Photoshop: 1940’s Feel November 30, 2008

To give a photos a 1940’s pin-up girl or Coca Cola feel, try this:

1. Open a photo. Using a model dressed in a 1940’s outfit for an illustration.
2. Duplicate the layer. We’ll now work with this duplicate layer.
3. Filter –>Blur–>Surface Blur. Try setting it to: Radius: 5 Threshold:5
4. Using the Smudge tool from the tools pallet, smooth out the person’s hair a bit by making small smudges following the natural path of the hair. This will give it a much softer look.
5. Set blending mode of the second layer to Overlay. This probably won’t look good but no worries, that will change.

6. Switch to channels palette. It’s usually in the upper right side, but if it’s not there, go to Window –> Channels.
7. Holding down the Command + Option + titda key, click on the RGB channel. This will make a selection on your image.
8. Go back to the layers Palette and press Command J. This will make the selection jump to its own layer
9. Set the blending mode of this new layer to vivid light. Again, doesn’t look pretty.

10. Command Click the Layer thumbnail of the last layer you made. You should see a selection on your image made.
11. Duplicate this (after you click the thumbnail, simply drag the layer to the icon in the layers pallet that looks like a page turn) and change the blending mode to luminosity.

12. repeat step 10 and 11 change blending mode to multiply.

If it doesn’t look quite right, select the background copy (the second layer we made) and go to filters –> filter gallery. In the artistic folder, try playing around with the dry brush. I also used the dodge tool on my subject’s hair to give it more depth.

After using the magnetic lasso, this was my final product (I’ve kept it large so you can see the brush details on the hair and face):

Photoshop: Combining Photos November 20, 2008

You know, sometimes you take a couple pictures of the same shot hoping to get a good one, and often times this person looks great in one photo while the other person, not so much. My dad never smiled in photos, so when he does, we cross our fingers that everyone else looks good. Not usually the case. I took two shots of my parents with this exact scenario. Here are those original shots:

One good photo of my mom, one good of my dad. But since they aren’t in the same photo, time to whip out the good old magnetic lasso. This is just one way of doing it, but it usually works for me.

I’ll set the feather in the top tool bar to 20 px. This will give me a much softer edge to my selection to help the photos blend together. Since my dad is in the foreground, I’m going to select him instead of my mom. And I’m only concerned about being accurate in the space between them. The rest of the picture to the right doesn’t really matter. Use the lasso and then copy.

Now I’ll go back to the first photo that’s good of my mom and simply paste my selection. My dad’s new position won’t match with his previous, but that’s ok. I’ll just shift him closer to my mom until it looks right.

I got lucky here because the background is dark enough that you can’t tell anything has changed. If you notice in this combined photo, I’ve also edited the faces a little. By using the Healing brush tool, I’ve eliminated the bags under both my parent’s eyes. Because the bags under my dad’s eyes are so dramatic, I didn’t want to erase them all together, so you can see still them a little in the final photo.

Photoshop: Magnetic Lasso November 19, 2008

Continuing with the Twilight theme, let’s take our vampire and put him in the right setting. I’ve taken the original photograph that I want

to use and first made all the desired changes in the original photograph, such as adding the gaussian glow to make him pale and sephoric, creating the glowing eyes, and even get rid of any acne. Here is the progression of my vampire from the original to the finished product (without the background):

Now we’ll use the magnetic lasso tool to cut him out and put him wherever we want him to be. The magnetic lasso in the tools pallet with the other lasso options. The magnetic feature helps the computer figure out what you want selected. Especially with high contrasting colorings, the magnetic lasso will easily cling to an image. Just click anywhere on the path, release, and the lasso will follow the path of your mouse until you connect the end point to the starting point. You can click anywhere along the way to help put the points exactly where you want them. Use the toolbar at the top of the screen to make other adjustments. Feather will impact how harsh or soft the difference is between the image you are cutting out and the entire image as a whole. 

You don’t always have to have perfect precision with the lasso tool. After you have the image selected, you can turn on the Quick Mask Mode by clicking on the bottom icon in the tools pallet that looks like a front loading washing machine. With this selected, you can go back and adjust your image. Using the paint brush will include more of the image in your selection and using the eraser tool will exclude those parts of the image in your selection. Here you can see my progression:

The dark shadows on this image make it difficult to see where the body ends and where the shadows begin, but since I know I’m placing him into another dark image, I’m not very concerned about this. All I have to do with him now is use the Move tool (arrow tool at the top of the tools pallet) and drag his layer into another picture. In my example, I’ll drag him into the forest.