Classes
Lesson 1 Introduction to PSE 5.0 and printing
images.
Lesson 2 Improving the basic photograph
Lesson 3 Retouching general images
Lesson 4 Retouching images of people
Lesson 5 Tips and techniques for going further
Lesson 6 Brief look into creative Photoshop Elements
Assignments
Lesson 1 Reading: Pages 1 – 45
Homework: Using the procedures developed in class
produce a final print for the file BonVoyage.jpg. You should consider straightening the horizon,
quarter inch borders, portrait orientation, and printing on letter sized photo
quality paper. Do the same thing with
one of your photographs.
Lesson 2 Reading: Pages 46 – 71
Homework: Try the quick fix method of improving image: Overexp.jpg. Using the selection method outlined in class
crop the image to remove the really bad material. Use the Adjustment Layer technique to improve
the image: PatShadow.jpg. Do any of the
above to your own pictures.
Lesson 3 Reading: Pages 72 – 107
Homework: Practice isolating figures from Beckham’s
images. Some are easy, while others are
hard. Try: layers 1.jpg, making montages
1.jpg, and making montages 13.jpg.
Practice workflow on your own pictures.
Lesson 4 Reading: Pages 108 – 131
Homework: Practice retouching with three of Beckham’s
images: restoring old photographs 1.jpg, retouching portraits 4_1.jpg, and retouching
portraits_2_1.jpg. See what you can do
with some of your own portraits.
Lesson 5 Reading: Pages 132 – 185
Homework: Use the
techniques on page 114 to convert: color to B-W1.jpg to B & W. Create faux DOF with: depth of field effects
6.jpg. Do a vignette with:
KimonoGirl.jpg. Work on your own images.
In
Class Lab
Lesson 1 Goal: Produce a “ready to print” image.
Task: Start with the test picture called
BobPatSkiing.jpg. Resize the image such
that its height is 14 inches at 300 ppi.
Do an 8 by 10½ fixed sized cut of a pleasing section of the photo. Paste this on to a letter sized blank new blank
file that has a resolution of 300 ppi.
Lesson 2 Goal: Get to feel comfortable with Quick Fix and
Adjustment Layers.
Task: Use Quick Fix to improve on Beckham’s page 24
example. Use Adjustment Layers to
correct Beckham’s page 32 image. If time
permits, work on other Beckham images.
Lesson 3 Goal: You should begin to feel comfortable taking
apart images and making adjustments to each segment.
Task: Work on the image: Parasail.jpg. Here are some ideas for modification: Try to straighten the horizon. Improve the overall contrast and
brightness. Isolate and enhance the sky. Isolate and sharpen Pat. Isolate the chute and play with H/S/L.
If you find you have extra time try to cut
out the girl from the image kimono girl a.jpg.
Once you have a copy on the clipboard you might try to paste it into the
scene called Ocean.jpg. I have made this
task easier for you by scaling both pictures to approximately 4.5” by 6.0”.
Lesson 4 Goal: You should be able to improve on portraits
you take. In this session you will
retouch the picture of Mike’s younger brother, Keith.
Task: Use the same workflow we used in class with
the image of Mike. You will use the
image of Keith, Keith.jpg. Start by
isolating the subject and remove him from the background. Next “heal” Keith’s acne. Remove any highlights from the picture. Do not sharpen the eyes as the glasses make
this very hard to do. Add an interesting
background to the final picture.
Lesson 5 Goal: To master some additional image altering
techniques.
Task: You will want to exercise extraction,
perspective correction, and faux depth of field techniques.
Lesson 6 Goal: To be able to recreate the silk screen effect.
Task: Load the photograph SilkLight.jpg into
PSE. Starting with the sky, select broad
areas of the image and create a layer via copy.
Choose a color and “paint bucket” that color into the area. Be careful with the windows of the lighthouse. Select the windows before you do the body of
the lighthouse. Then when selecting the
body, exclude the painted widows with the Magic Wand by area subtraction.
Notes
for Lesson 1
Intro Introduce the course as a whole.
Objectives Explain the objectives for the entire
course. Point out that this is just a
small subset of PSE. There is a lot that
we do not have time to get into; image organization for example. PSE is a really big program. The objectives are the things I want you to
be able to do after taking this course.
Outline Outline for the entire course. The slide lists the topic of each lesson.
Lesson 1 Explain what we are going to do
tonight. This is the lesson 1 outline.
Meet Introduce myself and give a brief biography. Ask the students to introduce
themselves. Show how I have used
photography in my career. Spend some time
justifying my approach to teaching.
Objectives Display the objectives for tonight. Note that we have accomplished a few of them
already!
Course CD There
are restrictions on the use of the class images on the CD. Go over what is on the CD. Beckham’s material is under copyright, mine
is not.
Starting PSE Show how you can start PSE by the icon, or by
any graphic file type that has been tied to PSE. Use the slide of the desktop to illustrate
starting any program including PSE. Explain
version 5.0.
Editor Explain what to do if the Editor
does not come up. Workspace is a new PSE
term for the Editor window. It has two
tabs: Full Edit and Quick Fix.
Preferences Briefly explain some of the preferences
and how to set them. Doing a general
reset back to the factory defaults. Talk
about PSE “remembering” of the defaults and why this is both good and bad.
Workspace Look at the basics of the Editor’s
workspace. Tour the workspace geography: We will mention (briefly here): A. Menu bar,
D. Shortcuts bar., Workspace buttons (tabs), B. Tool box, E. Options bar, C.
Photo bin, F. Palettes, and H. Palette bin.
Note that the letters refer to the PSE manual page 27.
Workflow Workflow is a term that refers to the
process of taking an image and producing a final print. Here are the basics. The first file to work on should take no
adjustments. Use OceanView.jpg as a
demonstration file. We need to open the
file in the PSE editor, change it from the camera size to the print size, and
print same. Most workflow will be more
complex, but we need to start somewhere.
Open File | Open to select your image. This was done earlier such that the tour had
an image loaded.
Adjustments There are things we could do to this image,
but at this point we will bypass adjustment and move right on to resizing the
image.
Resizing First we will discuss the basics so
you will have to take it some things “on faith.” Everyone’s camera is different, so some of
these rules will have to change. Without
explaining resolution now, I assume your picture, as it comes from the camera
or scanner is fairly large with respect to pixels. I shoot all of my images at 2000 by 3008
pixels. This means that the picture
comes into PSE as a 6.667” by 10.027” @ 300 ppi image. Clearly this would fit on a “letter size”
piece of paper (8½ by 11), but it would be nice for the image to fill the paper
save a ¼” boarder.
