In the example shown, the little boy on the left is fading almost completely away, including his face, yet you can still see clearly where his eyes, nose and mouth are. In a case like this there are two ways to tackle these features, the really, honest-to-goodness, completely correct way, which is to build all the facial features back up exactly as they are in the photo, a time consuming, detail intensive job, and the sort-of-cheating-but-not-really-cause-it’s-family-after-all way.

Let me say that if this was a paid restoration I’d do it the first way and it would take a long time and would still need some composite work, which I’d also take from the other subjects in the photo, they’d just be placed a little differently, but for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to change the angle of the little boys head, just a bit. First, though, lets bring him back from the fade!

The object, here, is to darken the faded area while leaving the rest of the photo alone. To that end, the first thing we’ll do is a Levels Adjustment Layer. Even if you have a version of Photoshop, or another program altogether, that doesn’t have adjustment layers, you’ll need to make one by duplicating the previous layer (Ctrl or Cmd + J). In the Levels dialog, bring the black slider on the left, for the dark, or shadow, values, over to where the main peaks begin in the histogram.

If you don’t have adjustment layers, add a layer mask to your layer, now.

With your foreground color set to black, select the gradient tool.

On the layer mask, bring the gradient from the right to the left, as in the example, below. The black in a layer mask is transparent, letting the image beneath show through, the white is opaque, leaving the levels adjustment show, and the gradient allows a smooth transition between the two.

As with most repairs of this nature, it’s better, to do them in small steps. The next step is a Curves Adjustment. Move the Input/Output line down, slightly, towards the lower right hand corner. I don’t go too far in any one step because I find it easier to keep it looking natural if it’s done on multiple layers. Back in the layer stack, with the mask active, invert the color of the mask to black (Ctrl or Cmd + I). Paint the areas you want darker in white, in this case, the little boy. I’m not worrying about the background in this step, just the boy.

Now for, in my opinion, the key to successful masking of this sort, a slight Gaussian Blur to blend.

Lower the opacity until the blend is seamless. Continue the curves adjustments until the tones more closely match the rest of the photo. I ended up doing six curves adjustments. You’ll end up masking out less and less of the area with each pass, as some of the tones will match earlier than others. In other words, don’t just use the same areas for each adjustment!

Now we’re going to work on the faded background area. The area on the right is so good, we’re just going to borrow it! Select a nice clean area and move it over to the faded side. It will take some transforming (Tranform > Distort) to get the boards to all match and stretched to fit the area, but it’ll be a much nicer finished look in the end.

To blend, change the Layer Blend Mode to Darken and work around the edge with a very low opacity eraser tool – I’m talking way down around 10% low! Lower the opacity of the borrowed layer to around 70% or until the blend is seamless. You may need to tweak it, even going back to the previous step if you need to select a larger area so you have more blending room, but it’ll be worth it!

Now we’re going to do a little medical procedure. As I said in the beginning, the little boys face can be brought back enough that you could look from the before and after and not see any shift at all, in other words, all the elements will be exactly where they are in the original. With a lot of time, patience and care, it can look very good, too. But for the sake of time and sanity, both yours and mine, we’ll take a little short cut. For this demonstration, we’ll be performing a face transplant. Yes, we’re going to borrow one of his sisters faces for the sake of time. I’d normally use his families features, at any rate, to reconstruct his face, so this is just a little cheat. Select a good candidate for the area you want to composite, be it a face, an eye or whatever, and put it on it’s own layer (Ctrl or Cmd +J), and move it to the element it’s to replace.

In this case, the direction the boy is looking is basically the opposite of the little girl, so go to Edit > Transform and select Flip Horizontal. In the case of faces, eyes or anything else that needs to be lined up with like elements, lower the opacity a bit, select Transform (Ctrl or Cmd +T) and adjust appropriately.

Nibble away the edges with a low opacity eraser and adjust the opacity to blend. The result is a bit more “real”, now.

I continued with the normal restoration methods, clone, patch and healing brush tools, plus did a couple more Curves adjustment layers to whiten the shirt fronts, lace and the little girls dress. I also worked a bit on sharpening the little boys face. One more thing: since he’s now looking directly at the camera, I filled out his face on the right side.

