TipSquirrel.com is delighted to welcome a new ‘Nut’ to the collection. Dan
Moughamian has authored four Adobe training videos, including Digital
Photography Workflows with Photoshop CS4 and Core Lightroom 2
This segment provides a sneak-peak at his newest video tutorial title
for CS5: Image Retouching & Adjustment with Photoshop CS5.
Its great to welcome back Justin Seeley for another Photoshop Quicktips. In this exclusive episode of Quicktips, Justin shows us why Camera RAW is better suited for creating black & white photos and demostrate why using both an Adjustment Layer and the Sliders available in Camera Raw.
A Video Tutorial from Janine Smith
Well, finally it’s here! CS5 trial is available to download. So if you’re going to grab yours then you may be interested in our CS5 new feature tutorials.
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Have you ever wanted to put a photo into a (virtual) picture frame and just had a heck of a time doing it? No? Am I the only moron on board? I actually spent untold hours trimming around edges of pictures to make them fit into shapes…it makes my head ache just thinking about it!
Ok, in my defense, it was a long time ago, but I obviously wasn’t savvy enough to know about a wonderful little bit of magic in Photoshop called the Paste Into command. Once I discovered it, life became a whole lot easier! Today I’m taking a break from photo restoration to show you a fun little project using the Paste Into command.
First a bit of background. I decided it was time to do something (finally) with Landailyn Research & Restoration’s fan page on Facebook. The old one, aside from my not having actually posted anything on it, looked pretty trite, and just tired. Tired of being neglected! So I got to thinking, trying to come up with a different way to show some of my before / after work.
I don’t know how the idea popped into my, but pop it did: a take on a Rubik’s cube! Nifty! So I enlisted my good friend, Google, and we went looking for a cube to use as a template. At first, of course, I made the whole thing way to complicated, trying to actually use the photo of the cube itself as the base. Waaayyyy too complicated! I finally snapped back to reality and said “Hey, Brain Trust! You’re supposed to be an good at this Photoshop thing! So use your skills, woman!” And so, I did. Let me tell you, making the whole thing from the ground up was so much simpler!
Once I put the finished product on Facebook, I started getting a lot of comments and requests. Seems others might find ways to make use of my little cube, at least I hope so! To that end, I’m going to go over how to put your images on a Landy Cube, and provide you with the .psd file to get you started!
Unzip your file and open in Photoshop. You’ll notice that it’s just made up of two little layers, the cube base and the squares. I actually could have had it all one layer, I just wanted to be difficult. While working, you can have the base on, or not. It’s the squares we’ll be working with. The object of the exercise is to get your photo to fit in the square and actually look like it’s pasted on the cube.
Open the image you’d like to use. Select the area, or the entire image, and copy (Ctrl or Cmd +C or Edit > Copy). Using the Magic Wand tool, select the square you want your image to reside in.
Now, go to Edit > Paste Special > Paste Into.
Your image will appear inside the area you selected and in the layer stack as a shape layer.
Once your image is in the selection, it’s time to transform it by using keyboard short cut Ctrl (or Cmd) + T, or by going to the Edit > Transform menu. Then, either in the Transform menu or by right clicking inside the transform area, select Distort.
We’re doing this because in this particular case all of the shapes are at different angles. Grabbing the corner handles, move them to the edges around the white shape on all four corners.
Repeat for all the squares and that’s pretty much how easy that is! To give the image a little depth and make it look more like it’s pasted on instead of inside the shape, just give it a bit of a Layer Style in the form of an Outer glow. All standard settings except you’ll change the Elements Size to 5 px and the actual glow color from the lovely yellow default to hex value #7F7F7F.
But what if you want one photo to cover an entire side of the cube? Easy! Just select every square you want the image to show up in before you use the Paste Into command!
Okay, it’s a pretty nifty cube, right? So what can you do with it, exactly? Well, the first thing you’ll want, probably, is a place to show off your cube. If you have a blog or Facebook for instance, show your friends, family and customers your cube-ness! Cube your family history! Cube your old photo collection! Old baseball card collection? Cube it!