Image | Resize is the process we want to
execute. I am going to enlarge the width
of the picture to 8” and accept that the height is going to exceed 10.5”. In the next step I will crop the picture
taking off a bit of the sky. Therefore
set the width to 8.0”. Make sure that
the Constrain Proportions checkbox is checked.
This will force the height to 12.032”.
Crop by cut I typically crop by using the rectangular
selection tool in concert with cut ‘n paste.
While there is the Cropping tool, it is fairly limited and we will be
using selection all of the time, so we might as well get used to using the
Selection tool.
Click on the Selection tool and set the Mode
to Fixed Size. Make the dimensions of
the selection 8 by 10.5. Click anywhere
in the image and the selection is made.
Note how you can move the selection.
Make sure you are removing sky.
Next do Edit | Cut to remove the image. Close down, but do not save the
original. Cut placed the image on the
Windows clipboard. To place it in the
workspace command: File | New | Image From Clipboard.
Blank image In order to have the white boarder we could
just print the image, but I like the step of creating a letter sized image. Then you can select, copy, and paste. Select | All to define the image and Edit
| Copy to
place the image on the clipboard. Create
a new active image by File | New | Blank File. The Preset is Letter, Color Mode is RGB
color, and
the Background Contents is White. When OK is pressed a blank image is placed on
the workspace. Edit
| Paste
will lay the image on this blank page.
Printing The “finished” picture is now ready
for printing. [Note: OceanView.psd is
the image after resizing] File
| Print invokes
the PSE printing window. Nothing needs
to be changed here. Press the Print button
and you will bring up your printer’s driver. Everyone’s printer is different. This driver is for my printer, the Canon
S9000. Choose the paper type to match
the one you are using. Print your
picture.
Rotate In order to demonstrate image
rotation I am going to use Beckham’s raccoon as he did not supply the bird he
used on p. 29. [Note, in a day or so I am going to
replace Beckham’s image with one of my own.] The key to an accurate rotation is to have a
baseline to match. Use the grids to provide
a horizontal baseline. We will put the
raccoon’s eyes on this line. View
| Grids
turns on the grid lines. [If the grids
are the wrong size it can be set with Edit | Preferences |
Grid] Image | Rotate | Custom 11° to the left will do
it. I had to play around to get the 11°
alteration just right. A better way is
by Transform.
To start the process do: Image
| Transform | Free Transform. As you
start into this procedure you will get a warning message about creating a
layer. We will talk about layers in
depth over the next few sessions. For
now just accept the new layer with the default name. When you move the cursor outside of the image
it turns into a linked arrow. By
dragging it around you rotate the image.
To finish the transform you must click the green check mark. A number of tools work this way so be on the
lookout for these green check marks.
Once rotation has been done, by either
method, you need to crop the picture or it will not be square. Use the Selection Rectangle in Fixed Aspect
Ratio mode. This will make sure that you
end up with a picture that will fit in an 8½ by 11 print. Select, Cut, and Paste the new image. Resize the image to 8 by 10½ as we did
earlier.
It
is important to understand what enlarging and reducing an image means. These terms refer to the pixel dimensions of
the image and not the page size of the printed image. On this picture we are not changing the ppi
resolution so an increase in document size is the same thing as an increase in
pixel dimensions. When you are enlarging
an image, as we are here, you get a better looking image if you use Bicubic
Smoother to Resample Image. On the other
hand, if you are reducing the size of the image choose Bicubic Sharper.
If, however, your camera produced a 72 ppi
image with a much larger document size you have to be careful. My Olympus C-750 will give you images with a
smaller pixel size owing to its smaller sensor.
But, the pixels are arrayed such that the document size is larger. Here is an example: If I had taken this shot with the C-750 the
pixel dimensions would have been 1520 by 2288.
The document size would have been 21.111” by 31.778” @ 72 ppi. You might think that we would be reducing
this image to get a document size of 8.0” by 12.042 @ 300 ppi, but you would be
wrong! When you entered those dimensions
and look at the pixel size the new values are 2400 by 3613, almost the same as
the Nikon pixel sizes. We are actually
enlarging the image by adding pixels.
Therefore we would use Bicubic Smoother resampling in this case too.
Notes
for Lesson 2
Homework There are three things that need to be
covered with respect to homework. First,
we must deal with people who cannot get their prints produced at home. Next, we can devote some time to the student’s
own images. Finally, we need to handle
questions from the Beckham book. Be
careful not to get too deep into book questions that you jeopardize class time.
Enhance This is the second step in our
workflow. Last week I was suggesting to
you that the first step was resizing your print. Now it is time to improve upon the basic
photo. We will begin with a shot that
does not need a great deal of enhancement.
Quick Fix The Quick Fix tab in PSE 5.0 is a new
feature. It combines in one place all of
the automatic photo repair tools. It is
a great place to begin our study of PSE for photographers. You should use Smart Fix or Lighting
& Color. Sharpen is best left to the
more detailed corrections in Editor. If
Auto does not do it for you, it is better to return to the Editor tab and proceed
by “hand.”
Smart Fix Smart Fix is the one stop shop for
automatic correction. It is often the
first thing to try. Push the Auto button
and see what happens. If you like what
you see, you are home free. If you do
not like it: hit the reset button to undo everything.
As
it turns out Smart Fix does very little for Roger except make him a tad more
red. This is not what Roger needs. We want to remove some of the shadows in his
face, so hit the Reset and start over.
Lighting Quick Fix is fine, but it really does
not do a great job. For this we need to
start to investigate real image enhancements. Lighting is the study of contrast and
brightness. Switch into the Editor, from
which we will spent just about all of our time.
Following our workflow we will correct lighting and I will assume that
you did not go into Quick Fix (or that Quick Fix did not do the job for you).
To
best understand lighting we should start with black and white. Let’s take photography back 100 years to a
time before color imaging. Here is the
same picture showing extremes of contrast and brightness.
Histogram Histograms are a plot of an image’s tonal
distribution. If the following is a bit
too technical, you can safely “zone out” for a few minutes and not miss anything
practical. The horizontal axis shows the
pixel brightness. The darkest value (black
= 0) is on the left and the lightest value (white = 255) is on the right. This is a range from deep shadows to bright
highlights. In a B&W image the darkest
value (0) is black and the lightest value (255) is white. This defines 256 columns in the plot.
