The Restorationist Janine Smith continues her foray into the world of video tutorials with this brilliantly effective, yet simple to achieve, restoration using the color channels.
This easy to follow tutorial shows Janine removing a large patch of damage to an older photograph as she starts her restoration.
Vintage is the new thing..wait…vintage and new…oxymoron. Lets say Vintage is all the rage right now. I am seeing it from fashion to photography. It is really easy to achive a cool vintage tine to you images.
Open an image, copy layer…and then burn the outside part of the image so the eye focuses on the subject. I do this at 50% opacity on the new layer so I can lower the opacity even more. You can also dodge parts of your image to stand out more on this layer.
Add a b&w or sepia layer. I used a custom b&w layer with a tint (Hue 35%, Saturation 25%)
Play with the opacity so some color comes through, mine is set at 50%
Create a new layer (I add a layer mask incase I want to “erase” parts) and fill it with any color you heart desires. I tried a purple. Then changed the layer mode to the “soft light” and lowered the opacity to 75%
It was okay….but not the feel I wanted…so I tried a brick red…
I liked… a lot!!!
Last time on TipSquirrel, on our ever-expanding journey into blend modes in Photoshop, we looked at the Luminosity blend mode. This mode allowed us to use the brightness values from one layer to make adjustments to the brightness of underlying layers, without creating unwanted shifts in the hue of the underlying layers.
Today, we’ll apply this technique to our sharpening workflow. If you’ll recall in the last lesson, I showed an example of an image that was sharpened heavily, and the resulting halo along the edge boundary had developed some weird color shifts as a result of the sharpening:
Let’s take a look at three ways to use the principles we’ve seen with Luminosity Mode blending to eliminate the color shifting, and leave the hue intact as we add brightness and darkness along the edges to sharpen our images. You may have seen recommendations that you convert your image from RGB to Lab and sharpen the L channel, then convert back to RGB. This technique will achieve essentially the same result, without the conversion – and without having to flatten a multi-layer image.
1. Using Fade
Let’s start with this next image of some sweaters on a rack, and we’ll simply begin with our trusty friend, Unsharp Mask. We apply an aggressive low radius, very high amount for our sharpening in a single step, to a single layer (probably the most inflexible approach):
Click OK, and the IMMEDIATELY choose Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask (you must do this as the next step, a single click will cause this command to be grayed out). In the Fade dialog, we see an opacity slider that we can use to lessen the effect, but what else do we see? That’s right, blend modes! Let’s reduce the opacity to about 67%, and change the blend mode to Luminosity:
Click OK, and mission accomplished. If we take a very close look at the knitted yarn on the sweaters, we can see the effects of before, after sharpening, and after fading to luminosity. Notice the garish colors in the original sharpened image, which have been toned down considerably after fading to luminosity blend mode:
2. Using Layers
As I mentioned above, applying the Unsharp Mask (or any sharpening technique) to a single layer is the most inflexible way to approach your workflow. If you make a mistake, you have to undo and try again, and while “Fade” allows some flexibility, you only get one shot. Let’s try something a bit more flexible. A separate sharpening layer.
If you have only a single layer in your file, simply drag the layer to the “Create New Layer” icon to make a copy of the background layer. If you have multiple layers, select the layer at the top of the stack, and press “Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E” (on a Mac, that is “Cmd-Opt-Shift-E”). This is the “Stamp Visible” command, and it creates a composite image of everything that is visible, all on a single layer, above the one previously selected. Perfect for sharpening!
Our image is ready:
Now, we run Unsharp Mask as before, this time on the top merged or copied layer:
As before, we go in aggressively, intentionally oversharpening so we can back off to a more appropriate setting. Since we’ve sharpened this individual layer, let’s set the blend mode of the layer to Luminosity, and the Opacity of the layer to 67%:
Now we’ve achieved the same results as with Fade… except for one key advantage: We can modify the opacity of this layer at any time in the future, even after saving and coming back again later. This allows us a much better control over the effect. In addition, since this is a separate layer, we can add a layer mask and hide any areas where we don’t want sharpening to occur. Much more flexible than the straight sharpening on the original layer.