Just for grins, I cubed five of my favorite artists, my Facebook, Twitter and NAPP fellows. These are really talented people; do yourself a favor and give their portfolios a look!
Show me your cube-ness! I’d love to see what you come up with! Post your cubes on Landailyn Research & Restoration’s wall on Facebook! Happy Cube-ing!
Landy Cube .psd:
http://landailyn.com/TS/Landy_cube.zip
Artist links:
Patrick LaMontagne, Cartoon Ink
Christine Pentecost, Bridger Mountain Photo
Pat Wendt, NAPP Portfolio
Giesla Hoelscher, Inkblots
Sharron Benn, ShazNYC
Thanks to you all for letting me cube you!
There was a bit of a debate among the genealogical community a couple of weeks ago as to the correct way to handle old photographs, documents and other artifacts. Was it the time honored method of wearing white cotton gloves or the newfangled ways which are disposable, non-latex exam gloves, or washing and drying your hands. Actually, there wasn’t much of a debate at all, just a bit of education, which we are always pleased to get (right?), but the bottom line, no matter which side of the debate you come up on, is to never, ever handle photos without washing your hands and always handle them by the edges, only!! Why? Because fingerprints will eat your photos for lunch! And that, my friends, is no myth.
The cute little tyke is my big brother, Mark.
Fingerprints are impressions of friction ridges, raised portions of your skin which are actually all over your entire hand. They assist in gripping and identifying you if you leave said prints at the scene of a crime. Like on your photos.
Fingerprints are left on everything we touch. Anything that happens to be on your fingers when you touch that surface is also deposited, things such as dirt, sweat, grime and acids. When you pick up an old photograph or slide, or negative, and leave your fingerprints, the acids that are deposited then begin to, literally, eat into the surface. You may not be able to see it easily with the naked eye, but once it’s scanned and enlarged, Whoop! There it is! If it’s on the photo and you’re going to restore it, even if you can’t see it with the naked eye, it’s my opinion that you should take the time to do it right and get the fingerprints out!
I know when you come up against a big pile of lines all over your photo, it can be pretty intimidating, but just go about it like you should go about everything in photo restoration: a little bit at a time. Obviously, it’s going to be a lot easier to fix the fingerprints if they’re in a wide open, uncluttered area. If this is the case, the Patch Tool may be your best bet. You could possibly, with the tool, do a large section at a time, knocking out a huge fingerprint in a single bound!
This, of course, works better on a fairly uniform background. This particular space has a light texture, but is uniform in color. Before you begin, make a copy of the layer. Whether this is the first bit of restoration you do on the photo, or you’ve done some previously, you’ll need to have a combined layer, other than the background layer. Ctrl (or Cmd) + J if you have only the background layer, or Shift+Ctrl+Alt (or Shift+Cmd+Opt on a Mac) +E if you have multiple layers.
That will work better than, say a swirly studio background with lots of variation in tones. If the area is still wide open, not on top of details, you can still use the Patch Tool, I’d just take it in smaller increments. Of course, every situation is different and calls for different tools and solutions. Always try a variety of options to see which work best for you!
Unfortunately, the pesky prints don’t always show up on the background, or around the edges. No, they somehow always seem to leave their mark right smack-dab in the middle of the most detailed part of the picture, like someone’s face! I understand why, so-and-so is showing whats-her-name photos and says “That’s your Uncle Whosits” and points to his face, touching the photo, leaving behind a little bit of themselves in the process. Don’t get me wrong! I’m all for keeping a piece of our ancestors! Just not on the restored copy, thank you.
The prints left on the detailed portions are naturally going to require a bit more detail to fix. Repeat after me: Close up, small bits!