The
vertical axis shows the number of pixels having the same value. Thus column one represents the number of pure
black (in B&W) pixels. It is easier
to talk in terms of black and white rather than shadow and highlight so I am
going to use those terms for a minute.
Later, as we talk about color I will return to the more proper
terms.
I
like to keep the histogram palette visible when I first look at an image in
PSE. The Levels tool allows you to make
adjustments to the histogram. We will
discuss these adjustments shortly. A
good image with a pleasing balance of contrast will have pixels at every column
position. The picture of Pat in this
slide has a pretty good balance although it misses pure black and pure white.
Now
let’s consider some problems. If most of
the pixels are bunched up at the left the image is lacking detail in the
shadow. If they are bunched up at the
right the detail is missing in the highlight area. If the information is not in the image, no
amount of processing is going to bring them back.
In
the Distribution Shapes slide, the histogram under the image shows patterns. The low contrast image has the pixels bunched
in the center of the graph, indicating no black or white but just shades of
gray. The high contrast shot has the distribution
well spread out and the lack of detail in the image at both in the black and
white.
The
brightness study is different. The dark
image has all of the pixels shifted left as you would expect. The light picture is just the opposite, the
pixels are shifted right. Now I doctored
the base line image to demonstrate these concepts.
Adjustments It is instructive to explain how I produced
the five images of Pat. The full color
picture was the starting point. The
first thing I did was to remove all of the color information: Enhance
| Convert to Black & White. I saved
this in a file called BaseLine.jpg. I
then created four copies of this image:
C-40.jpg, C+40.jpg, B-40.jpg, and B+40.jpg.
These are the four corner images that you see on the slide. Finally, I made the adjustments using the Brightness
& Contrast tool: Enhance | Adjust Lighting |
Brightness/Contrast. This slide shows the B+40
window.
Final Now, how do we use the Levels tool to improve the
full color picture of Pat? As I was
suggesting to you earlier, the picture is not really a bad one. We could stretch the distribution a bit to
add a tad more contrast and I would like to brighten the midtones just a
little. By using the term midtones, I am
now reverting to the full color language rather than black and white. From here on in we will talk about shadows,
highlights, and midtones. To do this we
are going to use the Levels tool. From
now on we will always use this tool to make lighting adjustments.
Invoke
the Levels tool by entering: Enhance | Adjust Lighting | Levels. Notice the three sliders just below the
histogram. These make the adjustments to
the shadows, highlights, and midtones.
They are a touch counter intuitive to use, so take careful notes
here. The control on the left, the black
triangle adjusts shadows. We want to
stretch the distribution to add contrast so we are going to clip off some of
the dark pixels. You move the slider to
the right and the image gets darker.
What is happening is some of the pixels which were not the deepest
shadow (black if you will) are redefined as the darkest (or value 0). Said another way, the pixels in column 20 are
now in column 0 when I move the left slider to 20.
Next
we do the opposite with the highlight slider on the right. Moving this to the left redefines the high
end of the distribution. Now the image
gets darker as the brightest highlight is no longer 255, but 247. What we have done now is redefined the range
20 – 247 and stretched this out so it now fills the entire span 0 – 255.
The
midtones slider works as a factor based around 1.0 rather than a specific
column number. It shifts the center of
the distribution. It too is somewhat
backwards. If we want the midtones
darker we move the slider to the right.
We want the midtones lighter so we move the slider to the left. OK, so it is confusing so let us do by hand
what the program does when you push the Auto buttons in Quick Fix. We are now returning to the practical and
leaving the land of the technical.
The
first thing you do is move the shadow and highlights sliders toward the center
of the distribution. Keep looking at the
image after moving both sliders a bit.
You want the sliders to just get into the mass of pixels. Then move the midtones slider left or right
until the picture looks just right. I
used the highlight area on Pat’s right cheek to keep the contrast from washing
out the light areas. I used the shadow
on her left cheek to keep definition in the dark areas. As you become familiar with the Levels tool
you will find it is very useful for tuning up lighting. This is the second step in our work flow.
Burn/Dodge Another way to adjust lighting in a small area,
like a face, is to burn and dodge. These
terms came from the B&W darkroom where they were applied to the negative in
the enlarger. The dodge tool is used
more often. If you had a clear spot on
the negative too much light reached the print causing it to go dark. In digital photography a face crossed by
shadows is too dark. In the enlarger if
you blocked some of the light in a small area you could lighten the print up a
bit. You would construct a lollypop
looking tool and shake it between negative and the print to block the
light. This was called dodging.
We will use the dodge tool to remove
shadows. The first issue we need to
address is where this tool is to be found.
It is next to the last tool in the toolbar, but it will be showing the
sponge tool by default at first. Click
on it and the dodge tool will be among the hidden tools in the Option Bar. Select it.
A good starting configuration would be a Size: 40 px., Range: Midtones,
and an Exposure: 30%. Work slowly.
Adjustment We are going to cram a lot of PSE into a
few minutes here. If you do not
Layer get it all, don’t fret. There will be plenty more discussion on
selection, selection tools, and layers in future lessons. Explain the “onion peeling” method of
development. Layers are like clear
plastic sheets that stack up above the original image. You can place things from the base image on
the layer and work on them independently from the original image. The layers concept is used often and it is a
critical skill you need to master.
Often when taking pictures of people in high
light settings, like this skiing scene, you and/or the camera need to make a
compromise on the exposure. Here, the
background is fine, but Bob is in shadow.
We will use the technique outlined in Beckham, page 32, to effect this
change.
Create an Adjustment Layer to manipulate
Levels. Name it Bob if you want. Move the midtones slider to the left to
brighten the picture. You could change
the shape of the histogram if you want to, but it probably is unnecessary.
Once the figure is set, choose a soft
brush. Start with a brush size of 500
and “chip” away the layer with a black foreground color. As you remove the “paint” on the layer you see
the original image below. As you get
closer to Bob, switch to a smaller brush.
I used 15 close in, and 100 a little bit further out.
Once
you have a pleasing image, you should flatten out the adjustment layer. Layers | Flatten will do that for you.
Improving Like other techniques PSE gives you a
great many tools to make color
Color corrections. We
will touch on a few of them and spend some time with one of them. Removing color casts can often be handled
very skillfully by the automatic correction button. Hue & Saturation is the standard color
tool. We can even use the color channels
of the Levels tool. Finally, we will
briefly mention layers once again in connection with color correction.