There’s always more than one way to do any restoration work, and a face transplant is just one. While I normally don’t advocate something like this unless a face is completely obliterated, if done carefully it can be an alternative for the casual restorationist!

Janine on Twitter

Janine’s Website, Landailyn Research

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First thing I’m going to do is grab the rectangle shape tool

and choose to make a path

Next I drag out a path where I want the border effect to be. I went straight for it in this example but you may want to drag out some guides first. So here’s my path.

Now all I have to do is get a 1 pixel white brush;

Now all I have to do is click the Stroke Path With Brush icon

And there we are….

 …. But what else can we do?

I’m going to Ctrl+z to undo that and re-select the path. This time, instead of stroking the path I’m going to change it to a selection by clicking the Load Path As Selection Icon.

Now, with the image layer selected I can press Ctrl or Cmd + Alt + J to duplicate (or ‘Jump’) the layer and name it. I’ll call it ‘Main Pic’ and press ok

Now I have a layer slightly cropped, on top of the original background. Double clicking on the layer will bring up the Layer effects dialogue box. In here I can add a stroke to the new layer, to give a very similar effect to that above.

The difference here is that we can add other things too, your choice. I added a slight drop shadow.

But now I can also work on the background, which has now become a border. You may have to unlock this layer. Double clicking it and pressing OK will do it. Or Alt+Double click will do it without the dialogue box.

I’ve only added one effect to my image, a green to white gradient overlay set to Color Dodge.

I also changed the stroke on the upper layer’s blend mode to Soft Light

To be honest though, I don’t like the border, so I’ll take the effect off and I’ll add a Gausian blur to it.

Because my background is blured anyway it isn’t very noticeable, so, I add a new layer at the bottom, fill it with black and the lower the opacity of the Background layer.

And that will do.

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When BBC Wildlife magazine came out I was intrigued by the cover. Everything was standard except that it looked like there was an added cover. I’m sure there is name for it. Anyhoo, on closer inspection, there wasn’t this extra bit, it was made to look like it.

  I thought I’d give it a go…

  … here’s what I ended up with

Click to Enlarge

Your first thought might be the same as mine, looks like a simple gradient, so that’s what I tried first.

I drew a selection down the side of the green bar and then did a black to transparent gradient. I did it on it’s own layer so that I could alter the opacity should I wish, but I soon found that I wanted it bigger, no smaller… darn, Ctr+Z was getting a hammering… stop Tipsy.. think!

Simple enough, it’s just a drop shadow… I’m a fool. And because it is done through the layer styles I could tweak it as much as I liked. So it turned out to be as easy as I thought, just not in the way I first thought.
Something about the Wildlife magazine that I was disappointed with was that the title wasn’t altered at all, and this was the real ‘give-away’ that the wrap around thingy wasn’t actually there.

I had made this a little more tricky for myself because I’d changed the Type layer into a work path but no biggie, it was still going to be simple enough… probably….

I made a copy of the text (Ctrl+J) and then Rasterized the text. This takes it from being vector based to pixel. I nudged the copy up a bit and erased the right side, then masked the left side of the original text layer.

I finished off by creating a 50% grey layer, setting it to Overlay and then Dodge and Burn a couple of lines on the left to give it a bit of depth on the edge.

Image Used : “Squirrel” from Stock Exchange

This is a modified repost from June 2009

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Dictionary.com 

I don’t blame Adobe, far from it, their advertising and position in the market has led to their product becoming a verb, like Google, Hoover or Sellotape. Here’s the rub though, if I get asked to Hoover, Google or Sellotape I’m quite confident that I will manage (yes even as a male I know how to vacuum, don’t be sexist).

Because ‘Photoshop’ has become such a common word it is widely believed that it’s an easy thing to do – well, it is a computer thing so the machine does most of the work right? Ahh, dear reader, we know better. You’ll know that to truly use Photoshop you’re going to need to put in some serious learning time.