In the most detailed areas, such as the eyes in the photo, it would be better the work with a detailed tool, such as the Healing Brush, or, better yet, the Clone Stamp Tool. That way you can determine just what pixels go where. Use the Clone Stamp Tool on it’s own blank layer over your combined layer with Current and Below selected for your sample area. I’d use the Clone Stamp Tool, again, for the eyebrows, but once you get into the more open areas of the skin, you can go back to the Patch Tool, if you like, sampling from the other, un-fingerprinted, areas of skin.
Fingerprints are another one of those types of damage that you will find on your photos! The only ‘trick’ to getting them out, patience. Also, don’t forget to prevent this sort of damage in the future by, at the very least, washing and thoroughly drying your hands before you handle photographs, and only handle by the edges!
I’ve gotten quite a lot of questions, lately, about straightening photos. When it comes to old photos, especially those taken outside, without benefit of a tripod, you’re going to, without a doubt, come up against some off kilter ones. It’s pretty inevitable. Especially way back when people were first able to get hand held camera’s and take their own pictures, there wasn’t all the technology we see in camera’s today. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say they were basically just looking into a box! Most of the inquiries I’ve gotten deal with old photo’s, but I even had one dealing with straightening a product shot of tartan plaid! This technique is perfect, for old and new photos alike, as long as they have a reference line in them, a straight line of some kind, to guide you as you straighten.I first published this straightening tutorial on Janinealogy a year ago. Given all the questions, I thought I’d go over it again. I hope this ends up helping someone!
Wonkie images. I personally, have a million of them in my personal collection. A lot of them are caused by the cameras that were used, The old box cameras, like the brownie, which were, basically a big ‘ol honkin box with a relatively tiny hole for a view finder that you were supposed to hold still while you took the photo. Face it, even though tripods existed, most regular folks didn’t have one. Another reason for all the wonkie photo’s in my collection could be my grandmother. Bless her, every photo she ever took listed to the left. It’s like she had her own style. Nana-Cam.
I have this great photo of my great-grandmother, Annie Schaumanns house. You can see someone sitting in an upstairs window, and in the other upper window, what looks like the foot of a brass bed. It’s just a great picture of a really neat old house. I want to restore it, but it was taken with Nana-Cam. I’m not at all sure Nana actually took it, but someone with her skill set certainly did. So the first thing I need to do is straighten it. I could set guides around two sides to make a straight guide while I go into free transform and…OK, let’s not. Let’s do it the easy way, shall we?
In Photoshop menus, select Filter > Distort > Lens Correction. Uncheck Show Grid at the bottom of the dialog box and select the Straighten tool (Top, left hand side, second tool from the top).
Find a line that should, theoretically, be straight. The bottom of the house, the porch rails, the porch ceiling line, just find a line that should be straight, horizontal or vertical, and trace that line with the Straighten tool. Boom! Unwonkiness is abounding. Now, check the Show Grid box, double the tiny grid size to 32 (or whatever you like) and change the color of the grid to something that shows up well on your photo (I used a value of #00EAff). Use this to check the straightening and fine tune it, if necessary.
Since the last line we straightened by was horizontal, I’m going to check this one by a vertical line. I used the corner of the house as a guide and zoomed in 200%, just to see the line clearly. I used a horizontal line the first time, so I used a vertical line to tweak it, this time.
In this case, the vertical and horizontal lines won’t both straighten up. Either the horizontal lines are straight, or the vertical lines are straight. You can try to clean this up by using the Distortion slider in the Lens Correction dialog box.
I, personally, was bugged by the fact that when I had most of the major vertical and horizontal lines straighter, the posts on the porch were way wonkie, so I decided to use the vertical line I’d used, the side of the house, as my guide and leave it slightly off kilter. It’s “crooked” enough that it retains perspective but not so much that it looks like it was taken by Nana-Cam!
TipSquirrel is proud to welcome back Rich Harrington to our humble little site. Rich is an internationally published author. His book, Photoshop for Video, was the first of its kind to focus on Photoshop’s application in the world of video. He is also a contributing author for Apple’s Aperture, iLife ’09 and iWork ’09, Video Made on a Mac, From Still to Motions, Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS4, and Producing Video Podcasts.
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!
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