Color casts One of the “issues” that the automatic button
of PSE handles well is dealing with color casts. Sometimes the digital camera is fooled and
you end up with a color cast. Snow
scenes are notorious for having a gray or blue cast as in this picture of Pat
in Park City, UT. Bring up the image in
Quick Fix, press the Auto button, and most color casts are gone.
Hue & Sometimes color correction requires
a tad more intervention. The tool
Saturation for this job is found: Enhance
| Color Adjustment | Hue & Saturation. The
image here was scanned from a slide. The
rich fall colors are somewhat washed out.
We need to make them more vivid.
While there are lots more to describe about the Hue & Saturation
dialog box, let’s just make a few simple adjustments. What you see in the picture is after 3 small
adjustments to the Reds, Yellows, and Greens.
Here are the adjustments that were made:
|
Color
|
Hue
|
Saturation
|
|
Reds
|
-20
|
+20
|
|
Yellows
|
-5
|
+20
|
|
Greens
|
0
|
+40
|
Layers Once again we are going to use the
Adjustment Layer to restore the guys in the boat to the original color. This time we will form the Adjustment Layer
with Hue & Saturation. Layers
| New Adjustment Layer | Hue & Saturation are the menu choices. You can name the layer Color or just let it
take the default name. Repeat the three
color modifications as we did with the picture as a whole on the layer. Then, as we did before, use a brush ( the 100
pixel soft brush works nicely) with the black foreground color to “chip away”
at the layer so as to reveal the original color of the boat on the base (background)
level. To really see the hole in the
adjustment layer you might turn off the “eye” icon on the background layer.
Bit color In an attempt to get “Fall” color into
the trees, we have been shifting the hue yellow into the orange. In this much enlarged view (600%), we shifted
the Yellow by H: -20 and S: +20. Take a
look at the pixels around X: 0.183 Y: 0.897.
The original was (R: 196, G: 168, B: 100). The transformed pixels came out as (R: 202,
G: 145, B: 80). By depressing green and
blue we get a much richer red/orange.
Notes
for Lesson 3
Marquee We have used rectangular selection
before. Review the three modes of use:
Normal, Fixed Aspect Ratio, and Fixed Size.
Once the selection has been defined you can drag it anywhere on the workspace,
although you would rarely move a selection without placing in a layer. The elliptical selection is rarely used. The area it selects is an ellipse; however
the bounding box is the same rectangle you have just seen in action. Note that an ellipse with a fixed aspect
ratio of 1:1 is a circle.
Magic Wand Use the New Selection icon to start the
process. It is always wise to look at
this icon first as it is “remembered” from use to use and is often in the Add
or Subtract position. Next set the
Tolerance (0 – 255) to a low value for selecting colors very similar to the
clicked pixel or a high value for a large range of values. If the Magic Wand tool is to be used at all,
low values are the most useful. If that
does not isolate pixels, consider using another selection tool. The selection is based on color and tone.
With all the selection tools you can make a
first selection and then add to it with another selection. You can also subtract from it with another
selection. Don’t forget you can zoom in
on the workspace with <Ctrl>+.
This is useful with fine selections.
Paint Once we have isolated the sky we can ham-handedly
color it blue using the paint can tool.
This is not what we would usually do, but it gives you a good feeling
for layers and modifications to same. We
will actually this on purpose in lesson 6 to create a silk screen effect. Create a new layer with “New Layer via Copy.” Remember these steps because we will do this
time and time again from here on in.
Turn the lowest layer invisible by using the eye icon. Use the Paint Bucket tool with an extreme tolerance
of 255. Pick a foreground color of blue,
and click anywhere in the layer. Notice
that some white shows through the trees.
A really useful way to “fix” the sky is with
another image of puffy white clouds on a royal blue sky. The white showing through the trees would
blend into these low lying clouds. It
would be good to take a number of cloud images with blue sky above them and
make a cloud and sky “library.” The one
that would work best here is having a cloud in the lower left hand corner so
that the white that shows through the trees is taken for the cloud.
Lasso Another fix I have used with some success is to add
something to a picture. Look at this
shot of the Ritz Carlton hotel. It would
be a better picture if it had some foreground.
I am going to cut the jetski out of one shot and paste it into the beach
in front of the Ritz. The Polygon Lasso
just connects straight line segments with left clicks. I am going to use the Magnetic Lasso tool to
do the cutting. This tool hugs the boundary
of pixels with differing contrast. It
has three parameters that may need “tuning.”
Width – This is the distance in
pixels from which an edge will be detected.
A good tip is to turn on Caps Lock to see this width as a circle. A value of 10 worked well for this picture,
but the contrast differential will define this value. Too little contrast and this tool will not
work well at all.
Edge Contrast – A higher edge
contrast detects only very high contrast differences. The default 50% worked well in this setting.
Frequency – This value is the rate
at which the tool sets fastening points.
It is a range between 0 and 100.
The high the number the more often it will set these tie points
automatically. Of course, every time you
left click you set a user defined fastening point.
It is useful to use any lasso tool at a high
zoom factor, so this trick will help you move the image while lassoing. If you hold the spacebar down the Hand
repositioning tool becomes active and you can move the workspace and then
continue to lasso. You can also change
to the Polygon Lasso in the middle of a Magnetic Lasso run by Alt-Click.
When the lasso almost surrounds the object a
double click will close the selection.
Once that is done copy ‘n paste the jetski on to the sand. You will need to do a little resizing and
repositioning.
Artifact Sometimes you need to remove defects
from your image. If you use a
Removal film scanner, cardboard dust is
usually a problem. When you scan a damaged
print you often have cause to remove some a defect and replace it with “good”
pixels. The principal use of artifact removal
for photographers is to erase some distracting element in the photograph. Look at the telephone wires in this image.
Healing Brush When you want to replace “bad” pixels with
random similar pixels the Healing Brush is the best tool. A telephone wire against the clear sky is a
good example. The older Clone Stamp tool
will also do the trick, but not nearly as well as it exactly copies pixels from
the source area while the Healing Brush blends them. Do not confuse the Healing Brush with the
Spot Healing Brush discussed next week.
Clone Stamp Use this tool when you want to copy pixels
exactly. Notice how I duplicated the
bolts at the front of the engine. A hard
edge brush was selected. The clone
source was set to just cover the original bolt.
<Alt>left click will set the source. The destination was an area where the edges
would be hard to see in the finished image.
You can “paint” with the clone tool to copy an irregular shape, but
there are better ways to duplicate and paste objects.