3. Smart Filters
For the ultimate in control, however, we must turn to a great new feature introduced in Photoshop CS4, and this one has been a long time coming: Smart Filters. This feature will allow you to control not only the intensity of the effect, but you can actually go back and re-adjust the settings of the Unsharp Mask (or any other filter used in this way).
Smart Filters make use of Smart Objects in Photoshop, and require us to have a separate layer as in the previous example. Here, I’ve used “Stamp Visible” to create a composite layer at the top of the stack:
Now, we want to convert this new layer so that we can use Smart Filters. We can use the menu command Filter > Convert For Smart Filters… then click OK at the warning dialog box:
Now, notice that the layer has been converted into a Smart Object. This is indicated by a small icon in the lower right part of the image thumbnail in the Layers panel:
Now that we have a Smart Object, any filter we apply will automatically be a Smart Filter. Let’s use our trusty Unsharp Mask just as before:
When you click OK this time, look at the layers panel and notice the difference. The Unsharp Mask is added below the layer, with an eyeball icon for visibility (similar to layer effects) and even a Smart Filters mask that you can use to specifically control the areas where the Smart Filter is visible.
However, I want you to notice specifically the little icon to the right of “Unsharp Mask,” that looks like a couple of sliders. Double click this icon, and you get the Blending Options dialog for the Unsharp Mask filter itself!
Once again, we can set the blend mode to Luminosity, and adjust the opacity of the Unsharp Mask filter independently of the layer settings.
Now, here’s the bonus: double click the words “Unsharp Mask” and you get the original dialog box, so you can tweak the sharpening settings – as often as you’d like, until you find the right setting!
Surely, this third method offers the greatest flexibility of all – in that every parameter remains adjustable in your file forever. You’ll never paint yourself into a corner again!
There you have it: three ways to use the Luminosity blend mode in a sharpening workflow, and still more hidden nooks and crannies of Photoshop where we can encounter the power of Blend Modes to give us a greater flexibility and creativity with our images.
Whether you produce your images for web or for print, at some point you’ll want to sharpen the images for output. Sharpening, as we’ve discussed in earlier tips, is a process in which the edges of detail are enhanced by making the dark side of the edge slightly darker, and the bright side slightly brighter – in effect, increasing contrast along the edge. However, in many cases, sharpening can introduce unwanted hue shifts as a result of the way the darkening and lightening affects the image. We can use Photoshop’s Luminosity blend mode to remove the color artifacts, leaving us with a cleaner result.
For example, take a look at this document, which has some noticeable color shifts along the edges, as a result of sharpening. We can use Luminosity blend mode to prevent this type of result:
Before we start with the sharpening workflow, we’ll need a basic understanding of the Luminosity blend mode. Luminosity is one of the four tonal blend modes located near the bottom of the blend mode list. In its simplest terms, when you combine a layer in Luminosity blend mode with another layer, the resulting color keeps the original layer’s hue and saturation, but the luminosity value ONLY comes from the new blending layer. Let’s demonstrate with a quick example.
We’ll start with a one-layer document, and add a gradient as shown below. The gradient transitions from a red value (RGB: 128, 0, 0) to a blue value (RGB: 0, 0, 128).
If we examine the foreground and background colors with the color picker, notice the HSB values located directly above the RGB values. In both cases, these colors have a “B” (Brightness) value of 50%. This indicates that while the “H” (Hue) and “S” (Saturation) values change across the range of the gradient, the Brightness, or Luminosity, of the colors is constant – 50% throughout the image.
