor tweaks. So I first just did a straight auto color from the image pull down and the adjustment display to see what would be changed. It's a slight improvement, but could be much better.



I erased it from the history palette and opened up auto color options. I selected Find Dark & Light Colors, Snap Neutral Midtones, and changed the clip percentage to .5 % as opposed to .1%.













Then I did a quick fix on the red eye and teeth, because you don't want any of that. For that I just used the red eye tool with a little bit of cloning for areas that looked to white. For the teeth, I just traced around the teeth, opened hue/saturation, changed to yellow channel, decreased saturation, and increased lightness so long as it looked natural.






Then I decided to tackle the overbearing redness in our skin tone. I opened up hue/saturation and turned the red channel all the way up to 180. This pretty much resulted in what I had suspected that the skin tones were the concentration of the red. I altered the hue of red to +5 and the lightness to +13. This worked for the skin, but I didn't like how it dulled out the shirt and purse strap of the middle female.







I traced the outline of her shirt and deleted that area from the hue/saturation layer that altered the red. You notice it most in this small picture in the leather strap.











Then I saw that the middle female still had some remaining red around her collar. So, I used the healing brush on lighten with a grab from a less red area of her chest and reduced the redness. I also noticed that the whole picture still seemed really dark. So I added a new layer copy on screen and reduced the opacity to 25%, the level at which I thought we were sufficiently light without being washed out.






Now I know that cropping is in order, as the picture is not centered. Their heads are almost cut off and mine is no where near the top. I am open to suggestions on this, but this is how I cropped it. I have a feeling it could be better.









And just to refresh your memory and put them side by side....




Before and After


Thoughts?

Welcome!

Hi gang. Here's the blogspot I promised you. You're all going to be administrators (as soon as I can find your emails...) so you can add your own posts. You can change the layout and do whatever you'd like really. just be respectful of other people's posts, that's all.

The first order of business is goal setting for the class. Tell us what you hope to learn- you're basically teaching yourself as you teach us. So tell us what book(s) or tutorials you'll be working from, and tell us how you're going to present your final work.

The second order of business is to get started! Each of you need to provide the others with a lesson from a chapter of the book that you're using, or the tutorial you're watching.

Let's plan on getting together again this week, on Wednesday, September 10, 12:30. We'll do Lu-Lu's again unless anyone can suggest a better place...