Red eye The best way to deal with red eye is
not to use a flash in the first place.
Note that I teach a course in digital photography where I rail against
the use of flash photography. If you get
red eye, the Red Eye Removal tool works well.
Choose the tool. Click the red
area of one eye. Then click the other
eye, and it is done.
Dust If the problem with dust or mild scratches is not too
severe there is a repair that is quicker than the Healing Brush. It is the Dust & Scratch tool. Select the area with the artifact you wish to
remove with the Rectangular Selection tool.
Invoke the tool with Filter | Noise | Dust & Scratches. Sadly, the Adobe documentation does not tell
you how to use the parameters of this tool. However, a Radius of 5 and a
Threshold of 0 does the trick. Beckham
explains that moving the Threshold above 0 reduces the softening effect of the
filter. You can really see the action of
this tool on the scratch on the Stop sign.
By keeping the Threshold at 0 and raising the Radius to 8 you can remove
the scratch entirely. However, my
feeling about this defect causes me to want to use the Healing Brush.
Sharpening One of the last tools to be employed in my
workflow is the Sharpening tool. My
longest lens almost always leaves the subject just slightly out of sharp
focus. Additionally, in camera
processing of digital images often blend pixels leaving the resultant image in
need of a bit of retouching.
This picture of a Marlin’s baseball player
could use a bit of sharpening magic. Now
that we are lasso experts, we employ the Magnetic Lasso to isolate the player. If we did not do this we would sharpen the
stands and ruin the depth of field effect that adds to the player “pop” in this
image. Once the player is isolated, bring
up the tool by: Enhance | Adjust Sharpness. Use the Hand tool to move the preview window
to an area of high definition, like the fish logo. The Amount parameter tells the program just
how much sharpening to perform. I go for
small amounts at first like the 110% in this example. The Radius determines the number of pixels surrounding
the edge pixels affected by sharpening.
Usually this number is smaller than the 25 used here, but I felt this
image needed a healthy slug. You should
use the Remove parameter called Gaussian Blur for most images. Lens Blur and Motion Blur have their uses, but
are used less frequently.
Sky Blue sky would help this picture of Pat in front of
the Great Buddha of Kamakura. As we
noted earlier, you should create a collection of sky shots with white cloud in
the lower edge of the image. Make a
layer of the picture. Use the Magic Wand
tool to select most of the sky. Delete
the sky and check to see that it is gone by making the background layer invisible. Do not worry about the “old” sky remaining in
the trees. Create a blank layer just
above the background. Paste the sky on
to this blank layer. Select this layer
and make all other layers invisible. Use
the Move tool to position the sky such that the cloud is in the tree. Now we will get rid of the boundary “line” of
unerased pixels. Use the Eraser tool on
the top layer with a small soft brush.
Enlarge the image so a 5 pixel brush looks big. Cut away the offending pixels. Do not use this technique around hair. Hair is usually not a problem anyway.
Workflow In general these six steps are what I
use with the normal image. Obviously, if
you are making a radical change to your picture, like we did by adding the
jetski, there will be other steps. These
six will cover the tuning up of any image to make a very decent print.
Notes
for Lesson 4
Professional I wish I could tell you that after taking
this course you could do work like this.
These are my great grandparents who went on an adventure to the Klondike
in 1898. The picture had been folded
into a book and is now in two pieces.
After restoration a high quality print is hanging in my bedroom and a
fairly large TIFF file is on a CD.
Isolation Often it is useful to remove the
subject from the background. Even if you
are not going to replace the background we will want to work on a layer so our
selection technique will be a skill you will want to master. Start with the Magnetic Lasso in the high
contrast area of the image. Work in
small sections using the Add to Selection feature. To get to the edge of the workspace use the
Rectangular Marquee tool. If you cannot
get to the exact edge, do not fret. We
will trim the image a small amount after isolation.
Lasso Once the entire figure has been selected, including
the little area beneath the sleeve, you will execute an Inverse process: Select | Inverse will get you there. This isolates Mike rather than the
background.
Cut ‘n paste With Mike selected, cut the image to the
Clipboard. Form a new image: File
| New | Blank File. Then paste Mike into the new
letter sized picture. If your selection
was not perfect around the edges, use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select
and cut Mike from inside his image.
Delete the layer you just exhumed Mike from and paste again. Now move him into position flush with the
lower left hand corner.
Notice that one layer is Mike and the other is
a white background. In the end we will
place a nice textured backdrop behind Mike by inserting a layer between the
white and our boy.
Skin I chose Mike, in his late teens, and his brother
Keith later on, because they have issues with acne. Look at this close up to see what we need to
repair. Create a new layer by copying
the Mike layer. Enlarge the view. Use the Healing Brush tool with a soft edge
about 15 pixels in diameter. Hold the
Alt key down and left click to define the source or donor pixels. Then paint over the destination area.
Spot healing A better technique for small repairs, like
acne, is the Spot Healing Brush. You do
not select the source pixel area. Choose
a soft brush a little bigger than the blemish.
The Create Texture option seems to work best for this type of
defect. It uses the pixels within the
selection area to repair the blemish. A
simple left click executes the tool.
Teeth Just like the example in Beckham p. 94 we will remove
the highlights on Mike’s teeth. Create a
new layer: Layer | Duplicate Layer. I could use the Spot Healing Brush as
demonstrated above, but I am going to use the older Clone tool as Beckham does.
Eyes In a similar manner we will follow Beckham into
sharpening the eyes. Create two new
layers: Layer | Duplicate Layer. I
keep building up layers on the original, but you can flatten out your work as
you go along. The reason for two is we
are going to do “violence” to the under-lying layer and I do not want to do
this to the “teeth” layer. The two
layers are “eyes” and “eyes over-layer.”
Select the “eyes” layer. Now
radically sharpen the “eyes” layer: Enhance | Unsharp Mask. I used the suggested Amount: 200%, Radius: 2
pixels, and Threshold: 0 levels. Note
the Radius parameter defines the “edge” that gets sharpened. Threshold values determine how different
pixels must be before they are considered “edge.” A Threshold of 0 means all pixels are
considered in the image.
Move to the top layer, “eyes
over-layer.” Use the Eraser tool with a
small soft brush to poke a hole in the top layer in the eye area to reveal the
sharpened image of the layer below.
Sometimes it is useful to make all of the layers below invisible so you
can see the developing hole more clearly.