Before proceeding, we want to change our foreground colors again – change the foreground to an RGB value of (180, 255, 82). Notice that the luminosity of this color, as evidenced by the “B” Brightness value, is 100%:
Again before proceeding, let’s change the background color to an RGB value of (54, 77, 24). Notice that the luminosity of this color (the “B” Brightness value) is 30%. Also notice that the Hue and Saturation values are identical to the foreground color:
Now add a new layer to the document, and fill it with the foreground color by pressing Alt-Backspace (Option-Delete on a Mac). With this layer still selected, we select the command Filter > Render > Fibers and accept the default values in the dialog box by clicking OK. We have this result:
The fibers are rendered in colors ranging from the foreground to the background colors, which differ ONLY in their Brightness, or luminosity value. Let’s bring blend modes into play. With the fibers layer selected, change the layer blend mode to “Luminosity:”
We can see that, although the layer with the fibers has a range of garish green colors, the Hue and Saturation of the greens are completely ignored, but the Luminosity, or Brightness, remains. The Hue and Saturation of the original bottom layer shows through, but its Brightness values are over-ridden with the Brightness of the fibers layer.
The key point to take away from this – it doesn’t matter at all what Hue or Saturation the fiber layer is – ONLY the Luminosity is retained when using this mode.
We’ll use this principle to great advantage next week as part of a sharpening workflow. Stick around!
Last week we looked at some practical and very utilitarian ways to take advantage of Difference blend modes in Adobe Photoshop. Today, we’re going to take a 180 degree turn and look at some ways of using the Difference blend mode in some creative and artistic techniques. So let’s get in to the artistic frame of mind and take the creative plunge.
Difference mode can be a very interesting way of working with multiple images in a collage. Since Difference mode, you may recall, magnifies and highlights the differences between images, this technique work especially well with images that have nicely saturated colors and good contrast. We’ll start with this image as our base:
Now, we’ll open our second image, and drag it directly onto the first, so we have both layers in a stack, like so:
Now, simply change the blend mode to Difference, and look what happens:
Now, if you’re on Windows, when you have the blend mode highlighted in the layers panel, you can press the up or down arrows to cycle through the blend modes – this is really useful in cases like this as you experiment to see what looks cool. Mac users can do this by pressing Cmd-plus and Cmd-minus to move through the blend modes. Either way, experiment and see what happens. Most often, I find Difference blend mode to be one of the more interesting results.
Now let’s look at another technique. I saw something like this in Photoshop User magazine many years ago, and it is a really cool technique for making futuristic abstract backgrounds and textures. Lets start with a new document, white canvas, at the default Photoshop size.
Now, let’s select a nice saturated green color as our foreground color. Then, choose the gradient tool, and from the gradient picker, choose foreground to transparent and select linear as the style.
Now, look in the toolbar just to the right, and what do you see? Yes, yet another of the hidden spots within Photoshop where blend modes are available. Let’s set the gradient tool’s blend mode to Difference, and draw a random gradient (again, make sure you have foreground to transparent set in te gradient picker:
Nothing special, right? Now let’s drag out another gradient, and watch the colors interact with the difference mode:
Cool! Now drag out some more in succession, like so:
And a few more in random directions:
Now, let’s switch to a saturated blue and drag a few more times:
Now, a saturated red and continue:
Now, some yellow… and for variety, lets switch to the radial gradient:
A few more times:
You get the idea – you can keep playing with this all day, creating new wild gradient blends with Difference mode. Here I’ve added some type and set the type layer blend mode to Difference as well:
Experiment, get creative and have fun!
Do you have some of those 70’s era color photo’s that just look tired? Here’s an easy way to paint a little life back into them using photo filters!
For the purposes of this demonstration, I’ll use a photo of a bouquet of flowers my Nana got for her birthday in the 70’s. They obviously meant enough to her to commit to film and keep. If this photo meant so much to her, it deserves the care all the other family photos do. It’s not in horrible shape, but it has gone a bit red and need a bit of a pick-me-up. The photo is included in a zip file, placed at the end of this tutorial, in case you’d like to play along!
The first thing we’ll do is get rid of some of the red cast. In this case, we’ll use Levels, and, as I like to do, we’ll adjust each color channel separately. I prefer to do it this way because it gives me a little more control, obviously, over individual channels.