Odd then that I keep coming across advertisements offering “Master Photoshop in Two Hours” or “Learn Photoshop in a Weekend”. Coincidently, Deke McClelland’s course “Photoshop CS4 – Getting Started” runs for two hours and his entire CS4 One on One is 48 hours, so I guess the latter could be true so long as you eat at the computer and don’t sleep.

If you’re just starting on your Photoshop journey you’ll see these adverts but the reality is somewhat different, which can be a bit disheartening. I’m honest with people that ask me about learning Photoshop and I tell them that I’ve honestly lost count of the hours I’ve watched tutorials, altered images (ahhh Claire Grogan) or masked something for no reason other than for practice.

I’ll leave you now with a little story:

An 81 year old lady recently asked if I could look at a photograph of herself when she was a young lady, sadly it had got some sort of damage to it and she’d love to pass it on to her granddaughter. Of course I agreed to do what I could.

I collected the photo and soon realised this was going to be quite a tricky job, but a challenge and practice. So I got to it. A couple of evenings and much swearing later I took the finished picture round. The tears of delight on this lady’s face were worth every pixel-push, every thrown away level adjustment layer.

I told her how fascinated I was by the photo and she told me she had others in a collage type thing in a frame upstairs, I was welcome to have a look. Up I went and found the collage. In the middle was a perfect, undamaged copy of the photo I had been working on.

The morals of this tale?

1. Always ask if there is an original or at least another copy of a photo you can use for reference.

2. Make sure you enjoy what you do

3. When you think that all that learning and pixel-pushing is too much, remember, people could be moved to tears by what you do.

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Pixel Dimension for Screen / Document Size for Print

Notice the two distinct areas for sizing an image – Pixel Dimensions and Document Size. Pixel Dimensions are used to size an image for a display, e.g., monitor, overhead projector, television. Document Size is necessary when outputting an image for print.

Resampling Changes All Field Values (Resolution x Size = Pixel Dimensions)

When “Resample Image” is checked, changing values in any field effects the entire dialogue. If you look closely you can see that the resolution of the image (300) multiplied by the height in inches (5) gives us a requirement of 1500 pixels to print. (300×5=1500). Resampling changes the pixel dimensions and total pixel count.

Whenever I size an image, I always set the resolution field first. Once that’s set, then I move to the appropriate width & height field for outputting my image.

No Resampling Means Image Integrity is Maintained.

When “Resample Image” is unchecked notice how the Pixel Dimensions become locked. Adjusting resolution will simply increase or decrease the size of an individual pixel. The integrity of the image does not change because the pixel count stays the same.

Notice how the image went from being a 5×7 print to less than two inches in size. (300×1.667=500).

In the above figure any attempt to get a 5×7 print results in lower resolution. Because “Resample Image” is unchecked, there are only 500 pixels for width & 357 pixels for height.

It’s the Total Number of Pixels, not Resolution You Should Watch

I often hear folks argue about resolution in terms of printing, but what’s most important is the total number of pixels when the image is first opened. An image from a digital camera measuring 3500×2400 pixels gives you a lot more options for output then one taken off the Internet at 400×250. It will always be easier to take a large image, and reduce the size, then to take a small image an size it up. Resampling is not bad, but you are either deleting existing pixels (downsampling) or creating new pixels (upsampling). Some resolution values to keep in mind:

Screen resolution – 72-96ppi – PowerPoints, websites, emails, TV Office printing – 150ppi – laser or inkjet printing, drafts, proofing Professional printing – 240-300ppi – can be higher, but these values tend to work just fine

Keep in mind, resolution can be set TOO HIGH. If your desktop printer is rated at 240ppi you receive no benefit from outputting an image at 600ppi. In fact, you offload the resampling onto the printer which will result in a pixelated image.

 Quick Crop Tool Tip

As a final tip, if you really dislike the Image Size dialogue, you can skip it and use the Crop Tool instead. Simply specify the width, height AND resolution, and your image will be resampled appropriately. (Keep in mind, all the rules still apply, the Crop Tool just executes commands quicker)

I hope you found this information useful. You can follow me on Twitter @aj_wood where I post daily Adobe tips Monday through Friday at 12PM CST or feel free to visit my blog ajwood.com

Cheers!

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