Backdrop Let’s add one last touch, a professional
backdrop. Select the lowest layer. Go to the Artwork and Effects palette. Select “Backgrounds” and “Textures” in the
dropdown boxes. Choose the texture
called Patina and apply it to the lowest level layer. We want to blur this texture quite a bit, so:
Filter
| Blur | Gaussian Blur. A Radius: 35 should do
it. Next we want to brighten up the
backdrop so: Enhance | Lighting |
Brightness/Contrast. A Brightness setting of +35
works is a good value.
One last point should be mentioned here. This is good enough for a class room
illustration. However, we did not use
too much care in cutting Mike out of the original image. Therefore, there are some boarder pixels
which would receive some “loving” hand crafting were this to be passed off as
professional work.
Restore The slide explains the steps toward
restoration and the order of the workflow.
Although I am not going to explain how to use the tool, I used the Magic
Extractor tool to isolate the subjects.
You can use the same procedure that we used on Mike to isolate subjects. Most of the damage repair was done with the
Spot Healing Brush. Sometimes I used the
Clone tool. I am not sure at this point
how much red eye I should repair. The
Red Eye Removal tool cannot get it right.
Levels Use the shadow and highlights
slider to bound the distribution. Then
darken the midtones a touch. This has
the effect of reducing the fading. Next
adjust the hue and saturation by bringing up the color adjustment: Enhance
| Color Adjustment | Hue/Saturation. Move the Hue
slightly into the magenta by -2. Push up
the Saturation by 15.
Eyes Red eye tools do not work here because there is not
enough definition in the eyes. Let’s
approach it in a different way. Create
two layers here. Drastically shift the
lower layer into the blue range with the hue slider at -95. Chip away at the upper level in the center of
the eyes with 60% opacity.
Highlights Do the same thing with the harsh
highlights. Create two layers. Use the Clone brush to eliminate the
highlights. Then chip away at the upper
layer to reveal the skin tones below. I
had success with a 40% opacity setting as I did not want to do away with the
highlights entirely.
Notes
for Lesson 5
Technique There are a fair number of other
techniques that can be useful to photographer.
In this lesson we will discuss a number of them, although as we have
been saying all along, PSE is a very big program and we can only focus on a few
items.
Magic You have already visited the Magic Wand tool. It is one of the many color
Selection differential selection tools. The Magic Selection Brush allows you to
combine the ease of use of the Magic Wand with the area defining nature of a
brush. With Magic Wand you click on a
pixel and it finds like pixels of the same color, give or take whether
contiguous is selected. You have to keep
playing with the tolerance control to get the right tonal range correct. With Magic Selection Brush it will only find
pixels covered with “paint.” Tolerance
is gained by what color the “painted” pixels are.
Scribble over the colors you want to select
and the red foreground color will paint the image. When you release the mouse button, that color
will be selected. You may have some
non-contiguous items selected. They are
easy to remove with polygon lasso in subtract mode.
Extractor The Magic Extractor both selects an
object and extracts it from the image onto a layer. There is no tool icon for this feature. It is launched in its own window by: Image
| Magic Extractor. You place foreground red dots
(or scribbles) on what you want to extract.
Blue background dots define what you want to remove. The Preview button lets you see what will happen. Clicking OK extracts the image and makes it a
layer. Note that the background is gone
once this procedure is executed. Usually
this is fine because the image is often going to be pasted into another
background.
Painting For artistic reasons you might want
to paint over a large section of a photograph.
We will make good use of painting next week when we transform a
photograph into a silk screen. Pat had
this snapshot taken of herself during an Ikebana class on our trip to Japan in
2004. While this image will not win any
photography contests, it serves to illustrate how you can mold an image into
something better with PSE. It would be
nice if Pat’s T shirt matched the color of the flowers. Here is how it is done.
Duplicate the image into a new layer: Layer | Duplicate Layer. Use the Magic Extractor tool to isolate and
extract the shirt. You might have to
“tune up” the edges of the shirt. Next,
set the Blend Mode to Hue. This allows
the texture to show through the paint we are about to apply. While working on the background level, use
the Color Picker tool to find a nice shade of pink from the flowers. Change to the shirt layer. Use the Paint tool to flood the shirt with
the pink color. Use a Tolerance of 255 to
color everything.
Vignettes I seem to have an issue with Beckham
page 122. I could not make his procedure
work for me. Load the picture of
Pat. Create a new layer from the
background layer, not a blank layer as Beckham suggests. With the Marquee tool draw an oval around the
head. You need not be too careful as you
can position the selection after it is drawn.
Go for a tad bigger oval than the head.
Invert the selection: Select | Inverse. Feather the selection about 25 pixels or
more: Select | Feather. This will fade out the vignette. Choose the foreground color. White is the favorite for vignettes. Use the Paint Bucket tool to flood the layer
with color. Once again invert the selection. Now delete the selected area. The face from the background shows through.
Perspective This technique is usually reserved for
pictures of buildings take way too close as a means of making them appear not
to be falling over. Here I took a
picture of a silk screen painting from an angle to reduce, but not eliminate
glare. View the grid lines: View
| Grid Lines. We have to dramatically “shrink” the left
hand side of the image. Bring up the
perspective transformation tool: Image | Transform | Perspective. Notice the 8 “handles.” Click and drag the upper left hand handle and
move it downward. Notice how the left
hand side of the print shrinks. We want
to extract the silk screen print and not the frame, so match the grid lines
with the outside edges of the print and not the frame. Try to get the top and bottom edges as
parallel as possible. You will notice
that the camera was a little below the center of the picture so we will move
the center point of view upwards. Grab
the left center handle and move it up just a tad. This will give you the least amount of perspective
error. Now cut out the image using the
rectangular Marquee selection tool. In
the end you still have some glare on the picture. Using a technique we will discuss next week
you can fix this with some selective painting using the Paint Bucket tool.
B & W It is fairly simple to convert an
image to black and white. First size the
picture to its final dimensions and resolution.
PSE 5.0 has a separate feature for the conversion: Enhance
| Convert to Black and White. This procedure
will execute a program that will allow you to alter how the colors will be transformed
into gray scale. It is like putting a
colored filter in front of a camera loaded with B & W film. Once you find a pleasing look press OK and
commit the image to B & W. After it
is in B & W, you might want to adjust the levels for even more alteration
of the zonal values.
Faux DOF You can use Gaussian Blur to create a
faux Depth Of Field (DOF) effect. For
the quick and dirty, just cut out the central figure and blur the background. For a better effect select 4 or 5 distances
and scale the blur effect.