Now let’s paint some life back into the flowers. There are many ways to pump the colors in a photograph, just one being hue/saturation, but we’re going to ‘paint’ using photo filters. Pick a particular color in the photo you wish to adjust, in this case we’ll tweak the pink bloom’s, first, and add a Photo Filter adjustment layer.
Choose the color of photo filter from the presets, or select your own color from the color picker. Take the Density percentage up to around 50%. I leave the Preserve Luminosity unchecked for that much more saturation. As always, play with these settings to see which work best for you and the particular photo you’re working on. If you don’t have the adjustments palette (pre-CS4), you need to make your own adjustment layers by combining the original and levels correction layers into they’re own layer (Shift + Ctrl + Alt + E on PC or Shift + Cmd + Opt + E on Mac). Go to Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter and select your settings, hit OK. Now add a Layer Mask. The mask will be white – fill it with black and paint out the areas you want effected by the color adjustment with the foreground and color changed to white.
Repeat these steps, either with the built in adjustment layers or manually, for each color you want to pop. I made six Photo filter adjustments, red, purple, yellow, and green for the flower arrangement, another red for the vase and an orange adjustment on the table cover. I changed the layer blend mode to Color Burn for the red on the flowers and the yellow flowers and Color for all the other adjustment layers. I went through each layer blend mode on every adjustment layer to see what looked best to me. Also adjust the opacity levels on the layers to what looks good to you. The layers with an intense Layer Blend Mode, like Color Burn, will generally need to be brought down to a lower opacity to look natural. I brought them down to around 40%. All of the other I left at 100% except the vase which I brought down to 90%.
To add a bit more pop, I wanted to darken the background a bit – not completely black it out, as the background has context as my Nana’s home and familiar to us, but enough that the floral arrangement is definitely the main focus. To achieve that, I simply made a Curves Adjustment Layer, bringing the histogram down towards the lower right hand corner to darken, just a bit. Back in the layer stack, change the mask color to black and paint the background with white to darken. Bring the opacity down to between 40% and 50% so the darkening is slight but still transparent.
This particular photo, a product of 70’s photo finishing, I’m assuming an attempt to get away from the ‘slick’ photo look, and an unfortunate stay in a magnetic photo album (aka Photo Death Camp) is very textured, and not in a good way. To cover that a little bit, I combined all the layers into one (Shift + Ctrl + Alt + E on PC or Shift + Cmd + Opt + E on Mac, again) and put a bit of a texture of my own over it. Go to Filter > Texture > Texturizer and select the Sandstone option, Scaling at 100% and Relief at 4. Back in the layer stack, play with the Opacity until you get a result you like, probably somewhere around 50%.
Thanks for following, and if you play along, I’d love to see what you do with it! If you’d like further information on this or any other digital photo restoration article or technique, have an idea for a tutorial or a photo you’d like me to look at, follow me on Twitter (@Landailyn), add me as a friend on Facebook (Janine Smith) or email me at janine (at) landailyn (dot) com!
No I’m not talking about going to your local chiropractor…..We are talking Lightroom, Silly! I will admit until a couple months ago a few weeks ago I knew there was Local Adjustments in Lightroom, but that was it. I had never clicked on that brush on the right hand side.
When I did….I heard angels sing. I realized I could make eyes shine, and make faces more beautiful in Lightroom. Don’t get me wrong, I love photoshop…but I like to spend time outside shooting, not behind my computer…so any trick I can learn to shorten my workflow, makes me happy!!!
This is my raw image….
After applying a couple presets from my workflow set…
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Better, right? But you can see the beautiful Miss Shana has AMAZING EYES! I would have ran an action on them in Photoshop in the past….but now I click on the brush on the right
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Click A then choose a preset (I used ASD: Work It- Pretty Eyes as Brush A…this sharpens and brightens) or create your own and painted over the eyes
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Then I picked Brush B (used preset ASD:Work It-Pretty Faces) and painted over the skin…this made it brighter and softer.
wow….look at those eyes!!!! All in one program.