Proceed like the simple, but only blur a
radius of 1.0. Next make a simple
selection of those elements close to the subject. Feather the edge of the selection: Select
| Feather. Make the feather about 10 pixels. Invert the selection: Select
| Inverse. Create a new layer by way of Cut:
Layer | New | Layer via Cut.
Repeat the process by selecting outward. Feather the selection by 20 pixels. Invert the selection. And create the new
layer via Cut. Finally, just blur what
is left of the image to about a radius of 12.
Notes
for Lesson 6
Direction This lesson starts you out in a new
direction. Up to now we have focused on
making your photographs better. Now we
are going to transform your pictures to a new art form.
Transformed There is no need to go any
farther. Creating and displaying great
photographs is a fabulous end all in itself.
I, however, have a desire to go further.
Come with me into to the “world transformed.” Most of what we are going to do today is to
create faux painting. Of the seemingly
endless techniques we are going to investigate three: 1/ Silk screen. 2/ Water color. 3/ Poster paint.
Recipe Up to this point we have tried to
focus on real technique education. There
are better books than Beckham, but they are too deep for a course like this
one. I have tried to be the link to the
knowledge. The advantages of a knowledge
approach are obvious. You end up knowing
“why” things happen. By now you should
have a very good command of how layers work and why you need to use them. The old saying about the differences between
giving someone a fish and teaching them to fish is at the core of the knowledge
approach. Once you have this base you
can go out and buy a book on PSE, like Andrews, and go so much further on your
own.
However, there is something to be said about
the recipe approach that is often overlooked.
By not delving into the complex details you can learn to execute some
very difficult procedures. By following
a recipe you can get results a lot faster.
You do this by “standing on the shoulders of giants.” There are a lot of PSE giants out there. The faux serigraph on the right is Pat in the
style of Andy Warhol. I learned how to
do this from an article in Adobe Photoshop Elements Techniques magazine. This, together with their on-line community
has helped me master PSE.
Silk screen The technique is close to the serigraph
just displayed. It works best on images
that have large expanses that could be painted with one color. You will not get, nor will you want, fine
detail. The workflow is Select, Copy via
Layer, pick color, and paint. This is
repeated with each new area. To save on
RAM you can flatten after every cycle.
Note, there is a Posterize tool, but in my experience it works very
poorly.
Select Most of the time the Polygon Lasso
works best. Enlarge the image to visualize
the lasso’s path. Small areas of well
defined contrast can be selected with the Magic Wand. You do not have to be too careful around the
picture’s edge as a quick crop at the end will fix that. If you are sloppy with selection you can
always add/subtract areas.
Copy After selection use Layer via Copy to place the new
area over the background. To get a good
view of the area to be painted you should turn off the background layer. You can pick a color for the sky from an
existing color in the original image. If
you want to do this you need to make sure that the background is both visible
and is the active layer. Then you can
use the Color Picker (Eyedropper) to choose the color. There is no law saying the sky needs to be
blue. Set the color to anything you
wish.
Paint bucket Next, use the Paint Bucket tool to color in
the entire sky. Now you are ready to
select the next area. You do not have to
do every area. I chose to leave out the
shadow on the jib and a number of small areas.
Blend mode Because you often find Blend (or Blending)
mode in Beckham, we are going to take a brief diversion into this topic. But be warned, this is a very complex subject
and we could spend a couple of hours on it alone. When you have two layers directly on top of
one another you have the opportunity for layer color interaction. The normal behavior of a top layer is to
completely obscure the bottom layer. This can be modified by the action of the
Opacity slider. But there are color
interactions which can come into operations too.
Color
can be thought of as Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. As you remember from the Color Adjustment
feature, Hue is the shade of color be it red, green, blue, or any mixture
thereof. It is what we normally think of
as color when we ask a child: “what color is the sky?”
Saturation is the intensity of the color
running from gray to vivid. Without
getting into too much color theory, increasing saturation of red gets you the
most vivid hue until it is “fully saturated.”
Reducing saturation removes color until you get to gray for a hue other
than black or white. Adjust the hue or
saturation of black does nothing because it has no hue to change! In a similar manner, trying to adjust white
does no good because it is a mixture of all colors.
Luminance is the relative lightness of
darkness of the color. Adjusting the
luminance of a color light red will cause it to go to black or white. Increasing luminance will cause it to move
toward white, while decreasing it will tend to go to black. Black can have its luminance increased and it
will go to white, but it cannot have its luminance decreased because it is
already black. In a similar manner,
white can have its luminance decreased and go to black, but cannot have it
increased.
A few terms can be used when talking about
blending. The base color is the color of
the lower layer as defined by hue, saturation, and luminance. The blend color is the color of the top
layer. The resulting color is the final
color you will see after one of the treatments.
Let’s look at three possible ways to change the white stripes and stars
to green. Using the Magic Wand with a
Tol: 60, we isolate the desired areas.
Once again we remove them to by: Layer | Layer via Copy.
Apply color In order to show the effect more clearly we
will turn off the background layer. Now
set the foreground color to a nice vivid green (#00FF33). Apply the paint giving us a nice flat green
just like with the silk screen. Now we
turn the background on and we see that we have indeed turned white to green.
3 blend modes Now here comes the magic. What we are demonstrating is Normal Blend
Mode where the top layer completely obscures the bottom layer. If we shift the Blend Mode to Hue we start to
see texture in the waves of the flag.
This is because we are getting the hue from the top layer. The reason we don’t get much green is because
the saturation and luminance come from the base or bottom layer. What is the saturation of white? White!
What is the luminance of white?
White! The folds show up because
they are shades of brown and black and their saturation and luminance are
non-white.
Now look at the third flag. Here we have chosen a Blend Mode of
Color. This time we get both hue and
saturation from the top layer. The luminance
comes from the bottom. There is much
more green in this image because you only get white where base, or bottom, was
pure white. The folds are still there
because they are controlled by luminance and we still get that from the bottom
layer.
Watercolor One of the nicest “painterly” effects is
described on Beckham page 103.
Effect It is the watercolor effect. It is particularly well expressed if the
original photograph is composed of clear lines, simple subjects, and bright
colors. My example photo is not as good
as the balloons in the Beckham book, but I love playing with Monet’s water
lilies. This picture was taken at
Monet’s home in Giverny, France. This
demonstration illustrates a number of new techniques that can not only be used
in this effect, but in many others.
Included are edge finding, soft light blend mode, and the use of
pixilation. Before we get started you
will need to copy the background into a new layer.