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Go try it out…. have fun!!!
Up until the 1960’s, when resin coating became the norm and gave photo paper a smooth, shiny look and feel, photos were commonly developed using the silver gelatin dry plate process, caused by coating glass with an emulsion of silver salts, then letting it dry. One thing that identifies a vintage gelatin silver print is as the print gets older, a discoloring of the darker areas of the photo, called silvering, begins to occur, turning the blacks blue in various degrees, depending on the age of the photo, giving it a blue to silver appearance. Light silvering can be found on photos taken as late as the 1950’s, but is mostly found on early prints, taken before the 1930’s.
When collecting these photos, silvering is very desirable, as it shows the photos age and quality. When digitally restoring a photo, you may wish to lessen the silvering effect but still keep the character of silvering. If so, here’s one method of doing so, but keep in mind this isn’t to completely do away with the silvering, just to minimize it!
I’ve provided a sample image in a .zip file at the end of this article, as I realize that not everyone will have an appropriate image available. This image was provided by a client, so please respect that this is a private family photo and do not use for any other purpose except practice and please do not post anywhere on the Internet! Thank you!
Open your image in Photoshop. The first thing you want to do is to find the dark areas in your photo, as the darkest areas will be where the silvering begins – no matter how silvered the photo is, the darkest areas will be exponentially more. There are many ways to separate dark and light areas. One is Calculations (Image > Calculations),
and another is Threshold (Image > Adjustments > Threshold).
Adjust and play with the sliders to even the darks and lights as much as you like. When you hit okay, however, you’ll notice a lot of the ‘light’ comes back. The next steps will take care of that. With the Magic Wand selection tool, set at a tolerance of 10 (you want the tolerance low enough to only select white) select the white area.
In the layer stack, add a layer mask to the selection. If you remember to have the foreground color black and the background white, the mask will be the way you need it.
If not, and white is the foreground color, simply use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + I (I for ‘Invert’), Cmd + I on a Mac.
With your mouse poised over the mask thumbnail, right click and choose Apply Mask.
This is to be the overlay to tone down the silvering in your restoration. The first step to making your overlay is to fill it with color. With the Eyedropper, select one of the darker tones in the photo. The photo will rarely be a true black and white, and filling the overlay in with pure black rarely looks good. When you have your color selected, hover the curser over the overlay and select while holding Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) down to select the area. Fill with the color you picked (assuming that color is the foreground color, the keyboard shortcut for this is Alt (Option on a Mac) + Backspace.
Chances are the separation of light and dark, done earlier, probably has more then the darkest tones on it. If it does, now’s the time to clean up the overlay. To do this, add a Layer Mask to the overlay layer and ‘paint’ the lighter areas away with white as the foreground color. Lower the opacity of the mask layer so you can easily see the lighter and darker tones.
Now you should have an overlay that only covers the darkest tones, the ones with the heaviest silvering. Change the layers Layer Blend Mode to Hard Light and lower the opacity to around 75%.
Here’s the before and after, toning down the silvering but not completely obliterating it. Just a subtle change that keeps the character of the aging of the silver but isn’t distracting in the restoration! Thanks to Karen and Rocco for the inspiration! The .zip file of the sample photograph can be found here.
If you’d like further information on this or any other digital photo restoration article or technique, have an idea for a tutorial or a photo you’d like me to look at, follow me on Twitter (@Landailyn), add me as a friend on Facebook (Janine Smith) or email me at janine (at) landailyn (dot) com!
After a weeks break TipSquirrel welcomes back Mike Hoffman
Creating a good mask is an essential part of retouching and compositing images, but the process of developing that mask doesn’t have to be painstaking or overly time consuming. You can get a very workable mask by starting with one of the color channels from your image, and refining it with some quick enhancements. In this topic, we’ll examine some techniques for refining masks using Photoshop’s Overlay blending mode.
Let’s begin with the image we want to enhance. In this photograph, we have a Great Blue Heron – nicely composed and well-cropped, but the subject of our image doesn’t separate very well from the background:
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While we could try some image-wide adjustments with levels or curves, this image would benefit from brightening up the subject (the bird) while muting the background. Our technique will even allow for replacing the background entirely, if you desire. Let’s get started.
Begin by examining the color channels in this image (Window > Channels). Click on the Red, Green and Blue channels in the Channels Panel to see which one has the best contrast. While none of them are outstanding, the Blue Channel does have slightly more contrast than the other two:
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Let’s duplicate the Blue Channel, by dragging its thumbnail down to the “Create New Channel” icon in the Channels Panel:
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This creates a new channel called “Blue Copy” and sets it as the current channel; all the other channels are turned off (see the eyeball icons next to the channels, only “Blue Copy” is on):
Let’s bump the contrast just a bit overall, using curves. Select Image > Adjustments > Curves… and adjust as shown. Our goal is a completely black and white mask, so we’re trying to send the highlights towards white and the shadows towards black, and increase the contrast with this adjustment:
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Now, we’ll use Overlay blending to increase the contrast further. Perform the following commands:
Select > All
Edit > Copy
Edit > Paste
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At this point, there is no change – we’ve pasted the exact same image onto itself. Now, try this command:
Edit > Fade…
This step must be performed IMMEDIATELY after the “Paste” command. This brings up the Fade dialog box, which has another of Photoshop’s hidden locations for using blend modes! Change the blend mode to “Overlay” and leave the Opacity at 100%. The result is the same as two layers stacked together in Overlay blend mode – more contrast:
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Let’s add more density. The original Blue channel is still on the clipboard. Once again, choose Edit > Paste followed by Edit > Fade… :
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Now we’ve got a lot more contrast to work with, but our mask is not nearly complete. We will need to refine the edges. We can start by quickly selecting the background with the Lasso tool, and filling it with white color. Don’t go too close to the edge of the bird; just loosely select the open areas. Then loosely select inside the bird with the lasso tool and fill with black. We’ve now got just the edges to deal with:
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Overlay to the rescue again! Set your foreground color to White, and select a soft round brush with a fairly large size. In the Brush Toolbar, change the “Mode” to “Overlay.” Yet another place within Photoshop where we can take advantage of blending modes!
Now, start painting in a white area, and slowly encroach into the black. Notice how, with Overlay mode selected, the black in completely untouched – only the grays are lightened! We don’t have to be precise, and can brush with quick sweeps of a rather large brush – making quick work of refining the edges:
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Continue working with white color around the edges, always starting in the white area and brushing along the edges and right over the black. The grays disappear as if by magic, while the blacks remain untouched:
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Now, let’s touch up inside the black areas. Leaving the Brush tool set to Overlay mode, change the foreground color to Black. Start in the interior and paint towards and along the edge. This time, the grey areas become black, while the white is untouched:
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In this image, we are challenged because in some areas the background is darker than the subject, and in some areas lighter. If we refine in sections, we end up with lots of good, well-defined edges, but some are in reverse color:
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We can make quick work of this issue. Looking at the head, we select the area that has reversed color with the lasso tool:
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Now, we simply choose Image > Adjustments > Invert. The edge colors are now in the correct areas:
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We’ve got some extra back in the background, just select it with the lasso and fill with white:
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Likewise, we have some extra white in the interior, select it with the lasso and fill with black:
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Continue working around the subject, and in very short order, we have a very passable mask. Just a couple of areas require hand-touchup:
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All in all, a very quick job of masking, and we’re ready to use this mask. Return to the composite channel by clicking on “RGB” in the Channels Panel. Now, you can use Select > >Load Selection… to load your Blue Channel Copy and you’re ready to mask away. Remember that white color represents the selected area, so you can use Select > Inverse to change the selection from background to subject. Create a layer mask, and we’ve successfully isolated the subject – ready for further enhancement, or extraction into another image:
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I hope you’ve enjoyed our tour of Overlay blend modes! Next week, we’ll take a look at Difference blending.
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