Edge Many watercolor paintings are done over pen and ink
drawings. We will approach watercolor
using this vehicle. The technique of
finding an edge involves the Smart Blur feature, believe it or not. This function is buried with the blur
filters: Filter | Blur | Smart
Blur. You will want to use the Quality: High, and
the Mode: Edge Only. The Radius slider
informs PSE how far out to investigate for dissimilar pixels. In my water lilies I don’t want to go too far
out so I set Radius: 0.8. The Threshold
parameter determines how dissimilar the can be to be eliminated. I set the Threshold: 30. The careful use of these two parameters
determines how many edges the program will fine. Note, if you just wanted to create a line
drawing you could use this technique to create the lines.
Invert Since the edge finding technique
places white lines on a black background, we will want to invert this
effect. Release 5.0 of PSE moved this
function into the Filter menu so the path to this feature is: Filter
| Adjustments | Invert. If you wanted to do your own
silk screen effect, you might consider hand painting within the lines.
Soft Light Now we are going to introduce a new Blend
Mode, Soft Light. In the dropdown box in
the Layers Palette, select Blend Mode of Soft Light. This gives a nice pastel coloration to the
image. Here is how it works: The top layer, the line drawing is the blend
“color.” It is not color at all as it is
black and white. The base color is the
color of the underlying photograph. If
the blend color is less than 50% gray the result color is lightened. This is most of the image because the top
layer is almost all white. If the blend
color is greater than 50% gray (i.e. the black lines) the result color is darkened. In this case you can’t get any darker than
the black of the lines. You could stop
here and you have a very nice effect, but simulating brush strokes with blurred
pixilation is interesting. There are
other ways to get brush strokes and you might want to investigate other
filters.
Crystallize Change the focus to the background as
this is where all of the “paint” is
& Blur located. Bring up the Crystallize function: Filter | Pixelate | Crystallize. Set a fairly small Cell Size. I used Cell Size: 10. Now we should smooth out the effect with a
little Gaussian Blur: Filter
| Blur | Gaussian Blur. I took a pretty heavy hand at
this blurring: Radius: 10. You will want
to play with all of these values for your own images. Now you should flatten the image, print it,
and save it.
Painterly The third, and final, effect is
Beckham’s borrowed “painterly” effect.
Effect It is sort of the “paint by
numbers” look. I have chosen one of my
lighthouse images for this effort. It
has more sky than is recommended, but I will cut this off at the end when
improving the picture. I have prepared
the image lighthouse.jpg so as to be 300 ppi and 8.0 by 12.042 inches. The first step is to create three additional
layers on which to work. These will be
named:
Opacity layer #4
Color layer #3
Filter layer #2
Plastic wrap Turn off the visibility of the top two
layers such that you can see the work done on Filter layer #2. We are going to accentuate the highlight
areas to help in finding edges. To do
this the Plastic Wrap filter will be employed.
To do this: Filter | Artistic | Plastic Wrap. For my lighthouse I needed slightly different
values for the parameters of this filter:
Highlight Strength: 10
Detail: 6
Smoothness: 7
The Highlight Strength considers which pixels
are to be highlights. Beckham’s 15 was
too much for my image. The Detail
parameter smoothes or sharpens the selected highlights. The Smoothness affects the sharpness of the
highlight boundaries.
Cutout This filter is quite a bit like the
silk screen effect. It reduces the bit
level of the colors so that you get broad areas of a single hue, just like cut
out pieces of colored paper. It employs
the feature: Filter | Artistic | Cutout. The default parameters work quite well:
Number of Levels: 4
Edge Simplicity: 4
Edge Fidelity: 2
The number of levels is the color depth. Four bit color gives you 16 colors in each of
the color channels RGB. Note 24
is 16. The colors are chosen from all of
the colors in the image and reduced from the standard 8 bit color which has 256
in each of the channels RGB. Thus you
get fewer, larger areas of the same hue.
Edge Simplicity controls the area considered
a different color. Finally Edge Fidelity
controls the edges and their shape. Try
out different experiments using Cutout on your own pictures. You will be amazed at the transformations you
can obtain.
Color blend The two above steps pulled out much of the
color in the image as it redefined the areas that will make up the final
print. We need to take the color from
the original image and cast it back on the texture of the transformation. This is why we created layer 3 and called it:
Color layer #3. Turn on the visibility
of this layer and give it focus. In the
Layer Palette choose the Blend Mode: Color.
This will yield the Hue and Saturation from the Color Layer #3 and the
Luminance (and texture) from Filter Layer #2.
This means that the texture shows through just like on our flag demo.
Turn off the visibility of the Background
layer. We are going to merge layers 2
and 3. To do this: Layers
| Merge Visible. Now we have three layers:
Background, Color layer #3, and Opacity layer #4.
Opacity To return some, but not much, of the
original detail turn on the visibility of Opacity layer #4. Set the focus to this layer. Now reduce the Opacity to zero and slowly
bring back some of the detail in this layer.
Beckham ended up with 20%, but I found that 30% worked better with my picture. Once again merge the layers such that we end
up with two layers, Opacity layer #4 and Background.
Detail We could stop right here with a
fairly acceptable picture, but Beckham suggests a few finishing touches. He needed some detail in his faces. I could use a touch more detail in the bushes
at the base of my lighthouse. Make the
Background visible, but keep the focus on the top layer. We are going to erase some of the top layer
so as to reveal the original bush. Enlarge
the image such that the bush dominates the picture. Select the Eraser tool. Set it to a soft brush of about 32 px. Erase the bush from the top layer. Toggle the visibility of the Background layer
and you will see the
hole in the top layer. Now completely
flatten the image: Layers | Flatten Image.
Final touch Now we are going to make the final picture
“pop.” Nothing new will be introduced at
this point. First use the Levels control
to improve contrast. Move the end
sliders toward the distribution. Darken
the midrange pixels by moving the center slider to the right.
Sharpen the picture just a bit. Use the Unsharp Mask by: Enhance
| Unsharp Mask. Because we have created sharp boundaries by
our filtering, we can get a little heavy handed with the sharpening tool. Amount: 70% with a Radius: 2.0 and a
Threshold: 0 looks good to me.
To add more color to things like the red roof
we need to add saturation. Enhance |
Adjust Color | Adjust Hue / Saturation.
Kick up the Saturation to +30.
Finally, crop the picture using the
Rectangular Marquee tool with a Fixed Sized of 8.0” by 10.5”. Cut off the sky.
Memorandum